Sermon: The Gift of the Magi

[ previous | index | next ]

The Gift of the Magi

By Charles Rush

December 18, 2005

[ Audio (mp3, 7Mb) ]

me members of the congregation and our staff all thought a word on keeping Christmas simple might be in order this year. No sooner had we put the final touches on the service than the Wall Street Journal ran a story on “Downsizing Christmas-Nice Idea, Difficult to Execute”.

They interviewed one Robin Look, a 47 year old, mother of three, who is serving as the P.T.A. president this year in Dallas, where she lives, in addition to her job as a human-relations director at a law firm… Human relations director at a law office – I wonder what she really does? Teach people how to offer others a hug just after they bitten someone's head off.

Mrs. Look says she is “tired of the clutter and tired of all the time things take” and who isn't? The article goes on to say that in years past she felt the need to redecorate her entire house right down to changing the kitchen clock to one of those kitsch clocks of Santa that uses his arms to point to the hour and minute. This year she has decided to lose the clock… Let me just say, a very wise move, Mrs. Look. And she is prepared to lose about half of the other decorations- and here one can only speculate what will be left in the attic… the neon outline of Frosty the Snowman, a wind up Santa swinging a golf club, a collection of Elves in riding chaps and cowboy boots that play a tape of Willie Nelson singing “I'll be home for Christmas”. Whatever it is, trust me, she can live without it…

Mrs. Look is planning on giving her children a check for Christmas with a single inexpensive wrapped gift for each. As for relatives, friends, and colleagues, she is donating small amounts of money in their name to charity.

But, says Mrs. Look, “Call me back closer to the holidays… I might chicken out.” And that is where the Sharper Image and J Crew comes in on Dec. 21- as Mrs. Look runs up $2,350 during a long but very efficient lunch- on new jammies and some very interesting unique crap for the family that has everything already.

They also interviewed Iris Krasnow, an author in the metro-Washington, who is the mother of 4. Mrs. Krasnow reports that her teenage daughter has begun complaining that she doesn't hand make all the holiday decorations, cards, and delicacies. The author and Mother of 4 reports this with furrowed brow. Said her uncompromising teen, as only a daughter can say to her mother, “I thought you were from the Midwest?” The direction of guilt is now omni-generational.

Mrs. Krasnow reports that she has let go of one of the cherished Christmas traditions- the holiday card with the family newsletter. She has decided to send it out when she gets around to it… usually these days sometime in early June. We get a couple of those cards every year… but none of them come from Summit, New Jersey.

Our scriptures this morning and our theme music lift up the virtue of simplicity and I think there is a place for that in the Christmas season, remembering the simple grace that radiated out of a barn in a lowly rural village on the back side of civilization 2000 years ago.

But we also need to be realistic about why it is so challenging to be simple. It is true, as many Minister and Editorial writer will point out in the next couple of weeks, that the season is a bombast of commercial marketing that secularizes and materializes the season.

But, the fact of the matter is that our end of the year marketing campaign is simply our contribution to what is probably one of the oldest spiritual holidays of culinary/alcoholic/sensual excess in human civilization.

In the ancient world, the entire year was marked by the changing of the seasons and each had it's own particular mystery. As far as we can tell, every ancient civilization had a special celebration that fell for an extended period of time after the Winter solstice, marking the shortest day of the year. It was the end of the year, so to speak, and it was filled with a certain hope that from here on out each day would get a little bit longer until the blessed season of growth would finally return. It was also the beginning of Winter and a celebration of domicile and hospitality.

In Rome, the celebration was to the god Saturn, the god of sowing who gives plentifully from the earth. Saturn was married to Ops, the goddess of Mother Earth. Saturn was always depicted as fat, often with a cornucopia of fruit around his head.

The celebration lasted a week, and basically everyone had off from work, and returned to be with their extended families. There was a ritual that people followed in their homes. They took a bucket of earth, a memorial of the good earth that provides for us. Each of the family members lit candles, repeating prayers to Saturn, asking for a blessing of the crops for the coming year. Then they planted the candles in the urn full of earth. Then they took a handful of the precious seed corn for the spring planting was laid on the altar and prayers were said. In the middle of the room, they laid a chest that was made to seem empty for the children before the beginning of the ritual. By the end of it, the chest was opened and it was found to be full of coins and cookies that were distributed, gifts from the god of plenty, Saturn.

After the ritual was over, everyone retired to another room for the banquet feast. The Romans wore special dress down robes for the week, including, I might add, little caps pretty much like the one that Santa wears. And what a feast it was. They ate the best meal, served with the best wine, replete with special delicacies and special deserts, laughter and friendship. And they got up and did it again for 7 days.

Since the meal was to the god of plenty, the week long feast, plenty of food and plenty of wine that led to plenty of amour… Plenty, plenty, plenty. I mention this because there seems to be something deeply ingrained in the human spiritual psyche that needs a mid-winter indulgence in food, wine, and sensuality that been folded into the year from before the mists of recorded history. This does not excuse but it may help explain certain odd behaviors you will witness at the Christmas party at work… or with your Uncle Fred…

Yes, there is a dimension of excess built into the Winter Solstice celebration that was probably a primal indulgence many generations ago that stores up extra fat in preparation for a long season of scarcity in late winter. And since we no longer have a season of scarcity, our excess is… well, simply excessive.

