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Sunday Message
July 25, 2004
Richard L Sheffield
Text: Luke 1:26-38; 2:1-20
Two assumptions this July 25th. First, with the demise of blue laws, and the advent of the internet, every day is a "shopping day." (And every night too!)
And, second, when it comes to shopping, Christmas Day is too late, even for UPS SonicAir.
According to UPS "SonicAir same-day service provides reliable delivery of your urgent shipments to every U.S. address and to more than 180 countries worldwide." 1 That's almost as good as Santa, but I figure if it isn't under the tree by 5 am on Christmas morning it doesn't count. So rather than have some poor UPS guy making a delivery at 3 pm on Christmas Day afternoon, you might as well save your money and go shopping on December 26. Besides, I tried to get a "QuickQuote" from UPS for sending a same day delivery package from Lima to New York City and discovered that UPS doesn't deliver same day from Lima to anywhere – even to Dayton!
So, with all that said – every day is a shopping day, and Christmas day is too late for shopping – do you know how many shopping days there are 'til Christmas? I do. You knew that. Counting today there are 153. 153 days, and 152 nights, (because you have to come to church on Christmas Eve), to buy your stuff and get ready for Christmas.
Or, you can join in the Christmas Tea this morning, get it over with early, and then go relax some place warm come the end of December. Because December 25th, is just as arbitrary as July 25th, for celebrating the birth date of Jesus bar Joseph, Jesus son of Joseph, who would "go down in history" as Jesus Christ.
Obviously we're having a bit of fun this morning, but it isn't as silly as it seems. Our Eastern Orthodox friends celebrate Christmas on January 7. That's because, in 1752 the world switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. And they made a one-time adjustment of 11 days. January 7th on our "new" calendar, is December 25th on the old calendar. Some people don't like change!
The point, of course, is that it's not the date or the number of days, but the story that's important. And maybe, just maybe, like all good stories, it needs telling more than once-a-year.
I haven't seen the movie Auntie Mame in many years. But I remember snatches of one song that's become a Christmas song but really isn't. Mame sings,
"We need a little Christmas
Right this very minute,
Candles in the window,
Carols at the spinet.
Yes, we need a little Christmas
Right this very minute....
Need a little Christmas now." 2
You know that song. Did you know that in the movie it's sung a week before Thanksgiving? Young Patrick sings, "But Auntie Mame, it's one week from Thanksgiving Day now." To which Auntie Mame replies, "But we need a little Christmas ... now!"
"Christmas in July" is more than a gimmick – it's a need. A very real need in a very real "now," for angels singing, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men." 3 God knows, we need that. He does. That's why he came, and not just at "Christmas time," but for all time, even now.
When you head down to the Christmas Tea this morning after worship, you'll find boxes with ribbons, a tree, and even "snow" shipped in by UPS. What you won't find is Christmas. We have to find that in ourselves, and in one another.
If you listened carefully to the lessons from Luke's Gospel this morning you'll realize that you didn't hear a word about "Christmas." "Christmas" isn't in the Bible. Christ is. And it's when Christ is as real in us as he was in Mary that "Christmas" happens.
Edmund Hamilton Sears knew that. Edmund Sears was a Unitarian pastor in Wayland, MA. That's the next town over from where I began ministry 25 years ago in Sudbury. Sears was gone a long time before I got there. He died in 1876. But I think I've been following him around. Before his ministry in Wayland, Sears was a missionary for a while, way out west near Toledo, Ohio, about the time some folks a little further south were mispronouncing Lima, Peru, and calling their new town Lima! 4
Sears was called back East to the little town of Wayland, where he preached in a "Christmas card" New England church built in 1814. It's still there. While he was there Sears wrote "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" for the church Sunday School. We no longer sing one stanza that Sears wrote – except for this morning. Maybe because it doesn't sound very "Christmas-y." Like something Auntie Mame, or Bing Crosby would sing. Sears wrote,
"Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world hath suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love song which they bring:
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing." 5
In one sense, that is the Christmas story. For at least the same number of years before that first Christmas, as for 2000 years since, 6 "man at war with man" has been the story. The Christmas story is about God saying
"Hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing."
