THE LOVE THAT WILL NOT DIE
Christmas Eve, 2004The Reverend Anne Felton Hines
One of my all-time favorite Christmas stories is Amahl and the Night Visitors. Now I know that I may have just caused some of you to lose all respect for me; I know the story and the music are considered by many to be overly-sentimental. But I can’t help it; I love the music, and coupled with the story, I cry every time I listen to it.
Partly it’s the love that’s portrayed between the mother and her son, Amahl – a child who cannot walk without crutches. Their love is nothing extraordinary – no different really than that expressed by most of us who have had children. We become exasperated with them, and lose our temper, sometimes acting in very un-loving ways. But there is no question in our mind that we will do whatever we must to care for them and protect them from harm; our love for them is never in doubt.
Partly I’m moved by the three Kings who stop at Amahl’s home on their journey to find the special child they’ve heard has been born – a child, they say, “who will build his Kingdom on Love alone.” When the Kings witness the poverty of Amahl and his mother, and the depth of love in that home, they offer them their gold, saying that the child they seek has no need of it.
And finally, I am moved by the love of Amahl for this baby he has never seen, but to whom he spontaneously offers to send his crutch. “Who knows,” he says to his anxious mother; “he may need it.” And it is the power of that love for a stranger which allows Amahl to walk for the first time.
I know…it’s embarrassingly corny; but the love it portrays is anything but corny: The simple love between a parent and child, the larger love that welcomes a stranger and cares for the poor, and the miraculous love that can sometimes even heal.
It is said that God so loved the world that he gave his son, to walk among us and teach us that God is Love, and that we are all the sons and daughters of that Love. If Christmas is about anything, it is about the abiding presence of love within each of us – a love that does not die, no matter how disconnected we may become from it – a love that both embraces us and is carried within us to radiate out into the world.
But sometimes we forget – we bale up the lessons of Christmas and stuff them in the attic like Fulghum’s overlooked Christmas cards. We need the stories and songs of Christmas to call us back to our true selves.
I have a friend who wanted to give something more meaningful to his family for Christmas one year than the usual store-bought gifts. As Christmas drew closer, he happened to take one of the paper ornaments from the Christmas tree at his church, on which was written the names of a very low-income family in the area – a single mother and three kids. Under each name was listed things they needed for Christmas – blankets, towels, pajamas and other clothing, and of course, a few toys. At first his heart sank: There was no way he could afford to give all those items to the family. How could he know which items were most needed?
But then he thought of his own family – how he and his siblings needed nothing that they could not afford to purchase themselves. And he decided to buy everything listed on the paper ornament, wrap them all up and deliver them to the church, to be given to the family who was in need. Each of his siblings then received from him a card on which he had written: “Blankets (or towels or clothes or toys) have been given in your name to a family who would not otherwise be able to have them.” He told me that as he wrapped the gifts for that family, he thought lovingly of each of his siblings, and the joy they would feel, knowing they were helping someone more in need than they.
But it didn’t work that way. His siblings didn’t feel his joy; instead, they felt cheated, having spent money on a gift for him, and receiving nothing in return but a card. “We hadn’t agreed beforehand that we could do this kind of thing,” said one of his siblings.
God so loved the world that he infused each of us with the spark of divine love, to both embrace us and radiate out from us to others. But sometimes we forget, and need one another to help us remember.
In our early service tonight, the true story was told of a Jewish family in Billings, Montana, who several years ago had a rock thrown through their window during Hanukkah. Their young son, frightened to learn that some people hated them because they were Jewish, pleaded with his parents to stop displaying their Menorah. But instead, his parents were interviewed by the local TV station, and a meeting was held of all the townspeople to talk about the situation. What could be done to protect this family, and to prevent such violence in the future?
Finally the people decided to display Menorahs in their own windows, even though they weren’t Jewish, as a symbol of solidarity with the Jewish family. They kept their Menorahs up even beyond Hanukkah, and even though some of them also became targets of the violence. It was a powerful act of conscience, and an even more powerful act of love.
