First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Micah 5 and Luke 1

“She Went with Haste”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

December 24, 2006

Washington Irving is famous for his scary short story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and his humorous depiction of Rip Van Winkle. What he is not well known for though are his depictions of life in the 1830s of New York and the world. Irving wrote a series of reflections that were part journal and part romantic commentary on culture in his day. One of his main topics it turns out was Christmas.

Irving, writing in the 1830s, was concerned about the commercialization of Christmas, the public quality of the holiday, and, mostly, the drunken violence that was becoming the anticipation of his contemporaries. While today we often associate Christmas with decorating a tree and a shopping frenzy, for Irving and his time Christmas was quickly becoming a huge drunken brawl.

Reveling in public, bars giving free drinks, and a kind of weeklong open house in neighborhoods essentially created a rather dangerous holiday. There were letters written to the editor of New York Post asking women to start serving coffee instead of rum punch; people like Clement Clarke Moore wrote a visit from St. Nick as a way of suggesting that Christmas could focus on children instead of booze; and others, like Irving, chose a more subtle path.

He went to England. Irving traveled through the British Isles during the holiday season looking for the “real Christmas.” His stories are wonderful. The main characters are a family who are the baronial lords over villages. The family keeps a pastor in a parish who just happens to devote his spare time to tracing down all things Christmas, searching for the historical origins of things like the “Yule log.”

This I thought was kind of cool. It turns out it is historically referred to as a Yule clog as it is not a log, but a stump of tree. The stump is brought in for the Christmas celebrations and burnt the entire time. The remnant is used to start the next Yule clog. I was hesitant to bring this up as Irving made it clear that when the pastor started to share these tidbits his audience quickly fell asleep or fell away.

Irving offers a lot of observations regarding the people. He was quick to show the veneer of the rich merchants a bit too enamored with their wealth as opposed to the hospitality and friendship of the older aristocracy. The new rich rode in fancy carriages while the older wealth walked to church and spoke to all the people along the way, even stopping to spend time in their homes.

In the end though what really caught his eye in England was a rather profound balance of public and private celebration fueled with traditions that strove to be modest. There were risks the reveling would get out of hand, but a close eye was kept and families were the key. Christmas was a family affair.

Again, the purpose of these stories was to inspire a similar Christmas here. Irving was arguing that we reach back to traditions that were fading and blend them a bit with who we are. The pastor as the repository of all things arcane about tradition was a not so subtle way of saying just doing things because we did them is rather boring. Yet, the family hall with friends and games and a wassail punch made of an ancient recipe is something we could learn to enjoy. More directly, this was at the very least a much better idea than a week of drunken reveling.

The new and the old need to meet. I was surprised to see this in our passage from Luke. I’ve read the story Elizabeth and Mary meeting more times than I can count, yet after reading Irving I saw something new. The key to this was to remember how it was that Elizabeth was pregnant.

Elizabeth was old, really old. She had lived a life of hardship in a culture which defines a woman’s value on having children. So without children she had endured a life marked by shame. And then at the end of her life she is blessed with a child. At this moment she is not only an image of redemption, but a model. God coming to a barren woman at the end of her life and giving a child is the image of Sara in Genesis. Sara becoming pregnant after a barren life is an entire theme of the Old Testament: God will redeem the brokenhearted; healing will come even at the end of life.

This is what Elizabeth represented. She is the essence of the Old Testament as it were. And then came Mary. Mary was the opposite. At the very beginning of her life, even before marriage and the hope of children, she is given a child. So in the doorway of Elizabeth’s house where she is greeting Mary is not only the image of two pregnant women, but two icons or models of redemption. The one, the older one, Elizabeth being the image of what has come before, the tradition as it were; the second, the younger one, Mary being the image of what has not been seen, the in-breaking of grace doing something completely new.

I had never seen this commingling picture in this passage. And quite frankly I had never fully understood why this story was read in advent until now. I know there is the logical connection of Mary being pregnant and Jesus being born. But the Advent connection is bigger than that. For me the whole sub-theme of Christmas is how we struggle over our traditions.

