Keeping Christmas Redux [1]

December 24, 2007

The Nativity of Our Lord
The Reverend Stephen P. Bauman

Listen to this sermon

Shortly after the turn of the last century, a well-known clergyman of the day, Henry van Dyke, wrote a short Christmas message he entitled, “Keeping Christmas”. Like all wisdom that weathers well over the years, his was obvious as well as poignant. He made the simple observation that “there is a better thing than the observance of Christmas day, and that is, keeping Christmas.”

So, with a nod to Henry van Dyke, I will tell you that it is a very good thing that you’ve all shown up tonight. That it doesn’t much matter whether you’re here because of your mother, or because you happen to be visiting New York and you wouldn’t miss a Christmas Eve service if your life depended upon it, or any other purpose your presence here serves. It’s a good thing to do for all sorts of common and communal interests including the gathering of family and friends and marking time with sacred ritual. This has a noble effect on our culture regardless of whether one is a passionate believer in the child of Bethlehem.

But it is a far better thing to keep Christmas than to simply observe it.

So, tonight, since you’ve bothered to come to the stable, kneeling in the straw cradle-side with others who you mostly have never met, peering into the face of a small child, you could usefully answer a few questions…. Are you willing to ignore what the world owes you and instead, to think what you owe the world; to forget what you have done for other people and to remember what other people have done for you; to see your neighbors as just as real as you are, and to try to look behind their faces to their hearts, hungry for human connection, for dignity, for love and for joy; to own that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life; to close your book of complaints against the management of the universe and look around you for a place where you can accomplish some good?

If you have any of this willingness, you will keep Christmas and not simply observe it.

Are you willing to remember the weakness and loneliness of people who are growing old; to stop asking how much your friends love you and ask yourself whether you love, honor, and care for them enough; to step down from the pedestal long enough to see that you are not the center of the universe; to bear in mind the things that other people have to bear on their hearts; to try to understand what those who live in the same home with you really want, without waiting for them to tell you; to trim your lamp so that it will give more light and less smoke, and to carry it in front so that your shadow will fall behind you; to bury your ugly, destructive and selfish motives and nurture your nobler ones If you have any of this willingness, you will keep Christmas and not simply observe it.

Are you willing to recognize that your generation is not the last generation; that you have received an astonishing inheritance given by the hand of God; that your very next breath of life is pure gift; that all your various abilities and capacities were knit together in your mother’s womb and you had nothing to do with that; that the bounty planet earth offers – its beauty and majesty – are both a wondrous blessing and an awesome responsibility; that you have duties to perform as citizens of a free nation in a dangerous world; that matters of war and peace are not only problems for others to solve; that much, if not most, of what goes on in the space around you depends upon your choices and your actions?

If you have any of this willingness, you will keep Christmas and not simply observe it.

And then, good friends, are you willing to believe that forgiveness is the doorway to a hope-filled future; that mercy reflects God’s nature; and that love is the strongest thing in the world – stronger than hate, stronger than evil, stronger than death? Are you willing to entertain the idea that the child you observe in the manger is the image and the brightness of the Eternal Love?

If so, keep Christmas. Keep it this night, keep it tomorrow, and keep it in the days and weeks ahead.

Keep it for God’s sake, and your own, and for the sake of the world.

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[1] In the manner and by quote and paraphrase of Henry van Dyke, Keeping Christmas, 1924.