Have Yourself a Very August Christmas

4 August 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

SERMON

When I told my friend John I was doing another service, he asked, “What about?” I told him I had always wanted to do a service called “Christmas in July” and was finally going to do it – albeit in August. His reaction was quick and decisive: “Oh Jim, don’t do that.” “Why not?” I asked. “Because it is a clich”,” he said. ‘too late,” I said. “I”ve already sent in my blurb for the newsletter.” There was silence on the phone. “Oh no,” he said finally. Then he quickly added, “I’m sure you’ll be OK.”

Well, that remains to be seen”I will be making some fairly radical suggestions in a while. But part of the reason I wanted to talk about Christmas, and do it at a time when we are removed from the effects of the holiday – both euphoric and toxic – is precisely because so much about Christmas has become a clich”, or worse, a bah humbug. The Christmas season presents us all with challenges both practical and spiritual, and that is what I”d like to talk to you about today.

Speaking of bah humbug, lately I”ve been focused on stories as they define culture and provide meaning to our lives. And I”ve been thinking about our Christmas stories, especially the ones we’ve created since Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. Besides the stories of St. Nicholas – we’ll deal with him later – what popular Christmas stories have we created in our culture?

Being a child of the 60s, the first one I thought of was A Charlie Brown’s Christmas. This is basically the story of a misfit boy and his misfit tree. The most enduring feature might be Vince Giraldi’s theme music. There’s Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. How many here know how Rudolph came into our culture? Rudolph and his animated television special – also from the sixties – have outlived his creator. Montgomery Ward, now bankrupt and gone from the retail markets, introduced Rudolph to the world in the 1930s as a marketing tool. And then there’s The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. My memory is of the 60s animated TV show, with Boris Karloff as the narrator, although Jim Carry played the Grinch in the recent film.

Then there are movies like Home Alone – a violent though comedic piece set during the Christmas season. And speaking of violence during Christmas, there are Die Hard and Die Hard II, both set during the Christmas season. In fact, in Die Hard, after Bruce Willis and his pal kill the bad guys, but not before those bad guys kill some hostages and blow up a building, and while bearer bond certificates float down from the sky, the end credits begin with a rendition of “Let it Snow.” Frankly, I cannot invent a better image of what Christmas has become in our culture than that: money – not just money – bearer bonds’s nowing down from the sky while the triumphant heroes get in their cars leaving death and destruction in their wake. Now that is an American Christmas!

If a culture is defined by its stories, then ours is often pretty sick. But you already knew that. But what you may not have thought about is the fact that all of these stories – including Dickens – have (with one tiny exception) nothing to do with the meaning of Christmas. I make a distinction here between the meaning of Christmas and the spirit of Christmas. The meaning of Christmas is the birth of the Christ child. Period. The spirit of Christmas is how we feel about the season. The spirit of Christmas is about joy and glad tidings and parties and gifts and time off from work and drinking the finest liquor and seeing heroic truth justice and the American way movies and stuff like that. Our Christmas culture is like a James Bond martini’the tapestry of our cultural images feels like it has been shaken, not stirred.

Even in American culture, however, as bad as it is in many ways, Christmas has its moments. In fact, it has many moments. We all have wonderful memories of Christmas somewhere in our hearts. One year when I was a kid, we got our tree early (in my family, we often got the Charlie Brown tree on Christmas Eve), had it all decorated, and I got a robot toy called Mr. Machine. I had really wanted it and I was overjoyed when it was there on Christmas morning. But looking back, the best part was there was no stress that year, none of the terrible pressure that Christmas often puts on parents and families to be happy, giving, cheerful, and a little – or a lot – materialistic. Talk about performance anxiety. The Christmas season excels at inducing it, that’s for sure. But for this one time, it felt like we were in the spirit of Christmas as we were taught it should be. My favorite Christmases as an adult were when my own kids were young and I had survived cancer and having both hips operated on, and I was living vicariously through them.

I say living vicariously because for me Christmas was often more a dark time than a time of light and joy. I don’t do Christmas trees; the kids and I have a Christmas fern. And as you might gather from my talk thus far, the whole Christmas season as currently practiced in our culture leaves me not just cold, but a little bitter and a whole lot sad. I know I am not alone in those feelings. Indeed, many people feel far worse than I do. I know that because both the incidence of depression and the suicide rate go up during the Christmas season.

