"But the church knows and remembers that it was that particular newborn, the original Christmas gift, seemingly inappropriate, useless, and impractical, a “partridge in a pear tree”, born out of wedlock, born in a cow stall. It was that particular newborn who grew up and became a man who taught a revolutionary ethic."
“Perfume and roller skates for Grandma?”
The First Sunday After Christmas Day, December 30, 2007
May I speak only the truth, and may only the truth be heard by you. In the name of God our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Sanctifier. Amen.
You cannot live in this culture without experiencing how the air is let out of the holiday balloon on December 26.
The wise men will not arrive in Bethlehem until January 6th, but for most, Christmas is over.
But we know that today, it’s really just the Sixth Day of Christmas.
Most of the rest of the world was half-way through Christmas by noon on Christmas Day, but we’re just half-way through Christmas today.
It won’t be the 12th day, the final day of Christmas, until Saturday.
And then it’s the Feast of the Epiphany on Sunday, And our parish gift exchange on that day.
The 12 days of Christmas
“The 12 Days of Christmas” is one of my favorite Christmas songs, a song you won’t find in our hymnal, though.
I understand “The 12 Days of Christmas” was recently voted one of the most irritating Christmas songs, surprising for a classic that’s been around so long.
The date of the song’s first performance is unknown, but we know it was used in Scandinavian traditions as early as the 16th century.
It’s actually a children’s rhyme, a memory game, a “cumulative song”, …four calling birds, three French hens, two turtledoves, ending up every time with a partridge in a pear tree.
Each verse is built on top of the previous verses, each describing a gift given by “my true love”, on one of the 12 days of Christmas.
I love the tune.
Doesn’t matter who sings it.
Alvin and the Chipmunks, Bing Crosby, even the Hawaiian version that starts and ends with a mynah bird in a papaya tree.
I love the whacko lyrics!
I love the list of incongruous, ludicrious, totally silly gifts.
A partridge in a pear tree?
What would you do with that!
Four calling birds, two turtle doves, seven maids a-milking?
Makes no sense.
It’s laughable.
But Halford Luccock, a former professor of New Testament1 at the Yale Divinity School said this:
Those silly gifts are precisely the beauty of the song.
He points to a certain wisdom in giving completely inappropriate and useless gifts at Christmastime.
His advice would be to give your true love exactly that, an impractical gift.
Give grandma perfume, or roller skates, not woolen mittens.
Give your 17-year-old an album of antique phonograph records, not a Best Buy gift card.
Give your husband a footall, instead of a necktie, your wife a book of paper dolls instead of a kitchen appliance.
“The best gifts of love,” he wrote, “are those that show a lovely lack of common sense.”
He’s a New Testament scholar, and he is simply being faithful to the New Testament text.
The original Christmas gift, according to the New Testament stories, was certainly impractical.
It was a baby, a baby born in a cow stall.
What people wanted was a king like David, a king who would unify the nation, rally the troops, drive out the Roman occupation, and reestablish the monarchy.
That’s what a messiah was supposed to do.
Make things right by defeating the enemy, establish a new order of things based on real power.
Instead, the gift was a baby.
So when the gift was given, nobody much noticed.
An unwanted gift
God’s gift of love was not what people wanted then.
For that matter, it’s not really what people want now either, for that matter.
We live in a world of conflict spilling over everywhere.
Civilizations are clashing.
Competing ideas about who God is, and about what God wants, these things are cause for assasinations, and for suicide bombings, even for all-out war.
Competing ideas about The Truth are a cause for conflict and a cause for alienation and estrangement.
It’s more comfortable to deal with a God who confirms our own ideas, a God who puts our opponents “in their right place.”
But that original gift was a baby, a baby who grew into manhood, who became the one who continues to challenge the world to think differently about who God is, and what God really wants.
Christmastide
Almost anyone can be touched emotionally by the birth of a baby, especially a baby who’s close to you.
Personally, I’ve been overwhelmed by the extent to which I’ve been touched by the birth of my first grandchild this month.
By the way, they let Amelia Jane go home with her mom and dad on Christmas Day.
And on January 10th, four days after the Feast of the Epiphany, Rob and I, bearing gifts, will take on the roles of those traveling “astrologers”, magi making a trek from New York City to the San Francisco “manger” of Amelia Jane.
Touched by the birth of a baby
Almost anyone can be touched by the birth of a baby.
But the church knows and remembers that it was that particular newborn, the original Christmas gift, seemingly inappropriate, useless, and impractical, a “partridge in a pear tree”, born out of wedlock, born in a cow stall.
It was that particular newborn who grew up and became a man who taught a revolutionary ethic.
It was an ethic of unconditional love.
It was an ethic of practical forgiveness.
He overturned cultural convention by welcoming the marginalized, welcoming the excluded.
The church remembers that this baby grew up and got into trouble with the authorities, got in trouble for living out his notion of what God’s kingdom looks like, a new social arrangement without all the old barriers and boundaries, an arrangement in which all are loved and welcomed at the banquet table.
The church remembers that the baby grew up, and that the grown-up baby challenged social convention by forgiving enemies, turning the other cheek, responding to violence not with violence, but with love.
The birth of that baby is a sign, for us, that God is alive and at work in the world.
You cannot live in this culture without experiencing how the air is let out of the holiday balloon on December 26.
The culture may drop Christmas like a hot potato, but not us.
For people of faith, Christmas is a beginning, not an end.
Prayer
Let us pray.
Eternal God, the Great Mystery that is outside everything and yet at the same time inside, keep alive in each one of us the search for a faith that is real, a faith that helps us to live happier lives, a faith that gives us a fuller meaning to life and the events of life. Bring us to know the goodness that flows from the heart of the universe and may we be expanded in heart and soul by that goodness.
