Christmas Eve Sermon
“And the angel said to them, “Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”
The other night my wife and I ventured down to Memorial Park to take in some of the Yuletide Festival happening there – bonfires, horse-carriage rides, music, etc.
In the city archives at the McNaught House they had a display of vintage and antique Christmas cards collected from family collections from around Summerside; it showed cards from the late 1800s all the way up through the 1960s and 1970s. Some were really amazing, especially the early ones where each card might have had four or five layers of decorative paper, some used gold paint (which we now know was terribly carcinogenic…), and many featured intricate and sentimental images: cute birds, dogs, holly, Christmas trees, sleigh rides, etc.
One of the things you notice was that the cards up until almost the early 1930s are very sentimental, almost cheesy by our standards – impossibly sweet and lovely scenes of smiling happy faces under blankets in horse-drawn sleighs, smiling birds on frosty wreaths - all things that reflect the roaring 1920s: it was a good time, the world was looking for hope after the darkness of WWI, industry was booming, people – at least on the surface – were happy.
Contrast that with a card from 1935 which was pure yellow with a very blocky looking house and two people standing in front of it…nothing remotely Christmassy about it, nothing cheerful, nothing sentimental; the card’s face said “Have a fair Christmas”. It was 1935, it was the middle of the Great Depression – not even sentimentality could help the people in their struggles.
Now, I don’t know about you but we’re not all that different and so I’ll say this:
Between last November and April of this year it was confirmed that 70% of those killed in Gaza in that period were women and children, with over half being children.
In Ukraine, though it’s hard to know with certainty, it’s believed that by September there were since the beginning of the conflict 1,000,000 dead or wounded on both sides.
The nuclear missile sabres have been rattled.
Weird drones are flying all over New Jersey.
The political sphere in Canada is in upheaval.
The average price of a home in this country – you’ll be happy to know – dropped in November to only $700,000.
And butter costs $7/lb.
Add to this: all the hardships you’ve endured this year.
The health complications you’ve had.
The people and the opportunities you lost.
Your empty bank account or your full credit cards.
Your disappointment with what you are not able to provide to others this Christmas.
The guilt of not feeling like you’re ‘in the Christmas spirit.’
And every little thing that has not gone your way in 2024…
This is all just to say that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you if you feel like all you can muster this year is a ‘fair Christmas’.
So much of what this holiday has become is a trap, really. It’s why that one lone card from the middle of the depression, sad and pitiful and confusing as it was, was probably the most truthful card in the whole place. That was a year when even putting on the fake cheer and the faux smile couldn’t save you from the grief that was all around. You couldn’t pretend your way into being okay because everything was not okay, and everybody knew it.
Nowadays, through the pressure to be ‘okay’ and to keep up with the joneses we are very likely to put on the smile, put in the work, grin, and bear it for another year, stuffing down whatever cloud lingers over us and just trying to make Christmas happy.
Paradoxically, the real trap can be the parts of Christmas that most of us love the most, the schmaltzy things from our childhood that give us the warm and fuzzies – the sentimental things, but even having those around may not be cutting it this year. Heck, even the nativity itself has over the centuries fallen victim to the trap of sentimentality.
Look at the smiling faces below, look at the happy animals, listen to the sweet hymns we sing about the dear mother and her little baby, about the drummer boy and the shepherds – When St. Luke penned those words we heard tonight about Jesus’ birth, or when John the Baptist pointed to the coming Messiah, do you think these are the things they imagined? Did they do it so that every Christmas we can put a little baby in a fake cradle, pretend to feel happy for a few days, and then pack it away and get back to the slog?
Don’t get me wrong – the things we love from our childhood are good, but we often love sentimental things because they help us avoid facing and feeling difficult realities. We don’t like facing unpleasant truths. We put on that smile, however un-cheerful we feel within, so that we don’t have to face or think about why we are struggling or what we feel we are lacking.
What we like about Christmas as it’s so often presented is the softness, the easiness, the sweetness of it. The young lady, Mary, the lovely cooing infant, the blissful cows, the stars shining over the perfect manger scene; this story and these holidays are a chance for us to escape away from the realities of the news, from our work, the doldrums of daily life and the hard parts of our life.
But that’s a band aid, and that’s not what this child has come into the world to give us.
The Angels visit the shepherds and tell them they have, “good news of great joy” which shall be “for all people.”
Somehow – in a way that rises far above sentimentality, cheesiness, and the feel-goodness that makes us go ick this time of year, the birth of this child is good news – the best news – not just for you, and not just for me, but good news for the prisoners and those on death row, good news for those on both sides laying in frozen trenches around Kharkiv, it is good news for Vladimir Putin and for Zelensky, for Biden, Harris, and for Trump, good news for Justin Trudeau and Pierre Pollievre, good news for Palestine, for Syria, Lebanon, and Israel.
Because this night – contrary to what you might have been told, what you might have believed all along – is not a celebration of the birth of a baby.
Tonight is a celebration of the coming into the world of the one who is able to bring true peace not only to this broken and suffering world, but to your broken and suffering heart.
Tonight is a celebration of the fact that after all of man’s fruitless searching, all of man’s striving, all of man’s failure to love neighbour, to love God, and to right the wrongs of the world – out of a love for us, God comes to us to lift us from that gloom and from those clouds that overshadow us.
That carol that can sometimes be mistaken for sugary and sentimental expresses just this with its praises for Bethlehem, “O little town of Bethlehem / How still we see thee lie / Above thy deep and dreamless sleep / the silent stars go by / yet in thy dark streets shineth / the everlasting light / the hopes and fears of all the years / are met in thee tonight.”
If all you can muster for yourself or for your family this year is a ‘fair Christmas’, then let it be that, but just remember that what this time of year is actually about is about is not putting up the most perfect decorations that will get the most likes on Instagram, nor putting on the perfect Christmas dinner, it’s about the one who already sees through the strained smile and the faux-cheer you’ve put on to be a good sport, who knows the depths of exhaustion and sadness in your heart better than you do, loves you for it all the more, and came into this world – born this night – to meet your hopes and your fears and offer you his friendship and his love which will overshadow every darkness, cast out every fear, and fulfill every hope you could ever have.
Amen, and Merry Christmas.
