This week the flowers decorating the altar are poinsettias. Do you know why? Pepita was a poor Mexican girl who had no gift to present the Christ Child at Christmas Eve services. As she walked to the chapel with her cousin Pedro, her heart was filled with sadness rather than joy. “I am sure, Pepita, that even the most humble gift, if given in love, will be acceptable in His eyes,” said Pedro consolingly. Not knowing what else to do, Pepita knelt by the roadside and gathered a handful of common weeds, forming a small bouquet. Looking at the scraggly bunch, she felt even more saddened and embarrassed. She fought back a tear as she entered the small village chapel. As she approached the altar, though, she remembered Pedro’s words. As she knelt to lay the bouquet at the foot of the nativity scene, the bouquet of weeds suddenly burst into blooms of brilliant red. All who saw them were certain that they had witnessed a miracle. From that day on, the bright red flowers were known as the Flores de Noche Buena, or Flowers of the Holy Night, for they bloomed each year during the Christmas season.
It’s not just poinsettias, of course, that speak to us of Christmas. There’s also the Christmas tree - always an evergreen, a tree that does not lose its leaves to the cold. Although of course scholars remind us that Jesus probably wasn’t born on December 25th anyway, that Christians just appropriated the mid-winter festival as an appropriate time to celebrate the birth of the Christ-child.
Is it ironic that we should celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ during the darkest time of the year? Or perhaps those early Christians knew something we have forgotten. What better time, after all, to recognize that most of us are waiting for something new to happen in our lives, some glimpse of joy or freedom or hope or love? When nature winds down and stops pouring her bounty into our outstretched hands, when we have finished saying thank you for all the material things God has given us, that is the time to see that we need something more. Something beyond things; something, indeed, even beyond our imagining.
How many of you feel kind of flat right now? How many of you feel that you are in a desert time in your life, a dry time, a time when it takes a bit of effort to muster up the Christmas spirit and really get with the mandatory holiday cheer? How many of you feel that it’s positively your religious duty to feel joyful and that there’s something wrong with you if you don’t?
The elephant in the living room that few people dare talk about is the not-so-well-hidden fact that more people die between Halloween and Epiphany than at any other time of the year. Expectations are so high... We’re expected to HAVE FUN and LOVE EVERYBODY and BUY THE PERFECT PRESENT and SERVE THE PERFECT DINNER when underneath it all is grief over the death of a loved one or the breakup of a relationship, unresolved family conflicts exploding into unforgivable words under the pressure of too much togetherness, financial pressures reaching the breaking point as the bills mount up.
And to top it all off we’re supposed to keep our spiritual lives polished up too, and considering how hard it is during the rest of the year to keep any kind of disciplined devotional life, how can we be expected to be even better at it during this supposed to be holy time? And even if you can carve out a little time with Jesus early in the morning or late in the evening, what good does it really do against the barrage of contrary messages our world sends us? Christmas carols are everywhere, but it’s not Jesus who’s coming, but Santa. The only point seems to be to get people to buy more stuff and the faithful are heading to the Mall of America rather than toward Bethlehem. By the time December is half over it’s a wonder you want to sing anything at all. Sometimes it’s hard to know whether exhaustion or guilt is the most prevalent emotion at Christmas. Peace usually arrives, if at all, rather late on Christmas Eve, when if you haven’t gotten it done yet it won’t get done at all, so you might as well relax and get some sleep. Unless you’ve gotten someone a gift that “requires assembly,” in which case you might as well plan on an all-nighter. When people say, “Christmas is for children,” what they really mean is that the grownups are usually too exhausted to enjoy anything except the knowledge that they’ve given their kids some special memories. (The toys won’t last.)
I sound pretty cynical, don’t I. But I’m not; just realistic. That’s what Christmas is like for far too many people. And the only way to make it better is to quit trying to meet everyone else’s expectations and listen to God instead. Because God is the only one whose opinion really matters, isn’t it? And, incidentally, his message is not, “Do this, go there, accomplish that, and when you’ve done it maybe I’ll let you sit down. And, by the way, don’t forget to smile.”
