by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given December 23, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Good morning!  Welcome to this house of worship.  This is a place where people come together in community, where we care about the joys and the sorrows of those gathered here.  Our faith is a free faith, and here we support one another in finding our own truth.  Whoever you are, from whatever walk of life, you are welcome here today.  Come, let us worship together.

Here we are a couple of days away from Christmas, and I have to say I’m not prepared.  Not only am I unprepared in terms of cards and gifts—I’m unprepared, as always, for the cultural experience of Christmas.  Christmas is supposed to be warm and fuzzy, infused with love and togetherness.  As I was growing up, I would listen to Bing Crosby sing, “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” and I would have visions of snow covering the ground and lights shining through the windows of homes full of happy families roasting chestnuts over an open fire. 

My first problem was with the song—why did I actually dream of a white Christmas?  I lived in Louisiana, where it never snowed.  And I had never seen a chestnut in my life.  The second problem is that my family didn’t fit the picture on the Hallmark card.  I wonder how many families actually do.  Not that the season was completely devoid of warmth and joy.  I remember Daddy taking us three kids every year on a search for the perfect Christmas tree, out on some unsuspecting farmer’s land.  I remember the visits of my aunts and uncles and the house full of their laughter and the smell of the turkey and the cornbread dressing coming from the kitchen.  I remember my little sister waking me up at 5:00 AM to tell me that Santa had arrived.  “Big deal,” I would think, pulling the cover up over my head.  Even then, I was the grinch who hated to get up early.

What I’ve come to realize as an adult is that Christmas is really about transformation, about change.  And change, my friends, is not a merry, not a jolly undertaking.  Ultimately fulfilling it may be, but not easy—not, as they say, a holiday.

Let’s consider the original story—the myth out of which all this celebration comes.  Now please don’t get hung up on the literal—it doesn’t really matter whether Mary was really a virgin: forget that, and pay attention to the underlying truth of the story, the myth.  This is what happens: an adolescent girl from a small town called Nazareth gets visited by an angel who tells her she is pregnant and that the father is God.  Please!  Mary, the scripture says, “was troubled at this saying.”  That would be an understatement, I suspect.  She immediately questions the angel, which in itself was a courageous thing to do.  She asks the completely rational question, “How shall this be, since I know not a man?”  The angel responds, “With God, nothing is impossible.”  And Mary trusts, and she obeys, saying:  “Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.”

Next Mary has to explain to her fiance Joseph that she’s pregnant, and the father is God.  Now to me the biggest miracle in this whole story is that Joseph believes her.  He continues to love her and care for her.  Then just about the time the baby is due, the young couple have to travel to Bethlehem to comply with the Roman census.  Now all of you women who have born children—can you imagine making such a trip on a donkey, in your third trimester? 

The two arrive in Bethlehem, and Mary is beginning to have contractions.  They go from inn to inn, but there is no room anywhere.  The neon signs are flashing NO VACANCY.  Everyone, you see, has had to come to town for the census.  Finally, one of the innkeepers takes pity on them and says, “Look, you can stay out in the barn with the animals.”  They are grateful, for the baby will come soon.  And Mary gives birth there in the barn, among the cows and sheep, with no midwife, no woman to help or comfort her.  The birth, of course, is not as we see on Christmas cards.  It is frightening and painful and bloody.  Will the baby be all right?  Will Mary make it through?  When it’s all over, Mary is not sitting peacefully by the manger, fully clothed in flowing blue garments, adoring the baby in her arms.  She is exhausted and just wants to get cleaned up and get warm and go to sleep.

