Pastor's Notes

What is your favorite Christmas carol? No, I’m not talking about those Bing Crosby, Perry Como, or Andy Williams tunes that play incessantly over the airwaves one after another. (By the way, our college students listen to them as often as do we older ones) I mean those found in hymnals, and apt to be sung Christmas Eve or, this year, Christmas day.

Various surveys list different ones as number 1. I learned a long time ago I cannot have a Christmas Eve worship service without O’ Come All Ye Faithful, Silent Night, and Joy to the World. Somehow “Go Tell it on the Mountain” even in a state as mountainous as Colorado is no acceptable substitute for Joy to the World as an ending Christmas Eve tune. Funny, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Having said this while leaving out one of the big three will garner complaints, omitting one hymn in particular is apt to get more than complaints. Even I am smart enough to include Silent Night each of the 43 Christmases in which I have served as a pastor. Substituting another tune for Silent Night Christmas Eve? Pastors have been fired for less.

What is it about Silent Night that gets to us? The part about silence? Nighttime? The tune? And I also wonder: is Silent Night accompanied by candles or are candles accompanied by Silent Night? Either way for most who are frequently found in worship, Silent Night sung in complete candlelight is usually the worship highlight of the year.

Originally Silent Night was composed for a guitar as the alpine Austrian church in which it was first played had an organ damaged by flooding. Over the years the tune has been tweaked a bit until ending up the music by which you and I and countless others know it.

Perhaps it is a combination of words and tune that speak to us. Written after the Napoleonic wars, we can imagine the great need for a simple hymn of peace in both lyrics and music. In our time of hectic activity, wars, pandemic, threats, racism, anti-Semitism, and division, anything peaceful is greatly needed. During the singing of Silent Night we look around, grateful for those sitting by us should we be so fortunate. We think of those no longer able to be with us and those spending Christmas with others. Sometimes our burdens are lightened just a bit as we sing this hymn even with great solemnity. Gratitude, sadness, togetherness, and loneliness all mixed together in one emotional stew.

Likewise, the same ingredients seem to combine in a spiritual stew. Christmas, a time of great joy, is also a time the manger’s splinters and the gift of myrrh remind us of a cross and death yet to come. The one who comes as God’s gift and brings great joy is one who will be rejected and killed. The mother tending to him tenderly in a barn will be with him at the end, a grief-stricken witness to the violence that will befall him.

Silent Night. Sacred night. As we seem to feel God’s presence in this song, so we are reminded God is present in all those feelings we have as we gather or do not gather at Christmas. So is God present in a barn and a cross. The baby does not know any of this. The baby just knows when it wants feeding, changing, and holding. So it is with us. We are very aware of our hungering, our need to repent and change, and a desire to be held tight by all that is good and reaffirming.

The infant Jesus was placed in a feed trough. In this Jesus God continues to feed us and our emotional and spiritual hungering. Silent Night. Holy Night. We are fed, we shall be changed, we are held. Redeeming grace dawns. Jesus is Lord at his birth.
Jesus is Lord still.

It’s that time of the year! A time when TV channels are inundated with old Christmas movies. C’mon…you have a favorite, don’t you? Sure, for the most part they are schmaltzy, sentimental, sappy, and mostly nostalgic teasing us with thoughts that Christmases past were idyllic if not perfect and tempting us to think this year’s Christmas too can be just perfect.

However, in some small way many such movies are a commentary on the Christmas story or at least someone’s understanding of the Christmas story and the meaning of Christmas. (In my experience the meaning of Christmas seems to differ from person to person.)

Take the Grinch, for example. Different and outcast he was able to steal the physical Christmas, but not the heart of Christmas. Not a bad parable for our time as we too often bury the heart of Christmas in consumerism covered up by calling it gift giving, and yet, somehow, the heart of Christmas breaks through and continues throughout the ages.

It’s a Wonderful Life. Jimmy Stewart’s character, George Bailey learns the hard way the message of the Incarnation….God at work in and through human flesh. The impact of this savings and loan owner went far beyond interest rates, borrowing, loaning, and investing.

Even Christmas Vacation has a message however hidden in its comedy. Families are dysfunctional (hopefully not as much as the Griswold family) yet somehow in the end most seem to pull off being a family. The baby Jesus, Luke tells us, was born to an unwed couple. In addition, Christmas Vacation seems to be a parody on a Christmas whose meaning is in us and our efforts, and not on any spiritual meaning of Christmas.

Okay, maybe all this is a stretch so I can defend watching some of the schmaltz each year. Yet many seem to have some tug or nod however slight to a piece of the Christmas story.