We spend hours checking the Christmas lights for burned-out bulbs, untangling the cords and draping them over every available surface. But I wonder - are the lights supposed to represent joy, or to manufacture it? I wonder - are the twinkling multicolored rainbows that line our streets somehow substituting for real joy, real light, real celebration? As the country has gotten less and less Christian in its habits and thoughts, the streets have gotten more and more frantically festooned with the outward trappings of joy. Where do we go to for the real thing?
Where are we supposed to stock up on the joy that is supposed to be the staple food of the season?
Dozens of competing goods claim to be the true source of joy in life. Some people look for joy in their careers. Or at least for escape from the season’s pressures, so that we can ignore the fact that joy is somehow missing. Others look for joy on vacation, by “getting away from it all,” or “taking a break” or just looking for a “change of scenery.” It doesn’t always work, though. Anybody here ever come back from vacation more tired than when you left? A lot of people expect joy to come from their families: their husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren. And families are great sources of joy. But families are also the sources of some of the most painful moments in our lives, and the forced togetherness of the holiday season often brings the memory of loss and change, conflict and disappointment into particularly sharp and inescapable focus. We have many great, strong, healthy families in the church. But even in those charmed circles there is stress.
Where else do we look for joy, for fulfillment, for meaning? In our friendships? In our hobbies? Needlework and murder mysteries help keep me sane, what does it for you? Camping? Cooking? Tinkering with the car? Playing with the dog?
Entertainment is another popular place to seek happiness. From movies to rock concerts to casinos, thousands of people are trying to find that secret formula that will give their life spice and flavor, that will magically change their world from black and white to technicolor. Buying stuff is another way of trying to create joy. Our children are drowning in things - toys and videos and clothes - and every birthday, every Christmas, we gather more stuff to satisfy their longing for - what? How long do they stay happy with what we have given them? How long do you stay happy with what has been given to you? Does the new power tool, the new refrigerator, the new car, really make all that much difference?
What is joy, anyway? And why does it seem to be so hard to find, and so fleeting when it comes?
Isaiah’s words paint a picture of joy. It is a picture of light bursting onto once blind eyes. It is a picture of song replacing silence, of new strength springing into dance, it is a picture of trees and flowers, earth and air and water coming together in a rhapsody of rejoicing. It is a picture of life bursting from once barren ground.
This is what joy is: joy is what it feels like to be truly alive. And we can only recognize it against a background of desert, because flowers and trees and rivers are only a symbol for the kind of life our hearts are really hungry for. And our hearts are truly deserts, barren places with little or no life, if Christ is not present within us. But if he is present, even the dry times are filled with hope. And Christmas reminds us that even when the world seems cold and empty, the joy of Christ is on its way. The brilliant reds of the poinsettias, the pure white of the Christmas rose, the brilliant green of the pines and spruces and firs all speak to us of life that outlasts the darkness, life that can bloom even in the darkest hours.
Advertisers urge us to “say it with flowers.” But what are supposed to say? What great truth can flowers speak for us more powerfully than words? Poets and musicians, and artists use the language of flowers to speak of love. But the Bible makes this message of love explicit in a single person, the person of Jesus Christ. “Fairest Lord Jesus, ruler of all nature, fairer than all nature, even when robed in the blooming garb of spring...”
A thousand years before Christ came, King Solomon sang a song Christians have applied to Christ. Although Solomon spoke of romantic love and of the delights of human beauty, we have taken the words that he sang and given them to Jesus Christ, “I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys.” [Song 2:1 I]
Isaiah uses flowers to speak to us of life, Solomon uses them to speak to us of love. And what we learn when we put them together is that love and life are two sides of the same coin, that where love is life springs up, and life is a sign that love has been there. And as I said before, joy is what happens when we are truly alive, and we are only truly alive when we are giving and receiving love.
Do you remember that twenty years ago when the Iraqi war began many of our leaders believed that we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people, that we would be greeted with flowers? It didn’t happen, but it could have. The French greeted the Americans with flowers when we liberated Paris eighty years ago.
