James T. Cleland - "Advents to Christmas" (December 4, 1960)
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| - | Humbly confess our transgressions. | 0:03 |
| Let us pray. | 0:23 | |
| Let the words of mouth | 0:27 | |
| and the meditations of our hearts | 0:30 | |
| be acceptable in thy sight. | 0:32 | |
| Oh Lord our strength and our Redeemer. | 0:36 | |
| Amen. | 0:41 | |
| Thanksgiving, the festival of Harvest-Home is behind us. | 0:55 | |
| Christmas, the Festival of the incarnation, is before us. | 1:04 | |
| With what attitudes are we and the folk around us | 1:14 | |
| going to move towards this coming event? | 1:20 | |
| Let us look together at some differing Advents, | 1:26 | |
| that is, varying approaches to Christmas | 1:30 | |
| in an effort to understand | 1:36 | |
| what this annual holy holiday is all about. | 1:37 | |
| There is first of all, the fairly general point of view | 1:45 | |
| that this is an unusually joyous annual celebration, | 1:49 | |
| distinguished by good cheer and goodwill | 1:54 | |
| by an unwanted display of neighborliness | 1:59 | |
| and by an excusable sentimentality. | 2:05 | |
| It is a mirthful season. | 2:10 | |
| The accepted and acceptable greeting is Merry Christmas. | 2:14 | |
| As the old couplet has it, at Christmas, | 2:21 | |
| play and make good cheer for Christmas comes | 2:24 | |
| but once a year. | 2:30 | |
| Sir Walter Scott has elaborated this thought for us | 2:32 | |
| in some lines from "Marmion." | 2:35 | |
| "England was merry England, when Old Christmas | 2:39 | |
| "brought his sports again. | 2:44 | |
| "'Twas Christmas broached the mightiest ale. | 2:48 | |
| "It was Christmas told the merriest tale. | 2:53 | |
| "A Christmas gambol oft could cheer the poor man's heart | 2:58 | |
| "through half the year." | 3:02 | |
| Christmas is Dickens; and Dickens is food and frolic, | 3:07 | |
| and Mr. Pickwick at Dingley Dell. | 3:13 | |
| Christmas is Sir Roger de Coverley, and Washington Irving, | 3:17 | |
| and Santo Claus, and the Debutante Ball, | 3:22 | |
| so far as Durham is concerned. | 3:26 | |
| Now, why should so many Christians who enjoy all this | 3:31 | |
| be so bitter and so bilious about such a secular observance? | 3:37 | |
| It is but the ongoing of a much older festival | 3:45 | |
| than the Nativity. | 3:49 | |
| Such a Yuletide is part of a niche or cult. | 3:52 | |
| Based on the winter solstice, | 3:56 | |
| so far as the northern hemisphere is concerned, | 3:59 | |
| around December 22, the sun ceases to drop down the sky | 4:04 | |
| and begins to return. | 4:11 | |
| The Romans named the time | 4:17 | |
| the birthday of the unconquerable son, | 4:19 | |
| and surrounded the fact with a Saturnalia. | 4:23 | |
| We too are of nature, | 4:28 | |
| from nature, dependent on nature, | 4:31 | |
| therefore three cheers for hope: | 4:36 | |
| the hope that though winter comes, spring is not far behind. | 4:40 | |
| Whether or not Jesus the Christ had been born December 25 | 4:47 | |
| would be a festal holiday. | 4:53 | |
| Moreover, our Lord was a man | 4:56 | |
| who enjoyed what makes ordinary life endurable. | 5:01 | |
| He went to a wedding at Cana of Galilee | 5:07 | |
| and when the wine ran out, he provided more. | 5:09 | |
| He refused to make his disciples fast. | 5:15 | |
| In fact, he was accused of being a glutton and a winebibber. | 5:20 | |
| If He ever bothered to deny the accusation, | 5:26 | |
| it isn't recorded in the Gospels. | 5:30 | |
| The secular observance of a Yuletide holiday | 5:35 | |
| is not wrong for a Christian. | 5:39 | |
| It is just incomplete. | 5:44 | |
| At times, however, Christmas is regarded | 5:49 | |
| not merely secularly, but cynically. | 5:52 | |
| This is sometimes due to an intellectual annoyance | 5:56 | |
| which will have no truck with angels and stars and wise men. | 6:00 | |
| If one is an enemy of the supernatural, | 6:07 | |
| then the Nativity is rubbish. | 6:11 | |
| Why make such a fuss over a so called divine baby | 6:15 | |
| or even over the recurrent Winter Solstice? | 6:22 | |
| There isn't much that a Christian can do with such a cynic | 6:28 | |
| for there seems to be no common ground on which we can meet. | 6:35 | |
| It's just a flat fact to be accepted and lived with | 6:40 | |
