An Unfamiliar Christmas

“My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (John 14:27; KJV).

Myers Park Baptist Church 

Charlotte, NC 

It will be an unfamiliar Christmas in the northern Polish city of Olsztyn for the Syrian refugees who have been taken in by a 70-member Baptist church there. The family of four Assyrian Christians, a branch of the Christian faith that is old enough to be mentioned in 1 Peter 5:13 as “your sister church in Babylon,” will be hearing the music and words of unfamiliar carols in an unfamiliar language.

In that regard, they are not so different from most of us here this morning as we listen to Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. Unless you grew up singing in an elite children’s choir, or you are a maven of Middle English poetry, or you are an aficionado of 20th-century choral music, you too are hearing unfamiliar carols in an unfamiliar language. There is much to be said for the comfort and ease of the familiar at this time of year: “Comfort ye my people,” comfort food, Southern Comfort. Easter has eggs, but Christmas has eggnog; it is indeed the most wonderful time of the year. But this morning, instead of wishing you the comfort and ease of a merry little Christmas, I am wishing you an unfamiliar Christmas. I am wishing you at the very least a glimpse or a glimmer, an instant or an insight in which you encounter the surprise, the power, the life-changing and world-changing gift of “This Little Babe,” as the choir will sing next.

It’s a simple title, “This Little Babe.” And the music to which the text is set exhibits a simple compositional technique. It is a round, a canon, a simple form in which successive voices take up the melody echoing each other, as in “1. Row, row, row your boat/ 2. gently down the stream,/ 3. merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,/ 4. life is but a dream.” That’s pretty familiar, isn’t it?  

Ah, but the boat on which Benjamin Britten was sailing when he set “This Little Babe” to music was a cargo ship headed from the U.S. to England in April of 1942 while German submarines prowled the Atlantic. The month-long ocean passage on which A Ceremony of Carols was composed is a striking metaphor for our own time. The threat of the known—a world at war—and the threat of the unknown—undetectable, lethal assailants lurking just out of sight—are frighteningly familiar to us right now. And the round or canon in “This Little Babe” is a similarly striking metaphor. Britten set the voices in stretto, in close succession, so that the second and third voices enter only one beat after the previous voice. Instead of the familiar, easy pace, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” would go like this: Row/Row/Row/Row. That’s in stretto, and it wouldn’t sound so “merrily down the stream” at all. Nor does Britten’s setting of this “This Little Babe” sound at all like a merry little Christmas. And the words of “This Little Babe” don’t either.

They were penned in the 1500s by a Jesuit priest named Robert Southwell. Southwell was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in France in 1584, and in 1586 he returned to his native England as an underground missionary. Six years later, he was arrested by British authorities, imprisoned, and tortured. In 1595, Southwell was publicly executed by hanging, drawing and quartering. Those words fall antiseptically on our ears: hanged, drawn, and quartered. They mean that as he hung from the noose, still alive, he was emasculated, then disemboweled, then beheaded, and his body cut into four pieces. His crime? He was a Roman Catholic priest when being a Roman Catholic priest was against the law in England. If you know much at all about the history of Christianity, you know that today’s Islamic extremists look like relative amateurs at atrocity compared to the historic atrocities of us Christians of Anglo-Saxon and Aryan descent. Don’t fall into the popular trap of comparing the worst of them to the best of us and the best of us to the worst of them and then erroneously concluding that we are any better than they are.

Written in a world in which professing Christians in a Christian nation dismembered and disemboweled dissenters, “This Little Babe” is no “Away in the Manger.” Southwell’s poem depicts a surprise attack on the gates of hell mounted not by an army but by an infant. The battle is fought and won not with arms but with tears and cries and arrows of weeping eyes. The fortress in which safety is found is a cattle stall, a broken wall, a crib, and haystacks. Foes are foiled not by domination or annihilation but by joy. What Robert Southwell understood and wrote of Christmas in “This Little Babe” and what he lived and died of the gospel are entirely unfamiliar to you and me.

