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© Davidson Loehr
7 December 2003
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
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Prayer
As we enter the Christmas season, let us remember the difference between glitter and real gold.
We are so easily seduced into thinking the gifts of the season are to be measured by their price tags.
Let us remember that the richest gifts of this or any season are gifts of the spirit that don’t have to cost much money at all.
Jesus of Nazareth once asked what good it did if you gained the whole world and lost your soul. In a world where this distinction is often lost, let us try to give gifts to nurture the souls of those for whom we care.
For the highest of holy days and holidays, let us measure our gifts by the highest standards that such gifts deserve. May we and those we love remember the coming holidays with warmth and gratitude, as days then we gave and received gifts of life and love, not something less.
Let this be our holiday prayer: that we are opened to give and receive gifts of the spirit in this most spiritual of seasons, and that we may be grateful for the opportunity once more to give and receive in gratitude for the manifold blessings of life.
Amen.
SERMON
There’s a saying in theology that the first word in religion should always be “No!” The reason is because there is so much nonsense going around dressed up like religion that you have to get it out of the way before anything worthwhile can be discussed. The first word in religion should be “No!” so that later we’ll be able to say “Yes” to something worth saying Yes to.
There is hardly anywhere that this rule of first saying “No” applies more than the subject of Christmas! There is so much nonsense around Christmas that every year it feels like I have to shovel through more bad stuff to find the good stuff.
You may be thinking, “How can a minister not like Christmas? Isn’t that part of their job description?”
How do I dislike Christmas? Let me count the ways:
One is just a knee-jerk reaction to anything that is so overhyped. The Christmas ads are now starting before Thanksgiving! There ought to be a law against that.
Another thing I have against Christmas is that Jesus would have hated it, and that should count for something.
And when we wrap something just in sweetness and light as we wrap Christmas, then the shadow side of it grows. And the shadow side of the Christmas season is that there is more depression, there are more people feeling lonely and left out, than at any other time of the year. And if you don’t have a family, especially one that looks like a Hallmark card – well, there aren’t any pictures of single people enjoying Christmas alone, you know?
And pretending this is a religious holiday is a lie: it’s about selling stuff, and everybody knows it. We read that we’re expected to spend an average of $1,000 each on Christmas presents, and I think that’s both irritating and rude. We create these pictures of happy, simple people, and into it, we throw people who are frazzled, tired, working more hours for less relative money than they got thirty years ago, pressured by hokey ads to buy things their kids don’t need but have been taught to want. And all this is wrapped in tinsel and accompanied by a chorus of digital angels singing not to the prophets of the Bible, but to the profits of the bottom line.
Finally, I always struggle with the fact that ministers must do a sort of “command” sermon, finding reasons to be joyous, trying to convince you that this is, after all, a wonderful time of year. – Yes, this sermon will be one of those, but not yet.
Some people say that this is an important time because it’s the time of the winter solstice, which has been celebrated for 30 or 40 centuries, probably more. Well, the solstice was a big deal many centuries ago, a sign the sun was coming back and there would be more light, winter would be gone and we’d be warm again. But the seasons of the sun don’t mean much any more. We can buy fresh food from all over the world every day, electric lights make all our nights as bright as we want them, and the last time any snow was seen in Austin, there was a Democrat in the White House who was being impeached.
These are some of the reasons that I begin every Christmas season rooting for the Grinch.
And you know I’m not alone in this. You might be surprised, as I was, at the huge number of anti-Christmas web sites on the Internet. Do a Google search, type in “anti-Christmas” and you’ll find 11,000 sites for for it. Type in “Bah humbug” and you’ll find 58,000 sites. There are 587,000 sites under “Christmas depression,” and typing, “I hate Christmas” for a Google search brings up 1,200,000 web sites. Some other site names aren’t fit to repeat. But you can type almost every vulgar word you know, pair it with the word “Christmas,” and find hundreds of thousands of web sites put up by others who are saying No to Christmas – hopefully, because there is something deeper and more true that they want to say Yes to.
So this bah-humbug stuff isn’t just one or two grouches. There’s a conspiracy: millions of grouches, millions of them. Heck, this could even be a movement.
It’s the kind of movement that reminds me of my all-time favorite graffiti, penciled in the grout between the tiles on a men’s restroom wall in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Placed just where all men were sure to see it, someone had written “We hide in the cracks now, but soon we will take over the tiles!”
So this could be that kind of a conspiratorial movement, hiding in the cracks of our culture between all the Christmas hype, waiting to burst forth and take over.
