On Christmas Eve also my congregation, the Kritische Gemeente IJmond, came together. At the beginning we read the “Story of the Innkeeper’s Wife” by a well-known Dutch author, Michel van der Plas, in which the wife of the Bethlehem innkeeper tells an annually returning pilgrim about what had happened years ago. In her opinion it was “a lot of fuss about nothing”. The world hasn’t changed in the slightest. And God… well, “No one has ever seen God”. Apart from this, in the sermon we reproduce below, I refer to a hymn we sing at our services (“Licht dat ons aanstoot in de morgen” – “The Light that Touched us in the Morning”) and the “Table Prayer” (Communion Prayer) written long ago by pastor of one of the basis congregations in Amsterdam, Jan van Opbergen.
This question doesn’t sound very nicely and hospitably, somehow. We have become used to that this evening we need more chairs and more leaflets, just as it is in other churches. And, let’s say this right now: we are simply happy. Everyone is welcome and nobody needs to explain themselves. This is still an interesting question, though: why? In the end, you can have a decent Christmas and not go to church. In Australia there was a poll done, which showed that only 26% Australians associate Christmas with Jesus and his birth.
I bet that many colleagues will build their sermons on that topic this evening: how horrible this is that
people no longer know what they celebrate in Christmas. A nonsense, actually, since we don’t need this whole story about Jesus’ birth at all in order to celebrate today and tomorrow. Through centuries, Yule was celebrated on these days: Midwinter, winter solstice, the rebirth of light, the fact that days were going to be longer again. And it was a feast of peace. A feast of the light’s victory over darkness. A feast commemorating the duel between the Oak King (symbolizing the light) and the Holly King (symbolizing the darkness), in which the Oak King is the winner. So there is enough to be celebrated, and we don’t have to refer to Jesus and his birth. And that is why the question we begun with: why do you come back? why do you want to hear it again, live it again? is certainly appropriate.
I myself have to say that this really interests me, and that I would like to finally find this out. So attention please, if you are making plans for the next Christmas, it may turn out that in KGIJ, instead of a Christmas sermon, you will be confronted with a Christmas survey or a kind of interview. We only have to think of a few nice and interesting additional questions, but, since we are also nice and interesting, we will certainly manage to do that…
For the time being, however, I have to guess on the basis of what I annually hear from the group preparing the service. For example that there must be the classic reading of the Christmas Gospel, and a sufficient number of old, familiar carols. Long live the critical community, I think each time. Still, it seems to be one of the reasons we come back here. We come back to the old, the familiar, to our youth, our childhood…
Or perhaps even further back? Couldn’t we see Christmas as a feast of a new birth? A new birth of us all? A feast against darkness and for light, but in a sense also against the unpursuadable pressure of time and in favour of the future? “Light, the child in me, look through my eyes if such a world dawns somewhere…” How does a child actually look at the world? How does it see it? If you don’t know it anymore, that’s the right moment to remind yourself. Perhaps with help of the returning pilgrim from the beginning of the service. There is something childlike about him. He comes with his hope, his expectation. Open and vulnerable. And it seems that he is absolutely defenceless against the bitter cynicism of the inkeeper’s wife, who, by the way, if you listen to her memories, undoubtedly had all the reasons to become cynical and bitter. This is what she confronts her guest with, just as adults confront children in a certain moment of their lives with their cynical and disappointing reality. He listens to her story and doesn’t justify or defend his hope, his expectation or presumptions. How weak this is, one might like to say, how helpless, as if he personified her helplessness in the purest form. As if he wanted to say to her: have courage, have courage like I do, not to escape in that cynical attitude! Perhaps that’s why there is a chance that he will save her, liberate her: from what had happened in the past and was still happening, from pain and fear, from anxiety and hopelessness.
Children are liberators. Not without a reason we talk about their liberating smile and disarming behaviour. They are liberators, because they make us do what we haven’t done for a long time, we see what we haven’t seen for a long time, make us feel things, even though it may seem that our skin has become far too thick for us to feel them. And perhaps that is why we are not satisfied with these ancient, pre-Christian stories about Midwinter. Perhaps that is why we still, again and again, want to add to them the story about the birth of the child of man from Nazareth. Because that’s the way, the only way, we can express in words our deepest and naughtiest dream, the dream about our own new birth, and at the same time the birth of the “world where people will live worthily and everyone will bear their name in peace”.
It was a great mistake to start talking about the birth story as “something that really happened” in the distant past. “It was the way it was… with Jesus and with Mary, with the star and the wise men”… People wouldn’t admit that the whole story, seen in this way, doesn’t make any sense at all. There was no reason for everyone to go back to their family city for the census. Shepherds would never pasture their herds in an open field at this time of year. And we know this and that about king Herod and his cruelty, but no evidence has been discovered to prove that he had all these children killed. Yet it’s not the way the story was meant. It’s not a story about a one time event from the past, one of those that concern historians. This was not “something that really happened”, but it can really happen. It can BECOME reality. And it happens whenever we are ready to be liberated: from the heavy burden of the past. When we are ready to live our lives as a newborn child, and let ourselves be GIVEN future, by someone else. It can happen and it is happening whenever people meet one another in order to say, as we will say in a few minutes in the Table Prayer:
He can’t be found any more
in Bethlehem or Nazareth,
but it should be a sign for us,
that he is present
And that he comes as newly born.
You shall find
a circle of people
carrying each other in faith
and saying in his name:
I will be there for you
and you will be there for me,
one will be for the other towards life
towards new birth.Blessed Christmas!