They are as unfamiliar as the gift-giving of which Jesus spoke in the gospel of John when he said, “My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (14:27; KJV). Gift-giving as the world giveth is what is familiar to us at Christmas. But this morning, I’m wishing you an unfamiliar Christmas, a Christmas in which the gift you give or receive is not as the world giveth but is as the gift being given this Christmas in that 70-member Baptist church in Olsztyn, Poland, and in other places around the world to persons who have been driven from home and family and country by war and terror and atrocity: it is the gift of the peace of God which passes all understanding (Philippians 4:7); it is the gift of the peace of Christ that hearts may not be troubled and neither may they be afraid.

Choir, it’s all yours: Sing us the gift of “This Little Babe” and an unfamiliar Christmas. 

Copyrighted © 2015 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. This material may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jrogers3@gardner-webb.edu.

(With gratitude to friends to whom this sermon is indebted: Charles Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil and When Religion Becomes Lethal, and Marc and Kim Wyatt, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship field personnel)

This little Babe so few days old,

Is come to rifle Satan’s fold;

All hell doth at his presence quake,

Though he himself for cold do shake;

For in this weak unarmèd wise

The gates of hell he will surprise.

With tears he fights and wins the field,

His naked breast stands for a shield;

His battering shot are babish cries,

His arrows looks of weeping eyes,

His martial ensigns Cold and Need,

And feeble Flesh his warrior’s steed.

His camp is pitchèd in a stall,

His bulwark but a broken wall;

The crib his trench, haystalks his stakes;

Of shepherds he his muster makes;

And thus, as sure his foe to wound,

The angels’ trumps alarum sound.

My soul, with Christ join thou in fight;

Stick to the tents that he hath pight.

Within his crib is surest ward:

This little Babe will be thy guard.

If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,

Then flit not from this heavenly Boy.

--Robert Southwell

A New Testament Lenten Journey: Who Is This?

Matthew 21:1-11
Palm Sunday 2011

When I was a child, Palm Sunday was one of my favorite Sundays in the Christian year. I loved waving a palm branch as the children’s choir led the procession while the whole congregation sang, “All glory, laud, and honor to Thee, Redeemer, King, To whom the lips of children made sweet hosannas ring!” I love a parade! Growing up as I did in good Lutheran churches, Palm Sunday’s triumphant entry was a welcome relief after all the gloom and impending doom of Lent.

What I know now that I didn’t know then is that Palm Sunday is the spiritual and liturgical equivalent of the eye of a hurricane. When a well-defined eye of a hurricane is passing over land, the wind and rain disappear and the sky above is clear. Fear subsides, and people come outside. They are sometimes fooled into thinking that the danger, the gloom and the doom, are past. But when the other side of the eyewall arrives, the winds and the rain return with a vengeance.

That’s the part I did not understand as a child: the return of the storm in the events of Holy Week. The impending passion of Christ in Maundy Thursday’s Last Supper, betrayal, and trial; Good Friday’s crucifixion, and Holy Saturday’s descent into hell were lost on me as a child on Palm Sunday. It was only palm branches and children’s choirs and “sweet hosannas ring.” “All glory, laud, and honor to Thee, Redeemer, King.” Is this morning about the palms, or is it about the passion? Is it about the triumphal entry of a king who has come to reign or the arrival of a suffering servant who has come to die? That either/or makes Palm Sunday the most ambiguous Sunday on the Christian calendar.

It also makes Palm Sunday an excellent example of one of the great religious and theological and spiritual challenges our world faces in the 21st century. It is the challenge of selective listening and selective reading and selective believing and selective living.

