Erl Purnell Sermon

aAdvent 1 ~ December 2, 2007 ~ A sermon preached by The Rev’d Erl G. Purnell at Old St. Andrew’s Church, Bloomfield, CT

Isaiah 2.1-5; Psalm 122; mans 13.11-14; Matthew 24.36-44

Years ago, I adopted a mantra by which to live. I use it all the time. I mean, like two or three or ten times a day. I take my mantra very seriously because it really helps me. It comes from the Simon & Garfunkle’s Fifty-ninth Street Bridge Song. You know it.

”Slow down, you move to fast.
You’ve got to make the morning last.
Just kicking down the cobble stones.
Looking for fun and feelin’ groovy.”

Perhaps you also get going too fast. Or, is it that the world around you comes at you too fast? It’s like the Maxell tape ad from a few years ago that shows the man being blown back into his arm chair by the music he’s listening to. Whoa. Sometimes life just comes at you.

Maybe it’s just me, but I keep feeling like everything has accelerated in the past two decades. Is it the advent of the computer? Is it that cars are built better now and so the traffic goes 80 instead of 60 or 65? Is it that I’m older and time always speeds up with age?

Still, I open up my email in the morning and have ten new messages … and that’s on a good day. My cell phone rings constantly and I have to charge it every night just to have enough juice for the next day. And when I stopped to get gas on Route 44 in Avon a few weeks ago, I was blasted at the pumps by a video advertising things I neither want nor care about. Leave me alone! Just STOP! I swear, I’ll never get gas at that place again.

If the onslaught of advertising is hurricane-like during most of the year, it’s of tsunami proportions leading up to Christmas.

Even though last week I said some things about how you might approach Advent and Christmas, I’d like to add to those thoughts. Today, my staring point is to ask “How did Christmas get started anyway?”

You know Christmas—or Christ’s Mass—is not actually a scriptural holy day like Easter. Yes, Luke and Matthew tell of the birth of Jesus, but, in the gospels, there is neither a date fixed nor a ritual proscribed around Jesus’ birth. In ancient times, exceptional people were remembered at the anniversary of death, not birth. So it was with Jesus. After Jesus was killed, his followers institutionalized his memory in the passion and crucifixion, not his birth.

Consider also that Christmas didn’t enter history until at least the second century. It was first noted in Egypt. Origen, a famous early Christian writer, explained that the celebration was on “Natal Day,” despite that “…In the Scriptures, no one is recorded to have kept a feast or held a great banquet on [Jesus’] birthday. It is only sinners (like Pharaoh and Herod) who make great rejoicings over the day in which they were born into this world.”

As kind of a side-bar, in all likelihood Jesus was born sometime in the autumn, maybe September or October. Why? Well, the pastoral life of people in Palestine in Jesus’ day meant that they grazed their flocks in the open country sometime after the Passover in early spring. Out on the land, the flocks needed to be watched day and night to keep them safe from marauding animals and thieves. When the first rains began in the fall, the shepherds would bring the sheep back home for the winter months.

If what Luke tells us about the birth of Jesus has any credence at all—“In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2.8)—we can assume Jesus was born when the sheep were still in the countryside. Hum. So, even though tradition places Jesus’ birth on December 25^th, Luke seems to say he was born in the fall before the rains, before the sheep were brought in.

So why do we celebrate the birth of Jesus in December? Well, most elements of Christmas come from the Romans. It seems early Christians were reacting to the Roman holiday of Saturnalia around the time of the winter solstice. Saturnalia—the birth celebration of the sun that began on December 17^th—was a rowdy time of merrymaking and gift exchanging. In opposition and contrast, Christians offered a more sober holy day. (Oops, I guess that’s changed.) Since there was no certain knowledge of the day of Jesus’ birth, the feast was celebrated propitiously on December 25^th, the birth date of Mythra, the Persian mystery god, the Sun of Righteousness, and at the close of Saturnalia festivities. By 529, when Christianity was the religion of the empire, Emperor Justinian made Christmas a civic holiday for all to honor the Christ (The Buffalo News, Nov. 22, 1984). Over the centuries, the holiday became more and more raucous until conspicuous consumption and unequaled revelry reached a peak in the medieval period.

As I said earlier, the truth is that the Christmas holy day doesn’t come from scripture. Christmas is not a command of God, but rather a church-made tradition. We may like the idea of following the custom of the wise men giving gifts. More likely the origin of gift giving at Christmas was an off-shoot of the Saturnalia tradition. And, by-the-way, Matthew never does say the Magi were wise, nor does he say there were three nor does he say they were men. That’s all in the mis-translation from the Greek. Magi, in Greek, means oriental scientists, what we understand to be astrologers, people who knew the movement of the stars and planets.

Sometimes, what we think we know, is far from true. Did you know that the Puritans banned the celebration of Christmas? For the first two and a half centuries of American history, the Puritans or Congregationalists shunned Christmas in this land.

So, where are we? I suppose I’m inviting you to slow down and look at Christmas from a fresh perspective, with new eyes. We’re blessed with wonderful music at Christmas, the beauty of decorations, and, of course, gift giving. Even though those things are wonderful, they are not what Jesus was about, except, perhaps, giving to the needy … but surely he would never limit generosity to a particular time of the year, let alone his own birth date.

The Jesus story is about Hope coming into a broken world. The light of the Christ comes into the darkness. The promise of new life is born in the Christ child.

Jesus represents each of us and all of us. Now is our time. As we anticipate the new Christ light, can we slow down just a little and consider how we too are invited to be the light of the world in our own time. Can we let the birth of Jesus inspire us to brighten our world? Can we be the light of peace even in this time of war?

Amen.