felix hominum

the two kinds of christmas sermons

I've decided that there are two basic species of Christmas sermon.

The first one is sort of like having tea with a distant relative whom you visit once a year.  Christmas is, after all, often that time when we see people we haven’t visited all year long.  Sometimes it is grandchildren or grandparents who live far away, maybe some cousins or aunts and uncles.  We come over to their place and make the effort to “fit them in” for a Christmas visit.  I recall a particular aunt on my father’s side of the family, whom we would visit on particular occasions.  I think maybe she had some money or something, and maybe there was the hope that if we came to visit every once in awhile, there would be something in it for us at the end of the day. 

There is a sort of Christmas sermon which wrestles, to a greater or lesser extent, with this reality.  We really haven’t seen Jesus all year long, but it’s time to drop in for a visit and see if He is still there.  God is rather like the elderly aunt whom we humor with our presence, and hope that someday we will get some kind of inheritance when the time is right.  The kids all have to behave, and you are not allowed to touch anything when you are visiting, and for God’s sake don’t do or say anything embarrassing.  We can exchange some pleasant conversation, and then return home, having checked off one more thing from our Christmas “TO DO” list.  We might visit once a year, but this person has no real importance in our lives for the other 364 days, and there is no need to do otherwise. And on the side of the elderly aunt,  the preacher thinks “Make the visit pleasant, and maybe they will come back again.”

The second species of sermon is an attempt to trump up Jesus beyond all the distractions of the rest of the season, lament about the fact that there is no Christ left in Christmas, and try to lay out the whole plan of God’s salvation, explain in 10 minutes or less all the jargon of the Christian life – sin and grace, redemption and eternal life, prayer and repentance, joy, peace and love, what it means that Jesus is “Lord and Saviour”, and give everyone a chance to have a conversion experience in less than one hour.  Preachers with a lot of expertise and the gift of communication can squeeze the whole Christian faith into one sermon on Christmas eve.  I don’t’ have that particular expertise.

I have, I believe, one particular area of gifted expertise.  I am a guy.  I have been a guy for at least 4  decades.  And I am a parent.  I have been a parent for almost 10 years.  Therefore, my “guy skills” are greater than my “parenting skills” by a ratio of almost 4 to 1.  Christmas is about that thing that frightens guys more than anything else in the universe, except for a local playoff blackout – Christmas is about birth. 

Yes, Christmas is about birth.  Now I am at a disadvantage when it comes to this topic.  Because what I know about birth really comes only second hand.  Something I have discovered over the last 10 years is that holding a baby is an acquired skill – at least for guys.  Guys are not natural baby holders.  Guys know how to hold things: BBQ utensils,  remote controls, seasons tickets.  But guys learn how to hold babies only by comparing babies to footballs.  You sort of cradle it in here and tuck it like this so that no one can tackle you and take it away.  That is how guys learn to hold babies.  It’s just not natural for us. 

It’s an acquired skill – it takes practice, and sometimes we would rather just hand off the baby to someone else.  It makes us feel self conscious – am I doing it right?  What if I drop it or it starts to cry?  And the question which is most often on guys’ minds in these situations;  “Do I look stupid?”  That is the ultimate question which governs the lives of guys.  And at Christmas, we can get like that with Jesus.  We really don’t know what to do with Him. We don’t know how to hold Him.  We are afraid that if we actually try to hold him, we will look stupid.

It's an acquired skill.  In church they call it "grace".

I've discovered a few other things in the parenting process.  For instance, there is the birth announcement.  Guys are usually excited, but don’t know what to say.  If you are lucky, you get a few phone calls, you might even go whole hog and put something in the paper.  Not this baby.  What does His Father do for a birth announcement?  Let’s put a star up in the sky, and get a few singers: “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace”. 

And then there is the question every guy ponders – so what’s he going to be when he grows up?

“For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.  His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time onward and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.”

Got high hopes for your boy, do you?  Yes, yes, God is beyond gender, but you can see His Divine Guyness coming through:  my Son is going to accomplish something.   It just won't be the way mortal guys think.  If we come back to visit Jesus at Easter, we will see that He is grown.  Sometimes we are amazed when we haven’t seen someone for a while.  Then we come for another visit and we see how they have grown.  God not only has high hopes for his boy, He has high hopes for you and me.  Higher hopes than we have for ourselves.

