Angels of Light

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at the First Unitarian Church of Alton, December 18, 2005

after readings from the birth narrative of the Gospel of Luke

 

Ah, the Christmas story.  When I was a little boy and I heard these old words about new life, I was transfixed.  I loved Christmas; I was filled with comfort and joy, with hope and expectation.  Even now when I hear this story, it’s kinda like with even the sappiest of Christmas music - I am transported back to my childhood many years ago when I first heard this part of the Christian story with childish ears and immature longings and no real questions other than what presents I would get for Christmas.

But now at my moderately advanced age, I do have questions, so many questions.  I mean, don’t you?  Don’t you wonder if there is anything historical about these stories?  When I look closely at the story now, I wonder about angels; I wonder about shepherds; I wonder about swaddling clothes – what are swaddling clothes?  I also have to wonder about poor Joseph sticking around in the face of his fiancé’s less-then-well-explained pregnancy.  I also wonder why Joseph had to go all the way to Bethlehem, and why he had to drag his full-term girlfriend with him all that way – did she ride a donkey or did she just walk, for Heaven’s sake?  Which would be easier?  It hurts just to think about it.  Does any of this sound real at all?

Well, I know I’m not alone in my wonderment.  Scholars have been examining and discussing the biblical birth narratives for hundreds of years, trying to prove or disprove them, trying to figure them out, trying to determine if there is anything historical about these stories.

 

Let’s look at some of the questions these stories raise.  First of all, there’s that taxing of the whole world by Caesar Augustus.  Truly, historically, Augustus did indeed tax the whole world, or at least the world he controlled, but he accomplished this not through a census but by simply sucking the life blood out of the population every day in a huge pyramid scheme of which he was the principle beneficiary.  He didn’t have to have everybody go home to be taxed – he’d take it from you wherever you were, thank you very much.

Speaking of the census, there is a census that is reported to have been decreed by Quirinius in Palestine, not the whole world, but this census took place some ten years after Jesus’ birth.  So much for the idea of a trip to Bethlehem – at least now we don’t have to wonder why, if Joseph was from there, no one would let him and his pregnant companion stay with them so that they ended up having to stay in a stable.

So, after some study, scholars tend to discount the historicity of these birth narratives, for one thing because they only appear in Matthew and Luke and not in the earlier Pauline or Markan traditions, and there’s no mention of Jesus’ birth (at least the earthly one) in the later Gospel of John.

One of many theories about the actual birth of Jesus is that he was indeed born to Mary in Nazareth where he seems to actually have been from, but without a Joseph in the picture and that means out of wedlock.  As a child of a single parent (that’s the polite way to put it), the young Jesus would have been ostracized from his Jewish society in similar ways to the outcasts and expendables he lived among and championed all his life.

If the circumstances of Jesus’ birth are open to debate, the fact of his birth is more certain.  Two ancient historians, the Roman Tacitus and the Jewish Josephus, both mention the death of Jesus in their writings, so if he died, that means he was probably born, somehow.  But if these birth narratives cannot be historical, if the details are jumbled or the facts are out of order, the story as story may still be worthwhile.  It’s still the story of a baby’s birth, and as such it is full of comfort and joy, of hope and expectation.

 

Ruth Cousins Simons was my aunt.  Well, not MY aunt but my then-wife’s aunt.  Well, all right, maybe her great aunt or great-great, I don’t know.  At any rate, Aunt Ruth moved in with me when I was twenty.  You see, when I was twenty, I had a wife and two kids and one more on the way and then my in-laws got kicked out of their rent house.  So Aunt Ruth and my mother-in-law, who’d been disabled a stroke some ten years before, had nowhere else to go.  Oh yeah, and my 11-year-old brother-in-law was part of that package – he moved in, too, and I became his parental unit and the invalid mother-in-law’s guardian and the wage earner for the whole bunch.  At twenty years of age.  I know!  It sounds unreal!  But it’s a true story.  It happened.  You can’t always go by what sounds plausible.

Now Aunt Ruth was 84 when I was 20.  She could be very pleasant socially, but most of the time she was pretty grouchy.  I mean, she was 84, for God’s sake, and she’d worked hard taking care of people all her life.  Never lived on her own, never had a job for which she’d been paid.  Just always lived with whoever in her family needed to be taken care of the most.  So that’s how she’d come to live with my mother-in-law – when the stroke happened, Aunt Ruth showed up to help out for awhile.  And stayed.  And stayed.

Ruth was a tiny little person, never 5’ tall, but she had shrunk even from that by the time I knew her.  She didn’t get around easily.  She had to push a small chair in front of her to use as a walker – walkers didn’t come in that small a size back in the old days.  But small and frail as she was, she was a force of nature.  She moved in with that family and began to care for her niece, my mother-in-law, who was very nearly a quadriplegic and outweighed Ruth by a hundred pounds.  And she parented those children whose father was still living with them but was working less than he was drinking, and parenting even less than that.  And she took care of all those people the best she could.

By the time she moved in with me, the work had taken its toll, and she was pretty grouchy.  She hurt much of the time and I think that’s what made her so sour.  She didn’t have the energy to be pleasant when she didn’t have to.  And she lived like that until she was 94 years old.

