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Sermons
Sermon for Christmas Eve, 5 PM
December 24, 2009, Year C
Randal B. Gardner
Think of the great Christmas stories that come to the
surface this time of year. Dickens’ A Christmas Carol can
take credit for putting Christmas as a centerpiece in the
Christian year. Christmas was somewhat minimally
observed at the time of his small novel, and these powerful
characters of Scrooge and the Spirits give Christmas day a
hopeful, redemptive quality that makes it a day worth
anticipating.
Then there is Capote’s Christmas Memory, a touching
reminiscence from his difficult childhood. His only friend
was a nearly elderly, very childlike cousin. Together they
made Christmas a secret garden of friendship, hidden close
to the company of the adults who generally disapproved of
anything a child would like, and thus disapproved of
them. Years later, as an adult author, Capote looked back
on his years in his cousin Sook’s home with that nostalgic
pain that comes when we grasp that a season of blessing in
our lives will never be replicated.
It’s a Wonderful Life was such a bust at the box office
that there was little interest in renewing its copyright in
the 1970’s. That made it cheap fare for local TV stations,
who ran the movie so often it became almost universally
known and so, too, almost universally loved. The story of
a decent but defeated man finding grace and redemption is
both touching and uplifting, a message of encouragement
for everyone who suffers the nagging doubt whether
decency and goodness count for much after all.
Joyeux Noël depicts the incidents when, on Christmas
Eves during World War I, enemy soldiers abandoned their
weapons to sing Carols and share prayers with each other
in the fields between the trenches. In the midst of
brutality, the Christmas story had the power to carve out a
small oasis of compassion and hope.
Even cartoonish stories like The Santa Clause and Home
Alone have a moment of deep human transformation, a
moment in which compassion is restored, fear is broken,
and a healing gift is given.
All these Christmas stories touch us because they
remind us that God’s first and most important conclusion
about this life and this earth is that it is good. Plenty is
done to corrupt and pollute and degrade the conditions of
this earthly life, but Christmas stories remind us that
beneath its tarnished surface it is good.
Perhaps the greatest of the stories is the one we read in
church. Because we read it in church, and because it has
the stylized brevity of scripture we don’t always relate to it
in the way we relate to a Scrooge character, or a George
Bailey, or even Kevin McAllister — the sweetly dangerous
boy in the Home Alone movies.
This is not a story that is going all that well. It’s main
characters are an unwed mother and her disinherited
fiancée. They’re working class people in an oppressive and
tyrannical society. They get bossed around by foreign
soldiers. They probably suffer a lot of fear in their daily
life, for fear is part of the formula that keeps oppression
and tyranny in power.
This young couple is ordered to travel to a distant
town, and because they fear disobeying the oppressor
militia, they travel even though she is in her last days of
pregnancy. Because this journey is primarily for the sake
of disrupting people’s lives to show the power of
occupying armies, there is no thought given to manage or
care for the travelers. Of course the small town of their
ancestors is over-run with those who could travel faster
than a pregnant woman, and the young couple has to
settle for shelter in a cave with the livestock.
Can you feel your own way into this story so far? Can
you imagine being Joseph — cast out from your family
because you stood by the woman you loved? Can you
imagine being Mary — hoping this travel and these hard
conditions wouldn’t harm her baby’s health? Can you
permit yourself to wonder, as they might have, if God had
turned away from them or forgotten them after beginning
the miracle of a virgin’s conception?
So the child comes. A feed trough is the best substitute
for a crib. Strips of cloth — maybe rags — are the best
substitute for a blanket.
From out of the night come visitors, compelled by a
vision of angels. Shepherds, seldom welcome in taverns or
inns, can come to this hideaway to see the child they were
told about. To tell about the angels. To wonder about
this child, this little one. To hope that this child will be
the savior.
This story, so depressingly like the stories that fill a
news program on a slow news day, is turned around by
the angels. This poignant, nearly sorry story of a young
family cloaked by shame and oppression is elevated and
blessed by the appearance of the angels, who fill the sky
with wondrous sound as they convey the message: Glory
to God. For you this night a child is born — your savior.
For you. A savior.
