Languages of Love

Rev. Linda Simmons

December 25, 2016

The Blessing of Love

Pearl S. Buck also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu was an American writer and novelist. As the daughter of missionaries, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in China. Her novel The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the United States in 1931 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, she the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
She wrote a Christmas story called, “Christmas Day in the Morning.” I will read you a piece of it here:
He woke suddenly and completely. It was four o'clock, the hour at which his father had always called him to get up and help with the milking. Strange how the habits of his youth clung to him still! Fifty years ago, and his father had been dead for thirty years, and yet he woke at four o'clock in the morning. He had trained himself to turn over and go to sleep, but this morning it was Christmas.
Why did he feel so awake tonight? He slipped back in time, as he did so easily nowadays. He was fifteen years old and still on his father's farm.
He loved his father. He had not known it until one day a few days before Christmas, when he had overheard what his father was saying to his mother.
"Mary, I hate to call Rob in the mornings. He's growing so fast and he needs his sleep. If you could see how he sleeps when I go in to wake him up! I wish I could manage alone."
Well, you can't, Adam." His mother's voice was brisk. "Besides, he isn't a child anymore. It's time he took his turn."
"Yes," his father said slowly. "But I sure do hate to wake him."
When he heard these words, something in him spoke: his father loved him! He had never thought of that before, taking for granted the tie of their blood. Neither his father nor his mother talked about loving their children--they had no time for such things. There was always so much to do on the farm.
Now that he knew his father loved him, there would be no loitering in the mornings and having to be called again.
He got up after that, stumbling blindly in his sleep, and pulled on his clothes, his eyes shut, but he got up.
And then on the night before Christmas, that year when he was fifteen, he lay for a few minutes thinking about the next day. They were poor, and most of the excitement was in the turkey they had raised themselves and mince pies his mother made. His sisters sewed presents and his mother and father always bought him something he needed, not only a warm jacket, maybe, but something more, such as a book. And he saved and bought them each something, too.
He wished, that Christmas when he was fifteen, he had a better present for his father. As usual he had gone to the ten-cent store and bought a tie. It had seemed nice enough until he lay thinking the night before Christmas. He looked out of his attic window, the stars were bright
The thought struck him like a silver dagger. Why should he not give his father a special gift, out there in the barn? He could get up early, earlier than four o'clock, and he could creep into the barn and get all the milking done. He'd do it alone, milk and clean up, and then when his father went in to start the milking he'd see it all done. And he would know who had done it. He laughed to himself as he gazed at the stars. It was what he would do, and he mustn’t sleep too sound.
So that’s what he does, he doesn’t sleep and does all the milking and his father wakes him as usual and then he hears his father in the barn laughing and crying and they hug and his father says:
"Son, I thank you. Nobody ever did a nicer thing--
"The best Christmas gift I ever had, and I'll remember it, son every year on Christmas morning, so long as I live."
They had both remembered it, and now that his father was dead, he remembered it alone: that blessed Christmas dawn when, alone with the cows in the barn, he had made his first gift of true love.
This Christmas he wanted to write a card to his wife and tell her how much he loved her, it had been a long time since he had really told her, although he loved her in a very special way, much more than he ever had when they were young. He had been fortunate that she had loved him. Ah, that was the true joy of life, the ability to love. Love was still alive in him, it still was.
It occurred to him suddenly that it was alive because long ago it had been born in him when he knew his father loved him. That was it: Love alone could awaken love. And he could give the gift again and again. This morning, this blessed Christmas morning, he would give it to his beloved wife. He could write it down in a letter for her to read and keep forever. He went to his desk and began his love letter to his wife: My dearest love...
The name for this segment in our service I called the blessing of love. May we remember this Christmas to bless each other with love with the love that has been given to us over and over again.
May it come to us today so that we might give it to others, without judgment of whether they’ve earned it or deserve it or need it more than we do. May we just love today because we can.
The Gift of Community
Carl Scovel, “The Stolen Infant”
The Unitarian Universalist minister Carl Scovel tells a story about the heating wars in his house, which at the time was the parsonage of King’s Chapel, at 63 Beacon Street in Boston. Scovel, who retired in 1999 after 30 years service as the UU minister at King’s Chapel, writes:
I like to think that after 25 years of living together, our family has developed a certain sense of equilibrium, a certain ease with each other. From time to time, of course, differences arise and sometimes, momentarily an act of outright rebellion. But as the reigning benevolent despot of 63 Beacon St, as I sometimes fancy myself, I like to think that by and large we get on very well. (As I said), (t)here are differences… such as just how warm the house should be.
