Know Tea

What is Christmas?  You may think you know the answer already, and maybe you do.  After all, you’re here, right?  Preaching on Christmas Eve can be the proverbial preaching to the choir.  But we are creatures of our time and of our culture, no matter how hard we try not to be.  Because of this, I’m afraid that, at least in part, we don’t really get Christmas, and that’s a shame.  It’s a shame because the angel of the Lord is standing right in front of us, as God’s glory shines all around, proclaiming good news of great joy for all people.  What a shame it would be if somehow we missed this news, or only partially got it.  What is the angel talking about?  What is Christmas?

I can tell you what it’s not.  Christmas is not a divinely-instituted mechanism to set the U.S. economy to rights at the end of the fiscal year.  Every year, we hear about  “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving.  We wring our hands with the people on CNBC and the Nightly Business Report, hoping that Americans spend more this year on Christmas presents than they did last year, so businesses will end the year in the black.

There was a terrible TV Christmas special in the 1970s—no, not the Star Wars Holiday Special—although this one was almost as terrible—in which a child travels into the future to see what Christmas will be like in our time.  In the 1970s version of now, Christmas has been renamed “Commerce Day,” and the whole focus of the holiday iss on buying gifts and supporting the economy.  They even topped the Commerce Tree with a big, glittering dollar sign instead of a star.  As I said, a really bad, really dumb TV special, but was it that off the mark?

You know this is why the stores decorate for Christmas so early, don’t you?  They want us to get “in the holiday mood” earlier and earlier so we’ll shop earlier and, they hope, more often, too.  You also know this is why some radio stations start playing non-stop Christmas music right after Thanksgiving too, right?  It’s not peace and good will that motivates them.  The radio station has sponsors.  Those sponsors are businesses that want you to—you guessed it—shop early and shop often.  The earlier they can fill your head with multiple versions of “Little Drummer Boy” and “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” the earlier you will be in a “holiday mood”:   translation, a buying mood.  Sorry to break it to you in so cynical a fashion, but that’s just the way it is.  No, Christmas is not the shopping season.  Not even remotely.

Christmas is also not National Sentimentality Day.  Take a listen to our most-loved holiday songs.  “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.” “Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore.” “There’s no place like home for the holidays.” “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.”  If Christmas isn’t Commerce Day for us, it’s Sentiment Day.  Norman Rockwell painting day.  Home and hearth day. “Just-like-the-ones-I-used-to-know” day.  It’s all about looking back, all about nostalgia, all about trying to recapture a time, whether real or imagined, when things were simpler, brighter, happier.

In contrast to this backward-looking nostalgia, the Church has just experienced the season of Advent, which is the complete opposite of nostalgia.  Advent is all about looking ahead.  “People, look east!  The time is near of the crowning of the year.” Advent is partially about looking forward to Christmas, but it’s mostly about looking forward to the Second Advent, the Second Coming, of Christ. Advent seeks to reorient our thinking away from nostalgia and to get us looking out and up, for our redemption draws nigh.

The real downside of the nostalgic Christmas is that today never measures up to yesterday.  Yesterday is idealized:  it seems better in our fuzzy memories as compared to today.  This Christmas dinner isn’t as good as last year’s.  This year’s tree isn’t as big as last year’s, or as the ones we used to get back when.  Nostalgia can be fun, but it can also sour us on the present.  Don’t dream of a Christmas like the ones you used to know:  celebrate Christmas in the here and now, where you are, and praise God for his wondrous gift in Christ!  You can’t go back and eat sugar cookies your great-aunt Frances baked in the 1950s.  They’d be very, very stale by now anyway.  Living in the past can mean disappointment in the present.  Let Bing Crosby dream about the Christmases he used to know.  Let’s celebrate this Christmas, and do so joyfully!

