Sermon

INTRODUCTION: Several years ago, I was in Paris for a few days. And on one of those days, I had a golf game scheduled, and with a tee time reserved. But I had also promised to take a tour of the Louvre, which many call the world’s greatest art museum.

As you know, when the choice is between the Louvre and playing golf, to a true believer, the Louvre doesn’t stand a chance. But I had promised, so I went to the Louvre. But in an hour and thirty minutes, I announced that I had seen the Louvre, and I needed to leave or I would miss my tee time.

Unfortunately, the other members of the party made some insensitive and critical remarks about my choice. Yet despite the shortness of my tour of the Louvre, one motif still remains of my 90 minute viewing: I did see the Mona Lisa, but there was also an enormous number of other Madonna and child paintings.

To be sure, we could dismiss it as simply a hang-up of artists, but I think we would be missing something very basic. Peter Berger explains it this way in his book, A rumor of angels.

He says that when a mother hears her baby crying in the night, that by picking her baby girl or boy up, changing its diaper and feeding it, she is in one sense addressing very basic needs – hunger, discomfort, and fear.

But Berger feels there is something much more basic being said. The mother is saying to that little infant, frightened by its helplessness, that everything is okay, that she or he can depend upon its cry being heard and its needs being met. She’s saying something about order and dependability. She’s saying something to the baby about the kind of world we live in.

In a sense, mothers are communicating a basic faith in the universe and creation, that there is a dependable order to existence. It’s one reason we are so harsh as a society upon child abuse. It violates one of the most fundamental dimensions of existence. Mother and child are a profound symbol of the trust that we have as human beings in the overarching order of existence.

Something like that is happening at Christmas time. When we tell the Christmas story to our children, we are recounting every child’s wish to hear that there is love in the world. Stories of shepherds, angels and wise men, all say that children are important and deserve to be taken care of. They have a part and a place in the scheme of things.

When my daughter, Laura, was four and my son, Brett, six months, their mother and I decided that rather than having a third child, we would try to adopt an unwanted, older, minority child.

As many of you know, Oklahoma has more American Indians than any other state, though it has no reservations. Back in the 19^th century, when Presbyterian missionaries were working among the Oklahoma Indians, they established the Goodwell Indian School for abandoned American Indian children.

One of the many children they had was Carol Pishatubbe. She had lived with her grandmother for her first five years, but then when her grandmother had died, she had to go live with an aunt. Unfortunately, her aunt’s boy-friend had a drinking problem, and not only drank up their food money, but also became very mean when drunk, which is why Carol eventually wound up appointed by the court to the Goodwell Indian School.

At the school, one of the social workers thought that because of Carol’s first five good years in a positive family situation, she had a chance of fitting positively into another family situation. That she had escaped the institutionalization that is common to many children with long stay. Through a very involved procedure, she came to live with us at age 8.

One day something very special happened with Carol. It started with my telling Laura an amusing incident that happened when she was a little baby. Her little brother Brett was listening in fascinated. When I finished, he said, “Tell about me!” So I told something about his babyhood. Then totally unexpected, I looked at Carol, and I could she that she too wanted to hear about her life and her story.

The reality was, I didn’t know about her baby years, except that her mother chose to give her away rather than try to raise her along with her other 10 brothers and sisters. But I knew that wasn’t what Carol wanted or needed to hear. So instead, I went through the process of telling Carol how I first learned of her, and how nervous her step-mother and I were when we went to the Goodwell Indian Home in Hugo, Oklahoma. I told her about the judge we met with, and the social workers, and how brave Carol was when she rode back with us all to Oklahoma City. Then I told her some of the early positive incidents of her becoming a part of our family. As I talked a huge grin came over her face, and she beamed with pride that she too had a story.

Now she’s married and has three children of her own, and is a nationally recognized American Indian artist, with work in the Smithsonian and the U.S. Department of Interior. But I’ve never forgotten her need and her want to be told something of her own story. It was a way of saying that she too was cared for…that the universe was now a friendly place for her as well.

That’s a little bit what Christmas is about tonight. It says we belong, we care for our children, and that we are all part of a meaningful whole. It’s why we light candles…to say that in this world which has so many dark corners to it…we light a symbol of light to say there is another way.

However, the purpose of a service such as this is really in one sense to ask the question that my daughter Carol asked, “What about me?”

That’s another way of saying, what does Christmas have to do with us in this time and this place?

But let’s be honest: We all know the Christmas story, backwards and forwards. What possibly could there be to add to it? What new could possibly be said?

Several years ago, I was working on my doctorate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. It came time to select a topic for my doctoral project and dissertation. Special workshops were held to help the 19 students in the process at that time, and faculty members were accessible as well. Yet I knew that once a topic was approved and started on, it would be very hard to change it. I remember one of the questions I had was, “How can I possibly find a topic that someone else has not already written about that I could add anything new to?”

I remember saying something like that to one of the faculty members, and his response has stayed with me ever since. He said, “Wayne, research is to see what everybody else has seen, but to think what nobody else has thought.”

We’re not doing research here tonight, but there’s a real sense in which that is our task as well: to see what everyone else has seen, but to think what nobody else has thought.

Now think for just a moment. We’ve seen Christmas, but what do we think about it? To help us think, let me share this simple story with you:

There were six children in my family, and my youngest sister, Grace, came very late in my parent’s life – Dad was 51 and Mother 39. Grace was also the cutest, the smartest and the most talented of any of us, and unlike any of the rest of us, she had blond hair and fair skin.

We all loved Gracie. She had a wonderful and loving disposition. I used to love to tease her though and tell her she was too pretty to be a Robinson and that we had gotten her mixed up at the hospital. But we decided to keep anyway because she was so pretty.

She would run to Mother and tell on me, and Mother would hug her and assure her that yes she was pretty, but we hadn’t gotten her mixed up at the hospital. Gracie would come rushing back to me and with a proud look on her face say, “I belong, too.”

There are some who want to make of Christmas some kind of doctrinal statement, and we don’t need to be unduly critical of that. There are others who are not Christian and recall Christmastime as being a very unhappy time of year in America for them as non-Christians. Certainly, we want to be sensitive about that.

But there is also another sense in which the birth of Jesus is emblematic of the birth of all children everywhere. It’s a symbol of the vestigial hope we all have as parents that we will be able to provide love and care for our children. It’s also a symbol we have as a society that says we care about our children. And for our children, it’s a way of saying they belong…they are a part of the whole…the mystery of the universe.

Many of us have read Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning. It’s such an extraordinary book about the human spirit and the capacity of humankind to choose in the most difficult of circumstances. But he also writes in his book about a very strange topic: spirituality in the concentration camps. He says:

In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Spiritually sensitive people who were used to a rich inner life may have suffered much pain, but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive life better than did those of a robust nature.

And that’s the final meaning of Christmas: a spiritual one…that life is more than things…more than the external things of life. It’s also love and hope. It’s shepherds and angels and wise men, but it’s also children: little children, young children, big children, and children at heart. It’s why we light candles now in the darkness. Merry Christmas: Amen. And blessed be.

[1] A Christmas Eve night sermon given December 24, 2006, at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation of Ft. Myers, Florida, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne A. Robinson, Minister.