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Follow Your Star, Epiphany 2011

By Charles Rush

January 2, 2011

[ Audio (mp3, 5.9Mb) ]

hope you had a wonderful holiday and a constructive family time, except those of you who couldn't get home because the airports can't shovel snow inexplicably. I was amused to read the headlines of the Wall Street Journal yesterday that began "Stormy Relationships: Travel Delays have Families doing Quantity time", staying longer than they really needed to. The article began "Hana Greene doesn't want to sound ungrateful, but if she has to eat one more Early Bird special, she just might go bonkers. Ms. Greene, who is studying for a master's in finance at Harvard, flew to Florida last week to visit her grandmother and was supposed to get home to Boston on Monday.

“But the blizzard that pummeled the East Coast, forcing cancelation of thousands of flights has left her stranded in Delray Beach, fending of the match-making attempts of the canasta crowd at the Gleneagles Country Club who seem to have an endless supply of eligible grandsons.”

Ah, yes, more family than we need. It reminds me of a story my uncle Don used to tell of an earlier era, a friend of his was traveling by train from Pittsburgh to Chicago and got the very last sleeper berth, only to find that he had to share it with a woman. They agreed. Got to bed, he took the top bunk, she the bottom. After a bit, he is chilly and says to her, "Could you hand me the spare blanket?"

From down below, he hears, "You know, I don't know you, you don't know me, we'll never see each other again, why don't we pretend that we are married for just this one night."

Guy thinks about it for a minute and says, "Sure, okay".

From down below he hears, "Fine, then get your own damn blanket". Yes, that family... that family that we get when we spend too much “quantity time” together.

Our text has a bracing realism to it that is more than slightly jarring. Here the actual scriptures that remember the actual Christmas story break rather dramatically with the other Christmas traditions that center around Jolly Ol' Saint Nick who brings simply the winter wonder, Ebenezer Scrooge who discovers the simple pleasures of family and celebration, or Chris Kringle who encourages belief in something simple and good.

Shortly after the birth of the baby Jesus, the Roman governor Herod, ordered the execution of all boys under two, sensing that the child that the Wise men reported was born, might be a threat to his political power. Whether the story is literally true or not, I don't know, but Herod was a man that murdered at least a couple of his own sons. Actually we have recorded many chilling stories about his brutality. One of his nephews was over at a party once. The boy was potentially a rival in the future, and Herod held the twelve year old under the water in his garden pool until he drowned. He was certainly capable of something that arbitrary and horrid.

And poor Joseph, wondering exactly what he has gotten involved in. No sooner has his son been born, just trying to do the right thing, and suddenly he finds himself an exile and a refugee living in Egypt and lucky to be alive.

The gospel contains a gritty realism to it that matches the actual challenges of our life. At times, it highlights the profounder reasons for which we are here.

I think of the Christmas season of 1941. Early in the month of December, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, even as the Germans had already started an invasion of Russia. At that point, any hopes that we would avoid a world war, were dashed. It felt very much like a gathering gloom had descended across the whole globe.

"Shortly before Christmas 1941, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, at considerable personal risk, crossed the Atlantic in great secrecy to meet with President Franklin D. Roosevelt."[i] They attended Christmas services together, among other things. At that service, the church sang, "O Little Town of Bethlehem", a carol that Churchill had never heard before. That is because it was written by an American Clergyman, Phillips Brooks. Brooks had visited Bethlehem in 1865 and visited the hills outside of town where the locals directed him to the spot that tradition holds the shepherds gathered. Brooks penned this line, "On thy dark streets shineth, they everlasting light... the hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight." Who knows exactly what went through their minds, but you have to imagine that verse was particularly meaningful to both leaders that particular year.

At the White House, the President and the Prime Minister addressed about 20,000 Americans that were gathered on the White House lawn on Christmas Eve. This is what Churchill had to say.

“I spend this anniversary and festival far from my country, far from my family, yet I cannot truthfully say that I feel far from home. Whether it be the ties of blood on my mother's side, or the friendships I've developed here over many years of active life, or the commanding sentiment of comradeship in the common cause of great peoples who speak the same language, kneel at the same altars, and to a very large extent pursue the same ideals, I cannot feel myself a stranger here in the centre and at the summit of the United States. I feel a sense o unity and fraternal association which, added to the kindliness of your welcome, convinces me that I have a right to sit at your fireside and share your Christmas joys.

