A Messy, Merry Christmas

and Dina Claussen

December 23, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

I almost never write prayers in a lighthearted mood, but I did this morning. I keep replaying an imaginary phone call I am making to whatever cosmic department is in charge of Christmas, try to get the kind I want.

I call this number, and when they answer I say Hello, I’d like to order a perfect Christmas. Who handles that?

The line goes dead.

I call back. OK look, how about a nearly perfect Christmas? Can I get one of those?

Silence.

What about a truly Special Christmas?

More silence.

OK look already, it’s getting pretty late in December and I have to have something. What have you got?

A Messy Christmas.

Messy Christmas? I don’t want a messy Christmas. Who wants a messy Christmas? What about a truly horrid Christmas?

No, I don’t want that one. So we’re back to Messy Christmas? You’re sure it will be all right?

It will be messy.

Messy. Oh fine, very well, I’ll have a messy Christmas. After all, how bad could it be?

They’re laughing. They’re all laughing.

When will it get here?

You’ll know.

What’s that mean,

“You’ll know”?

Hello? Hello? They said Amen.

HOMILY: Angels, Here on Earth Dina Claussen

Angels rule at Christmas time. They grace trees, cards, wrapping paper, clothes, tableaux and children’s pageants. And we sing hymns with angels in them: “Angels on High”, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”.

The angels have various roles to play – announcing incredible events like the birth of a very special child, Jesus, for instance, or helping someone to remember that life is a gift like in the Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

In the 1987 German film, Wings of Desire, a story is told about an angel who chooses to become human rather than continue to stay in the life of looking on and serving humans. In one particular scene that has stayed with me, the angels are in a library. You can hear the murmuring thoughts of the humans that are there, as the angels stand close by. As one person or another expresses sadness, despair, or agitation in their thoughts, each angel leans in closer and then the human’s thoughts gradually get a bit brighter and calmer.

I don’t know whether there are unseen angels out there, watching and occasionally leaning in closer when we need it. I certainly like the idea of that. But I do know that there are angels walking around that we can see, but they are hard to recognize because they look just like you and I.

The ones that we are liable to recognize are the famous men and women who have only to enter a room and people’s spirits are lifted. And when they send out messages, many listen, even those who are outside their faith or path. I am thinking here of the Dali Lama, as one of the best known these days.

Years ago, I sat in a room with other people and experienced Katagiri Roshi, founder of the Zen monastery near San Francisco. I hardly remember his words, but his being shouted a message to me: Here is what it looks like and feels like when someone does not try to hold on to anything in the moment. He’d have an emotion on his face and then he’d let go of it – another emotion, he’d let go of it also. I can’t really do it justice with mere words, but somehow just witnessing that and the compassion on his face, changed me. I came in bored and tired, but emerged energized and deeply moved.

It is a wonderful thing to experience someone else’s over the top angel moments, but those kind don’t happen too often for us normally. Fortunately, there are other types of angels walking around. It’s you and I and maybe even everyone that we know. We have those moments when we can be the person who sets an example, sends a message of hope, but especially, leans in closer and gives comfort.

In ancient Hebrew tradition, there is a story about a special group of people called the Lamed-Tov: 36 people who are capable of responding to human suffering. Because of them God is said to have spared the world. The catch is that no one knows who they are, no even the 36 themselves. It is said that we need to treat everyone with compassion just in case we are one of the 36 and should be doing our job. Our compassion saves, blesses and sustains the world.

There is so much compassion needed, especially at this time of year. Sometimes it can be receiving a touch on the arm, a smile, a laugh, being listened to for a moment or something more. Sometimes it is a stranger doing a small favor in the moment, or a member of your family stretching past their usual routine with you in the moment. Whatever it is, it is part of what keeps us all reminded of the best of life, and then we can get on with life even if harder things are happening. We are reminded of community – that we are not alone; we are cared for; we belong.

I say all this especially, because this is my last sermon with all of you. You will hear soon enough, if you haven’t already, that things have not gone well in my internship – Davidson and I have turned out to be a bad match. It happens that way sometimes. We both take the internship experience too seriously to want to continue when our styles are not compatible. It makes it too difficult for others around us as well and neither of us wants to continue that, for sure. I am exploring options for a next internship in the Bay area and will return there to look for jobs in the meantime, as it will make things easier for me to be in one of my home areas while that is in progress. I will, however, be in Austin through the end of January.

I want to let you know that I have appreciated those angel moments that I experienced here in your midst: the kind words, hugs, smiles, sharing and listening; the people who offered rides or the use of their cars; the people who welcomed me into their homes; the people who I got to work with on various committees and projects; and the staff who welcomed a newcomer into their midst warmly and completely. I felt in community and not alone fairly quickly. It has made all the difference. May you continue to bless all who come here in this place.