We all know what selective listening is. One mom characterized it in her family this way. Her family’s “sense of hearing is, at best, unstable, and seems to work in their favor, rather than mine,” she wrote. “If I drop a few coins, my 14-year-old daughter . . . can identify their value by the pitch and tone as they hit the kitchen floor. This same girl, however, can’t hear the dog barking five feet from her while she’s watching television. Presumably, ‘selective listening’ is a genetic disorder, since her father, who was sitting on the couch beside her, didn’t hear the dog either” (http://www.parentinghumor.com/categories/familyparenting/sensorywarfare.htm).

Humans are not the only organisms afflicted with this malaise. I read recently that the law of selective listening is one of many “laws of cat physics”: “Although a cat can hear a can of tuna being opened a mile away, she can’t hear a simple command three feet away” (http://www.pawsperouspets.com/humor/catphysics.html). Cats, like teenagers and husbands, are notoriously selective listeners.

I’ve heard that selective listening even happens in church—so I’ve heard. “A Husband came home from church, greeted his wife, and lifted her up and carried her all around the house. The wife was so surprised, and she asked, ‘Did the pastor preach about being romantic?’ The husband answered, ‘No, he said we must carry our burdens and sorrow’” (http://blogs.rediff.com/prannath/2007/09/19/selective-listening/, alt.). Selective listening.

Selective listening is what made it possible for me as child to hear and to sing the Palm Sunday hymn, “Ride on, ride on in majesty, in . . . pomp, ride on” without hearing the totality of the second line: “in lowly pomp, ride on to die.” I heard the majesty and pomp of the triumphal entry and filtered out the humility and the death at the end of the parade. It’s a dangerously common religious disorder.

In his just-published book titled When Religion Becomes Lethal: The Explosive Mix of Politics and Religion in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Charles Kimball—who in some ways still considers First Baptist Greenville a “home church”—describes the Islamic movement of Wahhabism, the “uncompromising, puritanical approach to Islam [that] took root in Saudi Arabia beginning in the 18th century and became “the most conservative of the four major Sunni legal schools” (p. 194). It features a strict adherence to what one particular 18th century Arabian cleric named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab “understood to be the beliefs and practices of the earliest Muslims.” In the second half of the twentieth century Wahhabism was exported around the world from Saudi Arabia, and it is now most infamously associated with the extremism and the violence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda and Osama bin Ladin. Wahhabism is a religious and theological and spiritual disorder of selective listening, selective reading, selective believing, and selective living.

But the threat that Wahhabism poses to the West in particular has given rise to a similar disorder among non-Muslims who are choosing to misunderstand and misrepresent all of Islam as though it were all Wahhabi. And it is not. If you associate all Muslims with the radical extremism of Wahhabism, then to be consistent in your thinking, you must say that all Christians are skin-heads and snake-handlers. But you know better than that. And you should know better about Islam also. Selective listening, selective reading, selective believing, and selective living is a common religious disorder.

The crowd on the road to Jerusalem in this morning’s gospel lesson wanted a messiah-king so desperately that they threw down their coats on the road and cut branches from the trees to pave Jesus’ way into the city. They turned his arrival in Jerusalem into a parade with singing and cheering, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” They got the part in Zechariah 9:9 that reads, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he!” They got the “Ride on, ride on, in majesty” part. But in their desperation for a king in the image of their own projection, they ignored the rest of the verse: “humble and riding on a donkey” instead of instead of swashbuckling astride a stallion. They didn’t hear that part; they didn’t read that part; they didn’t believe that part; they wanted no part in living that part.

So later in the week, they were all surprised and offended when he offered no defense in response to the accusations that were made against him. When he was struck, he turned the other cheek. When he failed to meet their expectations as the kind of king they wanted they called for his crucifixion. That’s the kind of self-righteous sin that selective listening, selective reading, selective believing, and selective living can lead to. And every one of us is susceptible to it.