“This is a strange Christmas Eve. Almost the whole world is locked in deadly struggle, and, with the most terrible weapons which science can devise, the nations advance upon each other. Ill would it be for us this Christmastide if we were not sure that no greed for the land or wealth of any other people, no vulgar ambition, no morbid lust for material gain at the expense of others, had led us to the field. Here in the midst of war, raging and roaring over all the lands and the seas, creeping nearer to our hearts and home, here, amid all the tumult, we have tonight the peace of the spirit in each cottage home and in every generous heart. Therefore we may cast aside for this night at least the cares and dangers which beset us, and make for the children an evening of happiness in a world of storm. Here, then, for one night only, each home throughout the English-speaking world should be a brightly lighted island of happiness and peace.

“Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that life before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.

And so, in God's mercy, a happy Christmas to you all.”

By 1942, with the war still raging, more than 1,000,000 Americans were serving overseas in 65 parts of the world, and it was with those men and women and their families in mind that two talented New Yorkers, lyricist Kim Gannon and composer Walter Kent, went to work on a new Christmas song. Walter Kent had already composed "The White Cliffs of Dover", which had become nearly an anthem in Britain. Now they wrote, “I'll be home for Christmas” which in simplest terms expressed the longing for home and light in the darkness felt by so many. “I'll be home for Christmas, where the love-light gleams, I'll be home for Christmas if only in my dreams”. When Bing Crosby recorded that in 1943, it became an instant classic.

I should suppose that one of the reasons that this song has continued to have meaning for us is that it is hard to hear it and not think of our own boys, this year literally from Christ Church, that are in the snow bound passes north of Kandahar even as we are running errands getting ready for a wonderful celebration with our families. You can't help but think of someone that you know that more than anything else in the world, just wishes they could be in the magical, wonderful place we call ‘home', ‘real home'.

The Christmas story tells us that God loves us at the heart of things in such a way that it creates in us a deep fulfillment. It generates in us exceeding joy and the deeper form of peace that we can know. It is a beacon that we gladly follow, regardless of the terrain ahead, because this is a place we want to end up.

Where is the star beckoning you to go in this season of your life? Where is it that you need to grow to find a profounder sense of meaning? What is it that you are to be about in this chapter of your life? Where are you headed?

Nobody can answer that question for you. And this is the principal point of the spiritual life. This open ended adventure needs you to reflect and develop a life yourself.

Some of us have been through a rough time. We've been placing our trust in some things that didn't deserve our trust. And even as we are quietly saying goodbye to some things that need to end, what comes next? What possibilities lie out ahead for you?

Some of us are just closing a chapter in our lives. The children are almost out of the house at my place. We actually had a day or two over this holiday when it was just the two of us. And you know what? It was just fine. Feels a little creepy quiet since most of my adult life has had children, dogs, cats, hamsters, foster children, neighbors all running around under foot- on some days it was a barn. But this next chapter could be very promising and fun… What is developing in your family that is going to concentrate your attention in this next chapter? What part of you needs to grow so you can take your spouse to where they need to go? What is the family dynamic that you need to create?

Some of us have been through significant loss, a spouse has died, for others of us it is the turning over of the generation, the people that we were dependent on for support and guidance in the last several chapters are gone. What now? How can you honor them, take the best from them, but go on like you know they would want you to do? How will the love you have known grow confidence in you to steer solo in what can be some emotionally scary space as yet unchartered?

And some of us are networking and meeting new people. Our skills are coming together, possibilities are opening in front of us, and we are getting ready to tap the creativity in each other. What are you going to do with your team? What compliment can you put together with each other?

Love beckons us to start a new journey. Love gives us the confidence to sojourn places we've never been. Love pulls us in hope toward a new future that we can only faintly see from here, just now. Where is it calling you next?

My brothers and sisters step out and follow your star, creating as you go, the shape of your fuller destiny. Embrace the ever-changing evolution of your life and drink in the wonder that attends the way ahead. May love inspire you to stretch for something more profound in you. May love guide you toward a more meaningful life this year. May love secure you so that you become authentically yourself. Amen.

[i] I believe Geoff Worden gave me a wonderful little volume written by the presidential historian David McCullough which I simply condensed or quote in what follows. See In the Dark Streets Shineth (Stevens Point, Wisconsin: Worzalla Books, 2010). It is very short so I am not including page numbers.