'TIS THE GIFT TO BE SIMPLE
A Meditation by Rev. James D. Brown
Market Square Presbyterian Church
Christmas Eve
December 24, 2007
Scripture: Matthew 1:18-25
I’ve been thinking about tonight since early in November when worship for the month of December was being planned. I had just read an article by the Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann in which he says that on Christmas Eve “the church makes its defining move” away from a world of fear and anxiety and coercion. Tonight, he says, we are invited to come home, “to Jesus, to the neighborhood, to peaceableness.”
He then proposes the Old Shaker dancing song, “Simple Gifts,” as our mantra for living in the world as Christmas people. The Shaker community is well known for its emphasis on a simple life. I’m holding in my hand a small fireplace broom Nina and I bought years ago at a Shaker museum in Kentucky. A bundle of straw is carefully tied to its handle with a hemp cord. It’s hard not to feel nostalgia for a simpler world.
You’ll note that I said we bought it in a museum. Shakers didn’t believe in marriage. The movement grew in the early 19th century by adding new comers, but it was clearly doomed to slowly fade away. Today there is but one small community left at Sabbath Lake in Maine.
“Simple Gifts” was written by Elder Joseph Brackett at the Shaker community in Alfred, Maine, in 1848. Several old Shaker manuscripts indicate that it was indeed a dancing song, and the tune can be found in our congregation’s hymnal paired with the song, “Lord of the Dance.”
Listen as I read the text—even without the music it will make you want to dance:
‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and bend we shan’t be asham’d,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning, we come round right.
Listen to how Brueggemann mines the wealth of this delightful little song: “‘Tis a gift to be simple after all the complexities of the old enslavements that never satisfy. ‘Tis a gift to be free after all the old coercions that leave us programmed into restless, breathless performance. And it is a gift: ‘How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given.’”
Let’s ponder for just a moment how we might appropriate the simple gift of the Christ Child into our hearts and into the world. Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus hinges on his simple yet profound conviction that Jesus, born in Bethlehem and reared in Nazareth, was the fulfillment of the yearning of humankind for a glimpse of God, for the sure and certain conviction that God is among us.
Matthew sounds a trumpet blast of hope when he declares that the longing for a Messiah had come to fruition with the birth of Jesus in an out-of-the-way corner of the Roman Empire. The Hebrew word for Emmanuel means “with us—God.” God with us. If this was true for Matthew 2000 years ago and is true for us today, then our lives need to give evidence of our freedom, of our being where we ought to be, of living in the valley of love and delight.
We preachers are collectors of nuggets of delight that our parishioners come up with. Within the last week or so two of you slipped me a copy of Garrison Keillor’s reflections on “The Nativity in New York City,” taken from his weekly column on the Prairie Home Companion Website on December 4th. In it he tells of teaching a Sunday school class of teenagers in a New York church. What he has to say about his experience is instructive for all of us.
We sat in a sort of triangle, two couches at a right angle,
a line of chairs, a window looking out at the snow on
Amsterdam Avenue, and talked about the rather improbable
notion that God sent himself to Earth in human form,
impregnating a virgin who, along with her confused fiancé,
journeyed to Bethlehem where no rooms were available at
the inn (it was the holidays, after all), and so God was born
in a stable, wrapped in cloths and laid in a feed trough and
worshipped by shepherds summoned by angels and by
Eastern dignitaries who had followed a star.
Keillor was not surprised that some of the teenagers were skeptical about this strange and wondrous tale. Later, riding on the subway with some of them, he wasn’t able to explain how the story meshed with “the crazy old man boogeying in his sleeveless t-shirt and singing incoherently and watching his own reflection in the [window] glass.” He admitted to the teenagers that he doesn’t know how all the pieces of life fit together. I like his reason for pleading ignorance: “God prefers admitted incompetence to fake authority.” There probably should be a 3x5 card with those words on it in every pulpit in the world! Some things we just don’t know.
But we do need to hear what Keillor had to say in spite of not having all the answers. It’s right in line with our “coming down where we ought to be” this Christmas season. For him, the magical story of Christmas “is a cornerstone of the Christian faith.” Hear him out:
It is to the Church what his Kryptonian heritage was to Clark
Kent—it enables us to stop speeding locomotives and leap
tall buildings in a single bound, and also to love our neighbors
as ourselves. Without the Nativity, we become a sort of lecture
series and coffee club, with not very good coffee and sort of
aimless lectures.
On Christmas Eve, the snow on the ground, the stars in the
sky, the spruce glittering with beloved ornaments, we stand
in the dimness and sing about the silent holy night and tears
come to our eyes and vast invisible forces of Christmas stir
the world. Skeptics, stand back. Hush. Hark. These is much
in this world that doubt cannot explain.
I’ll close with a gem from a Christmas letter one of you received and then shared with me. [This really is your meditation tonight—not mine alone by any means!] The writer quotes from a book, Mystic Street, by S. T. Georgiou. I can’t think of a better reflection to move us toward the places just right for us this Christmas season. The writer describes an unexpected kindness he experienced:
The true mysteries of life accomplish themselves so softly and
quietly that they largely go unnoticed, especially because we
live in a noisy, hurried world that is mesmerized by spectacle.
But then it happens that a stranger gently and happily opens
a door, and suddenly revelation is at hand.
For a moment everything stops; we smile, sensing that we are
right where we should be. We feel something holy and beautiful,
and wish to return the feeling. An “energy of openness” irradiates
the encounter—all at once we can live without walls. There is no
tension left in us. We become (for the moment) transparent,
aware at last that only love matters, liberating and uniting Agape,
the eternal constant.
“‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free, ‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be.” ‘Tis a gift indeed. Open your hands and receive God’s gift of the Christ Child with grateful hearts.