I think somewhere I wrote that this service would be shorter than usual, and I will try to do my part to make that so.
I’m thinking though of my Uncle Frank. When I was little, Christmas was a time I got to see my uncle Frank, one of the relatively few times I got to see him. I have good memories of those times. My Uncle Frank was a memorable character, which means he was pretty eccentric. He smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish, and laughed a lot, with a sort of high nervous laugh. Uncle Frank was not a warm fuzzy person, but he was a character, and I always looked forward to his Christmastime visits. When I was little that was pretty much all I knew of him.
As I grew up I learned some more things about him, mostly from my mother, who was his sister. I learned that he was, during his working life, a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin, a Navy veteran, and a died-in-the-wool Republican. Sometime in the middle of his life, well before the age of retirement, my uncle Frank dropped out, quit his tenured job at the University, and moved to Mexico, where he seemed to be able to support himself quite well by managing his and other people’s investments.
Later on, some years later on, into my adulthood, I learned something else about my Uncle Frank. He was gay. While in the navy he had met a man who was to become his life-long partner, and they lived together quite openly in Madison, in Cuernavaca, and in Key West. As an adult I saw almost nothing of Uncle Frank, maybe at a family gathering every few years and then gradually not even that. He died with me knowing only a few facts about him. I never heard from him enough of the story of his life to give meaning to those few facts I knew about him.
Now, of course, I wish I had. There is a story there that I will never know. In fact I’m sure that there are several layers of stories, and I will never know even the most superficial layer that just had to do with the sequence of events, much less anything that had to do with his deeper thoughts or feelings and how he coped and what he had to cope with. There are lots of parts of his story I would have been interested in, and am interested in, but that I will never know.
In thinking of my Uncle Frank, I think of all the untold stories that are part of our lives. How many of us have people that we would like to bring back from the dead so that they could sit down across the kitchen table and begin to tell us all the stories they have to tell? How many families will gather this Christmas with people who have stories they would like to tell, or perhaps need to tell, but will not tell, or stories they would like to hear, or perhaps need to hear, but will not hear? It’s not a shame on us; it’s not even a very surprising thing that there are so many untold stories among us as people. It’s a human thing. It’s just the way things are. Sometimes the most important stories we have to tell are the most difficult to tell, even to people we love very much.
So I’m thinking of my Uncle Frank this morning, which means that I’m thinking of all the untold stories in our lives, and I’m thinking about these things in basically two ways. On the one hand, I’m thinking it’s o.k. It’s all o.k. My uncle didn’t feel comfortable telling me his story. There was maybe no particular reason he should want to, no particular reason to tell me. Mostly I was too young to hear it. After I got old enough to hear, there wasn’t too much opportunity, and I have the very definite feeling that once I became a minister he felt I had entered the ranks of the untrustworthy, and any chance that he might tell me his story effectively disappeared. And I, for whatever reason, throughout all of this, didn’t know how to ask. There are lots of human, understandable reasons why stories do not get told, and it’s o.k.
But then I also think of how some stories really do need to be told, or at least how much good can sometimes be done in the telling of stories, especially those that are hard to tell. I find myself praying that in many places this Christmas, as families gather, that there will be stories told that break through the silences that linger between people, that break through our loneliness, that bring some kind of healing or love or understanding that wasn’t there before. We talk a lot about trying to get back to the true meaning of Christmas and remembering the person whose birth we are supposed to be celebrating. But sometimes Christly things do happen without our having to talk very much about Jesus or trying too hard to recover or focus on the “religious” meaning of things. Wherever people are able to tell their stories to each other and thus to connect to each other in some new way, I don’t think it is too much to say that Christ may be present and that he may be smiling. There is no reason to be too narrow about what the religious meaning of Christmas is.
But then there is the more traditionally religious meaning of things too. There is the Christmas story, too, the Christ story, which as we often seek to remind ourselves, is not just about Christ but also about us. It’s about Christ being born, not just in a manger in Bethlehem, but in us. And…or…it’s about finding our way in the dark. Maybe finding our way all the way to Jesus, or maybe sometimes just finding our way period. I’ve been thinking of these things too—the words of Zechariah that promise the dawning of a new day and a light that will shine for those of us who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death…which of course is all of us—and of course thinking of the stories of Christ’s birth we have been given.
Matthew and Luke, the two gospel writers who tell us a story of the birth of Jesus, are clearly concerned to tell us that he was a gift from God in his very essence, not because he later said some wise or challenging words or because in his ministry he did good and loving things, but that in his very being he came straight from God and lays some kind of a claim on us even before he says a word or does a single thing.
But of course whether that is true for us, for any one of us,–that he lays that kind of a claim upon us—depends on our own journey of faith, not whether someone else tells us it is true, even Matthew or Luke. And that is why, for me, the stories are true, because they speak of journeys that are very much like my own. I know myself to have been miraculously and mysteriously led to Jesus. It took me a long time. Much of that time I didn’t even know quite where I was headed. It was not a matter of rational decision. No logic, explanation, cause and effect. No step by step progression. For me, it was (and is) much more a matter of twinkling stars that astronomers are not likely to have on their charts, and songs of angels telling me not so much some phrase I should believe in—JESUS IS LORD—but telling me to go and see, go find out, go discover who Christ will be for me. That is something I will never discover by standing on the outside, doing my calculations about whether this or that is a reasonable thing, whether the benefits will outweigh the costs, whether I should or should not believe in Jesus Christ.
I cannot speak for everyone, of course, but I know it to be true for myself, and I have known quite a number of other pilgrims, who have been led to Jesus by just as mysterious and just as miraculous means as stars and angels. Those whose faith is a first-hand faith, not a second or third hand faith, have made and are likely still to be on a journey of discovery. Upon encountering Christ, we do not immediately jump up and down and start singing gloria in excelsis deo. Well some of us may do that some of the time—praise the name of Jesus, proclaim the name of Jesus. Some Christians are more comfortable doing that than others. Some of us are more content to mostly let the angels do the proclamation. We still have a journey to make, even we, especially we who have met the Christ.
The wise men returned to their homes. Shepherds returned to their fields. Even Mary, scripture says, kept all the things that had happened, pondering them in her heart. There is still much to be pondered, even after we have come to Bethlehem. There are still journeys to be made, and many times it will feel like we are just making our way in the dark. But we do our traveling, knowing that we are in the company of one whose very name means that God is with us—Emmanuel.
We do not make a place for Jesus in our lives so much as one to whom we must submit or consent, but rather as one who is to be a companion on our journey of faith, one who we will live our lives with and in relationship to. And in this way his story becomes our story too. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 24, 2000