December 16 sermon - Confronting Christmas Culture 3: It's Not All About Decorations

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

(Luke 1:39-45)

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     “All that glitters is not gold.” It’s a very old saying. Some people say that variations of it go back to the 12th century, although in its current form it comes from the pen of William Shakespeare in the play “The Merchant Of Venice.” The meaning is clear enough I think. Just because something looks good doesn’t mean it’s valuable or useful or productive. Some things just glitter without meaning. Think of pyrite – better known as “fool’s gold.” Over the centuries a lot of people thought they had struck it rich by discovering gold, only to find out that it wasn’t real. There’s a lot in our world that’s glittering right about now. All you have to do is take a drive around the highways and biways or go into any shopping mall and you’ll see it. There are trees and lights and garlands and wreaths and bells and ornaments of various kinds. I have seen Santa inflatables, Grinch inflatables, snowman inflatables, penguin inflatables – inflatables of various kinds. All of them are intended to – in a sense – glitter. There’s a very long tradition of something special being done to places of worship as we approach the celebration of Christmas. We have special banners and trees and candles that make an appearance here at this time of year. Many people put in a lot of hours decorating their houses. I have to admit that I can’t even imagine a Christmas without thinking of Clark Griswold’s gaudy attempt at a Christmas light display in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Some neighbourhoods have contests for the best decorated house – if you remember Snoopy won a contest for decorating his doghouse in A Charlie Brown Christmas – and there are Christmas displays that cause traffic headaches in some areas as people come from long distance to see what some folks have managed to put together. And it’s all beautiful. What, after all, would Christmas be without some decorations for us to admire. And a Christmas tree without decorations really isn’t a Christmas tree – it’s just a pine tree.  As Burl Ives sang in “Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer:”

Silver and gold, silver and gold,

Means so much more when I see

Silver and gold decorations

On every Christmas tree.

     Would it really be Christmas without decorations? Norman Vincent Peale said that “Christmas waves a magic wand over the world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.” A part of the impact of that magic wand is surely the beauty of the glistening decorations around us: decorations that dazzle us. But remember the caution I began with – all that glitters is not gold. In fact, the things that glitter can simply distract us from what Christmas is supposed to be about.

     There’s actually truth to the saying that “all that glitters is not gold.” The fact is that gold doesn’t glitter. Pyrite glitters – that’s why people mistake it for gold, because people expect gold to glitter. It glitters, so it must be important, it must be valuable. But gold doesn’t glitter. Real gold is actually a rather dull metal with very little shine to it. Sometimes the things of the most importance – the things of real substance – easily get lost in the midst of the shiny things that are all around us. We romanticize the manger, turning it into an almost charming place to give birth rather than accepting it as what it was – a dirty, smelly stable. And, I’d point out, we do the same with the end of Jesus’ life as well, so that the cross – a crude object of torture in Roman times – becomes a beautiful crafted piece of wood, often (as in here) with heavenly lights shining upon it. It’s almost as if we need the glitter to convince ourselves that the story is actually worth telling.

     And yet, Jesus doesn’t glitter like gold, or like a Christmas ornament. In Isaiah 53, and in speaking of the Messiah to come, the prophet said that “he had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” But I think we get so dazzled by the concept of Christmas that we can forget the reality of Christmas. Even the way that we deal with certain aspects of the biblical story suggests that we’re often more concerned with sizzle than with steak – so when we talk about Matthew’s Christmas story and the visit of the magi (who were likely astrologers) we inevitably turn them into much more impressive kings – even though there’s nothing in the Bible that suggests that they were kings. But “kings” seems to fit the season so much better – it’s a word and an image that’s far more in keeping with the glitter of the season.

     I thought about this morning’s Scripture reading as I was reflecting on why it seems so important for us to be dazzled  by the Christmas story and the Christmas season. There was nothing particularly dazzling about the scene today’s reading describes. Two mothers to be – cousins to each other – share a visit with one another in “a Judean town in the hill country.” It was an out of the way location – not the centre of anything in particular – for these two to meet: one to be the mother of Jesus, and one the mother of John the Baptist. You would have thought that there might have been more of a fuss, more excitement, more – well – glitter, but there wasn’t. There were no strings of lights, no wreaths and no shiny baubles hanging off trees. Just two women sharing unexpected pregnancies - an experience that must have at one and the same time been both frightening and overwhelming to them.

     Perhaps it’s in reflecting on this story – essentially the first meeting between Jesus and John the Baptist, even though both were in the womb and not yet born – that we start to understand the point of Christmas. What was the purpose of God in coming in flesh to the world? Was it to dazzle us? I think that surely there were more effective ways that God could have dazzled us than by coming as a baby in a manger. The point of Christmas, perhaps, is that God chose to descend not to a world that glitters, but to a world that is hurting and broken; that God chose to become a part of this hurting and broken world, to share in our lives with all of our struggles, to experience our hurts and pains and sufferings and, ultimately, even death. None of that glitters. None of that decorates the Christmas season in the way we’ve come to expect – but maybe that is the meaning of Christmas.

     In 1517, Martin Luther preached a Christmas Day sermon. He invited his congregation to consider the conditions in which Christ was born:

There was no one to take pity on this young wife who was for the first time to give birth to a child; no one to take to heart her condition that she, a stranger, did not have the least thing a mother needs in a birth-night. There she is without any preparation, without wither light or fire, alone in the darkness, without anyone offering her service as is customary for women to do at such times. Everything is in commotion at the inn, there is a swarming of guests from all parts of the country, no one thinks of this poor woman. … Just imagine what kind of swaddling clothes they were in which she wrapped the child. … Is it not strange that the birth of Christ occurs … in such a poor and despicable manner?

     Martin Luther was himself engaging in conjecture. The Bible really doesn’t tell us very much about the conditions surrounding Jesus’ birth – but I do suspect that it was pretty rough. Luther asks, “is it not strange that the birth of Christ occurs … in such a poor and despicable manner?” Not really, I’d say. Considering the world God entered and the work that lay ahead for Jesus – that was probably far more appropriate than entering a world full of glitter and lights.