Some of us, for example, latch on to “Jesus Christ our Savior,” as Titus 3:6 puts it, and wish to hear nothing more of Jesus than that which feeds our personal faith and assures our “entry into the eternal kingdom” in the words of 2 Peter 1:11. Some of us, on the other hand, echo the words of the crowds in this morning’s gospel lesson who announce, “This is the prophet Jesus” (Matthew 21:11). We want an Old Testament Jesus, a reformer of the world order whose mission is centered on creating the ideal society, in spite of the fact that the Jesus of the gospels shows no interest whatsoever in establishing an ideal national or global or ecclesiastical society. He never ran for a seat on the Sanhedrin and he never endorsed a candidate for the Roman Senate. Pietists and policists alike turn their prized image of Jesus into a dashboard mascot whose head bobbles up and down in support of their every whim.

In contrast to the pietists and the politicists and self-centered crowds on the road to Jerusalem, the most important words in this morning’s gospel lesson are spoken by the bystanders in Jerusalem who on hearing all the commotion ask, “Who is this?” “Who is this?”

Every time you figure you have who this is figured out, your figuring will be inadequate. Every time you think you have found out who this is, your thinking will be confounded. Every time you believe you have who this is nailed down, the cross on which your believing nailed him will turn up empty. Who is this?

The New Testament says this is Joseph’s son (John 1:45), Mary’s child (Matthew 2:11), the brother of James and Joseph and Simon and Judas (Matthew 13:55), a Galilean (Matthew 26:69), a Nazarean (Matthew 2:23), a Savior (Luke 2:11), a prophet (Matthew 21:11), a blasphemer (Matthew 26:65), a madman (Mark 3:21), a rabbi (Mark 9:5), a slave (Philippians 2:7), a master (Luke 8:24), the king of the Jews (Matthew 27:37), the king of Israel (John 1:49), the Messiah (Mark 8:29), the Son of God (John 11:27), the Son of David (Mark 10:47), the Son of Man (Mark 8:31), God with us (Matthew 1:23), a glutton and a drunkard (Matthew 11:14), a friend of sinners (Matthew 11:19), the lamb of God (John 1:29), the lion of the tribe of Judah (Revelation 5:5), the Word (John 1:1), the true light (John 1:9), the Savior of the world (John 4:42), the bread of life (John 6:35), the light of the world (John 9:5), the good shepherd (John 10:11), the gate for the sheep (John 10:7), the way (John 14:6), the truth (John 14:6), the life (John 14:6), the vine (John 15:5), Lord and God (John 20:28), the Lord of glory (1 Corinthians 2:8), the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24), the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15), the firstborn of all creation (Colossians 1:15), the last Adam (1 Corinthians 14:45), the crucified one (1 Corinthians 1:23), the risen one (Luke 24:34).

The mistake that the crowd on the road to Jerusalem made was not that they welcomed Jesus as king; their mistake was that they could not or would not see that the Jesus they welcomed is always and everywhere much, much more than a projection of our own expectations and desires. And that’s precisely why Palm Sunday is so important in the annual cycle of the Christian year: it is palm branches and passion.

The truth be told, not one of us can avoid selective reading and selective believing and selective living any more than teenagers, husbands, and cats can avoid selective listening. The question is not whether you are selective or not; the question is what your principle of selection is. What do you select and why? What are the consequences of your selection for your listening, reading, believing and living?

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the parade while the palm branches are waving and the sun is shining and the band is playing. We all love a parade. But Palm Sunday is the eye of a religious and theological and spiritual hurricane, a temporary respite before the storm begins anew with a vengeance in the upcoming week of the Christian year because who Jesus is is more fully and authentically revealed in the cross than in the parade.

So even now, as Holy Week begins, we turn our attention in the direction that Jesus’ attention had been focused all along: to the cross, to the cross, to the cross. There is no better principle of selection for listening, for reading, for believing, and for living than the cross. After all, it was the cross that was waiting at the end of the parade: “Ride on, ride on, in majesty ride; on in lowly pomp to die.”


Photo by davecurlee, used under license of Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.