| that there are some folks who know the price | 6:45 | |
| of almost everything and the value of nothing. | 6:49 | |
| But there is another type of cynicism | 6:55 | |
| that we can do something about. | 6:57 | |
| This is the cynicism which arises | 7:01 | |
| from emotional and physical fatigue. | 7:04 | |
| When one has to address innumerable | 7:11 | |
| Christmas card envelopes, beginning in August | 7:15 | |
| so as to be ready by December 1 | 7:19 | |
| as requested by the post office, | 7:22 | |
| when one reaches the point of choosing gifts | 7:27 | |
| as an act of retaliation rather than of affection, | 7:30 | |
| and when one is definitely satiated by coddles | 7:38 | |
| beginning on Thanksgiving afternoon, | 7:42 | |
| then the cynicism caused by imposed fatigue | 7:46 | |
| is bound to rear its contemptuous head. | 7:51 | |
| This is the danger awaiting shoppers and shopkeepers | 7:56 | |
| and especially shop clerks. | 8:03 | |
| A clerk in a bookstore was once asked | 8:07 | |
| if he had the life of Jesus. | 8:09 | |
| His spontaneous answer was, the life of Jesus? | 8:11 | |
| I don't have the life of a dog. | 8:14 | |
| Now it's wise to take time out | 8:20 | |
| and retire from the mercantile free. | 8:22 | |
| Even our Lord withdrew now and again into the wilderness | 8:27 | |
| to escape the pressure of His world. | 8:30 | |
| Maybe one should pick and choose what he will do | 8:36 | |
| and what he will allow to be done to him at Christmas. | 8:40 | |
| One cure for the cynicism caused by weariness is rest. | 8:47 | |
| Rest that restores the tissues | 8:55 | |
| and also gives one a chance to reflect | 8:59 | |
| on what is really central in Christmas time. | 9:02 | |
| There's a third Advent to Christmas | 9:10 | |
| which we had better take note of because it must be faced | 9:12 | |
| and faced more and more in the days ahead. | 9:17 | |
| This is the openly antagonistic attitude, | 9:22 | |
| the point of view which is militantly against Christmas. | 9:26 | |
| I'm not thinking primarily of Scrooge, | 9:33 | |
| who, at the beginning of Christmas Carol, | 9:37 | |
| expressed his personal loathing of the season. | 9:39 | |
| And yet, listen to him: | 9:44 | |
| "A merry Christmas, uncle! | 9:46 | |
| "God save you," cried a cheerful voice. | 9:48 | |
| It was the voice of Scrooge's nephew | 9:53 | |
| who came upon him so quickly that this was the first | 9:55 | |
| intimation Scrooge had of his approach. | 9:58 | |
| "Bah!" said Scrooge, "humbug!" | 10:02 | |
| "Christmas are humbug, uncle? | 10:07 | |
| "You don't mean that, I am sure?" | 10:10 | |
| "I do. | 10:13 | |
| "Out upon merry Christmas. | 10:16 | |
| "What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills | 10:18 | |
| "without money; a time for finding yourself a year older | 10:22 | |
| "and not an hour richer. | 10:27 | |
| "A time for balancing your books and having every item | 10:30 | |
| "in them through a round dozen of months | 10:34 | |
| "presented dead against you? | 10:35 | |
| "If I had my will, every idiot who goes about with | 10:38 | |
| "Merry Christmas on his lips | 10:43 | |
| "should be boiled with his own pudding | 10:46 | |
| "and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. | 10:49 | |
| "He should!" | 10:54 | |
| The way to handle Scrooge is to invite him to dinner, | 10:58 | |
| wish him a merry Christmas and wait for a miracle. | 11:03 | |
| But more serious for us is the attack on Christmas | 11:12 | |
| rooted in a materialistic atheism | 11:17 | |
| and backed by the controlled educational policy | 11:21 | |
| of a powerful political state. | 11:25 | |
| Here is the English translation of a poem from East Germany, | 11:30 | |
| as published recently in Berlin. | 11:36 | |
| It is named "An Old-New Christmas Song." | 11:41 | |
| "A child in a stable came to the world, | 11:48 | |
| "Joseph the father had no money to pay | 11:51 | |
| "for a bed all white and a room. | 11:54 | |
| "On straw, the Mother Mary lay and cried | 11:58 | |
| "as she might in agony, none but dull oxen | 12:02 | |
| "and ass could hear her moaning and whimpering. | 12:05 | |
| "Joseph looked out the stable door, | 12:11 | |
| "but woe! the Three Kings failed to appear | 12:15 | |
| "with gold and incense and myrrh. | 12:20 | |
