A sermon preached at
Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ
Bethesda, Maryland
by the Rev. Rich Smith

December 11, 2005

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11, 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24

I’m Dreaming of a Blue Christmas

The White House has once again come under criticism from the religious right, this time not because of a less-than-acceptable Supreme Court nominee, but for sending out 1.4 million “Christmas cards” that don’t actually mention “Christmas.” "Best wishes for a holiday season of hope and happiness" they say, followed by a verse from a Psalm. William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, calls this evidence that the administration has "capitulated to the worst elements in our culture," along with Target and Walmart, whose ads don’t mention the C-word either. On the other hand, you may agree with Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, who writes, “I call it a recognition, especially welcome at a time of sectarian violence, that not all the 1.4 million folks on the Christmas list are Christian.”

Well, if there is a “War on Christmas”, as Fox News seems to think, and if the White House, Target and Walmart are waging it, I would think it would have more to do with things like policies about the poor, the environment, and the war, and consumerism than whether or not one uses the phrase “Merry Christmas.” Those are the things that dishonor Jesus’ birth and the message of his life. Have we forgotten that it was very religious people who initiated the original attempt to ban Christmas in the country – our spiritual ancestors the Puritans! I’m glad we’re not so traditional that we follow all of their practices! And I would further point out that even the use of the term “holidays” has religious connotations, deriving from the term “holy day.” And while there is a place for a healthy debate about the place of religion in the pubic square, I’m going to save my contribution to it for another time, and focus instead on another way in which the term “Merry Christmas” may not always be appropriate.

While this is the “season to be jolly”, a lot of folks have a hard time feeling that way! For many, this is not a time of merriment, but of depression. There are a lot of reasons for not feeling so jolly – if you have the flu, or a mile-long list of things to do, or expectations that are so high they can never be met. Sometimes you just want to say, “Bah! Humbug!”

And there are those for whom “Merry Christmas” sounds shallow or inappropriate. What do you say to a couple of have lost a child during the past year? Or to the widow who must spend her first Christmas alone, to a hospitalized person whose every breath is a struggle, to someone facing eviction or newly un-employed? To the solider in a dangerous land far from home and the family who waits for them?

What do you say to someone like Michelle Thomas, whose story was told in Tuesday’s Post? “For three months after Hurricane Katrina's waters consumed her home, Michelle Thomas locked her stress deep inside and put on a brave face for her husband and two daughters.

“She focused on the positive: Her Ninth Ward home was destroyed and her hospital job was gone, but her husband and children, ages 7 and 16, were alive and the family was together.

“Then came Thanksgiving, celebrated in her mother's cramped home in a small Louisiana town. Since then, the family has moved into a modest rental house they owned in a community an hour from New Orleans. As Christmas approaches, the 36-year-old woman is feeling anything but joyful. Like many survivors, Thomas has the blues.

"I go into a feeling of hopelessness, and I cry," she says.

It is not the season to be jolly for everyone, and for those who have reason to feel down, the expectations of merriment just make it worse. I think Elvis sang for them all, when he crooned, “You’ll be doing all right with your Christmas of White, but I‘ll have a blue, blue Christmas.”

In recent years a number of churches have recognized this need, and offer special Blue Christmas services, where people can be honest about their feelings of un-merriment, and hear the tidings of comfort as well as joy.

The scripture readings for this Third Sunday in Advent do bring those tidings and are a good antidote for holiday blues. Like the White House cards, neither one actually mentions Christmas or the nativity, but there are few passages in the Bible that tell of the meaning of Christmas as eloquently as do these two from Isaiah and First Thessalonians. Each was spoken or written by someone who was suffering to a people who were suffering. Isaiah’s time was especially bleak. The people of Israel were terribly oppressed and depressed. They had been exiled from their homeland, and even when they were allowed to come home, they would face a multitude of problems, similar to those facing Katrina’s evacuees. And yet the prophet proclaims hope: “God has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.... to comfort all who mourn....to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit....”

And who suffered more than the apostle Paul? He faced bitter hardship, imprisonment, the prospect of a martyr’s death – and yet he, too, brings a message of hope and joy! “Rejoice always! Give thanks in all circumstances!” God has not abandoned you, is indeed very close at hand, and this is good news! And isn’t that what Christmas is really all about – God’s presence being born in the midst of our crazy mixed- up lives?