There are really at least three different parts to the Christmas season. Somewhere buried under all this glitter is the idea of remembering a man named Jesus who lived once and taught some things worth remembering. Then, buried even deeper, is the fact that when Christmas was assigned the date of December 25th in the fourth century, it was to cover the ancient winter solstice festival of the religion of Mithraism.
I don’t want to talk about either of those things now. Today, I want to talk about the star of Christmas, the real center of all the decorations and sales. Of course I mean Santa Claus, the patron saint of the Christmas shopping season. We’ll talk about some of the solstice and religious dimensions on coming Sundays, and on Christmas Eve we will retell the traditional Christmas story and sing a lot of nice Christmas songs. But today, I want to talk about Santa Claus. That’s where we get the idea that Christmas is about getting and giving presents.
Our name Santa Claus is a corruption of St. Nicholas. The original St. Nicholas lived, at least according to legend, in the 4th century. He was a bishop, and a man with a generous heart. The most famous story about him concerned a poor widow with three young girls. The only way young girls without means could survive then, as also in many countries today, was by becoming prostitutes. To help them avoid this fate, Nicholas tossed three bags of gold through their window, one to serve as a dowry for each of the girls.
St. Nicholas was one of the most beloved of all Catholic saints. Besides being the patron saint of children, he was the patron saint of spinsters, sailors and travelers, and a reminder of his story could be seen up until just a few decades ago as the three balls hanging outside of pawn shops, representing those three bags of gold.
Nicholas first became associated with Christmas during the Middle Ages. An agent of this transformation may have been a 13th-century French nun who left gifts for the poor on the eve of St. Nicholas’ Day, which is December 6th.
As the patron saint of sailors, he was a favorite of Christopher Columbus, who named an island for him on his voyage here in 1492. But he wasn’t heard of much after that until the 19th century, because the Protestants who settled this country didn’t want anything to do with Catholic saints and holidays like Christmas, which they regarded as a pagan solstice celebration. The Puritans hated Christmas and wouldn’t allow it to be celebrated here. There was a time in the 17th century when you could go to jail if you were caught celebrating Christmas in this country.
But Santa Claus was just an imaginative image of the spirit of giving. Every culture has characters to represent this notion of the spirit of giving. German children awaited the arrival of Kris Kringle or Weinachtsman. (And “Kris Kringle” was another pollution. It began as Krist Kindl, “Christ Child,” in Lutheran Germany, where Germans replaced the Catholic Saint Nicholas with this invention of their own, a Christ Child that left gifts for poor people.) British tots dreamed of Father Christmas. In Russia, it was a female babushka that visited homes leaving treats for children. France had Pere Noel. The Dutch had long celebrated the feast of St. Nicholas on December 6th with gifts, food and parties. When they immigrated to America in the 1600s, they brought their version of “Sinter Claes” with them. Over time, Sinter Claes was anglicized to Santa Claus, and Santa’s story took shape by combining parts from most of the other stories about gift-giving spirits.
Still, it took a long time before Americans were willing to give Christmas any legal recognition. Americans said No to Christmas because they didn’t think it was a good thing. The first state to make Christmas a legal holiday was Alabama in 1836. It wasn’t a holiday in Texas until 1879.
What finally brought Christmas into our consciousness and gave us the holiday the way we have it today was the Romantic era. In the nineteenth century art and music and sort of the whole atmosphere were concerned more with feelings than with facts and rules. Christmas cards began around 1850 in England and caught on in this country by 1880.
Then in the 1860s, the famous Civil War cartoonist Thomas Nast drew the picture of a fat Santa in his sleigh, dressed in that fur-lined costume he still wears in a million shopping malls, and our culture’s picture of Santa was complete. (Thomas Nast was also the cartoonist who gave us the elephant as the symbol of Republican elephantine lumbering, and the donkey as the image of Democrats’ mulish obstreperousness.)
So what is this center of the Christmas season, its star performer, Santa Claus, really about? The spirit of giving that has been celebrated for the past thousand years has been a very special kind of spirit. It is secular, but holy – a rare combination. Secular means it’s dealing with this world, and holy means it’s doing so at a level both deep and live-giving. It has been a spirit of generous giving to people who need some gifts. They aren’t to help people fit in with their peers by having the same toy everyone else has. That may be the spirit of Wal-Mart, but it’s not the spirit of Santa Claus. They are gifts given to recognize the humanity of someone, like the three bags of gold given to ransom three girls from lives on the street. It isn’t about giving a lot of presents, it’s about giving gifts of the spirit in tangible form.