| "Mary held her baby in her arms, | 12:24 | |
| "her body must be the stove for His warmth, | 12:27 | |
| "and instead of the milk that God pray send | 12:32 | |
| "was only the rust in the bowl. | 12:35 | |
| "Joseph, dear Joseph mine, | 12:40 | |
| "how sad I am for this child of mine. | 12:44 | |
| "Ah Joseph, what's to become of us? | 12:48 | |
| "You ask for work, and they leave you to stand. | 12:51 | |
| "Joseph, we must go and beg, | 12:56 | |
| "My Joseph, I can see no end to this earthly misery! | 12:58 | |
| "And as they squatted in stable cold and moaned aloud, | 13:05 | |
| "they heard without in the yard a gladdening song. | 13:10 | |
| "The door flung wide. | 13:14 | |
| "In the lantern's light, came many young shepherds within | 13:16 | |
| "to bring the parents and delicate child | 13:20 | |
| "the message of goodness and joy. | 13:23 | |
| "We shepherds come from a far, fair land, | 13:27 | |
| "the people there have banished their need | 13:32 | |
| "when they redeemed themselves. | 13:35 | |
| "The children there grow up in the light | 13:39 | |
| "and hunger and misery cannot exist, | 13:41 | |
| "for none is in straits for a roof and bread, | 13:45 | |
| "the meanest now are the great." | 13:49 | |
| "Oh lead us there, sad Joseph begged. | 13:53 | |
| "A star in the heavens rose aloft, | 14:01 | |
| "red was the light it shed. | 14:07 | |
| "That is the wonder-working Star of knowledge and courage | 14:15 | |
| "that steals men's hearts. | 14:19 | |
| "And if you know it, then you have well read | 14:23 | |
| "the story the Bible told." | 14:28 | |
| The red star. | 14:33 | |
| The red wonder-working star at Christmas. | 14:36 | |
| That was published last year in east Germany. | 14:43 | |
| There are two ways to offset this advent. | 14:49 | |
| One is to be able to defend | 14:53 | |
| the Christian interpretation of life. | 14:55 | |
| Christian interpretation of life | 14:58 | |
| is not anti-materialistic perse. | 15:00 | |
| Christian interpretation of life sees the spiritual | 15:06 | |
| but on this earth sees the spiritual only in the material. | 15:11 | |
| That's the meaning of sacrament. | 15:17 | |
| The other way to offset this advent is to live the life | 15:21 | |
| in such a way that example | 15:27 | |
| becomes part of the argument for it. | 15:29 | |
| For though man shall not live long without bread, | 15:33 | |
| he shall not live with bread alone. | 15:40 | |
| Moreover, man cannot live merely as the citizen | 15:46 | |
| of a state, not even of a democracy or a republic; | 15:50 | |
| because the most important moments in a man's life, | 15:57 | |
| he lives as a person in his own right. | 16:03 | |
| At such moments he asks questions | 16:08 | |
| beyond the state's answering. | 16:11 | |
| He asks about God. | 16:16 | |
| He asks God about God and about himself | 16:19 | |
| so that he may live with wisdom | 16:26 | |
| and so that he may not die alone. | 16:29 | |
| There is a fourth advent to Christmas, | 16:37 | |
| one that is not unknown in an academic community. | 16:40 | |
| It is the wistful longing that Christmas might be true, | 16:46 | |
| that the star might be seen by wise men like us, | 16:55 | |
| that the angelic chorus might fall on our ears, | 17:04 | |
| that even we might come and adore the child | 17:11 | |
| as Christ the Lord. | 17:16 | |
| I don't suppose that anyone would accuse Thomas Hardy, | 17:20 | |
| the English poet and novelist, of sentimentality. | 17:24 | |
| His pessimism is as bleak as his style is bare. | 17:30 | |
| His characters are the victims of a cruel universe | 17:38 | |
| which plays with man and when weary of man, destroys him. | 17:43 | |
| Yet even Hardy cannot escape a wistfulness, | 17:53 | |
| a yearning that what he cannot accept intellectually | 18:02 | |
| might be true. | 18:08 | |
| Here he is mulling over an old legend | 18:11 | |
| about the oxen kneeling in the barn | 18:15 | |
| at midnight on Christmas Eve: | 18:20 | |
| Some of you know the poem | 18:24 | |
| " Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock! | 18:26 | |
| "Now they are all on their knees, | 18:31 | |
| "An elder said as we sat in a flock | 18:35 | |
| "By the embers in hearthside ease. | 18:37 | |
| "We pictured the meek mild creatures | 18:42 | |
