Whose Holiday Is It?
Sermon by Steve Edington
December 4, 2005
A week ago this past Saturday, as was noted in last Sunday's service, we were one on the sites for the Annual Nashua Holiday Stroll. It was really a wonderful occasion. We had eight performances take place in here that evening-four in our sanctuary and four up in the auditorium-with everything from gospel music by Pastor Ruth Choate, to a dance troupe called the Granite State Stompers, to a gig featuring yo-yos and hula hoops. I've got the whole program right here listing all the venues and events, with 23 sites and, if my count is correct, around 70 events. There was quite a range of churches that took part-from the Grace Fellowship to us, which is quite a spectrum. And there were a few banks, a couple of law offices, and even Fody's Tavern over here on Clinton Street taking part as well. It is quite a tribute to all who helped make it happen, and I hope we will continue to participate in this event for as long as the City of Nashua, through its many local establishments and religious communities, sees fit to do it.
What I didn't realize about the whole thing, however, until recently alerted to it by Rev. Jerry Falwell, Fox News Commentator John Gibson, and various others on the religious and political right, is that our Holiday Stroll right here in our fair city of Nashua was actually part of a larger liberal plot to get rid of Christmas. I'll bet you didn't know that. Well yes that gospel group, with Sister Ruth, performed here, and sang songs that specifically referred to the birth of Jesus-"Go tell it on the mountain, Jesus Christ is born" as the words to one of them went. That was fine by me as a joyful expression of the faith tradition of the persons doing the singing. But, you see, the overall celebration on that Saturday evening was referred to as a "Holiday" Stroll and not a "Christmas" Stroll, which is evidence enough for Mr. Gibson, Rev. Falwell, and others of their persuasion, that something truly sinister is going on. So sinister, in fact, that John Gibson has seen fit to warn the populace at large about it by way of a book he's just published called The War on Christmas-How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse than You Thought.
Full disclosure: I have not read this book in its entirety; but I've gleaned enough to get the general idea, which is that the use of the phrases like "Happy Holidays" or "Seasons Greetings" to a greater extent that the invoking of "Merry Christmas" is really a secular scheme with an anti-Christian agenda. Gibson's primary target is not so much government, and whether or not creches should be displayed on government property and that whole issue, as it is merchants and business establishments who wish their customers Happy Holidays rather than Merry Christmas; and who use references to "Holidays" more than they do to "Christmas." Indeed, Rev. Falwell's latest campaign is to undertake a boycott of stores that stick to Happy Holidays at this time of year instead of Merry Christmas. This latest salvo from the religious right is really a variation on an old theme, which is that if one does not fully endorse a particular brand of Christianity then one is an enemy of the faith.
I do not intend to devote a whole sermon to this topic. Whatever language a business chooses to use at this time of year is, I assume, a business decision made for the purpose of doing a good business. My guess is that they'll go with whatever phrase is most pleasing to the most customers. Looking for some kind of sinister liberal plot in all this strikes me as pretty silly. Personally it is of no great moment to me if a clerk wishes me a Merry Christmas, or a Happy Holiday, or Seasons Greetings, or anything else. I still hate shopping-and just want to get out of there and go home and curl up with a good book.
I will admit that trying to decide whether or not to call a decorated evergreen tree a "Christmas Tree" or a "Holiday Tree"-as the current Mayor of Boston is currently mulling over-strikes me as frivilous, but neither term offends me one way or the other. Folks will call the tree what they will; and it's certainly not going to lead to the elimination of Christmas or any of the other celebrations of this season. While we are a liberal religious congregation, and while we are not specifically or exclusively identified with the Christian faith, our most well attended service every year-far and away-is our Christmas Eve service when we probably violate every safe occupancy rule the City of Nashua has on its books. If we really wanted to ban Christmas we'd keep our doors locked and our lights off on the night of December 24.
