Sermon Archive

I was having coffee with a friend in Starbucks this past week. The background music was "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." I remember fighting back tears when I watched Judy Garland sing that to her little sister in "Meet Me in St. Louis" in 1944. This year I wanted to cry, but for a different reason. The words just aren't true, even though we may wish they were.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, Let your heart be light.
From now on our troubles will be out of sight.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas, Make the Yule-tide gay.
From now on our troubles will be miles away.

I like the song, especially as sung by Frank Sinatra. But it represents the misunderstanding I heard as people talked at the next table. A shopper with bags of presents said about Christmas, "It really is for the children." I found myself thinking, "The Christmas of sleigh bells, elves, and reindeer may be for children, but the Christmas of the Bethlehem manger isn't. It's for everyone: children, young people, and adults."

Christmas is for all who struggle with any kind of guilt, who bear heavy burdens of past failures. Christmas is for all who battle with depression and its weight of helplessness, with addiction and its devastation. Christmas is for all who walk through the valley of the shadow of death—our own inevitable death or the death of one we dearly love. In other words, Christmas is for all the world, for those at the pinnacle of joy, and for those with wounded hearts.

The Biblical story about the birth of Jesus may or may not be historical fact, depending on how you define fact. But it is certainly true. No serious historian doubts the existence of the man named Jesus, who lived in what we call the Middle East almost two thousand years ago. The open question is whether he was just another great teacher in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, or something more. People who have found him to be something more use words with multiple layers of meaning, but they end up saying he deepens their understanding of reality. He brings God close to them.

That is why Christians and various spiritual seekers come together on Christmas Eve to sing carols, hear anthems, and light candles. We do those things because somehow they make it possible for us to reframe reality. The truth they represent lights up the darkness all around us. They remind us of the Hebrew word Emmanuel, God is with us.

In the life and ministry of Jesus we see the compassion of God, who chose not to stand aloof from the pleasure and pain of bodily life as we live it, but graced it with a loving presence that gave hope to anyone open to it, especially the powerless, the marginalized, the exploited, and the disenfranchised.

In my understanding of things, you don't have to be on the rolls of a Christian church to understand the meaning of Christmas. For me the truth of the Christ event was well expressed by Marc E. Agronin, Director of Mental Health Services at Miami Jewish Home and Hospital, in Florida. Dr. Agronin wrote in yesterday's New York Times about memory, aging, and hope.

Dr. Agronin has worked with Holocaust survivors and has gleaned from them what he calls "lessons from fire." He writes that one "lesson gives me hope. One patient, a survivor of Auschwitz, recently lost her husband of sixty years. She came to me severely depressed, with thoughts of suicide.

I asked her, "How did you have any hope in the camp,
knowing that each day could be your last?"
She smiled briefly and told me a story.

"My dear doctor, I believe in God, and [God] was with me
in the camp. But I also had several young women from my
town in the barracks.


When we had to stand at attention for hours, we stood
together, propping up one another when weak. When we dug
ditches, we did it together, one holding and moving the arms
and shovel for another who didn't have strength that day.
We were desperate, but never alone.

Dr. Agronin says the lessons from the fire are faith and hope. The truth of Christmas is not very different. In Jesus of Nazareth a light came into the world, a light of love and hope, a light that tells us God is with us always, especially when darkness surrounds us. As our reading said, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not been able to overcome it."