If we can relate at all to the pathos of the story perhaps
we can also relate to the liberation, the encouragement,
the hope that this child will be the savior. The saving
grace of this birth is that it is so very human, it is so very
close to the grief and sorrow, the fear and anger, the
longing and the wonder that we know in our own lives.
For you. A savior.
Not an answer. Not perfection. Not bliss. A savior.
For into the hard-edge story we tell, the intrusion of
God is a reminder that this is ultimately to be good. That
human beings like you and me are worth the effort, in
need of the love. That this child is a holy answer, through
which we are to be saved.
Let Scrooge repent and become giddy. Let Truman
Capote be wistful in his affection for a woman the rest of
the world cared little about. Let George Bailey be
redeemed by the love of a town for his essential decency
and goodness. And may these angelic words of
redemption and hope, spoken for you to hear, speak to
you: God thinks well of you, well enough to send his own
son. For you, this night, there is born a savior, who is
Christ, the Lord.
Sermon for Christmas Eve, 8 PM
Around the year 1400 in Tuscany a child was born and
given the name Guido di Pietro. He grew up to be a
devout Dominican brother and a very fine painter of the
early Renaissance. His images had such serenity and
elegance to them that he became known as the angelic one
and the blessed one, and his Italian nicknames Beato
Angelico or Fra Angelico are the names by which his
paintings are known to us.
At about the age of 20 Fra Angelico started painting
scenes of the annunciation. In these the angel genuflects
gracefully toward Mary, the clearly feminine angel folding
her hands across her breast. Mary is usually seated, facing
the angel, her hands also folded slightly across her breast,
and her face marked by a gentle serenity.
In the dozen such paintings there are variations in the
depictions of the angel and Mary, but in most of them
Mary appears to be serene or in awe. The angels’ wings
are wing-like, though often of gold or as if the feathers
 were silk. Behind the angel, outside the structure where
the angel and Mary meet, there will be the image of
another angel, arm outstretched and pointing away, above
the image of a man and woman in pain fleeing from a
garden — the Garden of Eden, of course.
In one of the most elegant of these paintings, now in
the Museum in Prado, the angel and Mary are both
bowing to each other, though Mary is seated. A beam of
light is directed by barely visible hands inside the sun to
shine on Mary’s torso, and within the sunbeam is the faint
image of a dove. The angel’s right foot is lightly planted
outside the building where Mary is, but poised in a lifting
posture, as if about to step all the way inside the building.
But the step is not taken. The foot remains within a
luscious garden, with fruit strewn along the ground, and
trees full of fruit and flowers all around. Here the second
angel in the background is not severely stern, but with a
look of resignation seems to be ushering the couple from
the garden. The couple are so close they nearly have to
brush the angel’s wings to get by her.
In the building where Mary sits, the ceiling is dark
blue and full of stars. At the top of the center post that
holds the ceiling up is the face of a strong but gentle
bearded man, an image of the face of God looking down
upon the scene.
So it is Fra Angelico hopes that we will understand the
gospel. The banishment of Adam and Eve from the
garden is inextricably linked to the annunciation to Mary.
The annunciation is not about a woman and her
pregnancy, but about heaven and earth and all the cosmos.
For Christ comes not only to bring hope and salvation,
but to reverse the effect of sin itself, to reverse the decay
and degradation and despair that holds the world captive.
In the garden from which the man and woman are
banished, the shrubs are dark and the fruit is colorful, but
muted. The man and woman are pale, and their clothing,
even though made for them by God, is dreary and
monotonous. But in the building, the temple where Mary
sits, the light is radiant, the colors clear and vivid, and the
vaulting above her head is alive with stars on a midnight
field.
The world of the garden, even as we would call it
paradise, is nothing compared to the splendor of the
temple where Mary gives her assent to the angel. For
Eden was never to be heaven, but a paradise of God’s
imagination for a humanity created to enjoy and care for
the gifts of God. In Mary, though,  who carries the child
of God within, the human condition is changed from that
of immature enjoyment of God’s gifts to full partnership
with God, bringing the divine essence into the human
soul, bringing the created human soul into the essence of
God. Christ is not restoring the earthly paradise of Eden
but is transporting heaven itself into your mind, the
temple of God into your soul.