| "where they dwelt in their strawy pen. | 18:45 | |
| "Nor did it occur to one of us there to doubt | 18:49 | |
| "they were kneeling then. | 18:53 | |
| "So fair a fancy few would weave in these years. | 18:57 | |
| "Yet, I feel, if some one said on Christmas Eve, | 19:04 | |
| "come see the oxen kneel in the lonely barton | 19:09 | |
| "by yonder coomb our childhood used to know, | 19:13 | |
| "I should go with him in the gloom hoping it might be so. | 19:19 | |
| "Hoping it might be so." | 19:33 | |
| Maybe Pascal was not wrong when he said: | 19:37 | |
| "We know the truth, not only by the reason, | 19:40 | |
| "but also by the heart." | 19:45 | |
| We live in a wistful age. | 19:50 | |
| Into its materialism and pessimism, | 19:54 | |
| through its despair and doubts, | 19:57 | |
| man wants his yearnings for values, his groping for sanity | 20:00 | |
| to be realized and to be real. | 20:06 | |
| And so he turns, haltingly and hesitatingly and hopefully | 20:10 | |
| to religion, seeking to recapture and to be reestablished | 20:19 | |
| by the thrill of that tradition. | 20:27 | |
| Many of you, I hope, are reading J. B. Priestley's | 20:33 | |
| "Literature and Western Man," | 20:38 | |
| that comprehensive attempt at a large-scale evaluation | 20:42 | |
| of what made us, what we are, as reflected in the writings | 20:46 | |
| of poet and essayist and dramatist and novelist. | 20:52 | |
| He takes us excitingly all the way | 20:57 | |
| from the invention of printing right down to Thomas Wolfe. | 20:59 | |
| Let me quote from his concluding chapter, | 21:04 | |
| where he asks how man can recapture himself as a person, | 21:09 | |
| rescuing himself from his unconscious drives | 21:17 | |
| and from the slavery of political and social collective. | 21:21 | |
| These are in the last three pages | 21:28 | |
| of a book of over 450 pages. | 21:30 | |
| "Religion alone can carry the load, | 21:36 | |
| "defend us against the de-humanizing collectives, | 21:41 | |
| "restore true personality, but I have no religion. | 21:46 | |
| "Most of my friends have no religion, | 21:55 | |
| "very few of the major modern writers | 22:00 | |
| "we have been considering have had any religion; | 22:03 | |
| "and what is certain is that our society has none. | 22:07 | |
| "No matter what it professes, it is now not merely | 22:13 | |
| "irreligious but powerfully anti-religious. | 22:18 | |
| "And if we all joined a Christian Church tomorrow, | 22:23 | |
| "the fundamental situation would be unchanged, | 22:27 | |
| "because no Church existing today has the power, | 22:32 | |
| "and we could not give it this power by joining it, | 22:37 | |
| "to undo what has been done. | 22:40 | |
| "We must wait. | 22:46 | |
| "Even if we believe that the time of our civilization | 22:49 | |
| "is running out fast like sugar spilled from a torn bag, | 22:53 | |
| "we must wait. | 23:00 | |
| "But while we are waiting, we can try to feel | 23:03 | |
| "and think and behave, to some extent, | 23:08 | |
| "as if our society were already beginning | 23:13 | |
| "to be contained by religion, | 23:20 | |
| "as if we were certain that man cannot even remain man | 23:24 | |
| "unless he looks beyond himself, | 23:30 | |
| "as if we were finding our way home again in the universe. | 23:34 | |
| "As if we were finding our way home again in the universe." | 23:43 | |
| There is all round us a wistful advent to Christmas | 23:52 | |
| hoping it might be so. | 23:57 | |
| Now there is another and a last approach to the Nativity: | 24:04 | |
| it is the advent of the devout, of the Christian. | 24:10 | |
| It is here that we find what the wistful | 24:17 | |
| are being so pensive about. | 24:20 | |
| The way to discover the content of this advent | 24:24 | |
| is to ask humbly and sincerely, but very definitely, | 24:29 | |
| what was God trying to do in the Incarnation? | 24:34 | |
| After all, the Incarnation is the doctrine | 24:42 | |
| that God became flesh and dwelt among us. | 24:45 | |
| Yes, but what is the doctrine getting at? | 24:49 | |
| Isn't it something like this: | 24:53 | |
| God took this simple but unique way | 24:57 | |
| of letting man know what God is like. | 25:01 | |
| If man is to know anything about God, | 25:06 | |