After they  all come home from the hospital, guys discover one more thing about babies that they had never considered before.  Something that they knew about, but had never really given much thought to.  Something so mysterious and awful and stupendous that most of the guys I know, myself included, simply pretend that we don’t know how to do it.  And here it is.  It’s called change. 

Where ever there are babies, there are going to be some of these – diapers.  Babies and diapers go together like... – well, let’s just stop right there.  Babies are all about change.  As a father of 4, I can say that babies are about constant change.  Everyday.  Small changes, and big changes.  Some changes are easy to deal with.  Some are rather messy.  The highest level of alert in our house is called a “hose down”.  

The good news about this baby – Jesus – is that you don’t have to change Him.  Instead, he is going to change you. Big messes, small messes, daily messes.  Change is a necessary part of this whole picture.  What kind of change does God want?  God became like us – Jesus was born,  so that we could become like God – we can be reborn. 

thinking about the 4th sunday of advent

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary.  And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you."  But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. 

The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.  And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.  He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.   He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end."

Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?"

The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.  And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. 

For nothing will be impossible with God."

Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.

"For nothing will be impossible with God".  It strikes me that this is the turning point of the entire venture.  I believe it no accident that this line, this thought, this sentence which turns the world upside down, is found at the beginning of the Gospel.  Everything else which follows depends upon that one thought:  for nothing will be impossible with God.  If I do not believe that one sentence, nothing else to follow in the Gospel will be believable.  There will, of course, be no virgin birth.  Neither will there be miracles, or healings, or transfigurations, or resurrections.  Neither will there be hope.  Nothing else in the Gospel will make sense, or come to life, or invite me into the story, if my picture of God leaves out the impossible.  And as soon as I have eliminated this aspect of God, I realize that it is not God, but my imagination of God, that I am worshiping.

Perhaps impossibility was the first thing turned away from the inn.  There is no room, no space, for the God of impossibility in this place.  We tend to send him away time and time again:  in our own lives, in our relationships, in our churches.  No room for a God of impossibilities here.  We don't want the God of impossibility.  He would be too upsetting, too illogical, too threatening, too... transformative.

My advent prayer is that the God of the impossible would again break in upon our lives, even when we cry "no room".

ps - for a good Advent 4 sermon, see this at Nova Scotia Scott's place.

Retracing the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem

I decided today had to be the day that donkey number three and I would part ways. The last few legs of the trail had provided wonderful scenery, but there had been some tough climbs through the hills on the way.  The donkey was also now in unfamiliar territory and would have to walk close to busy highways, something she was not used to.

BBC correspondent Aleem Maqbool is walking from Nazareth to Bethlehem, retracing a journey made by Joseph and Mary in the Christmas story told by Luke in the New Testament.  You can read his notes here.

so one other Christmas eve the doorknob fell off

in my hands.  It sort of happened this way.  We had bought an older house with the idea that we would slowly do renovations on it bit by bit.  One particular Christmas Eve a few years ago, we were getting ready to go out.  I had been doing a little bit of fooling around with locksets on the door.  Nothing major, just a little bit of tinkering and replacing.  All the kids were in the car, Mrs. Felix was in the car, and they were just waiting for me.  I had a service to do at 7 pm.

I had a few loads of things to take out, and I still had a few necessary things in the house.  I pulled the back door closed.  I looked down and saw that I had pulled the doorknob out.  I heard the gentle sound of pieces falling on the other side of the door.  Even now I cannot find words adequate to describe the sensation -  the feeling which goes right down to the bone - of realizing that somehow I had not only locked myself out of the house, but I was standing there in minus 20 weather with a doorknob in my hand.  I had no way back in, and time was getting on.

Well, what else could a person do?  My sermon was sitting nicely on the printer downstairs, my fabulous props for the kids' story were in a box in the basement.  I, on the other hand, was merely an object of immense tragedy, or perhaps comedy. 

Doorknob in hand, we went off the the service.  I improvised a bit, suspecting that if one looks carefully enough, one can find God's message in all things.   So I explained the mystery of the incarnation in terms of my doorknob.  I'm sure Mrs. Felix was wondering greatly why I was bringing it to church that evening.   Christmas?  Doorknob? 