Talk about change. Talk about transformation!  And this is not to mention the rest of the story. You remember:  King Herod decides to kill all the boys in the area who are under the age of two, because he has heard that another king has been born, and he wants no rivals, and so Mary and Joseph have to leave the country and hide out until Herod dies.  And then this child from God—is he obedient?  No, he’s actually kind of a smart mouth who thinks he’s wiser than his own parents.  When they try to correct him, he says, “Excuse me, but God sent me—remember?  I must be about my father’s business.”  Joseph has hopes that Jesus might take over his carpentry business, and sure enough, Jesus shows promise—but then Jesus decides he must leave home and travel around the country preaching.  Mary and Joseph love their son, but they have never really understood him.  They warn him to not say controversial things, not to heal on the sabbath, and not to badmouth the scribes and pharisees.  He pays them no mind, though, and ends up being crucified like a common criminal, one among thousands that the Romans regularly put up on crosses to die a slow death, as a warning to others.  And Mary stands at the foot of the cross, with a broken heart.  All this because this seemingly innocuous angel comes for a visit.  The story has a happy ending, though, because the spirit of the Christ cannot be killed, and Jesus returns to free humankind from the burden of sin and death.  The story is ultimately about redemption.  But oh my—getting there is hard sledding.

Our secular Christmas stories are also about redemption and change.  Take Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, for example.  “Every Who down in Who-ville liked Christmas a lot, the Grinch who lived just north of Who-ville did not.”  Posing as Santa, the grinch steals all the Christmas gifts and food, but then is astounded to discover that the Whos were celebrating anyway.  “Every Who down in Who-ville, the tall and the small, was singing!  Without any presents at all . . . Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store.  Maybe Christmas, perhaps means a little bit more.”  So the grinch returns the gifts and joins the celebration.  The grinch is transformed, and stops being grinch-like.  He is, well, born again. 

In O. Henry’s wonderful story  “The Gift of the Magi,” the young wife has no money to buy her husband a gift, and so she decides to sell the most precious thing she has, her beautiful long hair, to buy him a chain for his watch.  He, in turn, has no money for her gift, and wanting so much to give her something worthy, he sells his most precious possession, an heirloom watch, to buy combs for her hair.  Foolish? A double mistake?  No.  Falling into each other’s arms, they come to understand the depth of the love each has for the other, and their Christmas is not ruined but fulfilled.

Then there is the quintessential Christmas story, published in 1853, that has endured to this day—Charles Dickens’ story of the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge.  Listen to Dickens’ wonderful description of Scrooge,  “that squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner—hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster.  The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.”  But after his experiences with the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, we see the old man’s remarkable change.  He exclaims, “I don’t know what to do!  I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school boy. . . A merry Christmas to everybody.”  His life changes so radically that he begins to change the lives of those around him, and Dickens concludes, “he [Scrooge] knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”

But before we go further, lest the language of poetry and myth take us too far from the earth, let me be more specific about the nature and the cost of transformation.  Consider how the baby chick is hatched.  Most every year I go to the State Fair in Salem, mostly for the purpose of eating all the junk food—the corn dogs, the ice cream rolled in chocolate and nuts—but I also love seeing the animals, especially the sow and her piglets—they, so eager; she, so resigned—and then the chicken hatching exhibit.  I guess I’m fascinated with birthing.  Anyway, consider the hatching from the perspective of the chick.  There it is curled in this dark shell, and for a while, that feels good.  But then it eats all the food in the shell and begins to feel hungry and cramped. The chick is fragile, starving—its own growth makes the shell untenable as a home. In desperation, it pecks at its own shell, and the chick’s world, the only world it knows, cracks open.  When everything that the chick has relied upon falls away, it is born, wet and exhausted, but ready to be its own chicken self.

I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty much how I experience my own birthing, my own transformation.  I begin to feel that I am living in a psychic or spiritual space that is inadequate, and I begin to feel terribly constrained.  I begin to hunger for something more.  Usually I go through a period of feeling fragile, perhaps even descending into despair for a time; I may become ill or depressed.   Because, you see, I don’t want to change, don’t want to leave the familiar.  But the pain becomes too great, and then life calls to me and I somehow crash through the impasse.  I use the word “crash,” because I sometimes injure myself and hurt others on the way through.  Not always, but sometimes.  That’s part of the risk, I’ve found.  I will blunder, I will bleed, but I will not stay on the treadmill, I will not run in place.  Something in me won’t let me do that.