This is our prayer. Amen.
Jerry Brooks
Saturday, December 29, 2007
“Perfume and roller skates for Grandma?”
The First Sunday After Christmas Day, December 30, 2007
May I speak only the truth, and may only the truth be heard by you. In the name of God our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Sanctifier. Amen.
You cannot live in this culture without experiencing how the air is let out of the holiday balloon on December 26.
The wise men will not arrive in Bethlehem until January 6th, but for most, Christmas is over.
But we know that today, it’s really just the Sixth Day of Christmas.
Most of the rest of the world was half-way through Christmas by noon on Christmas Day, but we’re just half-way through Christmas today.
It won’t be the 12th day, the final day of Christmas, until Saturday.
And then it’s the Feast of the Epiphany on Sunday, And our parish gift exchange on that day.
The 12 days of Christmas
“The 12 Days of Christmas” is one of my favorite Christmas songs, a song you won’t find in our hymnal, though.
I understand “The 12 Days of Christmas” was recently voted one of the most irritating Christmas songs, surprising for a classic that’s been around so long.
The date of the song’s first performance is unknown, but we know it was used in Scandinavian traditions as early as the 16th century.
It’s actually a children’s rhyme, a memory game, a “cumulative song”, …four calling birds, three French hens, two turtledoves, ending up every time with a partridge in a pear tree.
Each verse is built on top of the previous verses, each describing a gift given by “my true love”, on one of the 12 days of Christmas.
I love the tune.
Doesn’t matter who sings it.
Alvin and the Chipmunks, Bing Crosby, even the Hawaiian version that starts and ends with a mynah bird in a papaya tree.
I love the whacko lyrics!
I love the list of incongruous, ludicrious, totally silly gifts.
A partridge in a pear tree?
What would you do with that!
Four calling birds, two turtle doves, seven maids a-milking?
Makes no sense.
It’s laughable.
But Halford Luccock, a former professor of New Testament1 at the Yale Divinity School said this:
Those silly gifts are precisely the beauty of the song.
He points to a certain wisdom in giving completely inappropriate and useless gifts at Christmastime.
His advice would be to give your true love exactly that, an impractical gift.
Give grandma perfume, or roller skates, not woolen mittens.
Give your 17-year-old an album of antique phonograph records, not a Best Buy gift card.
Give your husband a footall, instead of a necktie, your wife a book of paper dolls instead of a kitchen appliance.
“The best gifts of love,” he wrote, “are those that show a lovely lack of common sense.”
He’s a New Testament scholar, and he is simply being faithful to the New Testament text.
The original Christmas gift, according to the New Testament stories, was certainly impractical.
It was a baby, a baby born in a cow stall.
What people wanted was a king like David, a king who would unify the nation, rally the troops, drive out the Roman occupation, and reestablish the monarchy.
That’s what a messiah was supposed to do.
Make things right by defeating the enemy, establish a new order of things based on real power.
Instead, the gift was a baby.
So when the gift was given, nobody much noticed.
An unwanted gift
God’s gift of love was not what people wanted then.
For that matter, it’s not really what people want now either, for that matter.
We live in a world of conflict spilling over everywhere.
Civilizations are clashing.
Competing ideas about who God is, and about what God wants, these things are cause for assasinations, and for suicide bombings, even for all-out war.
Competing ideas about The Truth are a cause for conflict and a cause for alienation and estrangement.
It’s more comfortable to deal with a God who confirms our own ideas, a God who puts our opponents “in their right place.”
But that original gift was a baby, a baby who grew into manhood, who became the one who continues to challenge the world to think differently about who God is, and what God really wants.
Christmastide
Almost anyone can be touched emotionally by the birth of a baby, especially a baby who’s close to you.
Personally, I’ve been overwhelmed by the extent to which I’ve been touched by the birth of my first grandchild this month.
By the way, they let Amelia Jane go home with her mom and dad on Christmas Day.
And on January 10th, four days after the Feast of the Epiphany, Rob and I, bearing gifts, will take on the roles of those traveling “astrologers”, magi making a trek from New York City to the San Francisco “manger” of Amelia Jane.
Touched by the birth of a baby
Almost anyone can be touched by the birth of a baby.
But the church knows and remembers that it was that particular newborn, the original Christmas gift, seemingly inappropriate, useless, and impractical, a “partridge in a pear tree”, born out of wedlock, born in a cow stall.
It was that particular newborn who grew up and became a man who taught a revolutionary ethic.
It was an ethic of unconditional love.
It was an ethic of practical forgiveness.
He overturned cultural convention by welcoming the marginalized, welcoming the excluded.
The church remembers that this baby grew up and got into trouble with the authorities, got in trouble for living out his notion of what God’s kingdom looks like, a new social arrangement without all the old barriers and boundaries, an arrangement in which all are loved and welcomed at the banquet table.
The church remembers that the baby grew up, and that the grown-up baby challenged social convention by forgiving enemies, turning the other cheek, responding to violence not with violence, but with love.
The birth of that baby is a sign, for us, that God is alive and at work in the world.
You cannot live in this culture without experiencing how the air is let out of the holiday balloon on December 26.
The culture may drop Christmas like a hot potato, but not us.
For people of faith, Christmas is a beginning, not an end.
Prayer
Let us pray.
Eternal God, the Great Mystery that is outside everything and yet at the same time inside, keep alive in each one of us the search for a faith that is real, a faith that helps us to live happier lives, a faith that gives us a fuller meaning to life and the events of life. Bring us to know the goodness that flows from the heart of the universe and may we be expanded in heart and soul by that goodness.
This is our prayer. Amen.
Jerry Brooks
Saturday, December 29, 2007
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