Christmas Eve! For me and for many, it’s our favorite night of the
year—a night for sharing with others the gift of God’s love, a night
for sharing with others the gift of our own love. Indeed, it’s a night
whose gifts of love seem almost able to enfold the whole of time and the
whole of the universe in an embrace of peace!
And on this particular Christmas Eve, I’ve decided that the nicest
gift of love I can offer you is this: to take my all-time favorite
Christmas story and to surround it with two verses from the pen of my
very favorite Christmas poet and then to offer these to you wrapped in
the joy that I feel—wrapped in the joy about which we’ve just been
singing:
“Joy to the world! The Lord is come!” (vs. 1)
“Joy to the world! The Savior reigns!” (vs. 2)
And wrapped in the joy about which so many other carols speak,
including this one:
“All my heart to[night] rejoices,
As I hear, far and near, Sweetest angel voices:
‘Christ is born,’ their choirs are singing,
Till the air, everywhere, Now with joy is ringing.”
(Presbyterian Hymnal, #21, vs. 1; the original word in line 1
is “today”)
One reason I feel such deep joy on this particular night each year
is that Christmas is not just about something that happened to others
in the distant past. It’s also very much about something that can
happen to us very much in the present. For every Christmas brings to
each one of us a fresh opportunity to experience within our own heart
a new birth of Christ.
And it was in anticipation of just this kind of Christmas Eve
experience that we here in this congregation last Sunday closed our
morning service of worship, closed our whole season of Advent, by
singing so hopefully and expectantly this prayer found in the last
verse of “O Little Town of Bethlehem”:
“O holy Child of Bethlehem,
descend to us we pray.
Cast out our sin and enter in,
be born in us today.”
Which brings me to the first of the poems that I want to share
with you. It’s from a book of Advent and Christmas verse by Ann
Weems, who happens to be a Presbyterian laywoman and a personal
friend. Her absolutely splendid book is entitled Kneeling in
Bethlehem (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1980), and this
particular poem is called “The Child Is Born Again” (p. 26).
Listen:
“Each year the Child is born again.
Each year some new heart
finally hears
finally sees
finally knows love.
And in heaven
there is great rejoicing!
There is a festival of stars!
There is a celebration among the angels!
For in the finding of one lost sheep,
the heart of the Shepherd is glad, and
Christmas has happened once more.
The Child is born anew
and one more knee is bowed!”
If any of you here tonight has never before experienced a
birth of Christ within your heart, then I pray that this will
be the Christmas when that happens for you. For as someone
wise once said, “If Christmas isn’t found in your heart, you
won’t find it under the tree.” (Charlotte Carpenter, as quoted
in The Westminster Collection of Christian Quotations, Martin H.
Manser, comp. [Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2001], p. 38)
Now for me, a memorable example of a person who finds Christmas
in his or her heart, and experiences there a wondrous birth of
Christ—a memorable example of that is the character Wallace
Purling in Dina Donahue’s radiant Christmas story “Trouble at
the Inn” (found, for example, in Joe Wheeler, ed., Christmas
in My Heart: A Timeless Treasury of Heartwarming Stories
[Doubleday, 1996], pp. 41–45). Listen:
“For years now whenever Christmas pageants are talked about
in a certain little town in the Midwest, someone is sure to
mention the name of Wallace Purling. Wally’s performance in
one annual production of the Nativity play has slipped into
the realm of legend. But the old-timers who were in the
audience that night never tire of recalling exactly what
happened.
“Wally was 9 that year and in the second grade, though he
should have been in the fourth. Most people in town knew that
he had difficulty in keeping up. He was big and clumsy, slow
in movement and mind. Still, Wally was well liked by the other
children in his class, all of whom were smaller than he, though
the boys had trouble hiding their irritation when the
uncoordinated Wally would ask to play ball with them.
“Most often they’d find a way to keep him off the field,
but Wally would hang around anyway—not sulking, just hoping.
He was always a helpful boy, a willing and smiling one, and
the natural protector, paradoxically, of the underdog.
Sometimes if the older boys chased the younger ones away, it
would always be Wally who’d say, ‘Can’t they stay? They’re
no bother.’
“Wally fancied the idea of being in the Christmas pageant
that year [as] a shepherd with a flute, but the play’s director,
Miss Lumbard, assigned him to a more important role. After all,
she reasoned, the Innkeeper did not have too many lines, and
Wally’s size would make his refusal of lodging to Joseph more
forceful.
“And so it happened that the usual large, partisan audience
gathered for the town’s Yuletide extravaganza of the crooks and
crèches, of beards, crowns, halos, and a whole stageful of
squeaky voices. No one on stage or off was more caught up in
the magic of the night than Wallace Purling. They said later
that he stood in the wings and watched the performance with such
fascination that from time to time Miss Lumbard had to make sure
he didn’t wander onstage before his cue.