Can't hear 'em if you don't hush!
There's a story of one time that we did. A Christmas story. I found it in the obituary column of the Honolulu Advertiser & Star-Bulletin. "Fritz Vincken - Former Honolulu baker Fritz Vincken died Dec. 8, 2001 in Oregon, 16 days before the 57th anniversary of the well-publicized Christmas story of 'the night God came to dinner.' Vincken was 12 years old when three American and four German soldiers converged on his house in the Ardennes Forest near the German-Belgium border on a harsh winter night in 1944. It was Christmas Eve and Vincken's mother, Elisabeth, offered food and shelter to the soldiers after they agreed to put their weapons down to share an evening of good will and peace. After a restful night, the soldiers went their separate ways but not before the Germans gave the Americans a compass and directions back to their front lines. In recalling the story in his 1985 visit to Germany, President Reagan noted that it "needs to be told and retold because none of us can ever hear too much about building peace and reconciliation." The 69-year-old Vincken, former owner of Fritz's European Bakery in Kapalama, had been living in Hawai'i Kai but moved to Salem, Ore., in September, according to his daughter, Elizabeth Vincken-Saberon. His health had not been good in recent years, she added. Fritz Vincken tried to find the seven soldiers after the war. It wasn't until the story was featured on a March 1995 "Unsolved Mysteries" television episode that Vincken learned about a man at Northampton Manor Nursing Home in Frederick, Md., who had been telling family and friends the same story for years. In January 1996, Vincken went to Maryland to meet Ralph Blank, who had served with the 121st Infantry, 8th Division, during World War II. "When he told me, 'Your mother saved my life,' it was the high point of my life," Vincken said of the reunion. "Now, I can die in peace. My mother's courage won't be forgotten and it shows what good will will do." Vincken, who was born in Aachem, Germany, is survived by his wife, Erna, daughter and two grandchildren. Private services were held in Silverton, Ore." 7
I suspect that when the Vinckens gather round their tree to read their "Christmas story" you hear the angels sing!
But lest you go out of here saying Dick is naive, I know that not everyone was sitting down to a truce with their turkey that Christmas Eve.
The story of Army Lt. Roy E. Connelly was different. This was written by his son.
"The frigid night air cut through the Lieutenant's army issue coat as he stopped in the knee deep snow to survey the perimeter. A heavy snow continued to fall on this Christmas eve 1944, but it was not a silent night. The flashes of artillery lit the sky and generated a rumble like distant thunder as the young officer finished his tour of the unit's outposts. He was an officer in Company B, 87th Chemical Mortar Battalion, the men who fired the big 4.2 mortars which were so critical to the effort of the infantry to advance. They were someplace in Belgium, he really had no clue where, and for the first time in a while the battalion was together again. All four companies had been brought in to help stop the German breakthrough. They didn't know it, but the 87th was about to be thrown right into the heart of the Battle of the Bulge." 8
And before the battle was over, before the 12 days of Christmas , 1944, were over, half of Company B was dead. Somehow, I think when the Conelly family reads their Christmas story you hear the angels sing. Because Christmas isn't about Christmas – it's about Christ. It's about God saying to a world at war with itself, Hush! It's about God saying when we war within ourselves, or among ourselves. Hush!
"For lo, the days are hastening on,
By prophet bards foretold,
When with the ever circling years
Comes round the age of gold;
When peace shall over all the earth
Its ancient splendors fling,
And the whole world give back the song
Which now the angels sing." 9
Merry Christmas!
1. https://www.sonicair.ups.com/cfw/tracking.screen
2. http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/mame/weneedalittlechristmas.htm
3. Luke 2:14 KJV.
4. http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/edmundhamiltonsears.html
5. Ibid.
6. "The ancestral history [in the book of Genesis] can be read, at least to some degree, in the context of the history of the Near East in the latter part of the second millennium (1500 - 1200 bc)." The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 1 ot.
7. http://w3.byuh.edu/library/obituaries/2001/V.htm
8. http://users.skynet.be/bulgecriba/connelly.htm
9. Edmund Hamilton Sears, "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear," The Presbyterian Hymnal 38.
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