Christmas is not even, primarily, about “Little Baby Jesus.” “Little Baby Jesus” is the perfect window dressing to the sentimental, nostalgic Christmas, although he’s pretty uncomfortable in the Commerce Day Christmas.  While Commerce Day Christmas wants to push Little Baby Jesus aside in favor of something flashier, like the aluminum trees in “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” Nostalgic Christmas is perfectly happy pasting Little Baby Jesus on top of its collage of sticky memories.  After all, what could be better to add to the mix of syrupy-sweet images of White Christmases we used to know, of our happy golden days of yore, than the cuteness of a perfectly clean, immaculately styled, blonde, curly-headed, rosy-cheeked, socially-smiling newborn in a Martha Stewart manger filled with 100% hypo-allergenic hay that no animal has ever been near?  Little Baby Jesus is a perfectly sweet motif for a perfectly sweet, nostalgic Christmas.  But the real Jesus wasn’t like that, and the real Christmas isn’t like that either.

Christmas is Incarnation.  Christmas is Emmanuel:  God with us.  Christmas isn’t just “Jesus’ Birthday.” It’s much grander, much more momentous, than that.  I know some families bake a cake, write ‘Happy Birthday Jesus” on it, sing the happy birthday song, and blow out the candles, but that sells Christmas short:  it cheapens it.  Christmas is this:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” Christmas is “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see. Hail the Incarnate Deity.”  Christmas is the eternal God becoming one of us and living among us.  A momentous, cosmic event that’s a little beyond cake and ice cream.  We usually refer to Christmas as “The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” and it is that, but perhaps we should call it “The Feast of the Incarnation.” Perhaps that would give this occasion the weight, the importance, that it deserves.  God could have left us all to perish in our sin, but instead he came among us, became one of us, to rescue us.  “To save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray.” Tidings of comfort and joy, to be sure. Good news of great joy, for all people.  Christmas is Incarnation.

Christmas is also Eucharist.  Christmas is not just about the event that it marks—God with us—but also about the way that God’s people mark that event.  And the way we mark that event is in the Eucharist.

Perhaps you are aware that we celebrate two holidays simultaneously every December:  Christmas and Yule.  Christmas is a 12-day feast on the Church’s liturgical calendar.  It begins tonight and lasts through January 5.  On January 6 the church will celebrate Epiphany:  the coming of the Magi to worship the newborn Christ.  That is how Christians have celebrated Christmas since at least the fourth century AD.  Yule is a winter-solstice festival from our pre-Christian Celtic/Nordic/Germanic tree-hugging past.  Holly and ivy, wassail, the boar’s head, mistletoe, the Yule log, a lot of our carols—are holdovers from Yule.  Yule is a happy time, a time of making merry, a time of rich food and strong drink.  A fun time.  The problem is, some people celebrate Yule and never get around to Christmas, including many Christians.  Christmas means “Christ’s Mass.” That is to say, the way Christians celebrate Christmas is through the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion, the Eucharist.  We celebrate the mystery of the Incarnation through the Great Thanksgiving to God for our salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ.  Eucharist means “thanksgiving.” Thanksgiving for Americans was a month ago.  But for the church around the world, this is one of our two Great Thanksgiving Days, the other being Easter.  We gather tonight for Eucharist: Thanksgiving.  We gather to thank God that in Christ, the Word became flesh, and we do that by participating in the Sacrament that reminds us that he is with us still, feeding us with his very self!  He is still Emmanuel:  God with us.

When I was in seminary, I was talking with a friend about my plans for Christmas.  I told him that the highlight of the season for me was the Christmas Eve service at the cathedral downtown.  This friend had grown up in a Christian home, but nevertheless he said, “I can’t imagine going to church on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.  That was never a part of my experience.” Christmas for him was simply Family Day.  Christmas that isn’t Christ’s Mass is Yule.  It might be happy, it might be fun, but it’s not Christmas.

Christmas is here.  This is the Christmas Feast.  This is Christmas Dinner:  the Feast of the Incarnation of our God.  This is far beyond singing “Happy Birthday” to Jesus, far beyond striking the harp and joining the chorus, far beyond shopping, spending, giving, and getting.  God is with us. Christ, in this Feast, this Christ-Mass, gives us His own self with His own hand.  Good news, of great joy, for all people.