I Need a Silent Night

As we enter this holy week of our Christian year, I am reminded of the frantic pace at which many of us enter Christmas.  This has been very real for me as this is my first Christmas without a Christmas break in addition to my first Christmas as a pastor.  It has been hectic, buying and wrapping gifts, sending cards out to friends and family, trying to prepare for our annual Christmas Eve service to be followed the next morning by Sunday worship on Christmas Day.

In my conversations with many of our congregants, however, this frenetic pace is common to many of us in this season.  Teachers and students talk about the stress of final exams, parents comment on the need to get presents wrapped but also make sure their kids get to various Christmas parties.  Many members have shared with me about the upcoming travel plans that will take them hundreds of miles away, or they talk about the need to clean the house and finish the preparations to welcome children and grandchildren into their homes.  Others are coping with illness and grief. 

I've been reminded in this season of a song by Amy Grant appropriately titled, "I Need A Silent Night."  In the song she laments the traffic, rushing around, short tempers, and crying children that often accompany our preparation of the season, and in the chorus she sings out:

I need a silent night, a holy night

to hear an angel voice

through the chaos and the noise.

I need a midnight clear

a little peace right here,

to end this crazy day with a silent night.

A silent night is often a hard thing to come by in this time of year, but that is exactly how our Lord comes to us.  Luke speaks about the census in the Roman Empire that takes the holy couple from their home in Nazareth and forces them to travel to David's ancestral home of Bethlehem, a distance of about eighty miles.  Bethlehem was a small town, probably without the appropriate accomodations for all the travlers, so the town must have been chaotic, a little like wandering through the halls of a local shopping mall for us these days.  Mary and Joseph are housed in a barn in someone's backyard, and then, in the silence of the night, into the chaos of the world around them, the Savior of the nations comes.

Our lives are busy in these days, and many of us are travelers, finding ourselves in foreign places with strange companions in the stable.  And we are in need of a silent night, a time to pause, to sit by the candle light, and to listen for the voices of angels around us.  The messiah arrives in the silence, not with parades and fireworks, so let us find some silence in these days to meet him once again.

The Tradition of the Christmas Tree

Have you ever taken a step back and contemplated the strangeness of the tradition of the Christmas tree?  Many of us have heard the legend of Martin Luther being the first to bring a tree into his home and decorate it with candles, and we’ve heard about the symbolism of the evergreen tree in the midst of the death of winter.

The modern tradition, though, is particularly interesting.  I suppose I’m most fascinated by the kind of ornaments we put on trees.  If you go to any Hallmark store you can see ornaments of the nativity, Santa Claus, snowmen and angels alongside Star Trek characters and NBA superstars.

Then there are the ornaments we buy when we’re traveling.  We make a trip in the middle of the summer and buy an ornament of Santa Claus wrapped in the tentacles of an octopus that reads “Myrtle Beach” along the bottom (that’s one of our stranger ones).  We put up ornaments of our favorite sports teams or where we went to college or ornaments that represent our hobbies.  Some of them are made by children, getting more and more worn with each year of use.

It becomes this kind of temporary scrapbook of our lives, those moments we needed to commemorate somehow and wanted to remember, so we bought this small item to hang on a tree inside our home during December as we celebrate Christmas.

Now I can’t take credit for the theological turn I’m about to make here but have to give my mother credit for saying this.  When we were decorating their tree over the Thanksgiving holiday (on the first Sunday of Advent mind you…) last year, I mentioned how odd the Christmas tree is, and she agreed that many of the things we put on them are quite strange and have nothing to do with a religious or a secular celebration of the holiday.  But then she said, “But we still put the star on top.”

I was really struck by this statement, that our Christmas tree could actually be a symbol of our trust in God’s Providence.  We put up ornaments from all the places that have meaning to us, ornaments given to us  or made by those we love and then we put the star (or angel) on top as if to say, “All of life occurs within the light of God, the light that shone on Christmas night to declare to the world that God has come among us to sanctify all of life.”

So really the Christmas tree is an amazing image of faith, for by it we are declaring once again God’s beginning words, that the creation, that our lives, that our memories are “very good.”  What a gift to celebrate at this time of year when we remember God’s incarnational love that came in Bethlehem to remind us that all life is God’s and that God works in all times and places.

December Newsletter Article

One of my favorite Christmas Carols is “In the Bleak Midwinter” by Christina Rossetti.  Set to a haunting melody, this poem helps us enter into the mystery of Christmas, the coming of God into the world in the vulnerable child in the manger.  Rossetti puts it this way:

Our God, heaven cannot hold him nor earth contain

Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.

In the bleak midwinter, a stable place sufficed.

The Lord God incarnate, Jesus Christ.

           

            In this second verse of the hymn, Rossetti points us to the deepest meaning of this holy season.  While many of us love thinking about the little baby in the manger, remembering Christmases at our grandparents’ homes, and enjoy the yearly singing of carols and decorating the tree, Christmas is primarily a time for us to reflect on one of our uniquely Christian notions, that our God cares so much for this world that God came into it in the person of Jesus Christ.

            The idea that God comes to us teaches us that our God hallows this earthly life and cares about those who live here.  The incarnation points us to the truth that God cares about things in this world and that as God’s children we should be attentive to the needs of other people and the creation as a whole.  The incarnation also reminds us that God’s presence can be seen in this world.  Whether the incarnate God in Jesus or the Holy Spirit who continues to move us to faithfulness, God’s presence is here even now.

            The incarnation, though, is also a challenge.  We will be exploring the challenge of the incarnation in our sermon series this Advent titled “The God We Get.”  Each Sunday we will take a look at each of the four gospels and how they introduce us to Jesus.  The God we get in Jesus was not the messiah anticipated by many of his Jewish family, and the God we get each time we celebrate Christmas is a God who often surprises us.  This God challenges us to push beyond our fear and our prejudice to a life of vulnerability and radical love.

            The incarnation is an intimate understanding of God, and at Christmas we often feel the closeness of the savior as we tell the story of his birth once again.  We not only remember his coming into the world but also his death and rising so that the whole world might be saved.  Christina Rossetti does not forget the cross even in her Christmas carol, and realizes that the salvation story of Jesus elicits a response from us much like it did the first shepherds and wise men:

             

            What can I give him, poor as I am?

            If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb.

            If I were a wise man, I would do my part.

            Yet what I can I give him, give my heart.

            This final verse moves us toward our commitment to the incarnate God.  Unfortunately, though, we often interpret “giving our hearts” to God in ways that are purely sentimental and driven by feelings alone instead of ways that are incarnational and affect our daily living.  In the middle of the Third Reich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood that following Christ meant incarnational living.  In his Cost of Discipleship, he says, “The incarnate Son of God needs not only ears or even hearts; he needs actual, living human beings who follow him.  That is why he called his disciples into following him bodily.”

            This Advent season, let us look with fresh eyes, hear with fresh ears, and feel with renewed hearts the God we get in Jesus Christ.  In the midst of parties and plays, shopping and baking, let us remember that the Word has become enfleshed among us, and may we look for ways the light of Christ can be see not only in a dark sanctuary full of lit candles but the light embodied in our lives following the God we get.