But you can understand why the early Christians chose this time of year to celebrate the birth of Christ. Not only were the early Romans too busy to notice them (or persecute them), it was already a season of gift-giving and the early Christians wanted to lift up the simple but profound gift of the birth of the Christ. Through the Christ, we were given the fullest gift of God's love for us and shown the example of how God wants us to live in order to find spiritual fulfillment. And that gift transcends and orders all of our material gifts. And it still can.

Giving gifts is such a wonderful thing, especially the face of surprising joy from children. Last year, we asked the homeless guys we serve in lower Manhattan what they wanted for Christmas. You all bought them a bunch of those gifts. Our confirmands passed them out on the street just before Christmas.

We were at Battery Park, passing out sandwiches, soup and blankets. The guys were all crowded around the Bridges truck. One of our confirmands said, “Is a Larry Washington here?”

One of the homeless guys said, “Yeah that's me.”

The confirmand said, “I have something for you.” And they walked together to a park bench. Larry was confused, having forgotten that several weeks ago he had filled out a request for a Christmas present. He took this present sat down, indredulous, and opened it. Inside were a pair of insulated boots, size 14 ½ double E. His face grew wide and he said, “I can't believe it.” Suddenly he was a little boy again… still housed in a 6'5” frame of 315 lbs.. It was a wonderful moment. And there is a spiritual dimension to our gift-giving that fills others with grace and lifts them up. That is wonderful.

Not all gift-giving is that effective. We have spiritually flat years. Usually for most all of us here, who give great stuff, our spiritually flat years are times that we give in a careless manner or in an indulgent manner or both.

This may be even more an issue for the Father's amongst us- just careless or indulgent. For most of us, it gets started in the workplace. Too many of us are prone to think of our bonuses at the end of the year- or our salaries- as a kind of pay off. It is supposed to make up for the fact that we have to endure a lot of ugliness at our jobs. It makes up for the fact that we have spent too much time at work getting to the place where we can get these big bonuses and that over the years, we just don't have good balance in our lives. It is supposed to make up for the fact that we don't really care about our firm or its mission and that we are largely only doing what we are doing because it pays so well, and we are resentful of the fact that the best years of our lives, the best of our talents are being sucked up doing things that are not intrinsically worth while… And, and, dammit they owe me.

In our spiritually flat seasons, we spend too much time fantasizing about what we would do if we could just get to the place where we could cash out and get out. We think too much about what life would be like without the hours of commuting, sitting in airports that all look the same, and just have our time, our thing, our gig. We think like that because we feel like we are in spiritual purgatory… It is spiritually a very flat season, internally we are managing some low grade depression and anger. But…. We got this Mondo Check. Mondo with a capital M.

And, too often, instead of dealing with this resentment and flatness, we just transfer it to our families. We allow our family Christmas time to become shaped and shaded by our vocational ethos. We are a little more sophisticated than the car commercials that are running this season but not much.

We say, by our actions, in effect, “Honey, I know that I've been gone too much; I know that I've been crabby, anxious and really just a pain to live with much of the year. Honey, I know that I have really been paying attention to you or really listening to you. I know that you are not really feeling fulfilled… So, here, have a Jaguar… because I really do love you… but this is the best I can do for now.”

And by Damn, that Jaguar gig works pretty well for a while. People really will think to themselves, “I'm not all that satisfied with my life right now, but I look good going to the grocery store.”

But I wonder, though, what the season would look like, if we really let our Higher Spiritual Selves really lead rather than follow. What if your Higher Spiritual Selves structured our giving?

Thinking still of families, what our loved ones really want is our Higher Spiritual Selves. They want a connection. They want us to love them. They don't want to be indulged and empty or flat.

If we just started in our families, I wonder what would happen if this season, we all spent some time- when you are riding to work or when you are pedaling that exercise bike- if we all spent some time, thinking of something kind that you could do for your spouse. Let's just stay with Father's for a moment. What could you do for her? Not something material, but what is it that she needs… really needs… especially from you? What is it? How could you give her that?

We just don't ask that question enough. I had a conversation with a couple that we have known for twenty something years. Their relationship, I think they would probably agree, has plateaued at some point. We were talking about the morning and I was telling a story about fetching Kate her morning coffee. This woman says, “My husband hasn't brought me coffee in bed in a decade.”

We don't ask that question enough. And we wonder why we get to these places when our marriages have slowly atrophied and truncated into a joyless contest of wills?

In the spiritual gift-giving realm, imagine what you could do for her that would make her a better person? What could you do for her that would allow her to bloom? How can you fulfill her?

What if that was your mission in this Christmas season? Don't worry about you. Don't get defensive about ceding some control. Develop enough inner spiritual strength to become vulnerable. What if you started thinking of yourself as the one who blooms others, the one who fulfills others? What if you let your Spiritual self lead? What if you gave other people gifts that were spiritually nutritious? That is what they want, they want you to bloom them and you can do it.

And once you get focused on that, the material gifts will be less careless and more specific. You won't indulge because you aren't papering over. And the material gifts you give will be more meaningful because they are connected to blooming and fulfillment. And you unleash the beginning fruit of harmony that leads to real peace, the peace that St. John reports Jesus to have said, that is not of this world but the real deal.

I used one example this morning because you can't change over night. Start small, start centrally, but give one spiritual gift well. How can you bloom them? Think it out and come back to it regularly. It will radiate out from there. And it will not be easy, it will not be without risk; you will sometimes have fun poked at you for your efforts. Other times, it will make you open up in ways you do not want to. But… you will not regret it.

And, if right now, you are thinking that you are in for it over the lunch table today, I trust you will take some consolation in knowing that… so am I. May simple grace attend your gifts this season. Amen.