Seasonal Display of Joy
The Very Reverend Harry H. Pritchett, Jr.
The Cathedral of St. Philip, Atlanta, GA
Christmas Day Homily 2006
Many years ago, before multiculturalism and religious sensitivity, merchants in the town mall in Huntsville, Alabama, asked our parish to set up what was called a “seasonal display of joy.” A committee at the church went to work immediately and built a display that featured a movie screen with the words over the screen taken from a familiar Christmas hymn, “Christ was born for this.” While the hymn “Good Christian Folks Rejoice” played continually over the speaker, slides of scenes from current events flashed up on the screen…..scenes of the Vietnam war, starving children in Biafra and Appalachia, riots in Memphis and Los Angeles, Harlem slums on fire, a drag queen in Stonewall Bar, little children singing carols, families decorating a Christmas tree, a Christmas parade. Our message from our seasonal display of joy: Christ was born for this–for us–for where we are… now. After a couple of days, the management of the mall called us and demanded that we remove the seasonal display because he said that merchants felt that it was depressing and it would be bad for business and that people don’t want to think about stuff like that at Christmas. Now I can understand the merchants concern. And as I look back, I’m sure that our committee’s decision grew out of some confronting 1960s , rebellious truth telling. And yet from the point of view of faith, it really is the truth about joy…real joy at the Incarnation. Perhaps that confusion was and is because the real truth of Christmas is just so hard to believe. Much easier to swallow would be a ten-fold path to spiritual fulfillment. Much easier to comprehend would be a divine revelation from a holy mountain – a stormy prophet from the desert – a dazzling angelic vision from the heavens – or even a breathtaking sunset or noble ideal.
But the humanization of God? God stooping to be born in the same way each one of us came into the world…as a vulnerable little baby? God’s very own self-communication happening in a particular time, in a particular place, to a particular young woman, engaged, but not married, to a particular man, under particular circumstances, witnessed by particular “nobodies”. And yet, “God With Us” wrapped in the bands of geography and sociology and politics and economics and despair and violence and poverty – that is God with us wrapped in the world – every bit as much as wrapped in swaddling bands of cloth! In other words, God coming to where we are – to call us by our particular names and to call us home!! Paul writes in the church in Corinth, “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles…” He might just as well have said, “ For some demand signs and some desire wisdom, but we proclaim God born to a teenage, unmarried girl in a stable in Bethlehem, a stumbling block and foolishness to just about everybody!” No.. give us God in Christmas pageants, or in sermons, or in bibles , or in beautiful symbols or in majestic music and liturgical hoopla or even in abstract theological propositions. Any of these would have satisfied the merchants in Huntsville mall as an appropriate seasonal display of joy. Yes, give us God finally in what our culture settles for easiest and best this time of year, give us God in “the Christmas spirit”! But hardly in the particular person of Jesus.
So… what could all this mean for us? In the quietness of this holy morning – when the hoopla is over, after the parties have finished, and the buying and giving is done, we gather to celebrate real joy…joy to the world, as the carol exclaims.. This joy is about a God who loves us so very much that he becomes one of us, born among us, looking like us, feeling like us, living and dying like us….a God who comes to us, to where we really are, must be God willing after all to get dirty hands in the human condition…. in this world as we know it. So, if Christmas is really about joy, it must be a joy which somehow does business with all the truth .It must be joy which comes in the midst of realism about what ails us, joy which does not avoid confrontation with the tough facts. With out that realism, then our so called Christmas joy is simply another “seasonal display”.
Dennis Covington’s haunting book, “Salvation on Sand Mountain” about snake-handling holiness churches in Southern Appalachia, closes with these words :“It’s afternoon at the lake. The turtles are moving close to shore, the surface of the water is undisturbed, an expanse of smooth, gray slate. Most of the children in the neighborhood are called home for supper by their mothers. They open the back doors, wipe their hands on their aprons and yell, “Willie!” or “Joe!” or “Ray!” Either that or they use a bell, bolted to the door frame and loud enough to start the dogs barking in the backyards all along the street. But I was always called home by my father, and he didn’t do it in the customary way. He walked down the valley all the way to the lake. If I was close, I could hear his shoes on the gravel before he came into sight. If I was far, I could see him across the surface of the water, emerging out of the shadows and into the gray light. He would stand with his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker while he looked for me. This is how he got me to come home. He always came to the place where I was before he called my name.”
There are such moments when God still comes to us in all God’s vulnerability and calls our names. In those moments God’s word becomes human again and we celebrate, not the feast of mushy love with crocodile tears…not just a seasonal display of joy, but the feast of God’s mysterious love to us human beings. This is the stuff of real joy that is born in the messiness of a manger, and not in the sentimentality of a TV Christmas show. I believe it is in such occasions that we glimpse into the final reality of life… where unity will overcome estrangement, forgiveness will heal guilt and joy will conquer all despair forever. “And the word of God became flesh and dwelt among us,… full of grace and of truth.” Thanks be to God, and a merry, merry Incarnation feast!!.
Amen.
Comments? Contact Dean Pritchett at: HPritchett@stphilipscathedral.org