I want to wish you all well – and the best for this next year as this congregation moves into the next phase of your community adventure. You will continue to be in my thoughts and my prayers: Shalom, Amen, Salaam, and Blessed Be.

HOMILY: A Messy Merry Christmas Davidson Loehr

It may feel a little surprising to come to church expecting some kind of release from whatever stresses and strains you’ve had this week, and then learn that even Christmas services often take place against a real-world background. Even ministers and interns who sometimes dress up in robes like this, can have such differences in their understanding of what religion and ministry are about that a supervisory relationship can’t work. It hasn’t happened here before, but it does happen several times each year within the UUA, so it is part of the normal run of things. And it isn’t necessarily tragic. Other ministers who had a bad match in their first internship have done fine in second internships, and gone on to serve churches happily and well. But no matter how we wrap it, it’s painful, and feels like a failure – for both of us.

These are the kind of very human feelings with which everyone here can identify: ordering a perfect Christmas and getting a messy one. As I thought about it, I realized that most of our favorite stories – and most of our favorite Christmas stories, are also kind of messy. I think it’s why we like them. So I want to share a few messy stories of some of the things that life brings us. A couple of them may not sound like Christmas stories, but I think they are. They’re at least Christmas gifts today.

One of the messiest has to be the traditional Christian story. A young couple can’t even find a decent place to have their baby, who winds up being born in a barn. A million preachers have played on that picture of the birth of the sacred, taking place off-stage and out of sight, the last place you’d expect it, but the place where it’s usually born.

That’s really the message of the ancient winter solstice celebrations too, which were all about finding light and hope in the middle of the darkest and coldest nights. But not all good stories are like Hallmark cards or rides at Disneyworld. Some of the most memorable are also the most real.

I’ll share one from my own family of origin, which was the favorite Christmas story of my parents and an aunt who lived with us when I was two and a half. She was 22, and was living with us to save money for her coming marriage. But for Christmas, she put aside enough to buy something special for me that she knew I’d love: a little red scooter.

She put off shopping for it until December 24th. Unfortunately, Tulsa had a rare snowstorm that day – two or three inches of snow. She took the bus downtown, and found the scooter – she told me it was the last one the department store had. Those little red scooters were very popular that year.

Then she had to carry this thing through thousands of shoppers, with every third person yelling at her because they”d been hit by the handlebars. All the way home, the scooter or its handlebars seemed to seek out people to hit, and by the time she got to our stop she felt like she’d been yelled at by half the bus.

It got worse. She got off the bus and began to walk the seventy or eighty yards to our house, when she saw me out in the front yard, playing in the snow. So she snuck behind two neighbors” houses, climbing over or through their fences and dragging her presents and that scooter along, trying not to scratch it. As she came through our neighbor’s snow-covered yard, she stepped in a hole and twisted her ankle. Somewhere about right then, she stopped loving the little red scooter – and may have had second thoughts about me, too.

But she got to our back door, got the thing down into the basement, and hid it in the furnace room, cleaned it up and put a big bow on the handlebars. On Christmas Day after all the presents had been opened, my aunt said she had bought a very special present for me, but I had to close my eyes while she brought it up from the basement. She brought it upstairs and set it up in front of me, then told me I could open my eyes. I looked at it, then looked at her, and said, “I didn’t want a scooter!” My aunt told me this story when I was twenty-one, and said the moral of it was that I was lucky to be alive!

I don’t remember that Christmas at all, and have absolutely no memory of that scooter from my childhood. Apparently, I really didn’t want it and never played with it.

Sometimes, what life brings isn’t a gift at all, but an attachment to something that will harm us if we can’t let go of it. For about a decade, I’ve loved a story told by San Francisco physician Rachel Naomi Remen, about a young man she worked with many years before. He had been stranded in snow for three days on a skiing party, not long before he was to be married. His right foot developed gangrene, and the doctors said it would have to be amputated. But he would not give them permission to do the surgery, and kept refusing until the time was approaching when they would no longer be able to save his life unless they removed his foot. Finally, his fiancé got his attention, when she became so angry she took his engagement ring off and put it onto the swollen black little toe of his right foot. “I hate this damned foot,” she sobbed. “If you want this foot so much why don’t you marry it? You’re going to have to choose, you can’t have us both.” Sometimes, survival demands letting go of everything but life itself. (Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. 192)

A third story is one I had never thought of as a Christmas story until now. It’s one that has been told in a lot of ways. It’s also from Dr. Remen.

