The Sermon

The music of Christmas starts here, in Luke, with Mary singing and angels singing and I love it.

At this time of the year, and I know I’m not alone, but I’m just this close to a song from the moment I wake up until that last snort before sleep. The music goes on and on with radio stations and CD’s and the Cable music station and Debi’s Ipod and the loop of favorite songs running through me from Elvis to Barbra to Willie, to Karen Carpenter to John Denver and Kemit the Frog to Dean to Bruce to Lennon and McCartney, separately, to Bing Crosby and David Bowie, together, to the Goo Goo Dolls – and there will be more about Bing, David and Goo Goo on Thursday night, and of course there is Jimmy’s masterpiece: Ho-Ho-Ho and a bottle of Rum, which we will not be hearing about on Thursday night.

I can’t even imagine how great it must be for the choir members who actually know what they are doing when they sing! But maybe that’s not fair, maybe, at this time of the year, we all know what we’re doing! We’re singing and as the noted Christmas music expert, Buddy the Elf, describes it, singing is easy: it's just like talking, except longer and louder, and you move your voice up and down.

The truth is that everyone sings well at Christmas, we are uniting our voices with Mary’s as we magnify the Lord. But what does that mean?

How can you take the One who is the creator and Lord of all, infinite in all attributes and magnify that? Well, I had always thought that it was just a poetic flourish of Mary as she sang her song of celebration during her visit with Elizabeth.

It occurred to me this week, as I read through Mary’s song, that she identified some very specific aspects of God’s will, some things that might get lost in the shuffle this month, and perhaps these are the things that we need to magnify in our world, things that our culture tends to diminish.

She sings of God’s favor being poured out on the lowly.
She sings of God scattering the proud and bringing down the powerful.
She sings of God filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty.
She sings of a God who reverses all of the traditional measures of life.
She sings of a God who helps us remember mercies granted and helps us appreciate the sacred simple things that are found in a birth and a family.

So that becomes our song for today, because isn’t in the simplicity of the story that we need so desperately today? Isn’t this storm an opportunity for us to shift gears away from our busy-busy lives where we are always doing and just allow us to be with each other and with God?

Don’t our hearts ache for a glimpse of that Little Town of Bethlehem, for the sound of that Silent and Holy Night? When we gather here on Thursday and we light the candles and we sing the songs, there is within us a desire to stop the clock and to linger. But we don’t do it, at least we rarely have.

We hurry out and go about our tasks and routines and then get back to our lives after the first of the year with nothing changed but the date on the calendar, but what would happen if we magnified that glimpse and taste and expanded it beyond these doors?

The answers lie in the music. And not just the clearly scriptural music, much of what we arbitrarily label “secular music” abounds with the subtext of God’s presence in our lives and our world, doesn’t it?

How many songs tug at the strings of our hearts with a single word: “home”? “I’ll be Home for Christmas”, “Christmas Eve in My Hometown”, “Home for the Holidays”, the list is long.

One of the things that I have always insisted upon is the distinction between home and house. It is popular, and unfair and untrue, for those of us who work to aid those who have no housing to say “Jesus was born homeless”. We are so very wrong! He may have been houseless, but there was a mother and a father to love him, to surround him with faith, to be sure that he was safe, that’s home.

When I think of the places that I have spent my Christmases, from Pompton Lakes to Toms River to Sussex County to New Brunswick to Long Island to Clover Hill to that other place and back again, I don’t think about the building I was in, I think about the people I was with, don’t you? The faces, not the places, made it home.

Barbara Striesland was singing at our home yesterday while I was losing a game called “Whovilleopoly”, and I looked around me and heard her song, as if for the first time:

I close my eyes and see, Those shiny faces
Of all the children who now have children Of their own
It's funny, But come December
I remember, Every Christmas I've ever known
And my memory went home for a while yesterday.

We need to magnify that in our world, we need to remember all of Christmases and carry the same appreciation we have for the people we remember into our relationships with each other today and anticipate those that lie ahead.

We need to take that awareness of God’s presence and guidance and providence that we know here and in our homes and magnify it by bringing it into our work places and our social encounters.

You see, just as Mary, Joseph and Jesus could find their holy moments in the animal stalls, so we can find them in office cubicles and classroom desks.

Stretch your understanding and expectations of God beyond this place and your family room and you will be amazed at the blessings you will distribute and receive.

Don’t limit God, magnify God. If I understand anything about the Christmas message it tells us that those distinctions that we make between sacred and secular are the very distinctions that Christ came to eliminate.

A couple of weeks ago I sent some of you, who are on the Church email list, this quote from Father Andrew Greely, the Roman Catholic author and priest because it speaks well to the mix between the culture and our faith, Greely writes:

It might be easy to run away to a monastery,
away from the commercialization,
the hectic hustle,
the demanding family responsibilities
of Christmas-time.
Then we would have a holy Christmas.
But we would forget the lesson of the Incarnation,
of the enfleshing of God, the lesson that we who are followers of Jesus
do not run from the secular;
rather we try to transform it.
It is our mission to make holy the secular aspects of Christmas
just as the early Christians baptized the Christmas tree.
And we do this by being holy people -
kind, patient, generous, loving, laughing people -
no matter how maddening is the Christmas rush…

You see, the point of Christmas is that when we experience it the whole world is restored to the moment of Creation when all is holy.

So sing “We Need a Little Christmas” and sing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, with the emphasis on “Little”. This is the echo of Mary’s song where the big and powerful forces of the world are leveled, pride is scattered, the hungry are fed, there is a reversal of fortunes brought about by Christmas and the treasures are found in the small moments of life when you sit and stare at tree for no reason but the peace it brings you. You can hear, in Mary’s song, the concern that God has for the people on the margins of the world, the people on the margins of our lives and as we remember them, God is magnified.

Micah sees the future for a minor town like Bethlehem in God’s great plan to bring his people home, home from exile, home from the distant places they have wandered. And when they come home, when they feel safe and secure, then they will know the peace that angels promised.

Magnify that vision, stretch it all the way to include us, another obscure corner of God’s kingdom. Let it envelop all of the homecomings this week, let it touch the people who come into your homes and the homes that you visit.

Listen to the music, sing the music, magnify the Lord and let the music lead you home this week so that you will be ready to see God all around you.

And let me leave you, until Thursday, with more of the Theological wisdom of Buddy the Elf: The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear.