Scripture: Luke 1:5-23.
Somewhere recently I ran across a phrase that caught my attention. The piece I was reading referred to “the curse of the professionally religious”. I like that phrase, and I think it has a number of applications.
One of the curses of being professionally religious, I think, is to feel the need to complain about how we celebrate Christmas. Not that there are not legitimate complaints to be made. Not that other people, besides those who are professionally religious, don’t feel the urge to complain or have the right to complain. But the curse of the professionally religious may be that they feel somehow the obligation to complain. It’s what they are called to do. What kind of a professionally religious person would a person be if he or she didn’t complain about the way our culture celebrates Christmas? The term “professionally religious” is not a particularly flattering one, but I have to admit—it would be hard to deny—that’s what I am. And I also have to admit that I carry the curse.
There is a voice in my head that says that sometime in the month of December I need to raise my voice in protest against all the unholy ways we have of celebrating and somehow urge us to prepare in such a way that we get back to the “true meaning” of Christmas. There is another voice inside me that says that the time to do this is probably not on Christmas Eve, even the morning service on Christmas Eve. And next week we’ll be too busy with other things to find any time for complaining. So that leaves this week…
I’ve been talking to myself about this though. There are so many targets out there that one could shoot at and they are so large that it ain’t hardly any fun to shoot at them. A $20,000 Christmas tree? There’s no challenge in it. Stores using the birth of Jesus to double their gross receipts for the year? The only reason it’s hard to hit that target is because there are already so many holes in it. It seems not only outworn but pretty much irrelevant to complain about the commercialization of Christmas that goes on out there. Does anyone think our society is anything other than commercial at Christmas time or any other time? Do we expect Wal-Mart or K-Mart or any other Mart to have Christ at the heart of their Christmas?
So the issue, I remind myself, is not with them but with us. The spirit of Advent is not so much one of social analysis but of self-examination. It’s always healthier anyway to confess one’s own sins than to confess the sins of someone else. So the challenge, if I’m going to complain, is to bring this all closer to home, to look at what happens not so much out there in society, but also what happens in here, in the church…and what happens in here, within me. I also find that commercialism or materialism is not exactly what I want to complain about. It is the trivialization of things that I at least want to think about. We can trivialize things by making them into a cash commodity, but we can also talk up a storm about Jesus Christ in pretty trivial ways. The trivialization of Christmas is about more than just commercialism. It may be about us in the church. It may be about us as individuals. I want to reflect a little along those lines this morning.
I have mentioned before that one of the things that gave me a good impression of Sojourners before I really knew anything about it was the message conveyed by certain statements in the bulletin, such as the one I used for today in one of its several forms. It says that at Sojourners “we try to be concerned about things that matter…” It’s interesting that a statement like that would attract my attention, which it did. You would think that it would sort of go without saying that a church would try to be concerned about “things that matter”. But at least in my experience churches are not necessarily concerned about things that matter. In fact that may be part of the reason that some of us are at Sojourners—because we have found elsewhere that there is too much concern about things that don’t matter, or too little concern about some things that do, or both. That Sojourners even recognized this to be an issue attracted me in a positive way. But recognizing the issue is one thing. Keeping the commitment is something else. And so now I’m asking what it means in the context of the Christmas season to be concerned about things that matter, or to put it the other way what are some of the ways we may trivialize Christmas in the church.
I mentioned last week one of the ways I think we in the church can and do trivialize Christmas and that is by speaking broadly and vaguely and generally about such things as peace, hope, joy, love, and faith. We use pretty sounding words, but we don’t give them much substance. That’s one way of trivializing Christmas. It’s hardly the only way.
As I was trying to organize my thoughts on this, a scripture popped into my mind: the one about Zechariah, the priest who was literally made speechless after receiving the news that he was about to become the father of a baby, who turns out to be John the Baptist. I’m not quite sure why this scripture came to me. It wasn’t a conscious decision on my part. Often it is. I start out with a general idea of what I want to say and then I choose a scripture, not with the idea of proving some point, but with the idea that being in conversation with the scripture passage will help me to think about or think through whatever I want to talk about. In this case the process was a little more mysterious. I didn’t really choose this scripture. It was more like it appeared to me, without my being quite sure why. I decided to go with it. It’s the beginning of Luke’s gospel. He has a short paragraph that’s sort of like the preface, and then…
The story begins: “In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah…” In fact, each of the first three chapters of Luke’s gospel begins in a similar way. This one says, “In the days of King Herod”. Chapter two, which tells the story of Jesus’ birth, starts out, “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be enrolled…this was the first census when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And the reading that we read last week from chapter 3 about John the Baptist begins, “In the fifteenth year of the Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea…”, and so forth.