In many ways the world has not changed a lot since the time of Isaiah and the time of Paul and Jesus. We’ve learned a lot scientifically, and we’ve matured some theologically, and yet we’re still beset by problems – global, social, environmental, personal – and there’s often good reason for not feeling merry or jolly. But still, there is good news, that somehow, as the spiritual says, “the Lord will make a way”, and we can experience joy that is beyond merriment.

The poet Ann Weems puts it this way:
Into this silent nightas we make our weary waywe know not wherejust when the night becomes its darkestand we cannot see our path,just thenis when the angels rush in,their hands full of stars.

A man went to his rabbi and ran down a long list of things that plagued him and made the world a pretty lousy place. “It’s enough,” he said, “to make me lose my religion.” The wise rabbi listened patiently, and then replied, “Maybe it’s enough to make you use your religion!”

And the rabbi is right – the central message of our faith is not gloom and doom on the one hand, or sweetness and light on the other, but quite simply, joy! Now I hasten to point out that there is a difference between merriment or happiness and joy. Happiness is something we seek after; joy, on the other hand, seeks us, grabs us, surprises us. Happiness is a feeling, an outward expression; joy is an attitude, something deep inside, the weather in your soul. Happiness is fleeting, it comes and goes; joy is abiding.

Of course you can be happy and joyful at the same time; but like Paul, or Isaiah, you can be joyful while suffering, while going through the worst life has to offer, because joy is not dependent upon your outward circumstances. In fact it determines how you deal with your circumstances.

Christmas often comes with trappings of happiness and merriment, but its real meaning lies beyond merriment, in joy. As the Catholic theologian Pierre Tielhard de Chardin says, “Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.”

Now of course you can’t order up a package of joy from the LL Beane catalogue, because, as I said, it’s not really something you can seek after; rather it is something that is proclaimed to you, something that surprises you, and somehow gets inside of you. You can’t get it; rather, it gets you. But you can get yourself ready for it.

Georgia Harkness, in her classic The Dark Night of the Soul, suggests ways in which our faith prepares us to receive joy. It begins, she says, with self-acceptance, with your accepting who you are and what you are, in whatever condition you may be in. And you can accept yourself because God accepts you. And that’s what the incarnation means: God accepts us as we are in all our humanness in becoming as one of us, taking on flesh and blood and living as a real person. Humanity is therefore sacred, God says, and there is a spark of the divine in all that is human, the good, the bad, the ugly. Joy begins when you accept yourself as you are because you have already been accepted.

But no sooner do you accept yourself that you are counseled to “get out of yourself.” After all, there’s no smaller package, it is said, than a person all wrapped up in themselves! When you can accept yourself as you are, you don’t need to be so wrapped up in yourself, and you can begin to get involved in something larger than yourself – meeting another’s need, helping to relieve the suffering of the world. Joy beings to grow in this way. And remember that Jesus grew up and became what Bonhoeffer called, “The man for others,” living not for his own sake but to serve human need. As “Ask Amy”, the new “Dear Abby” says: “I'm going to offer up my own antidote to the holiday blues. Take your own turn at the kettle. Bundle up the kids and take them downtown and let them help you ring the bell and wish people a Merry Christmas. Follow up your outing with a cup of hot chocolate, and I guarantee that you will feel at least a little bit better.”

A third thing our faith counsels which will help prepare the way for joy to surprise us is the accepting of reality. The word religion means “to bind,” and while many have seen this in terms of the binding of a straight jacket, I think the more accurate understanding would be “to bind to reality.” That is, our faith is not a bunch of hocus pocus, concerned primarily with some other world. It is about the here and now, this world, however we find it. As the liturgy to one “Blue Christmas Service reminds us, “the story of the first Christmas is not really a happy story but a story about life in the real world. Mary of Nazareth, who is engaged to the carpenter Joseph, discovers she is pregnant. Joseph does not want to embarrass Mary and plans to break the engagement privately. This was not an easy time for this couple. Their country was under Roman occupation and King Herod who ruled Palestine for the Romans was known for his cruelty. These are not exactly ideal conditions for bringing a child into the world.” Jesus never preached escapism – he didn’t take his followers to some out-of-this-world utopia divorced from the world – but sent them into the world, to live out the Great Commission and the Great Commandment. His message – along with that of Isaiah and Paul – is for this world, in whatever condition we find it. An honest joy will never take hold of us so long as we try to escape reality, however difficult and discouraging reality might be, for joy is meant for this earth. It’s joy to the world!