What is missing in the movies, as in just about everything from Hollywood, is the true reality of life. Sometimes there are not happy endings in life. Missing from the Christmas movies is any hint of a shadow of the cross over the cuddly infant. Matthew tells us at least one of the gifts was a burial spice. Most Christmas movies do not have the scratch of the straw, the stench of a barn, nor the splinters of a manger that give hint to splinters on a cross yet to come and of real life that comes with pain as well as joy.

The Christmas story which we also romanticize and, to continue with a word, schmaltz, is real life. A baby is born into a challenging situation with many struggles yet to come. So often the Christmas story is reduced to our picture of an infant, cozy and wrapped in a blanket. Missing is the news of a God come to earth in this child. Missing is a God willing to stoop to be in a place and a way beneath any god.

I don’t know if God cares that this most powerful of stories becomes so superficial and almost trivial. I just know God seems to think the risk of being so reduced is worth it. God seems to think being with God’s creation and people is worth any and all belittling that may come God’s way from those viewing such a God as weak.

We can enjoy our plastic trees and our LED candles. We can look back nostalgically, and we can think for a moment that the true meaning of Christmas is a warm feeling. Yet somehow the Christmas story breaks through. Somehow it stays with us and will do so long after we are gone.

Life itself is the best commentary on the Christmas story. Neither the Grinches nor the Scrooges of the world can rob Christmas as the story of God coming to earth. Our imperfect efforts nor even our consumerist passion can blot out completely God’s gift to us at Christmas. Hollywood can have their endings. They may cloud or tarnish the Christmas story a bit, but they cannot contain it nor end its message. Joy to the World will always strike a more powerful note. Joy to the World seems somehow to break through our striving to make Christmas dependent upon us.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. This, as you may know, is a line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It implies names do not mean very much. To some degree that is true. Yet most who have ever expected a child often spend anguishing hours struggling with just the right name for their baby girl or boy.

Names do often mean a great deal. Some names are quite revelatory such as “Mary’s Beauty Salon.” By that name it is fairly obvious what happens in that place. Were it called, “Mary’s Place” it could be about many things in addition to or other than a beauty salon.

What about Christians? What’s in a name? Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, 7th Day Adventist, Unification Church, Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints…the list goes on. These names matter. There is great difference in many of these. Many would not even consider some Christian despite their claim or their name.

Christians first received the label “Christian”, the book of Acts tells us, in Antioch. It seems to have initially been a derogatory label like those used by teasing children on a school playground. Previously the movement that came to be called Christian called themselves “The Way”, again, according to Acts. Lutherans received their moniker in a similar fashion as they were most often called such first by their critics. Martin Luther did not like the name at all. He preferred simply to be called Christian. Some within the Protestant movements referred to themselves as Evangelicals.

So what about our name? We call our community University Lutheran Church and Lutheran Campus Ministry. Once I suggested we drop the Lutheran in campus ministry and simply called ourselves “University Campus Ministry.” I was almost run out of town.

Lutheranism is not the name of a church organization or institution. It is not even the label for a style of worship or a type of piety. We Lutherans are and have been all over the place on such things. Some could play cards and attend the theatre. Some could not. Some, including a group now in our own ELCA, refused to celebrate Christmas, Easter and observe Ash Wednesday and Holy Week, including Good Friday. Some had altars and pulpits, others had pulpits with only a small table beneath it for communion elements. Talk about different styles of worship and pieties!

Lutheranism is, at its core, the name of a body of faith. Its crowning attribute is not the sphere of polity or worship or even ethics. Our heart is in the sphere of religion and theology. Lutheranism is an understanding and expression of the Christian faith. We are, perhaps, the only main line Protestant “brand” who still adhere to and use our original body of doctrine, that is, our Lutheran Confessions, as collected and written in the “Book of Concord”. They include both the Large and Small Catechisms and the Augsburg Confession, among other writings. They are not to supplant scripture, but to put to common expression how a community with the name of Lutheran understands the basic tenets of Scripture and faith. In other words, they serve the Bible, which remains the rule and norm for faith. Many of my Protestant colleagues find this puzzling. They don’t understand how we find use for documents nearly 500 years old.

Ah, but one thing Lutheran doctrine is not is exclusive. That is, it does not proclaim we are the only or the truest of Christians. The Augsburg Confession is written in two parts: Part I is all about what we have in common with the Roman Church, to whom this document was presented. It is an ecumenical writing written and presented with the understanding we are all Christians, but we have some particular understandings and beliefs about some aspect of the faith.

One thing for certain: God is not Lutheran. God is not Christian, for that matter. God is God. The name Christian and its subtitle Lutheran are particular ways of understanding God in an attempt to live out the faith and the life God would have us live.

Names make a difference. With the names Christian and Lutheran those names do not bring with them privilege. Instead they identify a particular faith and a way of living that expresses that faith. We may or may not smell as sweet with different names, but we do have a somewhat unique picture of God using the names we have. We have the same mission of proclaiming the Good News of the Christ whose name Christians bear.