Christmas Eve Homily, 2017

C

as preached Christmas Eve 2017 at the First Parish Church, Unitarian Universalist, Ashby, MA

Perhaps I’d be happy, live content
if it weren’t for the light that explodes
above the city walls each day
at dawn, blinding my desire.

These words from one of our poets capture something of the Christmas spirit. They are words that invoke the endurance of hope through hard times. Christmas is about nothing if it is not about hope when hope cannot be found. It is the story of a child born to parents who were at the margins of their society. The mother and father of this child were what we would now call refugees. They were the kind of people who the Gospel of Matthew tells us Jesus called “the least of these”–the poor, the outcast, the starving, the unemployed, the dejected, and the rejected. In the story, the child of “the least of these” becomes the most important person in human history–the messiah, the anointed one, the individual whose birth will bring about peace on earth. Can you imagine a more hopeful message than this? That a child born to the least powerful people will grow up to be the most important?

In ancient times solstice offered much the same kind of hope. Imagine winter three thousand years ago in a place like Ashby or Northern Europe. Imagine a winter like this one. The snow and ice have come earlier than expected. The trees are fragile with the weight of water crystals. The ground is hard and each step over its frozen sharp fragments breaks forth bitter cold. There is little light. Surviving until the spring will require luck and skill–that stores of foodstuffs are well gathered and protected; that the deer and rabbits will be hunted successfully; that there is enough dry wood and shelter to build vital fires. The slowly lengthening days that come with solstice bring the promise that all of this scarcity, all of these hard times, will be followed by abundance. After winter will come spring. Banks of solid snow will give way to tender shoots, rising sap, and new animal life. There will be fawns, rabbit kits, goslings, maple sugar, dandelion greens, nettles, black morels and dryad saddles.

Solstice, the hope that life will continue. Christmas, the hope that humans can ultimately live in a peace and justice filled world where there is no least of these. These are the season’s extraordinary hopes.

Christmas is also filled with ordinary hopes. Hope is, after all, just the desire that the future will contain a good. That good might be something as immense as world peace or the return of spring. It could also be something more mundane: time with loved ones; a special meal prepared with care; a break in our regular patterns of work and self-survival.

I like ordinary hope. Actually, I confess that I may like ordinary hope more than its extraordinary cousin. I draw sustenance from the way it patterns our daily lives. Take cooking, something that is at the heart of so many of Christmas rituals. Do you like to cook? It is one of my favorite things to do. It is an activity infused with ordinary hope.

Which is to say that it begins with a desire that the future will contain a good. When I sit down to plan a party or imagine a meal, I am expecting the end result of the chopping, stirring, sizzling, frying, baking, grating, and sautéing will be something satisfying. But, of course, that does not always happen. Sometimes the bottom of the dumplings get burned or the pasta gums up or the flavors do not combine just right. The anticipated sweet is a little sour. The expected bitter is more of a salt.

This can be true of all of our ordinary hopes. Sometimes, I admit, that the time with loved ones I had been looking forward becomes a little too complicated. We cannot all agree on the movie to watch. There’s disagreement about politics or religion. Sometimes, I confess, I find vacation time dragging and desire to get back to the regular rhythm of work.

But when the meal fails, the children bicker or the hours seem unnecessarily long I remember that next time might be different. That pleasures that infuse ordinary hope may yet come again. Next week’s Sunday dinner may triumph over this week’s kitchen catastrophe. The kids will spend hours of pleasant company together. I will overcome my own need to be doing some and luxuriate in some hours of nothing.

Ordinary hope echoes extraordinary hope. When I lead a Christmas Eve service I close with words from Howard Thurman. They promise that the candles of Christmas “will burn all the year long.” These words suggest that the seeds to our ephemeral extraordinary hopes are found in our concrete ordinary hopes. We wish for a world filled with peace and justice because sometimes we find peace and justice in our own homes. We can desire the returning warmth of spring because the warmth of our hearths sustains us through the winter. There are dreams of a miraculous child who will change the world because the ordinary birth of each child is a miracle that changes our world.

And so, this Christmas, my wish for each of you is this:

May we uncover hints of extraordinary hope,
in our ordinary hopes,
may the Christmas dinners we cook,
may the toasts we raise,
may the candles we light,
may the fires we kindle,
may all that we give,
and all that we receive,
remind each of us
of the season of hope
all throughout the coming year
and in extraordinary ordinary moments of all of our lives.

Amen, Blessed Be, and most importantly, Merry Christmas.

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