This whole story that Luke is telling takes place against the background of power. In the background there is an array of politicians, people of power and privilege, players on the stage of public affairs, emperors, governors, names everyone at the time would recognize. They are the context of the story, but they are not the story.
The story is in direct contrast to all these powerful people who represent the world as it is and in effect are asked by Luke to stand aside and watch while what really matters takes place. And what really matters is not just the birth of a baby but the dawning of a whole new reality, a way of people relating to each other that is not based on power, privilege, rank, status, control, or presumed superiority of any kind. This is not a matter of being kindly or feeling warmly toward other people. It is not a matter of God being kindly or feeling warmly about us. It is a matter of a restructuring the way we live together and re-imagining the way we live with God in ways that in neither case depend upon power.
Mostly Luke is indirect in conveying this message. He contrasts the images of power with what happens among unlikely and unsuspecting people in out of the way places. He does have Mary say some words that are about as direct as you can get: God, she says, “has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts…brought down the powerful from their thrones…lifted up the lowly…God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich empty away.” Not a “Hallmark card” kind of message, not a message you see or hear very often anywhere.
So this is one set of meanings I get from our scripture for this morning, about the birth of a new social order, a new creation. When we talk about Jesus as though he had nothing to do with a different vision of how things ought to be, we trivialize Christmas and we trivialize Christ. We can talk about putting Christ back in Christmas, but if the Christ we put there, if the Christ we sing about and talk about put at the center of churchly celebrations—if that Christ is not pointing us in the direction of a radical restructuring of our social relations, then we are still missing the mark on the things that matter, the things that matter to Jesus. (We’ll have occasion to return to this in the weeks ahead.)
This leads me to a second set of thoughts I have growing out of my interaction with the scripture. These thoughts have to do with Zechariah’s silence. I’ve already suggested that excesses of commercialism are just too easy to target. Same thing maybe with the excesses of what we consume in food and drink. However we choose to deal with them, those excesses are pretty easy to identify. But what about some other kinds of excesses—like an excess of words. I do believe that we suffer from that too, even though I recognize the irony of me standing up here talking about how we have an excess of words.
Zechariah was made to be mute. Some have suggested—actually, Gabriel is the one who suggested it—that Zechariah is struck speechless as a punishment, because he did not believe, or believe whole-heartedly the news which Gabriel was bringing him. Gabriel told Zechariah that he and Elizabeth were about to have a son, and Zechariah had the nerve to ask why he should believe Gabriel. So Gabriel basically says, O.K., no more words from you.
So maybe it’s a punishment, but maybe not only a punishment. Maybe there’s a gift that comes with this punishment, what one person has called an enforced sabbatical. I referred at the beginning to the curse of the professionally religious. I’m one of those. So was Zechariah. And another curse of the professionally religious may be that they are inclined by the expectations of people and by their job description to speak often and to use many words in speaking about God. It’s their job. It’s my job. It was Zechariah’s job. And so, after a while, there is a danger, a serious danger, of becoming comfortable when speaking about God, as though there is no problem here, no need to speak of God with fear and trembling, as though there were no empty spaces inside us, nothing to threaten our fragile certainties, nothing questionable about trying to transform holiness into words, talking as though we are unaware that there is almost nothing about our lives that is certain. An excess of words, and especially an excess of words posing as certainties, is another of the curses of the professionally religious, though it has been known to afflict other people as well from time to time. Zechariah, for a while anyway, was delivered from this curse.
He may be a sign for us. I believe he is. Easy words are trivial words. Certainties allow for nothing new to come into being. Things that matter occur in those silent encounters we all have with God, where some mysterious thing happens and we are called once again to set out…to seek justice, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 10, 2000