If Christmas is about anything, it is about the abiding presence of love, manifested in the story of a child born to humble parents, in the most humble of settings, but who grew up to have a profound influence on those who knew him, and whose life continues to influence us today. Even those of us who do not declare Jesus as our Lord and Savior, surely can agree that his teachings of compassion for the poor, of justice for the oppressed, and of peace for all people, could save the world if taken seriously; surely his message of unconditional love could be our salvation.
But sometimes we forget his message; we “bale it up and stuff it in the attic” for some future time when it seems more “practical.” Even at this holy season, we get caught up in our narrow visions, and need strangers to remind us of a deeper meaning.
A writer in South Carolina, Harriett Richie, tells about an experience she and her family had one Christmas Eve a few years ago. They had attended the late service at their church – just as you’re doing tonight – and on their way home decided to stop somewhere for a middle-of-the-night breakfast. So they began driving around looking for an all night restaurant, but all they could find was a truck stop. Their hunger convinced them to stop anyway.
Inside, there was a jukebox playing what Richie said was something like “When You Leave, Walk Out Backwards So I’ll Think You’re Coming In.” There were large blinking multi-colored lights strung around the window, and the air smelled of burned coffee and stale cigarette smoke. “At the counter a one-armed man in a baseball cap was drinking Pepsi from a bottle;” and a couple of other men were sitting at a booth, talking and eating and drinking.
Richie wrote that she was “enjoying feeling out of place” in this diner, and that she imagined that years from now her family would look back on this experience with laughter, remembering the “awful music and those tacky lights.”
They chose a booth near a window, and ordered breakfast from the only waitress there. As they sat waiting for their food, they watched a young couple with a baby drive up in an old VW van, get out of the car and enter the truck stop. The couple found a booth, and as the waitress took their order, their baby began to cry. The young father lifted the baby to his shoulder, but it continued to cry. The mother tried to comfort the baby, but still she cried.
Finally the mother got up to take the baby out to the van for a diaper change. But the waitress said to her, “Here, hon, let me take her; you go ahead and drink your coffee.” The waitress picked up the infant and began gently talking to her. She took her over to one of the men, who began whistling and making silly faces at the baby. And the one-armed fellow took a pot of coffee and began waiting on tables.
Richie suddenly realized that if Jesus were to be born that night, he wouldn’t choose to be born in her comfortable middle-class neighborhood or even in her church, but there in that truck stop, with people who listened to awful music, and had nowhere else to go. “When we first got here I felt sorry for these people,” she said to her husband. “Now I think that more than any place I know, this is where Christmas is.”
God, we are told, so loved the world that he gave us his Son, so that we might know love. And according to the story, God so loved the poor and the most vulnerable among us that He chose a humble maiden to be the mother of this child. And He so loved the Earth that the Holy Child was born beneath the stars, among the common creatures of the Earth.
But sometimes we lose sight of this simple lesson.
I leave you with one more story, told by Unitarian Universalist minister David Rankin, of a homeless man who began stopping by the church every Monday morning. Rev. Rankin writes, “I always hated to see him – shuffling into the office with the smell of booze and a long sad story to tell….A derelict, he lived in the doorways, ate in the free kitchens, and begged for the money that would kill his memory.”
Then a few days before Christmas, the man left a gift for Rev. Rankin – what appeared to be the top of a teapot. “Probably stolen from a thrift shop,” thought the minister. But then he read the penciled note left with the gift: “Dear David: The greatest gift of the Christmas season is always ourselves.”
“For all I know,” writes Rev. Rankin, “he could have been Christ.”
The Love that we are told was born in a manger so long ago did not die with the death of Jesus. It lives on in every one of us, bursting forth through sentimental stories of miracles, through sharing our wealth with those who have little, through neighbors standing in solidarity with the victims of hate, through strangers caring for one another on Christmas Eve, through simple gifts that are the gifts of oneself.
This love doesn’t get “reborn” every Christmas, because it never dies. It is as present in August as it is in December; we need only remember to look and to listen, so we may “dazzle the world” with the light of our Love.
© 2004 Anne Felton Hines. All rights reserved.
