There are some experiences in life, some ideas and feelings which defy our power of language and speech. It’s difficult to talk about the sacrificial love of parents. We struggle for words to describe the beauty of a sunset. We ransack our vocabulary to find words that image forth our experience of God. Not least among these experiences, ideas, and feelings which defy our power of speech and language, is the meaning of Christmas. We do our best as freshly and as meaningfully as possible to capture the meaning of it all. Try as we will though, we always feel limited and always feel that we’ve not quite made it. So we need more than words, don’t we. We need some means of communication more expressive than language. It’s true with other experiences as well. And to some degree we have found answers. When we can’t pass on our feelings of patriotism, we sing a hymn, or we salute the flag and pledge our allegiance to it. When we’re unable to express in words our deepest devotion for the one we love must, we give a rose or we touch her hand, or in a simple glance of love, we communicate our devotion. So in talking about Christmas, we need to soar beyond the normal paths of human expression, but who is capable of it? The glorious narratives of the nativity cause us to think of wise men, angels, shepherds, heavenly music, a virgin maid, a scared daddy, and a precious little baby. These all become symbols for our understanding. They become pegs upon which we can hang our thoughts, focal points to which we can come and assemble our imaginings. And that’s what I want to do this Christmas Eve. To lift up three common symbols and see if they can make us come alive to the meaning of it all, or see if we can make them come alive as far as meaning is concerned in our life.
I. A Star
We’re talking about a star, a stable, and a song. There was a star in the Christmas story. You know the scripture by heart. Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, behold there came from the east wise men to Jerusalem saying, where is he that is born king of the Jews, for we have seen his star in the east and have come to worship him. When they heard of the king, they departed and low the star went before them until it came and stood over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. Now it ought to be said right off that this has nothing to do with astronomy. It’s lofty business of the soul. God caught the magi with the star. These students of celestial splendor believed that there was a connection between the stars of the heavens and the events of the earth. The star had special significance to them and following it, leaving their comfortable and cozily cushioned life behind, they found themselves and the truth they were seeking. The God they were seeking in a little babe. Can we not see this as the beckoning of God to us? He sent the sign – far above the reach and the mystery and majesty of the sky – and this became man’s prime need, not for the grocer or the doctor, but for a savior. What star is this that shines so bright, which shames the sun’s less radiant light. It shines to announce a new born king, glad tidings to our God we bring.
II. A Stable
Not only was there a star, there was a stable in the Christmas story. And they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in manger. That’s the way gospel has put it. Here’s the way a great poet expressed it, there faired a mother driven forth out of an inn to roam in the place where she was homeless, all men are at home. The crazy stable close at hand with shaking timber and shifting sand, who a stronger thing to abide and stand, than the square stones of Rome. The stable is quaint, as mysterious, as beckoning as the star. Who would imagine it? The Messiah born in a stable. What an unlikely place to look for the Prince of Peace – in a cattle stall. It’s often so though, isn’t it? Life’s highest comes from unexpected places. When the circumstances of life seem most unfavorable, we witness the loveliest flowers of human and divine achievement. History verifies it over and over again. Hans Christian Andersen was the son of cobbler. His parents were so poor, they had to make their own furniture. Yet out of those circumstances came the most beautiful fairy tales the world has ever known. John Keats was the son of a livery stable keeper. By the age of 20, he was incurably infected with tuberculosis and died at the age of 26. Imagine that. Yet out of those foreboding circumstances, a poet matured, and from him came the music of Ode to a Grecian Urn. Who is not moved by the beauty of Keats’ lines, heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That’s all ye know on earth, and all you need to know. Do you see? Life’s highest often comes from unfavorable circumstances. And so the Christmas stable won’t let us escape the truth from gloomy and fretful circumstances come the loveliest experiences we can know. The wise men didn’t expect their star to lead them to a stable, but it did, and there they found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger.
But there’s more to this stable than the confirmation from hostile and unpropitious experiences come life’s highest. I remember my first trip to the Holy Land. Naturally, Bethlehem was high on the priority of places to see and experience. I can only imagine how it was in Jesus’ day, but I know how it is now. There’s a huge square in the center of Bethlehem town, and on one side of the square is a great wall, and in that wall there is a small door, so low that even a dwarf would have to stoop to enter it. Through that door, on the other side of the wall is the church of the nativity, built over the cave stable where Jesus was born. How powerful the idea that the builders of the church would force all who approach the place of Jesus’ birth to stoop, to bow low, and this is what the stable is really about. Here is the stripping away of all the world’s pride before the immense simplicity of God. The humblest circumstances of life are lifted up into immortal poetry. What is God saying to us in the stable? At least this – I will not let you think that in some rare place and privilege life will attain its highest fulfillment, but here in a lowly place, in the commonest environment, I come to dwell with you. Here in a stable is Emanuel, God with us. Now we might be able to pass the stable off as mere happenstance, something quaint and interesting, but no more, if it had stopped there. But it didn’t. The pattern of the stable was woven vividly into the fabric of Jesus’ life. In lowliness and humility, he served simple people in simple places. If his life entered the world through a back door, as it surely did, so also it was through little doors that as a man he went in and out. And always he made men and women know that what really mattered, what really mattered was not what they possessed, but what in the their inmost being they tried to be. And the pity is, the pity that so often we’re forgetful of that truth. We go on pursuing our false and shallow satisfaction, when the message of the stable finally breaks through, we’re driven to pray, oh God, oh God deliver me from these artificial things which stifle me in their net. Give me the courage to let go the efforts of keeping up appearances. Teach me to stop trying to seek enrichment in the things that glitter, which turn to dust in my hands. Lead me back to life’s simplicities, to the fresh sweet springs of honest thought and uncalculating affections, and to those relationships with human hearts, which alone can make life rich and great. That’s the stable in the Christmas message. Don’t miss it.