Finally, says Georgia Harkness, joy comes most readily to those who are open to new things, who are not anxious about the future, but willing to embrace it. Maybe that’s what saved the shepherds, out there in the fields worrying about lamb futures and wolves and robbers and how there were going to find enough feed in the middle of a dry winter: they were open to mystery and wonder and could live with uncertainty, and heard the angel song when no one else did. Hearing it put their own problems in perspective, and so they left their sheep for a few minutes and ran to the manger where they were filled with “exceeding great joy!”

If we try to live as Harkness suggests, and as our faith teaches, by accepting ourselves, by getting outside our selves and serving others, by accepting reality and by being open to the future and to surprise, we will be ready to be taken hold of by joy – not necessarily happiness, but the kind of joy that will enable us to live with anything, knowing that nothing can ever separate us from the love of God.

Christmas is meant for all – not just the merry or the comfortable. Dietrich Bonhoeffer recounted his Christmas of 1943. It was one of his last on earth, which he spent in a Nazi concentration camp, as grim and hopeless and un-merry a place as you can imagine. And yet he wrote, “For a Christian, there is nothing particularly different about Christmas in a prison cell. I dare say it will have more meaning, and will be observed with greater sincerity here in prison than in places where all that survives of the Feast is its name. That misery, suffering, poverty, loneliness, helplessness and guilt look very different to the eyes of God from what they do to us – that God should come to that very place which we usually abhor, that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn – these thing a prisoner can understand better than anyone else!”

Even a jail, or a hospital, or a graveyard, or a foxhole cannot stop Christmas from coming. Christmas doesn’t come to remind the lonely or bereaved or hurting of how bad off they are because they can’t be jolly – rather it comes to say, in whatever hurting or helpless or homeless condition you are in, Christ is with you. There is Good News, proclaimed to you, a joy that will grab you and transform you.

I think that’s what a recently widowed woman meant when she wrote, “People often say to me, this first Christmas without your husband will be hard. And I respond, it probably will be hard; but without Christmas, life would be impossible!” Here was a woman grabbed by job, “surprised by joy” as C.S. Lewis put it. Grabbed by a Christmas joy beyond merriment, and the conviction that in spite of everything, life still has meaning, and love is stronger than death.

Moss Hart, in his autobiography, tells of the Christmas Eve when he was ten years old. The family was extremely poor. His father had saved a few pennies with which to buy his son some small gift. And he asked Moss to accompany him among the street vendors with the overladen push carts. But they went from cart to car - Moss seeing this he would like, and that - but there was never enough money.

Finally, Moss wrote, "I understood! I saw the despair and disappointment in my fathers's face, but I never in my life felt closer to him than in that moment.....and I knew this was better than anything he could have bought me. We walked home in silence but I had learned what Christmas was really about. We were two lonely people struggling to touch each other, and love each other."

Maybe Moss Hart did have a “merry Christmas”, for perhaps the term “merry” can be redeemed. If you notice in the old carol, it’s “God rest ye merry, gentleman.” There’s a comma there, and we UCC folks know to pay special attention to commas! It’s not “merry gentlemen,” but “God rest ye merry.” It’s an old English salutation, meaning, “Go in peace”, “Be well,” or maybe even “Shalom.” God rest you merry, one an all, and feel the peace and love and presence of God!

And recall again the words of Ann Weems:
...just when the night becomes its darkestand we cannot see our path,just thenis when the angels rush in,their hands full of stars


The Christmas spirit
is that hope
which tenaciously clings
to the hearts of the faithful
and announces
in the face
of any Herod the world can produce
and all the inn doors slammed in our faces
and all the dark nights of our souls
that with God
all things still are possible,
that even now
unto us
a Child is Born!