from The Barrel

Sunday December 25, 2005
Park Presidio United Methodist Church
San Francisco, CA

Behold, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people. Luke 2: 9

Merry Christmas! Or do you say, Happy Holidays? Or does it matter? But we will come back to that in a moment.

First let me say how good it is to be with you again and to have the privilege of the pulpit, as I share in your worship today. Natasha is seeing to it that I don’t rust out in retirement.

Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays, does it make any difference? Have you been following the debate? I have not paid much attention to it, but it has been hard ignore it completely. Apparently some people in the “Christian Right” of whom, one of my friends says that they are neither Christian nor right, in any case some of these ultra conservatives are objecting to the use of the use of Happy Holidays. They insist that it has to be Merry Christmas.

And make no mistake about it, they are serious about their objections. They have gone so far as to organize and push a boycott against Target Stores until they stop advertising “Holiday Sales”. Does that sound a bit silly to you? Well, not to these zealots. They think that Christmas is uniquely theirs and any attempt to accommodate others somehow violates their theological integrity and their spiritual birthright. If Jewish people want to celebrate Chanukah they can do it without horning in on a Christian thing. Christmas is for Christians, Chanukah, Kwanza, Eid are for the others. In their mind any attempt to be inclusive of other people’s holidays by grouping them with Christmas must be resisted with all their might.

I must say, I have a pretty good idea of how they feel. When I was growing up, in Trinidad, I remember, all too well, resenting the fact that my Hindu friends and relatives celebrated Christmas. They did not go to church, or sing Christian songs, but they had their gatherings and festivities. I felt that they had no right to celebrate Christmas, because, as I said, they were not Christians.

Now listen to this:

Behold, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people.

“…great joy for all people.”
That does not seem to indicate that this is only for a select group of people. You may recall that at the time of the angel’s message there were no Christians. There were only Jews and Gentiles. The message of the angel was that the news of great joy was not only for Jews, and certainly not exclusively for Christians, who did not exist at the time. The message of the angel was for all people, namely, for Jews and Gentiles. The joy that was to come was not only for those who considered themselves to be God’s Chosen People. The joy was also for those whom the Jews considered to be beyond the pale. Indeed, the Jews at that time believed that God created Gentiles to feed the fires of Hell. That angelic message of inclusiveness certainly was not intended to soothe the sensitivities of those who considered themselves entitled to exclusive domain.

We create our barriers, we build fences to exclude those we believe less worthy. We devise theologies, formulas, passwords, ceremonies to prevent others from sharing the good news unless they follow rules which we have made. You have "to be saved". You have to be "washed in the blood of the lamb". You have to do a lot of things that we, ourselves have no idea of what they mean, that we ourselves do not do.

We divide and exclude so that we can get all the goodies. But the good news of great joy is for all the people: Christian, Jews, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto and whatever other divisions we have devised including agnostics and atheists. I kid you not, “all people” includes even those who are not sure of, deny the very existence of God. All of their celebrations are included. Christmas, Kwanza, Eid, Chanukah, Divali , Winter Solstice or whatever, all are celebrations of joy. All their holidays, all their holy days are joyful. The good news of great joy is that all the barriers have been removed.

Now I want to focus for a moment on what the good news of great joy actually is. The story in Luke focuses on the birth of Jesus. But what is the significance of that event? My concept of Christmas is that it is a celebration of love breaking into the world in the form of a human baby. In the midst of a world that is torn by injustice, greed, and oppression, besieged by racism, homophobia, and anti-semitism; in the midst of a world that is being blighted by the destructive use of money and power; into the midst of such a world love breaks in quietly, in the unlikeliest of places, in the most vulnerable form.

Someone asked me the other day what I thought God was like. Now you would think that for one who has spent the major part of his life as a theologian, teacher and preacher, that should be a pretty easy question to answer. I should have the answer on the very tip of my tongue. The truth is, I really don’t know much about God. Does that sound strange? O, I know the theologies, I know what the Bible says, I know what I have read, and I have been taught by my professors. But I know precious little about what God is like. I suspect that if we are deeply honest with ourselves we would all have to made the same admission.

So my answer went something like this: Of everything that I have learned about God the only thing that my experience can affirm and verify is that God is love. My concept of God is that God is Love. God is Perfect Love or to put it another way, Perfect Love is God.

Almost everyone has experienced love. We all know something about love, about loving and being loved. I love my wife, I love my daughters and my sons=in-law, I love my grandsons and my granddaughters, I love my brothers and sisters, my nieces and nephews and other relatives, I love my friends and neighbors, although I still struggle with loving my enemies. I suspect that the same is true for most other people, including most of you here.

As imperfect as my love is, I have loved, and I have been loved. To me there is nothing more beautiful, nothing more wonderful, nothing more full-filling, and nothing of greater value in the world than love. I believe that there is nothing more powerful in the world than love. That is exactly what my concept of God is. Yet, even though I am love and love, my love is imperfect. My self-love often gets in the way of my love of my wife. The desire to exercise power was too often mixed into my love of my children. I have no idea of what Perfect Love would be like. But I do believe that if Perfect Love exists anywhere such Perfect Love would have to be God.

And to me, that what Christmas is about?

Love came down at Christmas
Love all lovely, love divine…

My sisters and brothers, if the message of peace on earth were ever to be fulfilled, it would not come through the governments of the earth. Nor would it come through the United Nations or any treaties between nations. Peace on Earth could only be fulfilled as we humans became more loving. The joy, the celebration of this season is this: not that somehow we come up with a formula so that some selected few can go to a special life after death, while the others are relegated to some horrible Hell. The joy, the celebration of this season is this: That love has come into the world, love that breaks into our lives. The good news of joy is that the transforming power of love can not only make us more loving persons, but make our society and the world more loving, too.

God redeems and transforms the world not by making Christians of us all, but making us all more perfect in our love, until the reign of peace and justice begins.

My sisters and brothers, whatever holidays we celebrate, whatever joy we receive and share, when love enters into our personal world, when love begins transformation within our personal lives, when love becomes more real in the world around us, God becomes real for God is love. And when we celebrate the coming of love into our world, we celebrate the deepest and best of our humanity.

That, to me, is the good news worth celebrating, the good news of great joy, for all the people.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanza, Happy Chanukah, Happy Divali, Eid Mubarak, Happy Winter Solstice. May love flood your heart, may love fill all our lives, and fill all the earth. Amen.