Christmas is a very powerful holiday that gets to you one way or another. I said in my newsletter blurb that it gets in our pores whether we are fer it or agin” it. And I sincerely believe that is true. I sometimes think that as we approach the Winter Solstice and the end of the year, the gestalt and ambience of Christmas itself causes us to look deeper at ourselves and our society and often we don’t like what we see. But I am even more inclined to think that a lot of the negativity is a function of culturally imposed expectation “why isn’t my holiday season like the Walton’s?” and the stark contrasts with reality that result at the edges of life. Misery loves company, and it is truly miserable to be miserable when society and family and friends tell us ’tis the season to be jolly. That really hurts.

And this explains in large part why Christmas is both the best and worst of times. Dickens had in mind the French revolution when he penned those words. I’m talking about the

Christmas season, which, emotionally and psychologically, at least, is just as powerful a time. And that time is getting longer and longer.

I used to get mad at stores that put up Christmas displays before Thanksgiving. In the 70s and 80s I had a policy of not patronizing those stores. Well, if I put that policy in place today, I would have virtually no place to shop. Christmas has become such a huge economic imperative that it is almost a year long undertaking. Christmas is a global secular holiday. Talk about getting out of the way of a freight train.

I have a report I found on the Internet called 2001 Christmas Sales in Major Overseas Markets and Retail Outlook for 2002. Here are a few choice excerpts: – the 2001 Christmas sales situation in Hong Kong’s major overseas markets commands special attention…” I caught you, didn’t I? You thought the report was about markets overseas from the United States. This report, based in Hong Kong, talks about sales in Europe, the US, Asia, even Japan and contains this interesting sentence: “In Japan, Christmas sales were not encouraging.” I guess not. I shouldn’t say this but I can’t resist: do you suppose Japanese children would write letters to “shinto Claus.” And how about this one for confirming the rise of Christmas as a world wide secular holiday: “While Christmas is not traditionally celebrated across the Chinese mainland, it has begun to catch on in more sophisticated urban cites. A growing number of retailers have started to promote the festive season by putting up Yule-tide decorations and offering discounts on related merchandise in the hope of boosting year-end sales.”

In the US, many merchants count on Christmas shopping for up to 25% of their sales and 50% of their profits. Thus, every item of commerce imaginable has become grist for the Christmas mill – power tools, vitamins, electronics, magazine subscriptions, pet accessories, furniture, carpet cleaning – you name it, I”ve seen a TV commercial for it. And the madness goes beyond mere retail sales.

My favorite example of the American business spirit of Christmas is a Federal Express ad in the Wall Street Journal in the late 1980s. It was a full page ad that compared business to war and made the argument that if a General moves his troops during a truce, he gets an advantage in the war. Well, said FedEx, a good business person knows that you can’t just sit around idly during Christmas. Packages need delivering. Advantages need to be claimed. So, like Santa,

FedEx is going to work on Christmas Eve and deliver on Christmas Day. Because even on Christmas, FedEx knows you have to get it there overnight.

In one ad we get business compared to war, FedEx compared to Santa, and the reality based notion that only an idiot would consider not doing business on Christmas. Scrooge would be so very proud.

Christmas has become so commercial, so ubiquitous, that both it and its economic symbol, Santa Claus, have been declared to be secular by the federal courts.

A couple of years ago a Cincinnati attorney named Richard Ganulin filed suit in federal court in an effort to have the federal government’s recognition of Christmas as a national holiday declared unconstitutional as an impermissible establishment of religion. Federal District Court Judge Susan Dlott disagreed with Ganulin and dismissed his lawsuit declaring that there were “legitimate secular purposes for establishing Christmas as a legal public holiday.” Judge Dlott issued her ruling in part as a poem. While it’s not The Night Before Christmas, I wanted to read you a verse or two:

The court will address

Plaintiff’s seasonal confusion

Erroneously believing of Christmas

MERELY a religious intrusion.

The court will uphold

Seemingly contradictory causes

Decreeing “the establishment” AND “santa”

Both worthwhile CLAUS(es).

We are all better for Santa

The Easter Bunny too

And maybe the great pumpkin

To name but a few!

There is room in this country

And in all our hearts too

For different convictions

And a day off too!

So we have a federal court flatly stating that Santa Claus is a secular rather than religious symbol and that Christmas itself is enough of a secular event to avoid any entanglements with the establishment clause of the Constitution.

I suspect many of us in the sanctuary today have problems with the commercialism of Christmas, with the hectic nature of the season, the unreasonable expectations, the cultural pressures. But we UUs have another problem with Christmas. It is a fundamental problem faced by many religious people, but not in the odd way we do. Although Unitarian Universalism is considered a Christian sect, by definition we reject the notion that Jesus was the Son of God and that he was sent by the Father to save mankind through a substitutionary salvation. Unitarian does not mean we are looking for one world government.

