Blessing of Evergreens.

The Blessing of the Evergreens.

The blessing should happen after nearly all deciduous trees are bare.  The people gather outdoors near a prominent evergreen tree.

We come to the time of bare trees.

Branches shaking stiffly in the pale air 

and whistling in the cold wind.

The leaves have turned brown and dried up,

falling to the earth,

disintegrating into the soil. 

The trees have gone dormant,

their life hidden within,

waiting for the stronger light of resurrection.

And yet some trees refuse to go into the cold unadorned.

Some trees brazenly shine a continued hope 

into the barren, gray landscape.

Some trees stubbornly stay green

even into the dead of winter.

Some trees refuse to surrender

to a season of indifference and hostility.

God has placed these trees among us as a sign.

A sign of life.

A memory of warm abundance and joy.

A sign of hope.

An anticipation of the distant spring.

A sign of abiding.

A bold act of resistance.

We call them “evergreen.”

The Light shines in the darkness

and the darkness did not overcome it.

The green persists in the cold

and the cold does not overwhelm it.

The icy darkness of bigotry, vulgarity, hatred, exclusion, and fear

cannot overcome Christ’s warm light of compassion, justice, peace, and welcome.

In the face of a harsh season:

some stay green.

In this season of waiting

as the darkness deepens

as the colors drain from the world

fading into the grays of winter:

We lift up the evergreen.

Pine, fir, cedar, holly, ivy, juniper, hemlock, 

spruce, cypress, rhododendron.…

We give thanks to the Creator

for the witness of the evergreens.

We cut and distribute sprigs of evergreen.

God of Life and Light:

you fashioned this Earth in love

and placed among us in nature

reminders of your abiding Presence.

Your life shines through your creation

and every living thing points to you.

Your Word echoes in everything you breathed into being.

So today we lift up in recognition

our sister and brother evergreen trees

whom you place among us as a reminder

that in your economy nothing is ever lost.

Life always remains.

Love always wins.

Keep us ever green as well, O God,

ever witnessing to the power of your verdant love

shining in all you have made.

Amen.

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The Reason for the Season.

First of all, let’s be clear: the literal, actual, physical, astronomical reason for the season is… the Winter Solstice.  That is, to people living in the Northern Hemisphere, for six months, the sun appears to be swinging lower and lower in the sky until it seems to stop, and then come back.  That’s why we have seasons at all.  That’s why it gets colder in winter.

Obviously, humans have noticed and dealt with this for millennia.  This time of year became a time of feasting first of all because crops were harvested just before the coming of winter.  And decisions had to be made about which animals to feed for months and which it made more sense to slaughter.  The fact that people had more produce in good years than they could immediately consume meant that they would sell or give away their excess.  The days prior to the Solstice  became a time for feasts and parties, as people prepared to hunker down for the winter.

The Winter Solstice was therefore a holiday long before the birth of Jesus.  In the Roman Empire it was called “Sol Invictus,” which means “Invincible Sun.”  

The early Christians, having no actual date for the birth of Jesus, eventually settled on this time of year for that.  This was, depending on who you talk to, either because they were trying to piggy-back on the celebrations that were already happening culturally, or they wanted to offer an alternative celebration in resistance to the debauchery, gluttony, and general excesses — often at the expense of poor and working people — that were going on all around them.  Christians said that the season was really about the return of the Son, prefigured in creation itself as the return of the sun.  Advent, the Christian season leading up to the Nativity, was originally a preparatory time of fasting, that is, non-consumption, conservation of resources, and generosity to those in need.  

So we see that the conflict between the two different ways of celebrating the season is very old.  (The best book on the last few centuries of this is The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum.)

The Church never wins this battle.  At worst, it gets coopted and subverted so thoroughly that when people go shopping they think they are doing something Christian.  At worst, saying “Merry Christmas” is part of the ethos of consumption, waste, spending, nostalgia, sentimentality, greed, and corruption that dominates the economy.  At this point it is more a confession of Capitalism than Christ.  And that is why many insist on forcing everyone to say it.  They are trying to baptize and apply a “Christian” veneer to an orgy of buying and selling, from which the main beneficiaries are the wealthy. 

If we want to make Jesus The Reason for the Season, and if we want to make “Merry Christmas” a confession of faith in him, then we need to radically change our behavior.  If we pay attention to our mainly Scriptural stories, we find things like: a woman with an illicit pregnancy, a baby born in extremely humble circumstances, the witness of animals, the testimony of working people, a visit from exotic foreigners, signs in the sky, a bloody assault by government troops against an innocent community, a family seeking asylum in another country, and elderly witnesses in the Temple.  