We've pulled the door shut;  we've closed it from our side.  And we've done such a job of it that there is no way, from our side, that we can get back in to the other side - to our home.  We can't get there from here.  The only hope is that there is Someone on the other side who will come to where we are. 

We could not get into God's world, we have closed the door from our side.  But He could get into our world, and in that stable he opened the door from His side.

Incarnation.

repost: one story from Christmas eve

Prelude

I've had my share of events on Christmas eve in years past.  I think over the next week I'll try to post or repost some of them.  This one is about one Christmas eve about 5 or 6 years ago.

Aria

I write many sermons, as I have written much of  this one, in a coffee shop on Whyte Avenue.  There are no administrative calls or knocks on the door to disturb me.  But there are other things to disturb me there.  People.  If it is difficult to preach a sermon isolated from people,  it is perhaps more difficult to write one isolated from people.  On Wednesday mornings at nine o clock there is a group who get together to share their stories of misery or happiness, more often the former than the latter.  They struggle with addictions. I have become the informal “chaplain” of that group.  One of their number is a 45 year old man we shall call Steve.   Steve came from a rather unfortunate past and carried that misfortune into his present.  He had been from time to time a carpenter – he was trained as a furniture maker.  I asked him almost a year ago about a gift for Alisa, my wife – perhaps an anniversary present. I had the idea of a chest, something into which our family could place our  various treasures in  the years to come.

He drew a sketch of a wooden chest, I asked him to build it for me.  He described the wood, the size, the time it would take to build and finish, and the cost.   It wasn’t quite ready for our anniversary, which was in August.  Throughout the fall Steve continued to work on it sporadically, and I from time to time would visit him in his small shop and check on the progress.   As October and November came around,  I was beginning to panic, hoping that it would be ready for Christmas.  Not having an anniversary or a Christmas present in the same year would be bad news for any husband.   In the days leading up to Christmas, I was in my new parish, thinking of all the details I needed to tidy up for the festive season.  In the back of my mind was the horrifying thought that my Christmas present to Alisa would not be ready, and that I would be in the domestic doghouse for quite some time.  Steve and I traded messages on the 22nd, and 23rd and the morning of the 24th of December.  In St Andrew’s that evening  we had a wonderful Christmas Eve service at 7 pm.  Alisa’s sisters had come home from the States and the house of God was a full  place that night.  We all drove home, the kids were in bed, everything was perfect.

At 10:30 pm this past Christmas Eve, as many were either drifting off to a happy and excited sleep, or dressing up for an extravagant midnight celebration of the birth of a King,  I went to meet a carpenter in his shop.

Steve had finished the wooden chest.  It was ready.  He told me with  pride all the details of the craftsmanship;  how to care for the wood, how to oil it so its colour would radiate, how it would  last, as he said, to give to my grandchildren.  He was proud of his work.   We sat in a small  room and I handed him a Christmas card,  and small box of chocolates, which he said he couldn’t eat because of his diabetes, which was complicated by his drinking.   We drank some coffee and chatted. There are four churches within a stone’s throw of Steve’s place.  I told him about our Christmas service at St Andrew’s, about God and Jesus, about love and prayer.   We chatted some more.   He told me that he had been to church a few times as a boy,  and he had even met some members of the clergy.  His experience of ‘church’ had not moved  him.  I did not convert Steve.

Instead we loaded the wooden chest into the back of my Jeep Cherokee, and I drove off to place it among a large pile of gifts in our living room.   I went back to the companionship of a loving wife, with two beautiful children, and a house full with anticipation of the large extended  family feast we would have the next day.  Steve went back into his shop and closed the door.

It was not the first time a carpenter had been abandoned by one who called himself a  disciple.

“He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

Postlude

While I was away at a church camp a year and a half ago, Steve died.  I found out about his death a month after it happened.  I don’t know what Steve was thinking at the hour of his death.

If there is room for another thief or two on a cross to be with Him in Paradise, I hope it’s Steve and me.

a sermon on repentance in Advent

is a terrible thing to write.  Especially if it actually challenges the one who is trying to write it to recognize his own need for repentance. 

I think one of the greatest barriers to my own growth as a Christian is the lack of depth in repentance.  An experience of the  richness of God's mercy, and the joy that I know it brings, seems to me to be tied somehow to the depth of my own repentance.  Inviting Christ to peer deeply into one's soul is a terrifying business.  I think that the first gift given to the prodigal son on his return journey must have been some form of courage.  For cowardice and courage seem to me to be part of the process of repentance: shallow or deep. 

