Orinda Community Church
Sermon for Christmas Eve, December 24, 2007
“O Holy Night”
Kirk R. Thomas, Preaching
TEXT: Luke 2:8-20
Have you ever been in the desert at night? Even if daytime temperatures soar, at night the desert can be very cold indeed. Without vegetation to retain it, heat radiates away from rock, sand and gravel into the night sky, quickly cooling the parched landscape. But what a sky! In the clear, crystalline cold air, stars appear brilliant, sharply-defined and amazingly close. The nighttime skies of the arid Middle East have always been like this, which may explain why humans living in these lands have always felt their gods to be very near to them.
The Nativity stories of Jesus give us two powerful images of holy night. In the Gospel of Luke we hear of shepherds tending to their flocks in the darkness. Since night is when predators stalked, nocturnal vigilance was essential to prevent livestock losses. Then, as now, night duty was the lowest rung of the ladder, and then as now, animal herding was a lowly vocation. These toilers of the night were used to the cold, and to the quiet peace of infinite skies and vast vistas. Imagine then their complete terror when this chilly tranquility was shattered by powerful, laser-like and all-pervasive light and by immense sounds of ethereal choirs as the heavenly hosts proclaimed the divine birth. The gospel writer Matthew’s birth narrative presents us with an altogether different nighttime image. Here is a pilgrim’s progress of magi, Persian astrologers, who read in the desert sky portents of a royal birth in Judea and, following a guiding star, make their way to tiny Bethlehem where, much to their amazement, they find the long-sought king lying within a rude barn.
There are other stories of this Holy Night. Perhaps the best and most heartening Christmas story of modern times is the famous Christmas Truce of December, 1914. In the fifth month of what was to become a 52-month war of vicious carnage, an amazing and spontaneous act of compassion erupted along the German and British trenches near Ypres on Christmas Eve when German soldiers began lobbing chocolate cake instead of hand grenades across no- man's land into the British trenches. Soldiers from a Saxon regiment attached a message to the cake asking for a ceasefire that evening so the troops could celebrate their captain's birthday. When a German band played “Happy Birthday,” the British troops stood on their parapets and applauded. Thousands of small German Christmas trees delivered to the front line were set up along the trench parapets and, illuminated by burning candles, the British troops responded with shouts and clapping. What followed was a bout of unprecedented fraternization between enemy forces that has never been repeated on an equivalent scale: in no-man's land, German “Fritzes” bearing candles, chunks of cake and cigars met British “Tommies” carrying cigarettes and Christmas pudding. The two sides exchanged presents, sang songs and played football. They helped each other bury their dead while reading the 23rd Psalm. German author Michael Jürgs wrote in his book “The Small Peace in the Great War” that, “In reality there was a spontaneous peace movement which ran for hundreds of kilometers, and thousands took part.” The truce collapsed shortly thereafter when news of the ceasefire reached the horrified high commands on both sides and strict military discipline was reinforced. In following years, artillery bombardments were ordered on Christmas Eve to ensure no similar lulls in combat. But for a short time, that Holy Night celebration of love incarnate brought mortal enemies together as friends, and caused these coarse men of war to remember, however briefly, that their shared Christian faith uniting them was stronger than the brute nationalism that divided them.
My Dad told me another wartime Christmas Eve story: When Hitler’s army mounted its final major offensive in December 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium, the Allied armies all along the Western Front were repositioned in defensive posture to hold the battle line. My father’s 7th Army, 103rd “Cactus” Division was moved west from its forward position along the German border in Alsace to defend another border position in Lorraine across from the German city of Saarbrucken. Sixty-three years ago this very night, Christmas Eve 1944, my Dad and a buddy were walking the streets of the French town of Forbach in a gentle snowfall listening to the boom of distant artillery that lit the skies along the nearby German border. Hearing another, softer and sweeter sound, the two men searched out its source to a bombed-out church in the center of the town. Entering the great front doors, they could see way to the front, beyond the pews covered with falling snow from the missing roof, a small group of people circled together by candlelight at the chancel altar, singing the Christmas carol “Silent Night” in German. The two were transfixed by the haunting melody of hope and peace emanating out of the destruction and cacophony of war, and with tears in their eyes they prayed also for the peace that eluded their world. In the very language of the enemy, sung by their suffering victims, was this compelling reminder that the powers of darkness cannot forever stifle the light of peace and goodwill.
Today the place where Christmas Eve began is no longer a small village in the Roman Empire but the modern West Bank of Palestine. In the Hebrew language Bethlehem means “House of Bread,” since this town has always been an agricultural market closely linked to nearby Jerusalem, six miles distant. How appropriate that the “living bread” of Christ is said to have come from this place! Bethlehem is also the trade center for surrounding farming villages and for the pastoral nomads who inhabit the area. Tonight, the cold sky is still full of sparkling stars as of old, illuminated not by angel hosts but by floodlights along a 24-foot high concrete wall that snakes across those same hills and gullies where shepherds heard angel songs, but now divides Palestinian Bethlehem from nearby Israeli Jerusalem. Writer Michael Finkel in this month’s issue of National Geographic describes the Church of the Nativity in Manager Square in these words:
“The interior of the church, cool and dark, is as spare as the outside; four rows of columns in an open nave lead to the main altar. There are no pews, just a collection of cheap folding chairs. But beneath the altar, down a set of worn limestone steps, is a small cave. In the rural areas of Bethlehem, today as it was 2,000 years ago, grottoes are used as livestock pens. Managers are carved out of rock. Here, in the bull’s-eye of this volatile place, ringed by Jewish settlements, imprisoned within a wall, encircled by refugee camps, hidden amid a forest of minarets, tucked below the floor of an ancient church, is a silver star. This, it is believed, is where Jesus was born.”
That same article describes a Christian Palestinian family who has lived in Bethlehem since Old Testament times and is even mentioned in the Bible. The family has a Jewish branch across the wall in Jerusalem from whom they separated 2000 years ago when their branch decided to follow Jesus. In Bethlehem, unemployment is at 50% because the economy has collapsed and tourism has plummeted since the Israeli barrier was erected. Bethlehem’s Christian population has dropped from 90% a century ago to less than 30% today, and this family also is considering leaving their ancient, ancestral home. So tonight, on this Christmas Eve, we remember with sorrow that the Holy Night falls uneasily in the Holy Land.
How many times have each of us looked into the starry night sky and imagined the possibilities of the Infinite. Even though we feel so small and vulnerable, don’t we also feel an abiding peace in the very vastness of the Creation? As usual, the Great Bard encapsulated perfectly the spiritual holiness of Advent nights and Christmas Eve when he wrote:
Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy tales, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.
May this peaceful, still and “holy” night be “hallow’d” and “gracious” for each of us tonight as well. May the stories of the lowly birth of a little babe remind us that the peace that eludes us is as near as our hearts humbled before our Creator. In the dark and cold of winter, may we remember that the return of warmth and light is an inexorable as God’s love for us. And may we remember especially that in the very depths of darkness is where the light shines forth most brilliantly.
Let us pray,
“It is very dark now, Lord. The night is deep. Touch our hearts and grant us the wonder that watches for the rising star, and for the courage to sing in the dark.”
Amen.