III. A Song
There was a star, a stable, and a song. Don’t forget the song. The human being is a singing animal. Have you ever thought of that? There is a sense in which history moves by the music we make. Do you remember O’Shaunessy’s Ode? “We’re the music makers and we’re the dreamers of dreams, wandering by long sea breakers and sitting by desolate streams. World losers and world forsakers on whom the pale moon gleams, yet we’re the movers and shakers of the world forever it seems.” With wonderful deftness ditties we build up the world’s great cities, and out of a fabulous story, we fashion the empire’s glory. One man with a dream, at pleasure shall go forth and conquer a crown and three with a new song’s measure can trample an empire down. We’re dreamers we person, and we sing our dreams. The Methodist church has moved into the hearts of men because we sing our faith. And so much of religion, especially Protestant Christianity has to do with singing. You can’t think of the Civil Rights Movement without thinking of the songs that came out of it. Though I’m not a social scientist, I’m certain that the songs of protest during the 50s and 60s affected significantly the direction of social change. And what is the medium of communication so common the generation under 30? Music. We write lyrics about experiences that are meaningful to us, and we set those lyrics to music.
Christmas has been set to music also. It started immediately. The angels heralded Jesus’ birth with a song. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, goodwill toward man. In this song, the priorities of Jesus’ life and teaching are set forth, even before he gave that magnificent summary of the law, love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. The angels were singing of these dual priorities – love and praise of God, peace and reconciliation for men. It may be that we are torn apart individually and collectively. At odds with each other individual, individuals and nations. Estranged, because we have forgotten these priorities. There is no peace, and there never will be peace without praise. Glory to God in the highest, and only then is it possible for peace toward men. The mounting tide of violence that has become the insignia of our time, is the result of the absence of worship. When we have no God to worship, when life is not arranged around some center, some focus, the circumference gets all out of shape, and that is what has happened to us. No praise, no peace. So there must be a song. And it can’t be a tentative melody that we hum or strum when we’re caught in the mood of Christmas. It’s a lifestyle, a condition of the heart, a dedication of life. This is what the child inadvertently suggested when he went out at the end of January to sing Christmas carols. A householder listening to the strains of Hark the Herald Angels Sing, opened the door and asked, don’t you know that Christmas was a month ago? Yes sir, said the pale little singer, but I had the measles then and I couldn’t go caroling. We’re singing all the time. We’re singing all the time if Christmas has really gotten through to us. Glory to God, peace to men.
In 1981, on Christmas Eve, Moore Memorial Church in Shanghai, China, held its first official service in 20 years. When I was in Shanghai in 1979, this church was still being used as a warehouse. After the communist victory in 1949, church going was still possible for a few years, but gradually all the churches were closed. This Shanghai church was converted into a warehouse in 1959. An elderly physician, Dr. Li, who studied in the United States in the 1930s, was a member of that church. He told us when we were there that on Christmas Eve in 1959, something compelled him and his wife to leave their little two-room apartment and walk through a cold drizzle to the church, dark and padlocked though it was. As they drew close to the church, they became aware of other silent walkers, from every side street they came, alone or in twos or threes, converging on the church square. Soon literally 100s were standing shoulder to shoulder in the dark courtyard of the church. Newcomers took up their post on the sidewalk. For over two hours as midnight passed, and Christmas day came, they stood in the rain – no hymns, no choirs, no sermon, only he is born, he is with us, in unspoken communion around that boarded up church that had been turned into a warehouse. And would you believe, that that same observance which began on Christmas Eve in 1959 has continued every Christmas Eve for 21 years, until the church was finally opened last year, and on Palm Sunday they baptized 20 converts.
People gathered at Christmas Eve to stand silently – against the law – to celebrate the star, the stable, and the song of him whose coming is the light that shines in the darkness and which the darkness cannot and will not overcome. Well that’s the story. And a big part of it a star, a stable, and a song. Stars rise and set, that star shines on. Songs fail, but still that music beats through all the ages come and gone, in lane and field and city street, and we who catch the Christmas gleam, watching with children on the hill, we know. We know it is no dream. He stands among us still. Tonight, Christmas Eve, as we join the vigil with those in Shanghai, and other places around the world, may we see the star, visit the stable, and sing the song.