A shallow repentance merely looks at the outward life.  It is the kind of repentance which is necessary and obvious to all who follow any kind of moral code.  It is an exercise in comparative law:  I have offended against this, or against that.  A deeper repentance takes a spade and a pick, and digs deep into the core of who one is before God and one's fellow human beings.  It uncovers the underworld caverns in the soul which are too often covered above with green turf.  It is difficult work, not least because I would rather not dig;  I would be content with a shallow repentance.  And at a certain point I am incapable of digging further.  I grow weary of it.  Yet there is a strange grace by which Christ leads us on our own journey into the underworld, like Dante traversing the Inferno.  We are called to see the true shape of our sins and the roots of our sinfulness, deep below the surface.  It seems to me to be the place where our desire for a deeper repentance cannot be matched by our own ability to accomplish it.  I think John Donne has shown us something of what this place is.

It is the place where the gates of hell do not prevail, and it is never of our own doing.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV

on opening the gift of joy, or how I scrapped my Advent 2 sermon

For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy

One of the Christmas traditions that arose in our house had to do with Christmas Eve.  Somewhere along the line it became the custom in the Felix household that you could open a gift early – on Christmas Eve. And somehow opening that early gift became a part of the bigger celebration of Christmas that we had.

One of my favourite scenes in the New Testament is when Mary (carrying Jesus) greets Elizabeth (carrying John the Baptist).  I often have the typical picture of John the Baptist as the last old testament figure - preaching repentance and calling people to account for their sins.  But what was John's first recorded action in the New Testament?  Leaping for joy at the presence of Jesus.  Can you picture John the Baptist leaping for joy?  Ever?  Can you picture yourself leaping for joy?

All through the season of Advent, John the Baptist calls us to repentance.  But don't forget what his first act as the prophet of the Messiah was:  jump for joy.  Like that early Christmas present we used to open before the big celebration, I think that John would also encourage us to open the gift of joy now.  Today.  This moment.  That's the beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the gift he gives when he "baptizes with the Holy Spirit".

I am now scrapping what I had intended to deliver as my Advent 2 sermon, and I'm going to encourage us all to be like John in that first Advent:  accept the gift of joy at the presence of Jesus.

Help Ian fill his online Salvation Army Christmas Kettle

You can donate online easily and securely.

From Ian's Messy Desk

Calculating the date of Christmas & the myth of pagan origins

A fascinating article by William Tighe (Associate Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania):

Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism, who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.

Rather, the pagan festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Son” instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the “pagan origins of Christmas” is a myth without historical substance.

The idea that the date was taken from the pagans goes back to two scholars from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Paul Ernst Jablonski, a German Protestant, wished to show that the celebration of Christ’s birth on December 25th was one of the many “paganizations” of Christianity that the Church of the fourth century embraced, as one of many “degenerations” that transformed pure apostolic Christianity into Catholicism. Dom Jean Hardouin, a Benedictine monk, tried to show that the Catholic Church adopted pagan festivals for Christian purposes without paganizing the gospel.

Read the full article here.  (H/T Mere Comments)

Update:  other important and contentious origins will be dealt with on this blog, including the origin of the bagel.  This important topic is most recently addressed in:

The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread
Maria Balinska, Yale University Press

Do you do anything for Advent?

Just wondering.

1000 troops needed to get Bethlehem ready for Christmas

In another step aimed at bolstering the Palestinian Authority, Israel will allow the deployment of close to 1,000 PA policemen in Bethlehem in the run-up to the Christmas period.

Brig.-Gen. Yoav Mordechai, the head of the Civil Administration in the West Bank, will meet Wednesday with his Palestinian counterparts to discuss a request to increase the number of PA policemen currently stationed in Bethlehem...

Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh said that he expects a good Christmas season this year.  PA Information Minister Riad Malki said the number of tourists to the Palestinian areas has grown steadily since 2006, following a sharp decline in Israeli-Palestinian fighting.

from the J'lem Post

In case you are wondering why Bethlehem might need 1000 additional troops around Christmas, let's just say peace on earth has not yet come to the place of Jesus' birth.  Keep an eye out for this year's traditional festivities...

(pre) Advent Quiet Day