 

But there was one thing that would always bring a smile to Aunt Ruth’s face, one thing that would brighten her day and make her forget how much it hurt and how much she had to do.  When she saw a child, the wrinkles in her face would all turn the other way and she would beam with delight.  She would be transformed before our very eyes!  Whatever was going wrong would fade away and for awhile the world would be right.  She would talk baby talk to them – she couldn’t help it – she would reach out for them and try to hold them to her for dear life.  She never showed more joy than when she was holding a child – any child – and we had three of them for her to try to get a hold of.  She loved children, couldn’t get enough of them, and called them all kinds of little pet names.  You know the usual ones, like darling and honey and sweetheart.  But there was one of her pet names that I didn’t fully appreciate the gravity of at the time, and that was ‘angel of light.’  She thought every child was an angel, her ‘angel of light.’

 

If you’ve spent much time on the labor and delivery floors at a hospital, you may have seen some amazing birth stories.  You’ve probably witnessed the most wonderful moments of joy for those families that have healthy, chubby babies.  Those babies are the vehicles for all the expectations of those moms and dads and families and the air is alive with hope.  The families, when there are some, are all smiles and chatter.

But in a hospital, it is natural that there are the other kinds of birth situations and maybe you or your family has experienced one of these.  When the birth does not go well; when the baby is not happy or chubby;  when something has gone wrong in the process, terribly wrong.  Maybe the technical term is ‘anomalies incompatible with life.’  But no matter what you call it to make it easier to bear, the baby is dead.  In those rooms there is a pall that has descended on those who are present.  Grief fills the space and hangs in the air.

In many hospitals, the nurses will dress the little body in a tiny nightgown and stocking cap.  The mom is usually the first to want to hold the child, then the dad if there is one, and whatever family is around.  They will hold the child close and nuzzle it; they will hold it away to look it over closely; they may talk baby-talk to the baby as if the baby could understand; they will tell the baby how much it is loved and how beautiful it is.

There may be a family member who hangs back, looking out the window, wanting to ignore what’s going on as if they can’t bear to be near the body of the dead baby.  But with the activity in the rest of the room, the ooh-ing and aah-ing about how pretty the child is and how it looks like mom or grampa, they are usually won over and end up joining the rest in holding the little body and maybe having their picture made with the baby and the other family members.

There comes a moment, after 20 minutes or two hours, when the nurse must take the baby from the room for the last time.  And it is at this moment, often, that an interesting thing begins to happen.  The mother may start to talk about some of the things she felt the fetus doing during the pregnancy.  The dad may talk about how good the pictures are.  The family starts to talk about the things they’ve witnessed and who the child looked like and what so-and-so said about the baby.  In short, they begin to tell that baby’s story.  The chronology may be messy, the facts thrown together haphazardly.  It’s not a story that’s debatable or up for argument.  It’s just a story – those people want to remember all they can about that new little person and they want to tell it to the world – that they were there when he was, that they held her in their arms, that these are the pictures of all of us with her.  This is the nightgown that he wore.  And this is her stocking cap.  And this is the vessel that held the water that the baby was baptized with.

 

One last story: I’ve worked in hospice, mostly with older people, but also with parents and kids in pediatric hospice, and pediatric hospice is just as difficult as it sounds.  There’s one family I met that I want to tell you about.  I was invited into the home of a young couple who had, just the day before, buried their seven-year-old daughter Annie.  I was asked to sit in their living room on a couch that was surrounded by toys and games.  There were typical second-grade drawings taped to the fireplace and on the walls.  This was the space where Annie had lived the last months of her life and the parents had tried to make it comfortable.  She had died on this very couch three days before.  The parents were reluctant to change much about the room – they had removed the medicines and other symbols of approaching death, but had left the toys and drawings (the symbols of life) just the way they had been.

I sat with those people as they cried until they laughed, and laughed until they cried.  Being in the presence of that emotion was like sitting on the edge of a knife.  It was intense; it could go either way, but they seemed to realize that it was better to let it out than to hold it in.

They took me into their dining room, which was given over to the remains of the funeral – flowers, ribbons, drawings from Annie’s schoolmates.  Along two walls were several poster boards displaying photos of Annie all through her life – with her family and friends and pets and alone.  It was obvious which poster the parents had started with – there were baby pictures arranged neatly and chronologically and labeled very carefully.  Pretty soon, though, the pictures became jumbled; they were stuck on in a haphazard collage that meant to me they just wanted to tell the story, to get it all out there – they didn’t care whether it was in any particular order.  They didn’t worry about the crispness or the artfulness of the photographs.  They just wanted to get the whole story out there about how Annie had been the most wonderful daughter anybody ever had and how she was so sweet and so special and had so far exceeded their expectations of a little girl in every way. 

They wanted to tell her story, and they didn’t care whether it was in the right order or the details were all perfect.  She was special, and she had brought a light into the world, and that’s what mattered the most.  In that way, maybe they were a little like Luke and the other gospel writers - they just had to get the story out.

 

In this holiday season, we celebrate a lot of stories.  Those of us who are adherents of earth-based religions will celebrate the winter solstice, a time when after ever-lengthening nights the cycle shifts and the days begin to get longer – the light begins to drive out the darkness once again.  In the Jewish tradition, we have just completed Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, when we celebrate one day’s oil lighting the Temple for eight days – God’s miraculous gift of light.  And in the Christian tradition, we celebrate the birth of Jesus – the birth of the one some call the light of the world.  All of these are stories, just stories, but all shed light, all tell the truth in particular ways.  In this holiday season, I hope you can give yourself the gift of listening to theses stories in new ways.  And that you can pay attention to the children.

 

No matter whether a baby is chubby or stillborn, no matter whether the child lives to 7 or 33 or 94, may we celebrate the light that each of them brings into the world.  May each of us experience the hope and expectation borne by an angel of light this holiday season, and may we continue to tell the story of that light throughout the coming year.

 

So may it be.