Christmas Day 2005

Church of the Redeemer

New Haven, Conn.

Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

Scripture: Psalm 98

The Child who defeated Communism

Psalm 98 is a song of victory. God’s right hand, God’s holy arm, win! Vindication and victory.

How easily we want to believe that. How hard it is to actually believe that God wins. What could be more perfect than the victory of God?

We do, however, seek that end: righteousness forever. The Pentagon even named the war in Iraq “Infinite Justice,” until both the religious right and the religious left reminded them when it comes to infinity we’re into God; infinite justice, the Pentagon conceded, was God’s business, not theirs. But who wants to fight for finite justice, proximate righteousness? Our hearts soar to songs of God’s victory and we want to be in the parade.

Having grown up in the cold war when the USA and the USSR were doing their lethal imitation of the Red Sox and the Yankees, I have since wondered why, when the real World Series was won by our team, there were not more parades?

Slowly people began to say, well, President Reagan defeated communism. He stood up to them and dreamed the impossible dream of a defense budget that would break their bank, and he called them evil, so obviously good had to win.

Others began to say that the Pope had defeated communism. John Paul influenced the Solidarity movement, unions in Poland, and took two international trips to counter the Godless materialism of the USSR. We heard that version less, for he also challenged our own materialism.

Some have said that it was the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and Levi Jeans that really created the turning point.

Christmas after Christmas in the 1950s and on look so different now, now that there has been a victory. Once the winner wins it looks like it had to be, like UConn’s women’s basketball has been. But before the victory it’s all so dark and uncertain.

It wasn’t clear that the depression of the 30’s would be beat. It clearly wasn’t clear that Nazi Germany would be beat. And while America looked at Howdy Dootie and drove Ford station wagons and went to church in droves unimaginable, terror was in the background of everyone’s mind. In fact the terror was so great we stopped really thinking about it. The picture was just the opposite of our picture of 9/11. Maybe two buildings in Manhattan might have been left standing: not the other way around.

So what happened?

Follow me, if you will, to this formica kitchen table on the 27^th floor of an apartment building on the outskirts of Moscow. It’s Christmas Eve 1955. Of course nobody outside this crowded smoky kitchen is celebrating Christmas. We are, after all, picturing the Soviet Union, the empire of communism, the triumph of Marxism with a little Stalinism thrown in to make for its victory. Of course there are vodka bottles on this prize modern kitchen table, with its aluminum edges and a pastel and orange design of little triangles, like boomerangs, printed into the formica. This one table was bought on the black market, everyone on the 27^th floor contributing. They wanted to celebrate and remember the life of Maria Nikolaievna, recently tragically deceased leaving her son. All the chairs were old and wooden.

Somebody’s uncle had brought a Russian egg with some jewels still left in it. Some hand-carved dolls were opened revealing some, but not all, of the increasingly miniature versions. Only the oldest there remembered how all this had happened so similarly in 1905 when Maria’s namesake had also just died, leaving then her son called Yura, or affectionately, Yurochka. He had become a doctor. He had seen the rise and then the betrayal of the revolution for equality, peace, and justice. He had known the hopes that came with defeating Nazi Germany which he knew Russia had done with its 20 million deaths, not just the USA and Great Britain.

But now the empire had returned to bleakness. The economy looked good. The satellite program looked like it would beat the Americans. But there was little civil liberty. The government could spy at will. Everyone was afraid and the military budget was huge.

But this night they were happy. They unwrapped the nativity crèche that they kept hidden under grandmother’s bed next to her chamber pot—who would go there they thought. Not even the KGB!

But the real prize of the night was the smuggled-in manuscript of a book they knew the doctor had been secretly writing. They unwrapped it from a shroud of slightly soiled surgical clothes.

Uncle Kolia had the honor to read first. Old old father Nikolai, defrocked but still passionate.

“Here!” he said. “My part! Listen. Shss!”

“As I was saying,” he read, “one must be true to Christ. I’ll explain.” At one point a long time ago he had become an atheist. He was so bitter over the betrayals of the dreams of his youth. But he had lost faith in his faithlessness. He had become an “internal émigré” he said. He listened to the inner music of his old faith in God.

But he read on, “Listen.” “It is possible to be an atheist…not to know whether God exists, or why…” But, he went on, it is not possible to believe that humankind was created to live in a state of nature, as if only animals. He had argued this for years. “If!” he would shout, “…if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats—any kind, jail or judgment after death—then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip.”

But that is not the highest emblem of humanity, he would argue. No. It was “the prophet who sacrificed himself.” This he called “the irresistible power of unarmed truth.”

We are not, he said—you couldn’t tell if he was reading from the book or just going on and on—animals in nature but human beings in history and this history began with the birth of Christ. Before that there was just blood and beastliness, cruelty and pockmarked Caligulas! They didn’t even know slavery was wrong!

He was drifting from the text of the smuggled in book, this novel by the doctor in which he had a voice. He couldn’t resist. “This is why we write symphonies and discover electromagnetic waves: we want to escape nature, solve the riddle of death. We were not made by God just to die! This is why we have spiritual equipment! From the Gospels. What are they? To love one’s neighbor, that is the supreme form of vital energy. “Once it fills the heart…it has to overflow and spend itself.”

He turned a page urgently. Listen, here is the best part, straight form me! “Into this tasteless heap of gold and marble, He came [MSOffice1] light and clothed in an aura, emphatically human, deliberately provincial, Galilean, and at that moment gods and nations ceased to be and man came into being! “And then the two basic ideals of modern man—the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice.”

By then, however, people’s attention had drifted. It was always hard to follow Father Nikolai Nikolaievich Vedenia [MSOffice2] din. The vodka was taking over people’s heads once more in this bleak and dangerous mid-winter gathering. At any moment they expected the doctor to arrive, having ditched the KGB. They were ready to celebrate and raise their juice glasses filled with vodka and hope.

This time with the book about to be smuggled out of the country they felt hope. Hope and love, even joy. A desire for peace just like they used to [MSOffice3] before the revolution—when being a Christian wasn’t dangerous, but rather average, expected.

Shss!! Here he comes in. “Zhivago! Zhivago!” They cried out. Mr. Pasternak was embarrassed but pleased. The inner music of Christ, like Psalm 98, might live to be heard again, he thought.

Amen.