I always find this First Sunday after Christmas Day a strong and vivid support for the season and the merriment. Today we confirm everything we celebrated at the midnight Mass: the warm and wonderful fact of the Incarnation. The lights and the greenery stays in place. We keep singing the Christmas hymns– one treason to feel sorry for those who think Christmas is over when the 26th dawns is that there are far too many great Nativity songs to fit into a single day. I woke up yesterday thinking about the special poignancy of St. Stephen’s Day, something Bishop Andrew reminded us about at Midnight Mass, looking forward to reading Stephen’s story in the daily office. That’s what December 26th is supposed to be for Christians. The fact that our faith is strong enough to celebrate St. Stephen’s Day during the festive season is itself something to be thankful for and something about which we should rejoice. But then I turned on my computer to download some pictures and got this message: Christmas is over–rev up your shopping carts for the post-holiday sales! I certainly will-when Gehenna freezes over.
The newspaper was replete with stories of post-Christmas depression and I understood that. I would be sad myself if Christmas indeed were over, if indeed I felt I had to squeeze it all into 24 hours. They just don’t get it, as they themselves like to put it.
For a moment last week I thought I had spotted some evidence to the contrary. “Lionheart,” which is an early music ensemble, did a concert in the medieval gallery at the museum before the big Victorian Christmas tree, and the reporter observed that the concert included music for the various commemorations in the Church between Christmas and Epiphany, and he mentioned St Stephen, St John, Holy Innocents. Then he spoiled it by adding, “and the feast of the Annunciation.” If that occurred between December 25th and January 6th, Mary’s pregnancy would have been bizarre in a way that the Bible failed to mention: it would have meant Jesus was three months overdue.
No, the Annunciation can stay where it belongs, where we in fact keep it: it’s one of the lovely and joyful moments in the midst of Lent, just as Holy Innocents is one of the bittersweet moments in the Twelve Days. Stephen, Holy Innocents, John the Divine, the Holy Name–what a rich and powerful fortnight, and beneath all that counterpoint the theme: joy to the world, the Lord has come.
I spotted another newspaper article this year that announced, breathlessly as though it were some new discovery or secret disclosed, that all the holly and mistletoe and Christmas trees and merrymaking or “partying” as the new and superfluous verb calls it are actually pagan, pre-Christians things that we Christians have unwittingly allowed into our holy days. Well, that article is exactly right except for one word: “unwittingly.” Of course they’re pagan things. We know that. I think I might even have mentioned that myself last year or the year before. So what? So we know that this was also a Roman festival having to do with the Unconquered Sun. Pagan is not a dirty word for us Christians, only for Puritans is it that. On the contrary, we think the Feast of the Unconquered Sun, and all those Celts hanging mistletoe, and Germans dragging logs and holly branches into their houses, and for that matter all those myths about half-god half-human heros, all those things, were nothing but strong foreshadows of the Truth yet to come. That it was all part of God’s preparing the entire world for the Incarnation, the Sermon on the Mount, the Passion, and the Resurrection. Lewis says it was the world dreaming ahead, and that is exact. But Paul said it first and even better. It, all that is part of what Paul in his Letter to the Galatians today calls the “fullness of time.”
I have always treasured that phrase: the Fullness of Time. As though the entire cosmos was like Mary also “expecting.” As though the Incarnation happened at just the right moment–when the Romans had the roads ready for the Gospel–almost literally fulfilling that prophecy we heard two weeks back, about making the way straight for the Lord–and the Greeks had invented ways of thinking that the Gospel would need to be expressed in, and the book as we know it so it could be carried from one corner of the earth to the other, and when everyone was dreaming of heaven joined to earth and earth joined to heaven. As though it all, well, added up. And that is in fact what we now in the hindsight of revelation can see.
And of course we Christians have always said that this is most impressively clear above all in the Hebrew Prophets. That’s why our Old Testament lessons are si ripe with prophecy through Advent and right on through to Epiphany.
That’s why this is the first thing we heard form Scripture this morning:
10I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. 11For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.
Does that remind you of anything? Doesn’t it remind you of the very words we heard in the Gospel exactly one week ago, the words of the Magnificat which Fr. David so poignantly and effectively and correctly connected to the plight of women in our 21st century world? And yet this was the vision of a prophet writing in the Name of Isaiah five hundred years before Mary.
That Prophet, the Church has always understood, was one of the most startling ways God was preparing the world for the Gospel–building up to the fullness of time.
Building up, in fact, to the Gospel we hear this day. For you see, this morning’s Gospel invites us to celebrate one more thing. One very, very big thing.
I want to explain that thing in a personal way. It means a great dal to me. I grew up in a post-WW 2 academic exile community. By that I mean my community was made up, approximately 75%, of refugee Jewish professionals, many of whom were university professors. And many of those of course were scientists. And my classmates were their sons and daughters.
I thank the Lord for that every day now, because it was a blessing I can’t even fully explain. But at the time, well, it did not always feel like a blessing. It felt like the opposite, or at least like a pain in the trapezius.
One day a particularly brilliant and especially nasty son of a physicist, figuring me for a clueless Goy, asked, McPherson, do you believe in God?
Just like that, while walking out of English class.
Yes, I admitted. I know , I should not have “admitted” it, I should have asserted it or insisted upon it or defiantly and proudly proclaimed it, but I didn’t, I “admitted” it. And his response was, “you’re stupid, aren’t you.” Period. Not question mark, period.
For years clever retorts have tormented me–you know, what I “should have said.” Everything from “do you have to be ill-mannered to be an atheist?” to “So I suppose you haven’t heard what Einstein had to say on that subject, and he was I think almost as bright as you” to “Your name means ‘judgment of God,’ and I don’t want to be standing near you when you get yours.” You see, he, as heretics and atheists have always done, provided a service for a Christian–challenging him to articulate his faith.
The right answer–or the best one–didn’t come to me until forty years too late. But when it came I knew it: “Listen. If it weren’t for the very faith I proclaim, your father wouldn’t have his job and you wouldn’t have your cocky attitude.”
Here is what that means. Dan labored under the assumption that we Christians had imported some wild and wooly superstitiousness into the world. But in fact what we introduced, we and our Judeo-brethren and sistren, as Fr Warren always says after Mass, was an understanding of God that today’s Gospel radiates–a God who structured the cosmos, the beautiful universe, according to his Word. That instead of a cosmos that emerged willy nilly from primal slop, or one where grotesque animals or strange Gods struggled it into being, or one where sheer purblind and meaningless Chance somehow arranged things, instead, a benevolent and intelligent God created it, and created us in the divine image, which means that we could understand it. As many have come to appreciate, had it not been for that vision, science as we know it would be inconceivable. And Dan’s father would never have made his living using calculus to figure out how molecules work.
The great Christian teachers have always known that: that Christianity makes sense, makes sense of a bewildering world, makes sense not only of its design and its dynamics but of its problems and its pain, and that it really does all add up to something quite beautiful. You see, that too is part of the merriment of Christmas. It’s the part we remember on this first Sunday of the season, and we celebrate it in the words no one has surpassed:
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4in him was life, 3through him. And without him not one thing came into being that has come into being. 4In him was life') and the life was the light of all people. 5The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
I rejoice that you have seen that light. And you know, I really hope Dan has. Merry Christmas 1!