I cannot let this matter go, though, without saying a little about what I see as the greatest irony in this latest shot across the bow in these cultural wars that continue to bedevil us. The first Christians to settle in this country, or in the New England region of this country, really did want to ban the celebration of Christmas at this time of year. They were Puritans, remember, who wanted to "purify" Christianity from any corrupting influences. So, they reasoned, December 25th is actually the date of a Roman pagan feast to the Sun God Mithra, and was a celebration of the gradual return of the sun following the winter solstice, and bears no connection at all to the date of Jesus' birth. So the date for Christmas had to go along with any festive celebrations on that day. Decorating trees and burning logs are updated versions of the tree-hugging practices of the ancient Druids-so that lets out the Christmas tree and the Yule log as far as the Puritans were concerned. Greenery, too, was pagan symbol for the persistence of life in the face of the death of the earth during winter-so no hanging of the greens for our Puritan ancestors either. And so on right on down the line.
For a time there in mid-17th century Massachusetts, when the Puritans held their theocratic sway, the celebration of Christmas was indeed legally banned, just as it was in England during the interregnum rule of Oliver Cromwell for the very same reasons. The fine for observing Christmas in New England at that time was something like 5 or 6 shillings. How such an edict was enforced has long remained a point of curiosity for me. Did the local authorities go around peeking in windows to see if anyone was having Christmas dinner and exchanging presents? And then break down the door and make arrests if they were?
So, as I say, the greatest irony in the Christian right's bemoaning of how secularists and liberals are trying to get rid Christmas is that the only people in this country who actually ever managed to successfully do that for a time were conservative Christians, our dear Puritan ancestors of nearly four centuries ago. The compound irony here is that those dear Puritan ancestors of ours were absolutely right in their reasons for banning Christmas. Many of the celebrations and decorations we associate with Christmas have little if any bearing at all upon the birth of Jesus, and derive instead from celebrations, traditions, and customs that well predate the Christian era. The celebration of Christmas at this time of year is really one of the more later additions to the celebrations and festivities that have always happened at this time of the year in our northern hemisphere.
But our Puritan ancestors were right only in a very narrow sense. They missed this bigger picture about the universality of this Holiday Season. And it is that bigger picture to which I'd now like to turn; as we take our leave of this notion that the only people standing between us and the elimination of Christmas are Jerry Falwell and his stalwarts on the Christian right, along with John Gibson and the vigilant staff at Fox news.
The bigger picture is that the festivities and celebrations, and observances of this season cannot be contained in any one religious tradition. They cannot, in fact, be contained at all-as those early New England Puritans eventually came to learn. They cannot be contained because they speak to certain fundamental human needs and desires and yearnings that we all experience in the depths of our being-in our hearts and minds and souls-whether we identify with any one faith tradition or not. And I think that the four themes of the Christian Advent season, which begins on this Sunday, speak well to those universal yearnings. I find in them a good example of how the particularities of one faith also transcend that very same faith, and go up into the realm of the Universal.
The four Advent themes are: Joy, Hope, Peace, and Love. Once we get past what the late Abraham Maslow identified as our basic human survival needs, I'd say those four speak to the next level of the attributes we need in order to give our lives a greater sense of wholeness and completion once our basic survival is attended to. Joy, Hope, Peace, and Love: These are not the same terms that Maslow used but they jibe well with his well-known hierarchy of needs. Let's briefly take a trip around those four bases for the next few minutes.
Joy. Joy is not the same thing as having fun or being amused or entertained, or in being somehow diverted for a time from the more ponderous matters of our lives. Joy may well include these kinds of things-I personally like fun and amusement and entertainment and diversions-and I find a certain kind of joy in all of them. But joy in living is really about appreciating the life you have and the world in which you have to live it, even with all those times when that life and that world have let you down or wounded you or hurt you deeply.
Then there's hope. Hope is not quite the same as optimism, and it is not believing that everything is always going to turn out OK; but it's not-not always, that is.. Here again, I am basically an optimist, and I do seek good and happy outcomes to whatever situations I come up against. But hope is bigger than that. To live with hope is to believe that we human beings, if we live with conviction and compassion, can still effect positive change whether we see the full fruits of our efforts or not. Living in hope is about holding onto a bedrock assumption or affirmation that the future remains open, that the past does not have to fully define the future; and that life is still there for the choosing-at whatever point in your life journey you may be.
