Stuffed, Saturated and Ready for a Lull
By Marcia Moret Sietstra; Crestwood UCC, Dec. 3, 2006
With thanks to Bill McKibben, author of Hundred Dollar Holiday
Well we certainly have jumped right into the Advent season this morning with our Hanging of the Greens service. Our Puritan ancestors would have been appalled at the decorations in our sanctuary! Not only did they disapprove of decorating, they outlawed any celebration of Christmas. Why? Well, I need to back up several centuries to explain…
In the days of the early Christians, there was no Christmas celebration, because the early Christians expected Jesus to return within their lifetimes—just as our Luke text says this morning. They worried very little about memorializing Jesus’ birth, and in fact had no idea of the date on which he was born. Their hearts were fixed on his return, expected to occur any day!
As the years passed, Christians began to realize that Jesus might not be returning as soon as they assumed he would, and some suspected not in the way they had assumed. So rituals grew up to preserve his memory. They tried to pinpoint his birth date. One famous early bishop named Clement chose Nov. 18. Hippolytus declared Jesus must have been born on a Wednesday, the same day God created the sun, spelled s-u-n. Other authorities picked March 28, April 19, or May 20.
Dec. 25 finally emerged as the date on which they would celebrate the Feast of the Nativity because that date marked the winter solstice on the old Julian calendar, i.e. the longest night of the year when Christians experienced the most darkness. AND Dec. 25th was chosen because they needed to compete with the pagan celebrations that already marked the winter solstice. It was a time when pagans worshiped the sun, s-u-n, and the Sun God Mithros. Emperor Constantine, when he declared Christianity the official state religion, intentionally chose to build the Vatican on the same hill where the Mithros cult worshipped the sun, and so he substituted veneration of Jesus the son for veneration of the god of the sun, spelled s-u-n.
The switch worked! But it came at a price; the raucus partying of those pagan celebrations never died out. The solemn celebration of the Nativity always overlay a foundation of revelry, because of course, it was the ancient midwinter break! Who could blame folks? The midwinter break was the one break in the lives of poor peasants when they got to relax and party. The harvest was done and it wasn’t time to gear up for planting. The beer and wine from that year’s crop had just fermented. In this life of extremely hard work and frugality, this season was the only time of the year to eat fresh meat, since animals couldn’t be killed until the weather was cold enough to keep the meat from rotting, and leftover meat would have to be salted if it was saved for later.
Christmas historian Stephen Nussenbaum says, “Little wonder, then, that this was a time of celebratory excess!” Historically, Christmas was downright rowdy, with lots of drunkenness, singing and playing of games. Now you know why the Puritans tried to ban the celebration and fined anyone who tried to “keep Christmas.” They objected, in particular, to the custom known as “going a-wassailing.” Peasant men and boys would fortify themselves with ale and go singing to the home of the feudal master, to demand a share of the harvest, in the form of food or money, a sort of wild “trick-or-treat.” Once the wassail bowl was shared, the men and boys would drink to the health of their masters. It is the background of our much more refined custom of Christmas caroling.
The Puritans were not successful in suppressing the Christmas drinking and partying. In the 19th century, great explosions and gunfire were popular frontier celebrations. Boys would save all the hog bladders from the butchering, inflate them, and then pop them with paddles on Christmas Day (p. 22). Over the years the customs have changed, but you will recognize a common thread: Christmas, the mid-winter break in a dark season, has always been a time of excess and celebration as well as a time to honor the coming of the Christ Child to the world. This is the tradition we have inherited.
But things are very different in the US today than at any time in the past. Bill McKibben, in his book Hundred Dollar Holiday, points out that we are not poor peasants or living very simple lives out on a frontier. We have available to us, every day, fresh meat and drink. We eat rich food year-round; we don’t need to beg the lord of the manor for a glass of wine. In fact, what has happened is that nearly everyone of us has become a “lord of the manor,” living relatively abundant lives. “We have lots of nice clothes and sumptuous food. Since we live with relative abandon year-round, it’s no wonder that the abandon of Christmas doesn’t excite us as much as it did a medieval serf. We are—in nearly every sense of the word—stuffed. Saturated. Trying to cram in a little more on Dec. 25 does not appear to be what we need at all!” (paraphrased, p. 50)
The boys on the frontier who popped pig bladders for noise, certainly lived a much less noisy life than we do, a fairly monotonous life, in which the noise of gunpowder was exciting. Probably the biggest event of their year was when the circus came to town. We, however, live surrounded by the noise of gunfire on television every night, along with dozens of circus-type performances, and newscasters whose primary goal is to get us excited. Accustomed to noise, we get in the car and turn on the radio. What’s the first thing you do when you get into a motel room? Look for the remote? Today’s Americans receive a constant flow of information, noise and excitement and we are in desperate need of peace and quiet, a lull in the frenzy of life. In a recent survey, only 19 % of Americans said they wanted a “more exciting, faster-paced life.” (p. 53) Excitement doesn’t excite us anymore. 70% of the people surveyed, who make over $30,000 a year, said they would give up a day’s pay each week for a day off work. Time is now our most valuable commodity. If there was a store selling time this Christmas, the line to buy some would be out the door.
There is a reason that “Silent Night” is the all-time favorite carol. Each year we sing it at the end of our Christmas Eve services, and we look around and see each other’s faces illuminated by candlelight—in that moment, we are all connected to God’s light, and we take with us into the cold, quiet night that feeling that God enters ordinary life in moments too big for words. Could it be that amidst the excessive clamor of our lives, what we need most is this kind of experience? It is time…time of contemplation and connection. Time to feel, deep down, that God is really here, and probably most visible in our loving relationships.
Our need for peace and quiet is as palpable as the need we hear expressed by first century Christians in our Advent text today, which is a longing for God to enter their lives. The ancient people expected Christ, in whom they recognized God, to return in typical apocalyptic fashion—in their day, the typical symbols of a God entering the world were of fire and cataclysmic change.
Our idea of what Jesus meant by his talk of God entering the world may be different from theirs. We see the Christ Child enter the world whenever people make peace, and practice compassion. During Advent, we pay attention and watch for ways God enters life again. Mostly, we are noticing that God has been here all along, but we often miss noticing, or we fail to let Christ be seen in our actions. It takes time and intent to notice all of this.
In worship in the next few weeks we will help you focus on God’s coming by sharing the ancient stories that grew up around the memory of Jesus—of angel visits, frightened shepherds, an unexpected birth, a special star in the sky—these and other archetypal symbols will remind us once again that God enters the ordinary mangers of our lives.
And what will you do day-to-day during Advent? Perhaps you will pause to wonder if it has gotten harder to make Christmas special with more gifts or more partying, and whether it might be because our level of excess is already quite high. Perhaps you will ask your loved ones for the gift of time instead of something they need to buy at the mall. Maybe you will want to think about taking 10 or 20 of the hours you would have spent shopping gift those hours to your family, puttering around making treats together or a project to give to someone else. That would really make Christmas a time set apart for the kind of celebration many of us need in our culture, as well as time set apart to become more aware of the presence of the Christ spirit in our lives. May it be so. Amen.