It involves a star football player for one of the California colleges, who developed a bone cancer in his right leg, and had to have the leg amputated above the knee. It ended his life as he had known it, a life of fast cars, many women, and an easy popularity. He went into a long destructive period of fury, alcohol, drugs and a couple car accidents. In one of their first sessions, Dr. Remen gave him a sheet of drawing paper and a box of crayons, and asked if he could draw a picture of his body. He drew a sketch of a vase. Then through the center, he began drawing a huge deep crack. He went over and over the crack with a black crayon, gritting his teeth and ripping the paper.

In time, his anger began to evolve into an empathy with other young people he read about in the paper, who had also gone through life-changing injuries like his. Now his anger was at the statements by doctors that were printed in the paper, because he felt they didn’t understand a thing about what their patients were really going through. One day he asked Dr. Remen if she could get him in to see any of these patients. Within a few weeks he was visiting them, and within a few months doctors were asking him to see patients who had lost legs, arms, anything that would change their self-image in dramatic and depressing ways. He really did understand them in ways the doctors couldn’t.

Then he was asked to visit a young woman who had a tragic family history: breast cancer had claimed the lives of her mother, her sister, and her cousin. Her other sister was in chemotherapy. So at age twenty-one, she took one of the only options open at that time, and had both her breasts removed surgically (Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. 117). Afterwards, she sank into a very deep depression, and would not talk to anyone. This young man took it on, and finally got her attention by going into her room wearing summer shorts and unstrapping his artificial leg, which made so much noise when it hit the floor that she looked up, to see him hopping around her room in time to the music from her radio. It was a ridiculous sight. After a moment, she burst out laughing. “Fella,” she said, “if you can dance, maybe I can sing” (Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. 117). Before long, they began visiting patients together. She was in school, and encouraged him to return to school to study psychology so he could develop his gifts further. A couple years later, they were married.

In his final meeting with Dr. Remen, she found the picture of the broken vase that he had drawn two years before, and handed it to him. He looked at it for some time, then said, “You know, it’s not really finished.” He took a yellow crayon and began to draw lines radiating from the crack in the vase in every direction, out to the edges of the paper. Thick yellow lines. Finally he put his finger on the crack, and said softly, “This is where the light comes through” (Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. 118).

Though I’d never thought of it this way before, this is almost a perfect Christmas story, from the very heart of what this season has always been about: the birth of something sacred from within the darkness of the real world, the return of light after it had seemed to disappear forever. The most formative moments of our lives are almost never in the well-laid plans we made, but in the unexpected and unwelcome disruptions of those plans, and our sometimes remarkable responses to them. As John Lennon said, life really is what happens while we’re making other plans. So the story isn’t a miracle in the sense of supernatural beings, wandering stars or adoring wise men coming from afar. It’s better than that. It’s a real-world miracle of transformation in the here-and-now, by the kind of light that can sometimes enter only through the cracks in our well-planned lives.

Life’s a messy thing. Sometimes we do get just what we wanted, but that’s not a very interesting story. Sometimes we get gifts that really are little red scooters, and the truth is that we didn’t want them at all, then or ever, in spite of the best intentions of the giver.

And sometimes we are given curses, to which we become attached, and which we must leave behind in order to choose life. Alcoholism and other addictions are like this. We become attached to them, but like that young man’s dead foot, eventually they can kill us if we don’t let go of them and choose life again. Relationships can be like this, too. Unhealthy relationships can become habit-forming, and to choose life we may have to leave a relationship that is killing our spirit.

And once in awhile we can be cursed with a terrible and life-changing loss – of a leg, a career, a beloved person, a partner who was our soul mate – and it creates a crack that seems to split us in half. We hate it, and don’t want to choose life again. Then if we’re lucky we may find somewhere down the road that a new kind of light and a new kind of life enter only because that crack had opened us up in ways we had never been open before.

So these are some of the gifts of life, at Christmas or any other season: the “little red scooter” gifts we really don’t want, in spite of the giver’s sincerity; a seductive attachment that’s going to destroy us if we don’t let go of it; and an awful kind of curse that breaks us open and ends life as we had known it – but which, with luck and work, can open us to a kind of light that can transform us in ways we had never imagined.

This mess is the gift of life for which we give thanks. And one reason we give thanks is just because part of the gift is our chance to sort through the gifts and other offerings, and put together our own life. It comes, as you know, in kit form. And part of the reason people gather in churches like this every week is to piece together parts of a diagram for their own lives – because there is some assembly required, and a lot of little sticks and things to put together. But if we can rub the right sticks together, they can make light. They really can.

Merry Christmas – to all of us.