Hope is believing that life continues to be worth the journey, with all of its knowns and unknowns, and however bleak it may be at any one time. The best expression of hope that I have personally found comes from the writings of one of the 20th century's best known atheists and humanists, Albert Camus-who in his own way was actually a pretty religious guy. Camus said: "In the midst of winter I discovered that there was within me an invincible spring." That line is part of my personal sacred scripture. To live in hope it to tend to and to nurture your own invincible spring that you carry somewhere within you. It is to hold onto and believe in that spring through whatever winters of the spirit you may have to weather.
We now turn to peace. Peace, of course, is more than the absense of war or conflict; although conditions being what they are right now I think I'd settle for that-at least as a starting point. But peace, as numerous others have observed, is more than the absense of war; it is the presence of what we in our Unitarian Universalist principles call "justice, equity, and compassion in human relations." If there is to ever be such a thing as peace on earth it will come when all the peoples of this earth feel that have some reasonable stake in, and share of, its bounty and its resources-that there is indeed enough to go around if we will but seek ways to make it happen. None of us are going to make that happen in our lifetimes, I'm afraid. But, reflective of what I just said about hope, we need to believe that the investment of some part of our lives here and now is a worthy contribution of that greater goal of peace on earth.
Finally, there's love. Romantic love, and love of a sentimental nature, are well and good and wonderful and delightful. In no way would I dismiss or belittle such love-being something of a romantic myself. I can even handle Barry Manilow is certain measured doses. But the love I want to point to here, as we touch this fourth base of Advent, is about feeling a deep sense of identification with, and a connection to, the life that surges all around us-and caring deeply and passionately about that life. It is this kind of love that lets us know that we do not live for ourselves alone; but that we are a part of a larger life that needs our energy, and our efforts, and our human good will.
Whether it is love for another person, for a family, for a community, or for the world at large, what this kind of love means is that your life is also a part of that other life or lives; and what happens within that life or lives is also happening to you. That is what I mean by a sense of identification and connection. The Christian legend or myth of the Incarnation holds that God chose to embody the full meaning of love by appearing on earth as a human being. One need not, I feel, be a part of that faith in order to appreciate its message-which is that we, too, in our lives are to be incarnations of love in the deepest and truest sense of the term.
So I try to use these four themes or attributes as a way of celebrating the universality and the holiness of this season, and to make of it a true holiday. As most you, I'm sure, know the very term "holiday" is really a contracted form of the words Holy Day. To wish someone a Happy Holiday or Happy Holy Day, is hardly a denigration of any of the particular celebrations of this blessed season. It is instead a recognition that no one observance, and no single faith tradition, can contain the many expressions of joy, hope, peace, and love that this season evokes. This is a Holiday and a Holy Time for all persons who seek these things-both in their personal lives and in the world in which their lives are lived.
This is a Holiday and a Holy Time for all persons of faith-persons of faith in the largest sense of that phrase: Faith that the Blessings of Life are stronger than even death itself; faith that life-and our lives-can be renewed, even as the earth will in time renew itself; faith that persons of good will who walk on a myriad of religious and spiritual paths can also walk on the common ground of human community.
So celebrate this season in ways meaningful to you; and speak to it in whatever ways and with whatever language that best conveys the stirrings of you own heart. I continue to appreciate much of the language and symbols and images of Christmas, largely because it remains a part of my personal heritage even if I no longer fully embrace the faith from which it comes. I'll have more to say about that in a couple of weeks. As a human community and a liberal religious community we should rightfully celebrate the presence of joy, hope, peace, and love in our midst; and seek to extend the blessings of each and all of these things in whatever ways are available to us. In so doing we will honor the many meanings of these Blessed and Holy Days.
Stephen D. Edington
December 4, 2005