William Bridges is a writer who has examined the stages of transition in an extraordinarily sensible way, and I’d like to share some of his insights with you.  Bridges says that we think development has only to do with gain and never with loss.  After all, we don’t have to discard what we learned in the first grade to move on to the second.  But in fact we cannot move to a new place without leaving the old, and leaving means loss.  The new cannot grow until the old is cleared up, is swept out the door, so to speak.

The process goes something like this, he says.  The newness may begin with disengagement, perhaps a disengagement that we did not see coming: a job loss, an illness, a divorce, the death of a loved one.  Such events disengage us from the contexts which give us an identity.  They break up the old cue-system that tells us who we are and how we are to behave.  So long as the old system is working, it is hard for us to imagine a new way of being—but with disengagement we are forced to devise an alternative way of life. 

One woman whose husband left her described it this way: she said she had “lost her mirror.”  People in transition have the experience of not being quite sure who they are any more.  Separated from the old identity, but having not assumed a new one, the individual is in a kind of limbo, a place of disenchantment, Bridges calls it, where one’s  world is no longer real, and one’s assumptions and expectations fall away.  This is the same feeling that a child gets when he sees Mommy kissing Santa Claus, or when you first discover that your parents sometimes make stupid mistakes.  Disenchantment calls us to look deeper at the reality we trusted, to go beneath the surface of what we thought would be true forever.

Another stage is disorientation, in which the person is lost, confused, and the old sense of life as “going somewhere” breaks down.  As Robert Frost put it, “You must get lost enough to find yourself.”  Such a period can be frightening, can feel chaotic, and the person may suffer greatly—but that suffering can be undertaken with more grace if the individual realizes that hurt and confusion are simply a necessary part of the growth process.  Chaos, says Bridges, is but a primal state of energy to which one must return for every new beginning.

In this culture, though, we do not easily see the value of emptiness, and too often we simply try to replace the old values or the former spouse or the last job with a new one as quickly as possible.  This is a time when we are in danger of betraying ourselves and aborting the growth process.  We try to skip this fertile void, but that would be a mistake.  We need this time of being lost in order to find the newness we seek.

“When, when, when will this painful, confusing time end?” we may wonder.  It will end when we are ready to make a new beginning.  There will be an inner realignment, a shifting of energy that moves us toward our deepest longings.  We will find that we are attracted in a new direction, pulled elsewhere, and we want to follow that. 

What is this something that calls us to more abundant life?  It is there within each of us—some would call it simply the life force, some would call it the Holy Spirit.  Something within asks us to bring our gifts to fruition, to not let them wither on the vine.  Something asks us to give out of the fullness of our lives, to rise in the morning with joy and drift to sleep at night in peace.

According to the Gospel of John, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  The Word, the very expression of God-substance, of the Eternal Mystery, came and dwelt among us.  Yes, when we hear the voice of the angel, in whatever form the angel speaks, we are typically surprised, confused, reluctant, but at some point the choice becomes clear.  We can turn away, or we can say, “Behold, the handmaid of the Lord.  Be it unto me according to thy word,” and follow the voice that calls us, in faith, to an unknown, unrevealed future.

And when we do follow that voice, that leading from within, the Christ child is born once again, and that child becomes another gift of love to our broken world.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

O Holy One, why is it you require so much of us?  Our lives are filled with loss, and yet we know that this emptiness can make room for us to grow.   Help us to be faithful even in the midst of fear; give us courage during our times of confusion and self-doubt.  We come before you thankful in this holy season for the story of the child, the one who was born in the midst of trouble, in the most humble of places, to show us how to love. Amen.

BENEDICTION

May you be willing to hear the voice of the angel, trusting that all will come round right.

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Copyright 2001, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.