The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
December 21, 2008

4 Advent – B
2 Samuel 7:4, 8-16
Romans 16:25-27
Luke 1:26-38

The seasonal greeting “Merry Christmas” is often replaced by “Happy Holidays” these days, as everyone tiptoes around trying to avoid giving offense to someone. But all that doesn’t bother me a whole lot, because, as greetings go, both are rather lukewarm.

For substance and heft, compare the original greeting of Christmas, the one we heard in the Gospel reading just now, the angel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary. It promised not merriment, but joy and blessedness. “Kaire” was Gabriel’s greeting, in Greek. “Be joyful.” “Do not be afraid,” is what it indicates, for “the Lord is with you.” And then, according to some ancient texts, the angel added, “Blessed are you among women.”

And later, when Elizabeth, who was carrying John in her womb, greeted Mary, she said, “Of all women you are the most blessed, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.... Blessed is she who believed [what the angel told her] – that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.” And then Mary sang her great song: “From this day forward all generations will call me blessed, for the Almighty has done great things for me. Holy is his Name.”

When God touched the lives of Mary and Elizabeth in preparation for Christmas, they were blessed; they were offered joy and peace and hope, not merriment.

My hunch is that all these greetings, which we find in the New Testament in Greek, were closely related to the Hebrew greeting of shalom, peace, for all of them promise that one has nothing to fear, which is, of course, what the angel said as well.

The angel’s greeting was intended to relieve Mary’s fear and to bolster her confidence, her courage and faith, by assuring her of the presence of God. Because, under the circumstances, without God’s presence and God’s blessing, Mary would have every reason to be afraid. The circumstances of her pregnancy would create suspicion, perhaps even lead to her death.

I don’t know where or when it began, that we came to think of Christmas as a merry time. In any event, I suspect that our modern expectations about Christmas are rooted somewhere in sentimentality, rooted in a kind of nostalgic rearview vision that leads us human beings to look back to the good old days, back to where we once were, or back, at least, to where we imagine we once were.

But nostalgia is a rearview vision that does not look back very far. Nostalgia does not look back beyond the rather immediate past of our childhoods, or the lives of our parents or grandparents. And we don’t remember Christmas is as it was, so much as we conspire with songwriters and advertisers to dream of Christmas we think should be. We dream of a white Christmas, even in Texas or Arizona, with glistening tree tops and happy children listening for sleigh bells, even when we live next to the freeway. We smell cookies in the oven; and even as big boys we anticipate the toys we hope will bring us happiness, even when we know they won’t, because they never have. And we drink more and more bubbly stuff, which we are told can make a merry Christmas even merrier because of the “cheer” it provides.

And year after year we are disappointed, because even as we do these things we know that they don’t speak truth to us. We are aware, even though we don’t consciously think about it, that far from being a “merry” time, for many Christmas is, in fact, the most depressing time of year.

Separation from loved ones gives Christmas a melancholy edge, especially for those who live alone and who sometimes pass even Christmas Day by themselves. Slick ads entice us to spend more than we can afford, but often the shopping merely covers a depression that waits to surface just as the tree comes down and the bills come in. And last night’s alcoholic “cheer” turns into this morning’s hangover, or even, for some, into death or the loss of a leg or brain.

And why? Because we build up a sentimental view of what life at Christmas should be, based upon a dream of what we imagine it once was, and we ignore the the message that God offers to the world as it actually is.

It’s no wonder, then, that depression – “the affective response to the gap between what is and what a person judges ‘should be’” – visits more frequently at this time of year than do the wise men from the East. And depression, pushed to the wall, becomes despair.

The truth is that Christmas was never meant to carry the weight of our nostalgia.

Recently, I heard someone complain that the problem with Christmas in America these days is that there is too much about Christ. But the truth is that if you don’t know history, you don’t know anything. And the truth is that from the beginning, Christ – a Word from God about real life, a Word to real life, a Word of hope and peace – is the gift Christmas actually brought.

Christmas began, long ago, in fear, in bone-chilling astonishment, with a peasant girl being told by an angel that God had chosen to use her life to turn the world upside down. And the child was born, not in a hospital, and not even in a lovely, decorated creche, but in a barn or a cave, among the real-life odor of the feces of cattle, attended by the weariness of a man and woman who had traveled for days only to find no place to sleep, except in the dark of a shed without electricity, heat, or running water. And with every expectation of trouble up ahead.

Elizabeth Little Elk, a Lakota Indian, tells about a Christmas gift she received from her mother when she was a little girl. “We were very poor,” she says. “And my gift that Christmas was an orange. I asked my mother about Christmas and about giving. My mother took me out to the barn behind our house. She picked up some straw and said, ‘Here. Feel this, and smell this.’ Then my mother picked up the orange and said, ‘Break this open. Smell this. Taste this.’ I did. Then my mother said, ‘This is where Jesus was born, and this is how he lived. Never forget that.’ And I have never forgotten....”

This is the reality of God’s becoming flesh. It was in the midst of real life, in a barn or a cave, in a land where the living Word of God had not been heard for over 300 years, in a land where, since the people’s return from exile in Babylon, God had been mocked first by the Greeks and then by the Romans, and where occupation troops were now swarming the streets with their spears and their uzies, and where the ancient promised hope of Israel seemed dim indeed.