I grew up in a house without central heating and I have always felt that a cool house is a healthy house, impervious to colds and conducive to the flow of blood. My daughters do not share that sentiment and at times become articulate upon the point. Last Christmas when I refused to turn up the heat sufficiently high…the youngest daughter proclaimed, “Behold a decree went out of Carl Augustus that all the world shall be frozen, and each went to her own room to be frozen.”
That Christmas eve we held our traditional services of song and scripture, and we added a small new feature. On the old communion table we placed a crèche—terra cotta figures of Mary, Joseph, the Babe, shepherds, sheep and kings as well. We had never had a crèche in King’s Chapel before and I felt that if we were to introduce one, the muted colors of these terra cotta figures might alleviate any Puritan objections.
We went through the family service at 4:30 p.m….and the big service at 10:30 p.m., and I heard nothing but words of appreciation. I was relieved and thought perhaps we’d started a new tradition. I had finished greeting the crowd after the late service when our [sexton] approached me with a worried look and said, “I think you’d better come down to the [front of the church].”
“Why, what’s the matter, Tom?” I asked..
“One of the pieces of the crèche has been stolen,” he said to me.
“Which one?” I asked.
“Well, it’s [Jesus].” he answered.
“Oh Lord,” I thought, “The first time we put it out and [someone takes a piece. I hope
this doesn’t mess things up for the next three hundred years.”]
As we walked down the aisle of the church I couldn’t help wondering who would take such a piece…An objector? A prankster?
We got to the chancel and looked at the crèche and sure as shooting the baby was gone. I looked under the table and around the chancel floor. Nothing. Then I saw that someone had placed a piece of paper under the figure of Mary. I drew it out and found the following message, printed neatly in pencil. “We’ve got Jesus. Turn up the heat at 63 Beacon Street and we’ll return him for the morning service.”
The heat went up at the parsonage, the infant reappeared and everything returned to normal. Well, not quite. The benevolent despot of 63 Beacon Street sits less certainly upon his throne. That is not surprising. No monarch, indeed no despot, can ever be so sure of his rule after a child has been born.
I called this story the gift of community because that is part of the Christmas message too, that we don’t live alone, even if we live alone, that our actions, our thoughts, our plans effect the lives of others and that we must consider our lives in relation to those around us, their needs and desires and hopes and dreams, to the best of our ability, so that we might find true fulfillment, true happiness, and a true capacity for peace on earth (and at home).
The Gift of Blessing and Being Blessed
The 12th Day of Christmas is called the Feast of the Epiphany; the day the 3 wise men arrived at the manger following the star with gifts for the baby Jesus. Epiphany means “a moment of sudden intuitive understanding, a flash of insight.”
The 3 wise men are written about in Matthew in the second chapter for a couple of verses, the only place they appear in the bible. They are said to be magi, or men who knew astronomy, and read the stars and knew their significance.[1]
They had long known of a prophecy that a certain star would herald the birth of the king of the Jews. King Herod heard of this and asked them to tell him where this king was to be born and when they found the king if they would tell him where he was so he could pay him homage. Of course, Herod wanted to kill him, not pay him homage.
The wise men, said to have crossed 1,200 miles of desert, following a star, come to the place of Jesus’ birth. They fall to their knees, recognizing Jesus as the king of the Jews, and give their gifts. They are told in a dream not to tell Herod, and they do not.
The bible does not say that the wise men are kings. Nor does it give them names or say that one was white, the other brown, the other black. That was done post-biblically.[2] And I can see why all of this was added to the story. The writers wanted others to know that to cross those miles of desert, to read those stars, to carry those gifts, to be changed by the journey so that when they arrived they would be able to see what would change them and the world: this would take wise people, people who were leaders, people who cared for others as kings are charged to do.
And they needed to be from different ethnicities too because epiphanies, moments of sudden intuitive understanding, flashes of insight…must be open to all people, of all races from all lands and languages. Indeed, they may be contingent upon this openness.
I see in this story a journey, a 1200 mile journey of epiphany, because though epiphany is said to be sudden, we know that it comes from everything that precedes it, from the openness and preparedness and wholeheartedness with which we live our lives. Epiphanies come into spaces that are built to contain them.
And traveling as three different ethnicities, as people from different lands and languages and ways of seeing and being in the world and needing to negotiate everything- that opens one’s heart, one’s eyes, one’s capacity for being changed.
I called this story the gift of blessing and being blessed because each time we bless, we are blessed, each time we see something or someone newly, we change and allow them to change too, each time we open ourselves to epiphany, a new understanding is born that explains what we could not understand before, and we become part of a miracle.

1

[1] Rev. Elizabeth L. Greene, “Epiphany,” Boise Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, January 6, 2002.https://boiseuu.org/sermons/jan602epiphany.pdf

[2] Ibid.