Christmas Eve Reflection
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
Unitarian Society of New Haven
December 24, 2017
Reading: Kids’ Stuff by Frank Horne
December, 1942
The wise guys
tell me
that Christmas
is Kid Stuff . . .
Maybe they’ve got
something there——
Two thousand years ago
three wise guys
chased a star
across a continent
to bring
frankincense and myrrh
to a Kid
born in a manger
with an idea in his head . . .
And as the bombs
crash
all over the world
today
the real wise guys
know
that we’ve all
got to go chasing stars
again
in the hope
that we can get back
some of that
Kid Stuff
born two thousand years ago—
Reflection:
Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart. This, to me, is the essence of Christmas.
The ability to hold it all: the journey and no room at the inn, the stable and the manger,
the star and the wise men, the prophesy and the angels, the shepherds and their excitement.
To hold it all and ponder what it might mean that a newborn baby could be the savior of all of human kind, ushering in a realm of peace, a peace for which we are still waiting, 2000 years later.
Fifty years ago, today, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began his Christmas Eve sermon this way: “This Christmas season finds us a rather bewildered human race. We have neither peace within nor peace without. Everywhere paralyzing fears harrow people by day
and haunt them by night. Our world is sick with war; everywhere we turn we see its ominous possibilities.”
His words ring true do they not? For, this Christmas season finds us a rather bewildered human race. And peace within or without seems a nebulous and unattainable ideal. Still we come, still we come to light candles and sing songs born of a tradition we have argued with and wrestled with and perhaps made our peace with and, regardless, it is to that tradition we turn once again this night.
Christmas is “kids’ stuff,” so the wise guys say. Hope and love and peace. The stuff of children’s tales.
Tonight, we have heard again the story of a baby born into a society rife with inequality and cruelty, with corrupt leaders and rampant oppression: an ancient myth in which we hear our own story.
And once again we find in the Christmas story this: hope in an unjust world. Love come alive.
The promise of a true and lasting peace.
Mary had her baby in a land that was ruled by emperors and governors intent on amassing power and land and wealth. Into that world comes a child said to be the king of kings. At his birth, however, he is the lowest of the low, announced by angelic decree to shepherds in the fields, attended by oxen and sheep in a stable with nothing but a manger to call his bed.
This night, hundreds of families from Puerto Rico are celebrating Christmas in Greater New Haven. Displaced from their homes by Hurricane Maria and the lack of federal response,
they are now strangers in a strange land.
According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “there are now an estimated 258 million people living in a country other than their country of birth — an increase of 49% since 2000.” 10% of these migrants are refugees or asylum seekers –
about 26 million people.
People are travelling. They are on the move, seeking a better life, seeking safety and refuge,
relief from hunger and poverty, persecution and danger.
And yet, in their travels, they too often find more of all of these things.
In a powerful opinion piece this week, Stephanie Saldaña shares images of the refugee and migrant camp, Moira, on the Greek island of Lesbos and the people she met there.
“The Christmas story is their story more than anyone else’s,” she says. “If we want to imagine the Nativity, we needn’t go farther than the tent of Alaa Adin from Syria, who left his home just days after he married. Now his wife is pregnant, and when I met them they were living in a tent outside of Moria, because there was no room for them inside.”
Joseph and Mary flee to Egypt because Herod the king wants to kill their son. “If we want to see today’s flight to Egypt,” Saldaña says, “we needn’t look far: Nearly every refugee I’ve ever met has a story about escaping in the middle of the night.”
Joseph and Mary travel to Bethlehem to be “enrolled” in a massive census in which all had to travel to the city from which their family came to register with the government. “If we want to understand a life upended for a census,” Saldaña says, “we need only ask those refugees whose futures are uncertain until their asylum requests are processed, their entire lives now held hostage to bureaucracy.”
“As we live through the largest migration in modern history,” Stephanie Saldaña writes,
“Christmas invites us to recognize our story in the millions who have been displaced by tyrants, war and poverty and to see their stories in ours.”
“We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” Dr. King said on Christmas Eve in 1967, “tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
And if we are to achieve peace on earth, “we must develop a world perspective.”
In the past year, we have heard harsh rhetoric of “America First” and witnessed the intentional weakening of diplomacy efforts and the rise in nationalism around the globe. Peace seems to be the farthest thing from our leaders’ minds – might and bluster being forefront. We see “ominous possibilities” in North Korea and a devastating blow to Middle East peace lobbed off seemingly without a care.
If we are to achieve peace on earth, we must, as King said generations ago, develop a world perspective. The truth is those of us who hold this perspective must maintain it and proclaim it without ceasing. And we must hold out hope.
Hope has never been naive. Hope is born in hard-scrabble places: refugee camps and stables lit by starlight. Hope holds on to the tiniest fragments of human decency. Hope knows that love comes alive in the birth of every baby, in the power of human connection, in the spark that resides in every single one of us and binds us together as a human race. And hope knows that peace is possible.
And so we pray and we hope and we work for peace on earth and good will toward all.
This Christmas, bewildered as we may feel, weary as we may be, let us choose to follow a star that leads to the promise of peace. Let us never lose hope. And we’ll regain some of that Kid Stuff born 2000 years ago.
May it be so.
Resources:
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. The International Migration Report 2017 (Highlights) 18 December 2017
https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/international-migration-report-2017.html
“Where Jesus Would Spend Christmas” By Stephanie Saldaña The New York Times Dec. 22, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/opinion/christmas-jesus-refugee-crisis.html?_r=0
“A Christmas Sermon on Peace” Martin Luther King, Jr. December 24, 1967. http://www.ecoflourish.com/Primers/education/Christmas_Sermon.html