God became flesh right in the midst of the real life of the disappointment and discouragement, perhaps even the despair, of Israel. God does not disdain real life. God loves real life and promises to live it and redeem it. That’s why he became part of it.

The real Christmas brings the word that God loves real life so much that he sent his Son to be part of it and to bring us once again the message of the angels, the promise that God has not abandoned us, but that God is not through with us yet. And that’s the promise of Advent and Christmas – blessedness, not merriment, the blessedness of the presence of God in midst of real life, the blessedness of peace and hope. And blessed is she, or he, who believes that what the angel promises will be fulfilled in her, or him.

It is so distant from what we have made of Christmas. We are bound to be depressed by the Christmas we have made, because it can never quite match what we judge Christmas should be. Nor can the Christmas we have made hold any promise for the future.

How different the Christmas God has made for us, the Christmas he offers to us, as he offered it to Mary!

“In the child of Bethlehem,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us – in the Christmas God has made for us – “the life of the world to come has come into the life of the world that is.”

God became one of us to bring promise for the future. And if, like Mary, we let him visit our lives – not the idealized lives we often wish we lived, but the real lives we do live – with the kids screaming in the next room, with the economy tanking and the bills piled high, with our knowledge of all our weakness and sin and unfaithfulness and of all the weight of our fears and the timidity of our hopes – if we let God in to visit these real lives of ours, he will bless them with the promise of the Christmas he has made for us.

But blessing, remember, does not confer ease or comfort or pleasure. It was not easy or comfortable or pleasant for Mary to face the neighbors when she was great with this child. It was not easy for her to bring her child to maturity and then watch as he was ridiculed by the town leaders. Later still, it was not pleasant to watch as he was mocked by the soldiers and spat upon by the crowds and hammered to a cross. What sustained Mary through all this? It was the angel’s promise – that she and her Son were blessed, that God was with her, and with him.

What blessing confers is peace and hope, the confidence that God is with us. But the babe in the manger is not the fullness of the blessing. The babe is only part of the Christ whose mass we keep this week. To see the fullness of the promised blessing of Christmas, we need to see Jesus the man as well. For that, we will have to get down on our knees with Mary not only before the creche with the babe meek and mild on a silent, holy night, but also down on our knees with Mary before the Cross on a dark, stormy day, and there receive the sacrifice the Son of God himself makes for us.

The creche, the Cross, and the empty tomb – that’s the whole of the promised “Emmanuel.” God is with us – here, today – in the midst of life as it really is.

The Christmas we have made can be depressing, because it can never match the Christmases we imagine in our minds. And depression, pushed to the wall, becomes despair.

But the Christmas God has given us, the child who was announced to Mary and who became flesh in a barn among the smells of oranges and straw in the gloomy days of Israel, and the Son reared by Mary and Joseph and then crucified by the powers of darkness but raised to life by the God of blessing, this Son, this Christ of Christmas, is confirmation of the truth the old rabbi, a survivor of Auschwitz, gave to John Claypool in the 1960s when the young Claypool was depressed about the reaction of real-life America to the hopes of blacks in the South. “Remember,” the rabbi said to Claypool. “Remember that despair is always presumptuous, because despair is saying something about the future you have no right to say, for the simple reason that you haven’t been there yet.”

And that’s God’s Christmas blessing. It’s the blessing received by all the world when the angel Gabriel visited Mary in the dark days of Israel.

Anne Lamott tells about how her old car broke down one day, and about the concern that consumed her as she asked the old-timer at the garage how much it would cost to repair. And she reports how the old-timer told her that if the only problem she had was a problem that money could fix, then she didn’t have a very interesting problem.

Well, Christmas,1864, found the United States with a problem money couldn’t fix, a serious problem. We were in the midst of civil war. Flesh and blood from the same families, fathers and sons and brothers, were killing each other in fields not far from where some of us grew up. Whether the nation itself would survive was arguable, and the liberty and lives of millions of God’s people of color hung in the balance. It was the bloodiest war in the whole world in the 19th century, a day dark and gloomy like that Good Friday long ago, with occupation soldiers patrolling the streets with their spears and their muskets.

And on Christmas Day that year Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sat in his study in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Longfellow had a serious problem, a problem money couldn’t fix. He was overcome with worry and despair. The blessedness of Mary seemed dim indeed. Hope stood apart from him. Longfellow grieved for his country, and he was worried about his son, who had been wounded in battle and was not home for Christmas.

“Bah! Humbug!” the scrooge in Longfellow growled, and then penned these words:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day,
Their old, familiar carols play.
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

In despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”


But as Longfellow brooded, the angel spoke to him again. The bells persisted their carols of faith and confidence and assurance, and of the presence of One who speaks to problems that can’t be fixed by money. And Longfellow began to edit and rewrite and expand his offering:


I heard the bells on Christmas Day,
Their old, familiar carols play.
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

I thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said.
“For hate is strong, and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men.”

Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good will to men.


It is a Word as old as God and as fresh as this morning, the Word made flesh by God and Mary on the Christmas God made for us.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.