Church of the Holy City

The Christmas Spirit

The Christmas Spirit
December 24, 2014
Christmas Eve
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete

I’ve been thinking about the Christmas Spirit over the past couple weeks. Mostly because I haven’t felt it. This disturbed me. I felt like Charley Brown in the Christmas special they play around this time of year on TV. The whole show is about Charley Brown and how he seems always to feel depressed around Christmas. I wouldn’t say I feel depressed, but rather sad. And this is kind of funny—I feel mildly sad because I don’t feel happier!
So all this made me think about the Christmas spirit. I see two kinds of Christmas spirit. And these two ways of seeing Christmas are like what Swedenborg calls the external and the internal of worship. The external of Christmas is the excited anticipation of presents, the Christmas tree, the lights on the houses, family getting together, Christmas carols and songs, shopping, and exhaustion. The internal of Christmas is the actual reason why we celebrate Christmas—the story of Jesus’ birth and the Old Testament prophesies. While I haven’t felt that excited anticipation of external Christmas, I can say that I am deeply steeped in the internal Christmas.
When I was young, the excitement of Christmas was almost magical. We would get a real tree and set it up in our family room. We had a tree stand with screws you would screw into the base of the tree to keep it upright. You would fill the stand with water to keep the tree alive until Christmas. We would take a night and decorate the tree as a family. We would unwrap the ornaments one by one, delighting in old favorites that had hung on the tree year after year from long ago. Then gifts would appear under the tree. We had stockings that we hung above a real fire place. Christmas Eve we would go to an evening Christmas service at church, then it was off to our grandparents’. All our aunts and uncles and cousins would gather at Grandma and Grandpa’s. The whole house would smell of the special Christmas sausage we would make from scratch every year the week before Christmas. There were presents from our grandparents, from Uncle Fran, and we exchanged names so that we had one other gift from whoever drew our name. Then came Christmas day itself and we opened our gifts from Santa, mom and dad, and our brothers and sisters. This was the excitement of external Christmas that came only once a year.
You may have noticed in this story that evening church was part of the Christmas celebration. You may also have noticed that Christmas Eve at church was pretty much eclipsed by all the other aspects of Christmas celebration. But as the years passed, the church aspect of Christmas became more and more important to me. It first dawned on me by a show we watched on TV. That show was the Charley Brown Christmas show I mentioned earlier. In that show there is one scene that struck me when I was younger. Linus explains to Charley Brown what the meaning of Christmas is. He recites the section of Luke 2 that we heard this evening. I remember how deeply that scene in the Christmas show struck me. I said to myself, “They’re reciting the Bible on TV! This is a network program on prime time and they’re reciting the Bible!” I didn’t know you could read the Bible on TV. But Charles Schultz, the cartoonist who gave us Charley Brown also had the courage to air his religious beliefs in the Christmas show he created.
This year I have been ruminating about the internal Christmas. I have been thinking about the Israelites and their history. It is a history that gave us the prophesies about the coming Messiah that we read in preparation for Christmas. Then I think about the birth of Christianity and how those prophesies were reinterpreted by Christians and applied to Jesus.
I think about that special Christmas morning when Jesus was born in the darkest time of the year. He was born in the darkest time in human history, when the world had forgotten about the real meaning of God and love. It was a barbaric time when religion was ritual, animal sacrifices, and detailed laws. It had been forgotten that God is Love, that loving is godly.
There is a kind of external to these ideas that have been running through my head. A few weeks ago I went to hear a performance of Handel’s Messiah by the Edmonton Symphony and the Richard Eaton Singers. The words to Handel’s Messiah are all Bible quotations. They are the prophesies in Isaiah, passages from the Gospels, and from Paul. I downloaded a recording by the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis. I played that recording in my car as I drove around town doing my Christmas errands. This glorious music lifted me into a high region of my mind and heart and all the traffic frustrations dissipated under Handel’s spell and the power of the Bible’s words.
I think that the highlight of Christmas for me, now, is this very Christmas Eve service. Sharing the Christmas texts in the Bible with you, participating in the sacrament of Holy Communion, and the candle-light singing of Silent Night brings home to me just how special this season is. There is the darkness, the light, the lights. These rituals call to mind that ancient night. When in a world of darkness, the Light of the World was born.

PRAYER

Lord, this is the happiest time of the year. There are many distractions and delights during the Christmas season. There are frantic crowds to fight, there are traffic snarls, there are parties and festivities. In all this, help us to remember why we are celebrating. Let us remember that your love for the whole human race is what this season is all about. It was your great love for humanity that caused you to come to earth as a human baby. You lived among us; your feet walked the dust of Palestine. Help us to embody the love you showed us, and continue to show us. Help this Christmas season to be about love–love for you and love for our fellows.

And Lord, we pray for the sick. May they experience the power of your healing love. Fill them with the grace of your healing power. Comfort their family and friends. We pray for the grace of your healing power for all who are ailing in body or soul.