This is the sweetest of the Christmas stories, and it
might be a good place to end this sermon. But Angelico
didn’t rest there, and neither shall I.
When Fra Angelico was about 50, with but a few years
to live, he painted another Annunciation scene. In this
setting there is no Garden of Eden in the background.
Mary and the angel meet in a courtyard, before an open
doorway through a wall. The doorway reveals a long
corridor, pillared on both sides by tall trees that rise above
the wall. The corridor nearly fades away over it’s distance.
There is at the far end of the corridor a figure,
unmistakably in the shape of a human, yet too shadowy to
describe.
Here the angel’s wings are not of delicate brocade or
gold feathers, but almost like what a child would paint.
Bold, sharp stripes of bright color course across the angel’s
wings. The angel, though genuflecting, extends a pointed
finger at the virgin, as if compelling the miracle to happen.
While in earlier paintings the angels’ posture was often as
receptive as the virgin’s, here the angel is accomplishing
something. The posture is upright. The look is no longer
so feminine; this angel could easily be taken for a male.
Here, the Virgin Mary clutches at her abdomen and
leans forward as if receiving a weight to carry. She is
more mature than in earlier paintings, and her face has the
characteristics of a woman who has had to fend for
herself; no servants have been waiting on this Madonna.
There is, perhaps, a wince of pain around her eyes, and her
cheeks are flushed with scarlet. There is no garden close at
hand, no veil of heaven above her head, and no smiling
face of God to oversee the moment. The angel’s words are
painted in large script above and below the scene, as if the
words themselves are causing the miracle which is taking
place.
This, too, is Fra Angelico’s way of preaching the
gospel from an older age, from a life grown complex. The
long corridor that awaits the onlooker could be anything
— the unknown journey of faith, the passage way to
death, the survival of a life in which the sting of sin is clear
and all around. The figure that waits at the corridor’s end
may be God, or Christ, or the true man or woman we are
to become, or death itself. The wince of pain in Mary’s
eyes is from knowledge, that true knowledge with which
Adam and Eve were both blessed and cursed, the
knowledge of good and of evil.
For one of the gifts of faith is knowledge, true
knowledge that things are not as God means them to be.
The person of faith who is able to see the heavenly vision
of Mary is also able to see the offense against God which is
told in suicide bombings of market places, in starving
children on the streets of an abundant planet, in the deep
wounding decent people can afflict on their beloved. The
person of faith who hears the angels promise salvation also
knows how to be patient in suffering and present to grief.
The man or woman of Christ is also the man or woman of
sorrows, in which the fears of the oppressed become that
man or woman’s fear, in which the hunger of homeless
becomes that person’s pang, in which the profanity of the
ungodly wounds that man or woman with sorrow.
Of course the virgin winces, and stoops beneath the
angel’s words, and blushes in anticipation. For this life of
faith is no holiday from life, it is an immersion in life.
This gift of a holy spirit is no cheap passage to Nirvana,
but it brings forth the lamentation of impatience for a
holiness that remains all too rare. Mary’s receptive words
are not words of passive acceptance, but they are an
agreement to become an active participant in the
transformation of the world. The corridor that waits is for
her, a journey to the unknown, taken not by accident but
with her full accord.
The elder Fra Angelico knew that letting Christ be
born within would bring not only the joy that comes with
hope, but the grief that comes with love. Saying yes to
God, not just once and then for all, but daily and forever,
grows into an abiding faith, into full acceptance and
complete knowledge. It is a faith that withstands the ups
and downs of life, a faith that counts its cost as part of an
active participation in transformation of the world.
It is good to feel the inspiration and joy of Christmas
that Angelico preached in his early Madonnas, who were
so sweet, so delicate, so gracious. It is also good to grow
into a mature optimism that is no longer delicate, into that
mature faith which sees this Christmas story as an
invitation to participate in the world’s healing. The
merriness of Christmas is not because this is a passive
blessing. This is a blessing of encouragement in the midst
of a faith which knows holiness comes from struggle,
which sees love as a moral posture, which sees in the
unknown a confident hope.
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