Christmas Eve 2005

Church of the Redeemer

New Haven, Conn.

Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

With this voice of mine these last few weeks in worship I have lifted up the words “imagination” and “innocence.”  The story of Jesus Christ assures us all that the power of God is born and never dies in those two parts of a child’s heart:  imagination;  innocence.  By the time we grow up, or old, we may prefer saying that our imagination is our idealism—visions of peace and justice;  and that our innocence is now our realism called love and power.

But Jesus didn’t need to dress up the child-like quality of God’s reign.  Not only did he never bargain away his own spiritual imagination and stunning innocence, he simply just said:  the kingdom of God is like children and the way in is to be like a child.

So, to use a big word for a moment, there is a theological truth to Christmastime.  In our religion God’s full revelation begins in a child, and in our culture Christmas centers on children.  You could say that there is a “theological coincidence” going on between our nativity story and our society.

But I’d rather be more personal than theological this evening.  A lot of us have read the personal life stories of great Christians, Saint Francis—who could tame wild wolves with his voice as well as feed birds on his hand;  St. Theresa of the Roses, known as the Little Flower.  We’ve seen in personal histories imaginative innocent Christians, Martin Luther King, Jr., for one.  And we’ve known a few personally.  Doc Edmonds, the Rev. Edmonds of new Haven, for example.  Many of you get to spend time with Doc reading to him, with him, now.  Doc is a powerful leader who has changed New Haven and changed lives across this nation.  He has been a lion yet feels also so much like a lamb:  both lie down together within him.

The other day I had the pleasure and honor of spending an afternoon hour with Doc.  He’s working on a book of his sermons and asked me to read one aloud.  It was an Advent sermon from twenty five years ago.  A celebration of Mary and her faith.  And in the sermon Doc retold an O. Henry story.  You may know it.  It is an imaginative parable of innocence in the real world, a suitable story for the conclusion of this four-part Advent sermon series:  “A Child’s Christmas in Connecticut.”

The O. Henry story features two school children:  a boy too young and rustic to know what to do with his devotion and desire for a girl in his school.  To him she is virtue and beauty.  She is his ideal person.  He wants both to be like her and to have her as his own.  So unapproachable and magnificent is she that he cannot say a word in her direction.

As life goes on the boy falls upon hard times.  He becomes a pickpocket and thief.  One day in a crowd he spies a purse he can snatch.  As he does, and begins to run away, the woman, his victim, turns and he sees her face and she is that girl:  his own first true love.  Life has robbed him and now he has robbed her, his image of life’s goodness.  Innocence crushed by experience.  Imagination lost to sin, in this story.

What is so masterful here is that we stand behind O. Henry as we watch what he sees:  the boy.  The girl.  The hope.  The crime, and the meaning of it all, or the meaninglessness of it all.  And because of the power of imagination in words we see not only how the man-child now sees the adult-girl, we see how he sees himself, a fallen man.  We see how O. Henry continues to see the woman, goodness itself, now victimized.  In a story “time” is different.  It’s freed from the clock.  Even eternity is possible in imagination, and that is why we have moral imagination—and so we can see O. Henry, himself, turn around and look at us—we who have been reading his story over his shoulder and his writing hands.  He drops his pen and looks at us.  “And what about you my friend?”  “Seeing my story how do you see yourself?”  Even the woman looks up from the page with  beseeching tears in her eyes.  “And you?  Didn’t you too once upon a time adore me and admire my virtue?  What have you done?  What are you doing?”

I saw those eyes again the other day.  And I heard the writer-prophet-preacher’s voice, “What about you Duncan?”  “What about your childlike idealism and love, your imagination and innocence, your devotion to Christ, your own generosity?”  Was it O. Henry’s voice?  Was it Doc’s voice in his living sermon?  Was it the voice of Jesus?

I saw that woman’s tear-filling eyes as I talked over tea about the reality of a child’s Christmas in Connecticut.  Her eyes were tired, edged with bitterness, soft with sorrow, strong in the kind of faith that says “what else can you do but keep on keeping on?”  Keep on trying to help the hungry children in Connecticut.  The 200,000 children in low income households.  The 80,000 children in poverty.  The children whose undernourishment goes to school with them and comes home on the weekend with them helping make Connecticut the state with the nation’s largest gap between rich students and poor students in several areas of fourth grade and eighth grade standardized tests.

“Who stole your purse?”  I wanted to say.  What happened to your classmate, the boy who fell on hard times, who once had images of virtue himself, visions where justice and love ruled?

It is not too much to ask even of ourselves, this evening, so that all the power that goes into creating Christmas renews and restores our imagination, our innocence, our devotion to this Christ child:  God among us, now and forever!  That is the hope that renews us, the love that has brought us here together tonight.  Our joy imagined in faith is that what is good about Christmas can be good about life.  In that is our peace.

Amen.