Christmas Eve Sermon 2005

As many of you know, I have this custom of looking for a "focus object" upon which I meditate in preparation for my Christmas sermon. In past years, it has always been something new to me. But this year, as we were pulling our Christmas decorations out of the bins in which they have been stored for three years, we ran across these .... (Displays a set of red felt antlers attached to a green headband.)

We’ve had these things for many years and each year we have tried to put them on one of our dogs ... Kelly our Golden Retriever would wear them for about a minute. They won’t actually fit on Josephine, our smallest Cocker Spaniel: they just fall off. But this year, the first Christmas in the Funston family for Rascal, our other Cocker, we have found we have a dog on whom they fit and who will wear them!

Not willingly, I hasten to add! Evie put them on him the other evening and he just sat there looking at us with those big brown sad eyes, looking very much like the dog Max in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. In other words, very put-upon and long-suffering. His expression reminded me of something I hadn’t thought of in a couple of decades.

Several years ago I had some very good friends, whose first child, a daughter named Meghan, was a master at misunderstanding and wrongly memorizing standard texts. It was Meghan who, at the age of three, came up with the immortal twisting of the Pledge of Allegiance from "I pledge allegiance to the flag...." into "I led the pigeons to the flag...."

She was even better at mangling religious texts. In her mouth, the Ave Maria which begins "Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou amongst women...." became "Hail Mary, full of grapes, blessed art thou in swimmin’."
Her best malapropism, however, was her version of the Lord’s Prayer in which she regularly prayed to God, "Forgive us our Christmases, as we forgive those who Christmas against us!" Doesn’t that resonate with you? During the past few weeks haven’t you occasionally felt as if you’ve been "Christmased against"?

I certainly have! As I have braved the crowds in the malls in Akron and Strongsville, pushed my way the crowded aisles of the discount stores on North Court, driven through the streets of Medina to be confronted by blow-up snowmen, Santas, Grinches, Mickey Mouses, and even Homer Simpsons, watched the slow animation of wire-framework, twinkle-lighted moving reindeer, and seen the spectacle of a two-story colonial home completely covered in colored lights, I have certainly felt "Christmased against"! We have all been "Christmased against" and, indeed, Christmas engulfed for at least six weeks now.

So let me give you a short Christmas quiz. How many of these names, all of which are connected in some way with the Christmas season, can you identify?

Joseph ... Mary ... Dasher ... Dancer ... Prancer ... Vixen ... Comet ... Cupid ... Donner ... Blitzen ... Santa ... Frosty ... Rudolph ... Caspar ... Melchior ... Balthazar ... Jesse ... Rahab ... Tamar ... Ruth ... Bathsheba ... and Jacob.

You probably recognized the names Joseph and Mary so I don’t need to tell you who they are. Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen ... ? Yep, I was pretty sure you would recognize those. How about Santa, Frosty, and Rudolph? What about these other names, Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, or Jesse, Rahab, Tamar, Ruth, Bathshea and Jacob? Did you recognize those? The first three are the traditional, but non-Biblical names given the wise men who visited the infant Jesus. The last six are some of Jesus’s ancestors as recorded in the genealogy which begins Matthew’s Gospel; Jesse was King David’s father, Jacob was Joseph’s father, and Rahab, Tamar, Ruth, and Bathsheba are the women named in the genealogy.

The fact that most of us know the names of nine fictitious reindeer, including one with a glowing, red nose, but few of us recognize the name of King David's father and other direct ancestors of Jesus, is perhaps not so surprising, but it demonstrates a dilemma the Church cannot avoid. The celebration of Christmas continues to generate and immerse us in fantasies and myths. The Christmas Creche is now crowded with reindeer and elves, Mr. and Mrs. Claus, Ebenezer Scrooge and Bob Cratchit, the Peanuts gang - in a scene festooned with snow, holly, tinsel, twinkling lights, and plastic mistletoe, while sleigh bells ring, chestnuts roast by an open fire, Bing Crosby croons White Christmas, and off in a corner (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) Mommy is kissing Santa Claus. (Behind the scene, we all know, the wicked Grinch is burdening Max with those silly red antlers and plotting to steal the whole business.)

Somewhere in this colorful scene, there is still a baby in a manger, Mary and Joseph, sheep and shepherds, angels and wise men, and, yes, even Jesse, Jesus' connection with Israel's royal house. Perhaps we have just lost sight of them behind Charlie Brown and his scraggly tree, behind the ghosts of Christmas, past, present and future, behind the red felt antlers of Santa’s reindeer. So let’s see if we can’t look past them to find the true magic of this holy season.

I am not suggesting that we try to stop the world's secular celebrations of Christmas; frankly, I don’t think we should – somewhere in all the "crass commercialism" of the gift-giving extravaganza that Christmas seems to have become, somewhere in all the cartoon stories of Frosty the Snowman, the Christmas-stealing Grinch, Charlie Brown, Linus, and all the rest, there is the kernel of Truth that is the magic and spirit of Christmas. I do not condemn the enthusiasm with which our culture generates fantasies, customs, and songs at this time of year. After all, the Christmas story is not for some other world or some alien people, but precisely for this world - a world that makes war and longs for peace, that crushes the poor who cry for vindication, that is dislocated and divided by suspicion and ancient hostilities, but dreams of understanding and acceptance.

