A CHILD IS BORN

A Sermon by Scotty McLennan, Dean for Religious Life

Memorial Church, Stanford University

December 24, 2009

Merry Christmas to each and every one of you here tonight. "For unto us a child is born,"[i]as the Jewish prophet Isaiah tells us. The angel in Luke's gospel is reported to have announced "To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior."[ii] As a result, "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light,"[iii] and shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night find a baby lying in a manger and end up "praising God for all they had heard and seen."[iv]

But if this had been any other baby, he might never have survived. As the story's told, he was born to a poor, unwed, peasant mother on the road, not in the equivalent of a hospital or even a home. She and her male partner couldn't find a place to stay and risked the newborn's health spending his first night in an animal-feeding trough. Then, the new family had to escape to a foreign country, to Egypt, because the king of Judea, Herod, issued an order to kill all the children under two years of age in the area around Bethlehem where Jesus had been born.[v] This is not a Hallmark card story. And we live in difficult times now as well, faced with challenges to human survival itself with global warming and the proliferation of nuclear weapons that could any day fall into the hands of terrorists. Our nation is fighting two foreign wars simultaneously, and we're in the midst of the biggest recession since the Great Depression.

Whenever and wherever a child is born, though, new hope comes into the world. Christmas symbolizes that for all of us. It's not just about the birth of Jesus either. As the fourteenth century Christian monk Meister Eckhart put it, "What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the son of God some 1400 years ago and I don't give birth to the son of God in my person, in my time, and in my culture?"[vi] So, let's celebrate tonight a child being born, all children being born, and ourselves approach the New Year with open hearts and minds, quashing our cynicism and feelings of despair.

My older son and his wife are due to have a baby in the new year, and my wife and I will then be grandparents for the first time. My own feelings of excitement and expectation are incredible -- almost overwhelming. I'll never forget the sensations I felt on the days that each of my children was born. It was totally awe-inspiring -- miraculous -- that little blue, lifeless bodies could emerge into the world, take their first breath, and be transformed into ruddy-colored, hollering little human beings. Then I remember feeling, with my wife, the most intense love conceivable for each of these tiny beings, and our imaginations ran amok envisioning their future and our future with them. Now, with all my warm memories of my own grandparents, I dream of becoming one myself and of lots of time ahead with my grandchild -- playing, exploring, adventuring, facing fears, crying, laughing, and growing older together.

The birth narrative we read tonight is really a new creation story in the Bible, as Episcopal priest Matthew Fox has claimed. Long after the Genesis account, we are called by Luke to allow our hearts to come alive again with hope at the birth of a baby. We can also give St. Francis of Assisi some credit for this. He is said to be responsible for the focus on the manger, the animals, and the newborn child at Christmas time. We have a creche display here at the base of this pulpit, as in innumerable churches around the world. The awe and wonder at imagining the creation of the world at the beginning of the Old Testament is here humanized in the beginning of a gospel account in the New Testament dedicated to the joy surrounding a baby's birth. The divine child or "radical amazement" within each of us, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel used to call it, is again being called forth by this holiday.[vii]

Jesus as an adult spoke of how important it is to retain the child within each of us. He exclaimed, "Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."[viii] (You should have seen the excitement and enthusiasm of the children at our 5:00 p.m. service this afternoon). Of course children love finding gifts under the tree. As I think back, though, there was a time in my life, perhaps in many of our lives, when we also found a fireside world of fancy and fantasy at this time of the year -- when we found wonderment, imagination and delight in songs and stories and laughter and the warmth of those around us. I write about this in a book of mine that was published this year about Jesus and Christianity.[ix] I explain how much I liked coming to church to see the creche in the chancel and to singChristmas carols. There were Advent Calendars that I savored slowly, day by day, opening one window at a time to a new delight as a narrative developed over four weeks' time. I remember my father reading "The Night Before Christmas" before my sister and I went to bed every Christmas Eve and getting lost in its poetic strains.

To approach Christmas like a little child, I believe, is to spend time around children if at all possible, but at least imaginatively to revisit each of our childhoods through present experiences. Obviously, one can do this only by snatches and glimpses. Yet, when deeply experienced through adult consciousness, those snatches and glimpses can be radically transforming. The wide awareness and ability to savor experience as an adult, combined with childlike envisioning, can lead at its best to solemn wonder and profound reverence.

One way to do this is through storytelling, as we're doing here tonight. A story well told allows us to break out of our fixed places and limited states of consciousness. We can come to imagine ourselves, or our community, or our world as they might be, or might never be, but are worth dreaming about anyway. Some of the great stories outside of the Bible are Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Frank Capra's movie It's a Wonderful Life, Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol, and Hans Christian Andersen's Little Match Stick Girl.

Laughter is another great legacy of childhood. It helps keep family and friends together, but it also has good effect at work and even with random strangers. Finally, connecting with childhood can also mean connecting with compassion. An afternoon spent at a children's hospital or a home for abused or orphaned children can give far more to us than we give to the children by our presence. There may be no more profound moments than those spent responding empathetically to another person, and this has often been described as the very heart of the Christmas spirit. And thinking about children and their future can move us adults toward social action in trying to build a new world of peace and justice, of working toward ending war, pursuing economic equity, and building environmental sustainability for all of creation.[x]

So, this Christmas I suggest storytelling, laughter, and spending quality time with children. For unto us a child is born. In the words of a prayer from the minister of my sister's church in Minnesota, "God of bright mystery...help us to remember your entering the world as a baby. You came skin soft and human scented... You knew simply hunger and food, cold and warmth, the goodness of a sweet, low song and a tender touch. Even now, the riches of kings mean nothing. You cry for our love as a baby cries for milk. Amen."[xi]

NOTES

1

[i] Isaiah 9:6

[ii] Luke 2:11.

[iii] Isaiah 9:1.

[iv] Luke 2: 8, 20.

[v] Matthew 2: 13-18.

[vi] Meister Eckhart, as cited in Matthew Fox, "The Divinity of Christmas" (2003),

[vii] Fox, "Divinity of Christmas".

[viii]Matthew 18:3.

[ix] Scotty McLennan, Jesus Was a Liberal: Reclaiming Christianity for All (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Virginia Rickeman, The Well is Deep (Cleveland: United Church Press, 1999), p. 10.