| there is only one way in which it can be done: | 25:10 | |
| God must take the initiative | 25:13 | |
| and allow Himself to be recognized in a forum | 25:17 | |
| that man can understand. | 25:22 | |
| He must reveal Himself. | 25:26 | |
| Until man is aware of what God is like, | 25:30 | |
| then he cannot answer his basic questions, | 25:35 | |
| what is the point in living and what kind of person | 25:39 | |
| is a person supposed to be in this world? | 25:47 | |
| And Christmas says that God answered these questions, | 25:52 | |
| and others, by making Himself uniquely, | 25:57 | |
| though not solely, known in Jesus Christ, | 26:02 | |
| born, living, teaching, dying, resurrected. | 26:06 | |
| One can almost see, over the stable door at Bethlehem, | 26:16 | |
| the words, "God slept here." | 26:20 | |
| If you wish that put less blatantly and more reverently, | 26:25 | |
| then recall John Oxenham's line: | 26:29 | |
| "The good intent of God became the Christ." | 26:33 | |
| "The good intent of God became the Christ." | 26:39 | |
| That tells us something about God, | 26:44 | |
| He is not just the omnipotently, omnisciently, remote, | 26:47 | |
| the God who hides Himself. | 26:52 | |
| He is a God willing to make Himself a sharer | 26:55 | |
| in the ordinary ways and the every-day conversation of man. | 26:59 | |
| The Christmas present is God giving Himself | 27:06 | |
| for man's advantage. | 27:15 | |
| This tells us something about ourselves too. | 27:18 | |
| Man isn't as hopeless and helpless as some contemporary | 27:23 | |
| theology and philosophy would make him out to be. | 27:27 | |
| This flesh of ours is worthy enough to incarnate God. | 27:32 | |
| The Incarnation gives dignity to man. | 27:41 | |
| This is what St. Paul could never get over. | 27:45 | |
| This revelation of what God and man is, | 27:48 | |
| as seen in Jesus Christ, made a poet out of Paul, | 27:51 | |
| a joyous, surprised, excited poet. | 27:55 | |
| Let me quote again some of the verses | 27:58 | |
| from our scripture lesson. | 28:00 | |
| "If God be for us, who can be against us? | 28:02 | |
| "He that spared not his own Son, | 28:07 | |
| "but delivered him up for us all , | 28:09 | |
| "how shall he not with him freely give us all things? | 28:11 | |
| "What shall separate us from the love of Christ? | 28:15 | |
| "Shall tribulation or distress or persecution | 28:19 | |
| "or famine, or nakedness, "or peril, or sword? | 28:23 | |
| "Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors, | 28:25 | |
| "through him that loved us. | 28:30 | |
| "For I am persuaded that nothing, | 28:31 | |
| "nothing shall be able to separate us | 28:35 | |
| "from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." | 28:39 | |
| That is the Gospel which the Incarnation made real. | 28:45 | |
| And at Christmas the devout say, thank you for it. | 28:50 | |
| This is what they are moving towards | 28:56 | |
| in their advent to Christmas. | 28:59 | |
| Do you know my own conclusion | 29:04 | |
| to the whole matter of advents to Christmas? | 29:06 | |
| There should be two festivals, | 29:11 | |
| and as Christians we may take part in both. | 29:15 | |
| The first should be celebrated on December 25, the secular, | 29:20 | |
| Santa-Claus, decorated streets fiesta | 29:26 | |
| of the winter solstice. | 29:31 | |
| The other should be celebrated on January 6, | 29:34 | |
| the day of the Festival of the Epiphany. | 29:39 | |
| For long enough in the East, | 29:45 | |
| January 6 was commemorated as the Nativity of our Lord. | 29:46 | |
| And on January 6, the devout here and maybe | 29:54 | |
| the wistful also would give thanks to God | 30:01 | |
| for the self-reservation He made, of His own free will, | 30:07 | |
| in Jesus Christ whom we call our Lord. | 30:14 | |
| Amen. | 30:23 | |
| Let us pray. | 30:25 | |
| Almighty God, who hast dramatically revealed Thyself | 30:32 | |
| in Jesus the Christ; lead us even unto Bethlehem | 30:37 | |
| that we may again come to know Thee and ourselves | 30:45 | |
| through the same Jesus Christ, our Lord. | 30:52 | |
| And may the blessing of the Lord come upon you abundantly, | 30:56 | |
| may it keep you strong and tranquil | 31:01 | |
| in the truth of His promises through Jesus Christ our Lord. | 31:04 |
