Note: I preach in a variety of styles, from traditional text behind a pulpit to no-notes and walking about. An intermediate style begins with a short sketch, though I often wander away from the text during delivery. The following sketch was prepared for a sermon series on Christmas traditions.
The Congregational side of our UCC house can lay no real claim to much of what we now claim as the traditions of Christmas. In fact, the Puritan rejection of Christmas will play into next weeks sermon. And now you already know the punchline!
The real cultural trajectory for the most common Christmas traditions flows through Germany and the Netherlands. And here we have some claim, as half of our UCC house descends from German Protestants, and our German Reformed grandparent was credentialed by their Dutch Protestant neighbors. And here we are, in the gravitational pull of New Amsterdam.
The Germans gave us lights on the tree, and a host of other traditions, and the Dutch gave us Sinterklaas and his assistant Black Peter. Fortunately, Black Peter, the current cause of anti-racist protests in Holland, didn’t make the trip, and we were left with Santa Claus, a name derived, as we all know, from Saint Nicholas, the legendary 4th century Bishop of Myra, in modern day Turkey. Legend has it, that Bishop Nicholas made a practice of giving secret gifts, and so you see how the legend develops. One account has him leaving coins in the shoes of those in need. But one tradition was stranger still.
For one legend of unknown age reports of a poor man with three beautiful daughters. Being poor, he did not have money for a dowry, meaning his daughters were unlikely to wed, and upon his death, might well fall into what is politely known as the world oldest profession. I was going to make a joke about the second oldest profession, but we like Deacon Laura, and there must be another lawyer out there who is a good person. It reminds me of Abraham bargaining with God, if he could only find ten righteous people in Sodom!
But back to our father and his beautiful daughters. The man had tried to scrimp and save, had tried every scheme in the book to make a little money, but all to no avail. And so he did what people often do as a last resort. He prayed.
And that evening, as Nicholas made his rounds, making secret gifts to those in need, he tossed three bags of gold into the hovel occupied by the man and his family. One bag, or maybe all three bags, the story is a little unclear on this point, landed inside of a stocking or three stockings hung out to dry by the fire. And a good thing it was stockings, cause if it had been bloomers, zippo, right through the hole and into the fire…
This, as improbable as it sounds, is one of several legends that supposedly answers the question “Why do we hang Christmas stockings?†But really, have you ever really thought about it? It is a strange custom. We hang one of the smellier and dirtier items of clothing on the fireplace, or at least we did before we became wealthy enough to buy pre-made stockings exclusively for use once a year. And really, it’s the only item of clothing that would work. Everything else has a hole in it, excepting maybe a cap of some sort.
As weird as the tradition is, and look, it’s weird, the sentiment behind it is not. The poor man prayed in hope, and that hope was answered, the theme for this first week of Advent.
I should start by differentiating hoping from wishing. We all wish for things. I wish I’d win the lottery. I wish there weren’t giant trees to the east of my backyard, making it difficult to garden. Wishes fall into the category of that would be nice. You might even pray for a wish, but it doesn’t come out of that deep part of your soul. It is hope that springs through the hard places in our life, like a plant shooting up through the concrete. Hope then, is a spiritual thing. It is also a powerful thing, but far more complicated than you might imagine. And, as it is our practice to re-tell our salvation history during the seasons of Advent and Lent, let’s turn to that history to find the spiritual practice of hope.
You see, there are actually three parts to hope. Or maybe four. All depends on how you break them up. And all three move outward, away from the self. But that is where we start, with the self, for the first step in the practice of hope is admitting that you have a problem. This is easier said than done for many of us, especially men in the traditional gendered clap-trap of our culture. To recognize you have a problem, and also to recognize that you can’t fix it alone.
It’s not surprising that this step in the practice of hope mirrors the first step in most recovery programs. In fact, the spiritual practices of the recovering addict often mirror the spiritual practices of the growing and thriving Christian.
And so, we turn to scripture to find moments that name a problem, and the inability to independently correct the problem. In truth, we need go no further than the psalms. There we find the problems of David, besieged first by Saul, then by factionalism in his own household, including the treachery of his son Absalom. We find later layers of text that seem to find their context in the geopolitical vulnerability of Israel and Judah, and eventually, in the destruction of Jerusalem and the southern kingdom, with the Exile in Babylon. We encounter the greatest grief in the Book of Lamentations, traditionally attributed to the prophet Jeremiah. The author writes:
All our enemies
have opened their mouths against us;
panic and pitfall have come upon us,
devastation and destruction.
My eyes flow with rivers of tears
because of the destruction of my people.
If the spiritual practice of hope begins with the seemingly obvious step of admitting there is a problem you cannot fix, the second is a bit less obvious. For the second step is a fundamental belief in something outside of an arbitrary existence. To hope, you have to believe in something metaphysical, or beyond the material. In many traditions, this believe hinges on a divine justice, so hope is only relevant when you have been wronged. And scripture is full of this type of language. Again, we can start with the psalms. Or we can look at the ways the prophets interpret the subjugation of the Hebrew people by one invader after another. In this understanding of the divine as justice, the wronged plea for redress, and the wrong plea for forgiveness, possibly as a result of restitution.
Again, we can look at Lamentations:
The punishment for your iniquity,
O daughter Zion, is accomplished,
he will keep you in exile no longer.
We find this same theme in the fiction of Job, where Job’s supposed friends read the calamity that has struck the title character as sure evidence of his sin.
This metaphysic, of divine blessing and curse as payment and punishment, exists in other traditions that spring from the Ancient Near East, and is a marked improvement over the arbitrary intrusions of the divine into human affairs seen in Greek or Hindu myth. This is a metaphysic in which you get exactly what you deserve, and who would really want that?
To get to Christian, you have to move much later on the prophetic trajectory. You have to hear the voices of the late prophets, voices like deutero-Isaiah, voices that claim that God is merciful and would rather bless us, that God, in fact, showers us with blessing. This is a metaphysic, a belief, in the goodness of creation, of that divine mystery we name as God. To practice hope, at least Christian hope, is to believe that God is good, to believe, as the Gospel attributed to John suggests, that God so loved the world, to believe as Paul’s letter to the Philippians asserts, that Jesus emptied himself, becoming like us, that we might become like him.
So you admit there is a problem you can’t fix, and you believe in something, something divine, that has the power to make right. The final step is to give yourself over to that divine mystery, to trust in that goodness, and to prepare for the arrival of salvation. That salvation may come in the form of the Human One, what older translations rendered as the Son of Man, and featured in today’s reading. It could come when Cyrus defeats the Babylonians. It could come when the doctors can’t explain the cure. It could come when you suddenly find the courage to walk away from a damaging relationship. You turn yourself over to the divine in faith, in full trust that this creation is good, that the source of this creation, that the creator is good.
A need to hope, a problem that is beyond us.
A belief that the problem is not beyond God.
A surrender to God and a preparedness for salvation.
And here is the maybe fourth step in the spiritual practice of hope.
Respond to deliverance. Be prepared to act.
Pack up your belongings and flee Egypt. Make straight a highway and head home from Babylon. Leave your tax-collectors table or your fishing nets. But act. Salvation is come, in Bethlehem, on Golgatha, at an empty tomb. Salvation is still coming, grace upon grace, right here on the South Shore. Believe and act, for God is with us.