Oh and happy Yuletide, too. I know that most of us have been celebrating Yule as well as Christmas and I think that’s fine.
Some of you have already heard my modest proposal for bringing back Yuletide, but some of you are probably a little confused at this point, so let me explain.
Yule is not, like Noel, yet another name for Christmas. Yule was a holiday long before Christ came and dwelt among us. It was what the English and the Scandinavians [the People of the North] and maybe others called their midwinter festive season. And it wasn’t about some Pagan God either, like Saturn or Easter or someone like that. So even the Puritans should like it. Yule was as far as we can tell just the old Norse word for “making a lot of noise,” maybe related to “yell.” It was nothing but a time for singing, eating, drinking intoxicants, having fun, decorating your houses with lights and evergreens, lighting fires, and generally defying the dark and the cold. Come to think of it I guess the Puritans still wouldn’t like it but everybody else would.
When I was younger one used to see Christian messages around town that said “keep Christ in Christmas” or “put him back in Christmas.” I am suggesting, instead, “get Christ out of Yuletide.”
Keep Christ in Christmas, if it meant “don’t forget to go to Mass” was a good thing. But I sense it also meant “this is our holiday, let’s take it back from non-Christians.” I would rather say, here’s Yule, a nice festive wintertime holiday we can all share, non-religious or at least non-specific. So atheists, Muslims, Jews, agnostics, Macy’s, whoever makes money off of Bing Crosby’s old recordings, Hallmark, the movie industry, the airlines, colleges that need the semester break as I do, and we Christians, can all share Yule. That seems nicer to me and actually more in the spirit of Christ than to say “keep out–this is ours.”
I know some of you have said you like this but many don’t. But really this idea isn’t for us.
I did try this idea out on someone it is intended for, a young atheist I know who said he was feeling guilty about having a tree in his house and so and so on. I suggested he just think of it all as Yuletide. He thought it was a wonderful idea. I trust he’s having a happy, and guilt-free, Yule.
What is in it for us, however? There does not have to be anything in it for us. Christians are supposed to do things out of love, not calculation. But there is something.
It can free us to concentrate on the Christmas season, which began last Monday night and won’t be over till this one. Or if you like until Sunday next, when the Wise Men finally arrive.
You have heard me say many times that we need to reclaim the Church Year. This is a time I feel it very strongly. We need to get back Holy Week, and refuse to go to work during those days, and we need to reclaim the season of Christmas.
Why? For the same reason: we need more time to celebrate Christmas. A day won’t do. Too short. Just superficially it’s too short. You don’t can’t possibly get to all the things you would like to do for Christmas in a single day.
But at a much more important level, we need time to contemplate the Nativity.
Did you notice anything about the Gospel for this first Sunday in Christmas? When did we last hear it?
The answer is five days ago. It is the Gospel for Christmas Day Mass #3.
If you say why should we hear it again, you are like the high school senior who said “but we already read King Lear in the 9th grade!”
Let me retrieve an old, a very old, approach to Scripture. Everything has three levels.
First, there is the historical level. So, Christmas Eve, we heard the historical account of Jesus’ birth.
Second, there is the theological level–what it teaches about our Faith. That is what we heard Christmas day–the cosmic meaning of the arrival of the Word Made Flesh.
Third, there is the moral level. Where we ask this question what does this have to do with us? Or where do we 21st century New York Transfiguration faithful fit into the story?
Bishop Andrew gave us levels one and two perfectly–on Christmas Eve he pointed out that the actual birthplace is startlingly humble, after our imagination has made it pretty and picturesque. On Christmas Day he quoted the great Gerard Hopkins, who really is the modern poet who gets the sense and the feel of the Fourth Gospel’s magnificent proem better than almost anybody else.
Today is level three. Where do we fit in?
We have a very good entryway in the Gospel passage: he came to his own and [they] did not accept him. Ever felt that way?
Ever felt not accepted?
My guess is there is not a soul in this room who has not known that feeling. My guess in fact would be that it is one of the things that binds us together.
Saint Hildegarde says that Adam lost his cloak of glory, but when the Word was made Flesh, Christ assumed the clothing of our flesh. That does not just mean our envelope of skin. It means our experience of this human life, with all its dangers and loneliness and fears. He knows what it is not to be accepted, just as we know what that is.
To those who do accept him he gives power to become children of God. I never quite trusted talking about accepting Jesus in the evangelical way. But this passage I do trust. It is vastly easier for anyone who has experienced rejection to accept someone else who has known that experience. Try accepting Jesus as a fellow human being who knows what life is like, what your life is like.
To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.
A Child of God. This Fourth Gospel does not intend that as a pleasant pretty figure of speech. I was once telling someone what it was like to see my Dad go through Alzheimer’s. She said what a dreadful thing for a child to see. And I said well, I wasn’t a child. She said correctly I didn’t mean a little child.
The New Testament Christian conviction that we are God’s children shouldn’t distract us with the idea it means we are God’s Little Children either, sentimental though that is. We all heard two days ago exactly what very limited way we are to resemble little children in our relationship to God–you remember, the lessons for the Feast of the Holy Innocents, which is one of the gems in the Christmas season. We are God’s adult children, and God expects adult spirituality from us.
St. Paul’s drash on this idea is offered today precisely to get us into the notion. So often St. Paul seems to say, look at the faith this way for a moment.
Today he says, we were slaves, imprisoned and guarded by the Law. But when the Word was made flesh, when God sent the Son, he redeemed us–paid for us to leave our servitude–and then adopted us, to make us his children legally.
Giving us the Spirit to cry Abba, Father! Rather than Master, Lord, King.
And if children instead of slaves, heirs.
Heirs of what? Heirs of what the Christ was splendid with: Glory, the glory of God’s only son, full of grace and truth. That is ours too. Glory, grace, and truth.
We have seen his glory. Now that cannot mean we know what Jesus looked like because we don’t. We know what his life looked like, we know everything that came next.
You may think of the sequence Christmas Eve-Christmas day-1 Christmas as rather like a picture with three panels or a piece of music in three movements. I thought of something very simple. I remember from math the Identity Sign versus the Equality sign. The familiar Equality sign is two parallel bars; the Identity has three. Two things are equal if they can substitute for one another in some ay, as a pound of lead equals a pound of feathers. But two things are identical when they are the same thing expressed in different ways: a pound of feathers is identical with 16 ounces of them.
Christmas first shows us the newborn Jesus in the manger. Then steps back and shows us Christ the Word who is God, and sets an Identity Sign between the two.
Today First Sunday in Christmas adds an Equality sign.
Or in the more poetic words of Clement, Christ is the lens the lens that shows us the face of the Father; and the Word became human that you might learn to become children of God.
So. Happy Yuletide, party on, Wassail, whatever. I hope my young agnostic friend is having a hearty and happy break right now.
But to you, good Christian friends, Merry Christmas. And in fact to him as well. I want to keep him in prayer this year, for after all he too is a child of God. He just doesn’t know it yet. You see, I want to share more than Yule with him and all my atheist friends. I suppose I am a secret Evangelical after all. Because I can picture him next Christmas–with us at Midnight Mass.