I don’t know about you, but this situation has always puzzled me. Jews don’t believe in the divinity of Christ and they simply don’t celebrate Christmas. Yet somehow, we Unitarians want to have our cake and eat it too. We disavow that Jesus was the Christ, but still have a candlelight Christmas Eve service. If we’re just celebrating the birthday of an important guy or the season, then why don’t we celebrate Sir Isaac Newton’s birthday?

Isaac Newton was born on December 25th, something we are certain is not the case for Jesus. In fact, this (fictional) coincidence of birth inspired Newton throughout his life and he felt that it was a sign from God that he was meant to be a giant among men. Back in my undergraduate chemistry days, we used to put a big banner along the halls of the chemistry department that read: Happy Newton’s Birthday! On the last day before winter break, we would have a birthday cake and drink punch and sing Sir Isaac happy birthday in absentia.

Although we had a good time and reveled in the goof on society we had invented, it would not be fair in any sense to say we had come up with a substitute religious holiday for Christmas. We merely changed the focus of the day.

So where does that leave most thinking UUs? We reject the divinity of Christ and hence the inherent meaning of Christmas. And we, as much as any sensitive, thinking people, reject Santa and the economic hold that Christmas has on the world. Yet at the same time, we all yearn for the hope, happiness, and joy we felt as kids and sometimes, almost by accident it seems, experience as adults.

I”ve been thinking for some years that there may be a way to reclaim the Christmas season in a way that will make it more meaningful for us. I hope you will find my suggestions helpful, recognizing that Christmas is an emotional and psychological battleship that is slow to turn.

My plan involves doing something that I spoke about in a theoretical sense in my last service – creating new stories that speak to us today in order to provide both context and meaning to our lives. Because, you see, the energy is already there. Christmas has more energy than you’d care to shake a stick at. That energy makes the Christmas season the perfect place to start to invent new stories, new mythologies, new ways of seeing ourselves and our lives.

I honestly believe that Christmas Day itself is too far gone to salvage. It is an economic juggernaut and my advice is to just get out of the way. But there is a holiday that can be salvaged. And it falls just twelve days after Christmas: the Epiphany.

The Epiphany, celebrated on January 6, is the day that the three wise men arrived at the manger, guided by the Christmas Star, declared Jesus to be the Christ child, and gave him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Their arrival marks the end of the real twelve days of Christmas, not the last 12 shopping days before Christmas Day that Madison Avenue wants you to believe.

The Epiphany is a day all but lost in our culture, although it was and continues to be an important holiday in the Russian and Greek Orthodox churches and in other Christian countries. In fact, when I talked about this service with a number of people, I found that a surprising number of them did not know what the Epiphany is.

I know about the Epiphany because my uncle was a Russian Orthodox priest. When I was a kid, I used to sometimes be an altar boy with my cousins, especially around the Christmas season, when services were crowded and my uncle could use the help. My family always celebrated the Epiphany and we did not take our Christmas tree down until January 7. Of course, by then it was a fire hazard and the object of ridicule by the neighborhood kids, most of whom had taken down their trees either right after Christmas Day or right after New Year’s . So I have practical experience with the holiday, experience that convinces me that the Epiphany contains considerable meaning that we can mine and use for our own lives.

The Epiphany, not Christmas Day, is the real religious holiday. Until the wise men arrived and revealed to the world that this infant was the Christ child, Jesus was just another poor kid in the manger. The word epiphany means to reveal or recognize that which is already there, but which we cannot or do not yet see. There is a universal aspect to the epiphany, beyond the manifestation of Christ to the Magi. And that is simply this: it represents the recognition of the light within all of us, whether you call it divine or simply the spark of life. While we do not believe that Jesus was god, many of us believe that we all – him included – have the divine within us. As Robert Heinlein said in Stranger in a Strange Land: “I am god, thou art god, and all that groks is God.”

Here is a ready made myth that is overripe for the taking by Unitarians. What is more Unitarian than a holiday that reminds us that we all have a light inside ourselves, a light that must be uncovered and revealed to the world in order for us to be fully human and perhaps approach the divine?

And here is another benefit. For the first time in 16 services I am actually going to talk about one of our Seven Principles beyond noting they exist. Our very first principle states that we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person. During the Christmas season, we can honor this principle by first, reminding ourselves of the spark within ourselves, and second, by honoring it within others.