“Then the time came when Joseph appeared, slowly, tenderly
guiding Mary to the door of the inn. Joseph knocked hard on
the wooden door set into the painted backdrop. Wally the
Innkeeper was there, waiting.
“’What do you want?’ Wally said, swinging the door open
with a brusque gesture.
“’We seek lodging.’
“’Seek it elsewhere,’ Wally looked straight ahead but
spoke vigorously. ‘The inn is filled.’
“’Sir, we have asked everywhere in vain. We have traveled
far and are very weary.’
“’There is no room in this inn for you.’ Wally looked
properly stern.
“’Please, good innkeeper, this is my wife, Mary. She is
heavy with child and needs a place to rest. Surely you must
have some small corner for her. She is so tired.’
“Now for the first time, the Innkeeper relaxed his stiff
stance and looked down at Mary. With that, there was a long
pause, long enough to make the audience a bit tense with
embarrassment.
“[Finally] the prompter whispered from the wings, [‘Wally,
your line, it’s,] “No! Begone!”’
“[And] Wally repeated automatically, ‘No! Begone!’
“[So] Joseph sadly placed his arm around Mary, and Mary
laid her head upon her husband’s shoulder and the two of them
started to move away. The Innkeeper, however, did not return
inside his inn. Wally stood there in the doorway, watching
the forlorn couple. His mouth was open, his brow creased with
concern, his eyes filling unmistakably with tears.
“And suddenly this Christmas pageant became different from
all others.
“’Don’t go, Joseph,’ Wally called out. ‘Bring Mary back.’
And Wallace Purling’s face grew into a bright smile. ‘You can
have my room.’”
“Some people in town thought that the pageant had been
ruined. Yet there were others—many, many others—who considered
it the most Christmas of all Christmas pageants they had ever
seen.”
“You can have my room.” In those words, we hear the love of
Christ being born anew in the heart of Wallace Purling, and, in
response to Wally’s words, also being born anew in the hearts of
many others. And that Christmas there was indeed such great
joy in the world!
Yes, when Christmas is found in our heart, and not under the
tree, there comes to us such great joy that we just want to burst!
And it’s another poem by Ann Weems that expresses this truth so
well. She calls it “O Lord, You Were Born!” (Kneeling in
Bethlehem, pp. 28–29)
“Each year about this time I try to be sophisticated
and pretend I understand the bored expressions
relating to the ‘Christmas spirit.’
I nod when they say ‘Put the Christ back in Christmas.’
I say yes, yes when they shout ‘Commercial’ and
‘Hectic, hectic, hectic.’
After all, I’m getting older,
and I’ve heard it said, ‘Christmas is for children.’
But somehow a fa-la-la keeps creeping out.…
So I’ll say it:
I love Christmas tinsel
and angel voices that come from the beds upstairs.
And I say three cheers for Santa Claus
and the Salvation Army bucket
and all the wrappings and festivities
and special warm feelings.
I say it is good,
giving,
praising,
celebrating.
So hooray for Christmas trees
and candlelight
and the good old church pageant.
Hooray for shepherd boys who forget their lines
and Wise Men whose beards fall off
and a Mary who giggles.
O Lord, you were born!
“O Lord, you were born!
And that breaks in upon my ordered life like bugles blaring,
and I sing ‘Hark, the Herald Angels’
in the most unlikely places.
You were born
and I will celebrate!
“I rejoice for the carnival of Christmas!
I clap for the pajama-clad cherubs
and the Christmas cards jammed in the mail slot.
I o-o-o-oh for the turkey
and ah-h-h-h for the Christmas pudding
and thank God for the alleluias I see in the faces of people
I don’t know
and yet know very well.
“O Lord, there just aren’t enough choirboys to sing what I feel.
There aren’t enough trumpets to blow.
O Lord, I want bells to peal!
I want to dance in the streets of Bethlehem!
I want to sing with the heavenly host!
For unto us a Son was given
and he was called God with Us.
For those of us who believe,
the whole world is decorated in love!”
In just a few minutes we will be lighting our candles in a wave
of light and love expanding outward from the Christ candle. And as
we do so, I pray that each and every one of us will hear within our
heart the voice of God saying to us, “Dearest Friend, on this night
of nights, hear, see, and know what great love I am extending to you
through the Babe of Bethlehem. And experience, within your heart,
great joy”—both the more exuberant joy expressed in the music of
Handel and “Hallelujah,” and also the more inward joy conveyed
through the music of Benjamin Britten, and “Silent Night,” and John
Rutter’s “Candlelight Carol.” Yes, tonight I pray that each and
every one of us will experience within ourself the joy of new
birth—the new birth of Christ in our heart, the new birth that will
send us forth into the night beaming. “For unto us,” here tonight,
in our very own hearts, “a child is born”!