There are examples of the spirit of Santa Claus everywhere, and we need to learn how to recognize and celebrate them. Friday night, which was St. Nicholas Eve, we had a Freeze Night here, when a couple dozen church members and friends fixed dinner and breakfast for about fifty homeless men who spent the night in our social hall. These folks were on Santa’s team.
We could all be on Santa’s team. It’s a time to be possessed by a certain kind of spirit, a spirit of giving, but a very high and precious form of giving. It isn’t about the money, it’s about caring, and recognizing someone as a child of God, seeing what the Buddhists call the Buddha seed inside of them. The gifts themselves can be simple, and don’t have to cost much.
From my own childhood, I can’t remember many of the presents that cost much. The gifts I remember were the personal things. A sweater an aunt made me, with sleeves of almost equal length; mittens from another aunt, a little big but really warm and handsome.
And when I remember the most touching gift, it was probably the cheapest of the lot. It was from my Uncle Franklin. He sent the same thing to all fifty-two of his nieces and nephews. We could spot it by the shape: long, with two small lumps in it. Inside, always, were two yellow wooden pencils, a small plastic pencil sharpener with a bubble top to catch the wood shavings, and a package of Wrigley’s chewing gum, either Spearmint, Juicy Fruit or Doublemint. Then there was a little note that said “Merry Christmas,” and had our name printed on it.
At the time, we joked about it, that same silly-looking present every year. I only met Franklin a couple times, I’m sure he never met most of the recipients of his gifts. But every Christmas, no matter whether we had been good or bad, naughty or nice, there would be those lumpy little gifts that said “Merry Christmas,” sent by our family’s incarnation of Santa Claus.
They weren’t given to impress us with Uncle Franklin’s generosity. They were just given. They were like the background against which Christmas came every year. Nothing to do with Jesus or the winter solstice, everything to do with the spirit of giving, the spirit of Santa Claus with no frills at all, except for the plastic bubble top to catch the wood shavings.
Years later, I imagined Franklin sitting each year, gift-wrapping fifty identical gifts and mailing them to nieces and nephews scattered all over the world, whom he didn’t know and would never meet.
But he knew who had been born, what our names were, and when we were ready to receive those little gifts – around age three or four, I think. And he sent them every year until we graduated from high school. He obviously had a list, and was checking it twice. Uncle Franklin was on Santa’s team.
I don’t care what you think about Christmas, I wish more of us were on Santa’s team. You don’t need a religious bone in your body to enjoy getting and giving the most precious gifts of this season. Gifts, given simply because you care about someone, because you see how precious they are, and want them to see it too, of just because you want to be on Santa Claus’s team.
It doesn’t need to cost you a thousand dollars. It doesn’t measure worth or meaning in that currency. It’s a gift of the spirit, because life is short and we shouldn’t let much of it get past us without trying to be at least a small blessing to those whose lives touch ours.
This isn’t the Christmas hype or hoopla; it’s the good stuff, the quiet background that’s there after you have said No to all the nonsense. It feels wonderful to both the giver and the receiver, and the wonderful feeling lasts a very long time. And you can be a part of it.
Actually – this was kind of an early Christmas present you’re hearing about for the first time – you were a part of it without even knowing it: yesterday afternoon about 4:30 in Berkeley, California. That’s when our ministerial intern from last year, Cathy Harrington, came out from meeting with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee.
I knew they would approve her for entering the ministry. So on your behalf, I had a lovely, classy bouquet of huge two-tone Ecuadorian roses delivered to her as she came out of the meeting room, along with two pounds of really good chocolates. The note in the flowers said “Congratulations and love from your Austin family – we never doubted for a minute.”
Yesterday was December 6th, which just happened to be St. Nicholas’ Day. And I gave the gift in your name because generous spirits want company, and the generous spirit of Santa Claus wants all the company it can get. Cathy phoned a few hours later, excited to be finished with the Fellowship Committee, and wanted me to thank all of you, from the bottom of her heart. Every member of this church will be part of a warm and lovely memory for the rest of her life, just like my Uncle Franklin.
And so yesterday, we all played Santa Claus. It’s wonderful to be on Santa’s team. But we need more people in on this, so spread the word. It’s a kind of conspiracy. It could even turn into a movement, you know. We hide in the cracks now, but soon….
