St. Paul's Episcopal Church

St. Paul's Episcopal Church
425 Cleveland Ave SW
Canton, Ohio 44702
Phone: 330-455-0286
Fax: 330-455-9818
E-mail: office@stpaulscanton.org

Christmas 1
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Canton OH
John 1: 1-18

December 27, 2009
The Rev. Barbara L Bond

God With Us

We are still out of synch with the world. All through Advent we were hunkered down in here, anticipating the coming of Christ, while the outside world was blaring away that Christmas was here, five weeks or more before the fact. And now, we are celebrating Christmas, and the outside world has moved on to New Year’s.

The outside world promised us happiness along with the tinsel and mistletoe, and many of us wanted to believe that ideal picture – a Currier and Ives picture on a Christmas card.

But Christmas cards are flooding in to me from all over the world, full of life stories – testimony that life is indeed a mixed bag and does not match the promises of Christmas merchandisers. Christmas letters from my friends tell me of joys and sorrows, of new jobs and lost jobs, of new grandchildren and divorces, of love and loss.

In this parish we have experienced huge losses in the last two months. I was so pleased that in early November, we celebrated our veterans and that this parish has ten World War II veterans. That is, we had ten. Now we have seven --- we lost Dick

Dowding, Bob Pryse and Dr. Norman Lewis within ten days of each other. My brother lost his wife on Dec. 12, and our deacon Carol Duncan lost her husband Bob on Dec. 17. Other members of our parish family live a tenuous existence, surrounded by family who fear the worst.

I mention this sadness to give us some balance, perhaps a reality check. This is what Christmas is really about. Christ came to be with us in real life: not just in the pretty packages, but also in the not-so-pretty ones. Christ came to human life in a filthy stable, born right into the dirt of the world, to be with us, right where we are.

In the 1930’s Irving Berlin wrote a secular song for the season entitled “White Christmas,” the most popular song of all time. It is not a song with false frivolity, rather it contains an undeniable strain of melancholy. We identify with that underlying melancholy because we can never quite deny it in our own lives, despite the tinsel and mistletoe. Irving Berlin and his wife lost a baby boy, Irving Berlin Jr., who died at the age of three weeks on Christmas Day in the early 1930s. Every Christmas day they visited the tiny grave. The composer of the famous song carried this ache of human loss in his heart and it seeped out into the song and touched all who have discovered that life is a mixed bag – a Christmas gift you may not have expected.

The day after Christmas, one sees Christmas trees tossed out, wisps of tinsel hanging to the branches. Suddenly all that stuff in the stores looks cheap and tawdry. The commercial “magic” of Christmas doesn’t work anymore, and is exposed for its true emptiness. The secular world moves along quickly to the next holiday, the next empty promise.

But we here in church are settling into the real thing, 12 days of Christmas, 12 days to live with real life, the life that Christ was born into. Our 12 days start with awe at the birth of God as a human baby, in a dirty stable. The second day of Christmas is St. Stephen’s feast day – Stephen who was stoned to death for following Jesus. The third day of Christmas is the feast day of St. John the Evangelist, the wonderful visionary Gospel writer who gave us our stirring reading this morning, beginning with the beautiful hymn about the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. The fourth day of Christmas is the day of Holy Innocents, remembering all the children Herod slaughtered while trying to stamp out Baby Jesus, and a reminder of all the children who still suffer in this world.

Oh yes, Christmas is a mixed bag, a microcosm of real life. God chose to come into this complex world and accept human life, to live with us, to experience all of it – the joy, the sorrow, the gifts, the disappointments, the intense happiness of love and new life, the pain of loss and being alone. All of us have experienced this mixed bag, and often it comes home most strongly at Christmas. Perhaps you have felt this complete, real Christmas while gathered around the feast table – whether at Festive Christmas dinner, or at our feast table here at the altar. We look from face to face and see all the stories gathered here, and we know that Christ is in the midst of us.

AMEN