Maybe an authentic Christian response to these stories surrounding the birth of the Lord would pay attention to, serve, advocate for, and associate with the same kinds of people today.  What can we do to support pregnant women and children?  How can we make the lives of the working poor better?  How can we welcome and provide for refugees and asylum seekers? And so on.

It seems to me that policies that cut food assistance to hungry people, maintain an absurdly low minimum wage, slash aid for children’s programs, cut Medicaid and threaten cuts in Medicare and Social Security, and perpetrate acts of barbaric hostility towards people who come to our country feeling violence and seeking shelter, are rejections of what Christmas is really about.  When people who support such policies sanctimoniously mouth the words “Merry Christmas!” is a hollow, cynical lie.

More than an empty seasonal greeting — let alone the self-righteous, sentimental, and angry political slogan it has been twisted into — “Merry Christmas” needs to be embodied in our acts of compassion, generosity, welcome, and justice on behalf of poor, rejected, marginalized, and victimized people now.  Then Jesus will be The Reason for the Season.  

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Advent 2019 + The Way of the Future.

We have just done a year or so on the book of Revelation.  It may be argued that the main point of that book is the collision between the weight of our past and the glory of God’s future.  As it happens, this is also the overarching theme of the Advent/Nativity/Epiphany time in the Christian Year.

It is in these days, inching across the interface between darkness and light, that we are almost violently torn between the two opposed lifestyles that John describes in Revelation.  On the one hand the world confronts us with a loud orgy of consumerism permeated with nostalgic sentimentality.  On the other hand we hear in church a message both critical and affirming about God’s unlikely yet majestic entrance into our lives.  

One story is about the past.  In this season we invoke selected childhood memories and a sanitized (and largely invented) history of cultural festivities, all dedicated to only one thing: selling consumer products.  Jesus’ birth is also reduced to a distant, irrelevant, historical event.  It is oddly out-of-place, and apparently obligatorily woven into the corners of this gaudy tapestry as “the reason for the season.”  This is the story we all grew up with.  Most people, even most Christians, are unaware that there is another one.   

But Christians witness to a very different, even contradictory, story.  That concerns the way God’s future breaks into our world with a vision of peace, compassion, justice, grace, and love, in the person of Jesus Christ.  He is born in the humblest of circumstances and first greeted by the lowest of society.  He offers his life in service, healing, liberation, feeding, and finally in dying to give us life.  

Our season of Advent is about this other story, and we Presbyterians have been in the process of recovering it over the last half century or more.  Advent, of course, is not about buying or selling anything.  It is about an awesome gift: light in our darkness.  (That is one of the reasons why the church scheduled the Nativity around the Solstice: to connect with the hemispheric experience of sunlight returning.)  

The two main characters of Advent are St. John the Baptist, representing the wall-to-wall critique of the forces who appear to rule in our dark world, and St. Mary, in and through whom the Light  emerges into our world as one of us.  They show us God’s firm “no” to the-world-as-we-know-it, dominated by destructive, mercenary principalities and powers, and God’s “yes!” to the true world of God’s future, which Christ announces, embodies, and calls us into.

Advent is really important because it sets the tone for the rest of the year, and for our Christian life generally.  For we always live in anticipation of the fulfillment of God’s future among and within us.  This future has broken into human experience in different ways over time.  The Bible is the “unique and authoritative witness” to this.  The events described in Scripture are not important as history; their essential importance is found in how they point beyond themselves to God’s Reality.   In other words, they are less about the past than they are about the future.

I was taught that human identity is a story we tell ourselves about our past.  That may be accurate for our ego-centric, personality-driven identity.  But I am coming more to the view that our real, deep, and true identity in Christ is better related as a story we tell about our future.  Where we are going is more important than where we have been.  Advent is about where we are going.  In Scripture we hear stories from the past which serve to inform us about our future.  In Advent this is most explicit.

And by “where we are going” I don’t necessarily mean when we die.  A. J. Muste once said, “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.”  So it is with the followers of Jesus Christ.  There is no way to Christ; Christ is the Way.  That’s why the early Christians referred to themselves as the Way.  We live now in anticipation of, and participation in, something that is in the process of being fulfilled in us and in our world.  To live now according to his teachings and commandments is itself both the destination and the Way.  

December is the hardest month to stay with focused on the future Jesus gives us.  We are harassed by other voices yelling at us all month long to follow another path.  Let’s keep following John’s advice and make our lives a living witness to Jesus Christ.  In this season, let’s prove his Presence within and among us, by our service to those in need, our humility, gratitude, and forgiveness, and our peace, joy, and hope in our knowledge of the Truth revealed in him, which is God’s love.  That is the future we need to let shine in and through us, into a broken world.

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