That is what people do when they’re filled with happiness. They throw flowers at their heroes. But when the parade is over, the blossoms lie dead and trampled in the street, the heroes turn out to have feet of clay.
The evergreens are beautiful, and speak to us of life. The poinsettias are also beautiful, and speak to us of love. But In Europe, where most of our ancestors came from, the flower of the season is not the poinsettia, but the rose. Not the lush red rose of Valentine’s day, but a pure white rose, a simple flower with five petals and a golden heart. That story tells that when the Magi laid their rich offerings of myrrh, frankincense, and gold by the bed of the sleeping Christ Child, a poor maiden named Madelon stood outside the door quietly weeping. She, too, had sought the Christ Child. She, too, desired to bring him gifts. But she had nothing to offer, for she was very poor in-deed. In vain she had searched the countryside over for one little flower to bring Him, but she could find neither bloom nor leaf, for the winter had been cold. And as she stood there weeping, an angel passing saw her sorrow, and stooping he brushed aside the snow at her feet. And there sprang up on the spot a cluster of beautiful winter roses, waxen white with pink tipped petals. “Nor myrrh, nor frankincense, nor gold,” said the angel, “is offering more meet for the Christ Child than these pure Christmas Roses.” Joyfully the Madelon gathered the flowers and made her offering to the Holy Child.
In the dryness of our hearts, it sometimes seems as though all we can do is keep putting one foot ahead of the other, pay the bills, get a meal on the table and the kids to bed. It seems impossible even to dream of more than just making it through the week. One low-cost way to handle the emptiness is to stop dreaming altogether. Each year that passes underlines the limitations on our lives, and tells us to settle for what we can get. The cynical playwright Hannah Green said, “I never promised you a rose garden.” But God does.
It has always been the message of Advent that hope can be reborn in each heart. So when the prophet tells us that we can hope that barrenness may give way to life and the desert blossom as the rose - well, actually, our translation says crocus but the Hebrew word just means flower – hope is not the only thing we must do. It is love in action, rooted in faith, that brings life and joy back into our hearts. And that is not always easy.
The poet Christina Rosetti wrote these lines:
Hope is like a harebell trembling from its birth,
Love is like a rose the joy of all the earth,
Faith is like a lily lifted high and white,
Love is like a lovely rose the world’s delight.
Harebells and sweet lilies show a thornless growth,
But the rose with all its thorns [its crown of thorns] excels them both.
Robert Burns gave us the famous line, "My love is like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June.” That’s natural love, and it is truly beautiful. But our love, our Christ, is like a red, red rose in the winter’s snow. He is a complete surprise to the oblivious world. He comes most vividly in our poverty and emptiness. Like Pepita and Madelon, when we offer up our barren-ness, our dryness, our emptiness, he can fill our arms. What’s different about these flowers - the Christmas flowers - these miracles that bloom in the wilderness - is that we don’t give them to Jesus. He gives them to us. We come to him with armfuls of weeds, we come to him weeping, and he fills our arms with flowers.
The love that first acted was the love of God. The first act of love was the creation itself, when God’s love overflowed and became a living world. But as we know, the beauty of creation is not enough. There is more that we yearn for, and it is met once again as God acts in love by making his own life available to us through Jesus Christ. As the apostle John tells, us, “We love because he first loved us.” [1 John 4:19]
But we must remember two more things. The first is, that even with lots of water, the desert will not blossom unless there are seeds lying there waiting to sprout. What kind of seeds are you nurturing in your heart?
And the second thing that we must remember is that love isn’t easy or pain-free. Joy carries its own price. Jesus paid the ultimate price, but the love that Jesus calls us to has thorns even for us.
The seed has been planted. Jesus comes to us as that tiny baby, but for his life to grow in us, we must be willing to follow him throughout the year, throughout the journey through the alien towns of Samaria, the barren desert of Judea, the hostile streets of Jerusalem. Christmas morning is just the beginning.