For instance all I have to say is what time should a Christmas Eve service be and we have gasoline on a fire. Ask a husband and wife about the proper time for presents to be opened and you’re almost guaranteed to witness a debate about what tradition is correct: the tradition of Christmas Eve openers versus the correct tradition of all presents being opened on Christmas morning.

Looking at the image of the old tradition of Elizabeth- blessing from barrenness- meeting the new tradition of Mary- blessing from the very beginning- looking at this image I couldn’t help but think we have before us the greatest image of our struggle to make sense of Christmas.

We do struggle over Christmas and not just to get the right presents or try to get cards out in time or to insure that we have neck ties that shouldn’t be worn in public, but we struggle to make sense of the joy and the blessing and the old and the new and the public and the private and reveling versus the reverence. We struggle with all these things.

I don’t know if this is good news but these were all the things Washington Irving was trying to describe in the 1830s. He was trying to find the very same balance we seek. And the exchange of the women in our passage is this all over again. Elizabeth not only greets Mary, she blesses her. It is as if she is signing off on the new model, saying in effect, the virgin giving birth to the child of God . . . new, different, amazing . . . I like it.

And then Mary speaks or sings depending on whether or not you read the Magnificat as a poem or a song. However she conveys it though the words themselves are the meaning of their meeting. Mary’s words are a kind of cut and paste medley of ancient poems or psalms. She has taken snippets of songs from long ago and reworked them into a kind of new song. So in essence she does what Irving is hoping his fellow New Yorkers would do with old English traditions: take a little here and a little there and fashion something new, but old.

This might sound strange, but it has taken me a long time to learn to love tradition. Even though I have been immersed in the study of history for the last twenty years, it has taken nearly that long before I could see what Irving was trying to convey and what Mary was trying to sing. The traditions are treasures to be reborn again and again. Getting the tree, eating the fruitcake, listening to Nat King Cole, stringing thousands of lights around our houses is more than a seasonal obligation but in truth the very stuff of mercy and grace and blessing. (I know fruitcake as the very essence of blessing is a stretch, but I am starting to get this.)

And the struggle to balance reverence with reveling at Christmas is a kind of annual check up. For isn’t life always a balance between those two? We often think of life as a balance between work and rest. But that is actually rather mundane and there is a commandment that pretty much points the way.

Yet what if life is a balance between the solemn, prayerful reverence of God and the joyous reveling in all God has done? And doesn’t that sound a lot like Christmas? And it is not by accident that Irving’s description of Christmas in England was the movement of families from the church to the fireside celebration. He was describing a balance of reverence and joy.

To add one more metaphor here might be dangerous but Elizabeth in fact is this very balance. She offers a kind of reverential awe toward Mary giving her a blessing, while the child inside of her offers the reveling joy, leaping in her womb.

I can’t say how many times people have said, Christmas should be easier, shouldn’t be such a struggle, should be simple. But what if it is by design just the opposite? What if Christmas is by nature one of our moments of greatest challenge? To find a balance between reverence and reveling, to blend them, to be both with your family and the community, giving and receiving, what is old and what is new, all wrapped in the expectation that in this one we have the salvation of the world: pretty tough actually. Not easy at all.

What if our traditions, even the Yule clog, are not obligations so much as they are clues, hints, glimpses of what it might mean to achieve such a balance, to be in the midst of joy and awe, reveling and reverence? What if finding the right tree and an adequate stand that doesn’t break . . . blah, blah, blah, what if the attempt to be modest and yet extravagant with gifts at Christmas is not so much about a budget or being realistic about the height of the ceiling in your living room, but achieving the balance of being blessed by God?

And we are so blessed. We are. We may think that life has dealt us the hand of Elizabeth, but I don’t believe that. We are blessed like Mary; we are blessed before we even begin to hope for blessing. So as you go from this moment of reverence and then return tonight to reverence yet again, revel in between. Rush about, enjoy the day, laugh, and be merry. For that is part of the balance. Amen.