In the first instance, we can connect with – or perhaps find for the first time’the divine spark within our own hearts and souls. Of course, none of us is a king; and none of us is the Christ. But we are all aware, spiritual beings. We all have a light inside of us, however you choose to describe it, and when we reveal it to ourselves at the Epiphany, we are reminding ourselves that we, like Jesus, are sons and daughters of the cosmos. Once we have revealed our light to ourselves, then we can follow the words of Jesus who said that one does not light a lantern and then put it under a box. Our light must be nurtured and allowed to grow and to illuminate ourselves and the world around us. We can use the Epiphany to remind us of that important task.

The wise men gave gifts to Jesus because he was the King of the Jesus and they worshipped him because he was the Christ. And the gifts they gave him were the gifts of a king: gold, frankincense and myrrh. The spiritual aspect of gift giving, then, is that it is a tangible demonstration of the worth and dignity of the other person. So when we give gifts to each other at Christmas, it should be for a better reason than to make housework easier or to accumulate stuff in the “whoever dies with the most toys wins” mode.

The best reason I can think of to give gifts at Christmas is to demonstrate to the person to whom you are giving that he or she is important, that he or she matters to you, that you are not just thinking of him or her, but will honor their individuality, and that they, like Jesus, deserve to be given a gift. In our society gift giving has gone from a special gift that symbolized the gifts of the magi, to trying to outdo each other in a materialistic shark feeding. My kids used to have so many boxes from relatives, and to be fair, us, their parents. that their mother and I decided to hold some back and dole them out over the year. There is something wrong, I think, with kids having 30 boxes waiting for them under the tree.

Here is where the thought really counts. The why of Christmas gift giving has been lost in a crass commercialism that knows no bounds. You are a daughter of the cosmos, my friend, my lover, I will honor you today with a gift of – a blender? See, it doesn’t work. Not if you are trying to connect to this universal truth I am talking about and our first UU principle. And just to be fair, it doesn’t work for a three-quarter inch drill either. If gift giving at Christmas is to have any meaning, the gifts we give must be the gifts of the human spirit, of the light that shines within all of us. On this day, at least, and for one special gift, at least, let the thought be noble, the heart pure, and the gift divine.

So, in the practice what you preach department, this is my proposal. Follow Jesus’ advice and render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. I have abandoned Christmas day to the merchants. It really has no meaning for Unitarians anyway, and I think in popular culture it lost whatever meaning it had as a spiritual holiday long ago. December 25 has for millennia been a day that belonged much more to Caesar than to God. If we can believe its press, it started out as a pagan bacchanalian festival – we, in our capitalist bottom line society have simply perfected it.

The spiritual meaning of the season and I think, the Unitarian meaning, might be recaptured by allowing December 25th to instead mark the beginning of a 12 day reflective period. Twelve is a magic number in many cultures, so we can keep it as part of the new story. Then December 25th can become a symbolic beginning of the quest to understand who we are and to find the sacred within us. The period in between, which now is just a stretch of dead time until New Year’s Day, will allow us time to think about and be quiet with this most important of spiritual subjects.

And then, on January 6th, let us celebrate the Epiphany, the revealing of that which was already there, and rediscover, rekindle, and reveal the light of life within us all. Then we may rededicate ourselves to honor that discovery within ourselves and allow – no insist that – the light inside shine outward the entire year through. And in conjunction with transforming this inner discovery into an outward expression of love, compassion, connection, and simply being, I suggest we use the giving of gifts to acknowledge the light in others with a gift from the heart and soul, a gift that honors the light in the other, a gift bought during the symbolic twelve day journey of discovery, and thus a gift that allows us to beat Caesar at his own game by buying it during the secular after Christmas sales.

I even think it would be nice if Unitarian churches thought about celebrating the Epiphany with its own service of light. Instead of celebrating the godhood of Christ, however, we would celebrate the spark of the divine within us all. After all, we UUs have a Christmas Eve candle light service. Frankly, it feels even more appropriate to me for us to have a candle light service on the Epiphany. The candles are obvious symbols of the light of life we carry within us, of the divine light the wise men revealed in Jesus.

The power of Christmas is undeniable. That power reflects our deep longing to know who we are, where we came from, and what is the best way to live and connect to one another. This is my suggestion for taking the energy of Christmas, so much of which is either lost to us or has become negative, and transforming it into our energy through a new story and a new commitment to ourselves and each other. If we can do that, then perhaps we can all have a very august Christmas indeed.

Presented August 4, 2002

First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

Austin, Texas

Revised for Print