I am not a puritan or a killjoy. I do not lose sleep or get upset if I see people enjoying themselves. But I do want to make a serious and fundamental point here. Although there is nothing essentially wrong with the cultural icons of Christmas, the plain fact is that Jesus has been dethroned. The focus of Christmas has shifted away from Christ and has come to rest on Santa and his reindeer. You see their images everywhere: on Christmas Cards, illuminated in shop windows, on the decorations in our neighbors’ yards, even on the sweaters and jackets some of us wear to church! One might even suggest that the veneration of Father Christmas has reached the point of idolatry. Now Santa, rather than Jesus, is the reason for the season. One barbed paraphrase of the Gospel puts it this way:

"And there were in the same country children keeping watch over their stockings by the fireplace. And, lo! Santa Claus came upon them, and they were sore afraid. And Santa said unto them: "Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy to all people who can afford them. For unto you will be given great feasts of turkey, dressing, and cake; and many presents; and this shall be a sign unto you, ye shall find the presents, wrapped in bright paper, lying beneath a tree adorned with tinsel, colored balls, and lights. And suddenly, there will be with you a great multitude of relatives and friends, praising you and saying, ‘Ooh! Thank you so much, it was just what I wanted.’"

If one wanted to, one could put the lie to this cultural co-opting of Christmas simply by pointing out the physical impossibility of the stories it generates. In fact, a scientist named Roger Highfeld has done just that. In a book entitled The Physics of Christmas : From the Aerodynamics of Reindeer to the Thermodynamics of Turkey, he offers a scientific evaluation of Santa.

There are, he writes, approximately two billion children in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to about 378 million. At an average rate of 3.5 children per house hold, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west. This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second - 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, was the Ulysses space probe, which travels at 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child has nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them – Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

600,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance – this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per seconds each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 mps in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 G's. A 250-pound Santa would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa (and his reindeer) did exist, they are dead now.

But this bit of comedic scientific analysis and that bit of satire I quoted earlier really lose sight of the spiritual longing that causes our society to embrace such fantasies and fictions as Santa, Rudolph, Frosty, and the Grinch, the deep yearning that is so well expressed in Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine’s secular carol from the movie Meet Me in St. Louis:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas,
Let your heart be light
From now on,
our troubles will be out of sight

Have yourself a merry little Christmas,
Make the Yule-tide gay,
From now on,
our troubles will be miles away.

Here we are as in olden days,
Happy golden days of yore.
Faithful friends who are dear to us
Gather near to us once more.

The fact that Christmas generates this endless profusion of fantasies, myths, images, songs, customs, and joyful silliness like these red antlers is a sign that it strikes a deep and resonating chord in the whole human family. The vision of walking hand in hand in a "winter wonderland" then sitting before a fire that’s "so delightful" with "chestnuts roasting by an open fire" is really the same old messianic dream of serenity in modern dress. It is the dream expressed by the Prophet Micah this way:

[God’s People] shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid. (Micah 4:3-4)

It is the yearning expressed in our reading from the Prophet Isaiah for a leader who shall be called "Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace" and whose reign will last forever and be a time of endless serenity.

So you see, the issue is not a simple sorting out what is religious from what is secular and then celebrating with chaste piety only that which is properly devout. I doubt if the world would be more Christian by getting rid of Santa Claus and forgetting the words to "Rudolph". It might be a less playful world, but I don't think that is what Jesus wants his legacy to be. No – the answer is not to get rid of the cultural icons of Christmas, but for us who are Christians to focus the world’s attention on the true source of the magic of Christmas. That magic is not to be found in things we buy, give to one another, or receive around the Christmas Tree. It’s not to found in the mythical characters of Santa Claus, or Frosty, or Rudoph. It’s not even to be found in flying reindeer who defy the laws of physics. If these cultural symbols have any magic, it is simply a poor, reflected magic.

Perhaps Meghan had it right! Perhaps we should pray that God will "Forgive us our Christmases, as we forgive those who Christmas against us!" In our Christmases, we have, perhaps, been looking for the magic in the wrong places. The true magic of Christmas is to be found in Jesus. In his birth the love of God is revealed. In his birth God enters the world of human experience. In his birth the love of God is released. And it is that love that resonates down the centuries, that is reborn and released every time our lives are open to God. This is the true magic of Christmas. And all who have heard of it were amazed. Mary treasured it all and pondered it in her heart, while the shepherds glorified and praised God for all they had heard and seen.

This Christmas may you, too, look through and beyond the silly red antlers and to see and share in the amazement, may you too ponder the magic in your heart, and may you too glorify and praise God for all that you have heard and seen. Amen.