A Stripped-Down Christmas
Mark 1:1-8 and Isaiah 40:1-11
December 7, 2008
Well, Christmas season is in full swing. Just yesterday I saw a car decorated as Rudolph, with a big fuzzy nose on the grill and two antlers anchored to the windows on either side of the car. Our Christmas tree here at Southminster is completely decorated in the fellowship hall. Garland has been slung around window frames and mantels. 8-foot inflatable Santas and Frosty the snowmen have been blown up and placed in yards all over this country. And Rich Kowalski is on his, I believe, fifth Christmas tie of the year. We certainly can’t dodge the invasive nature of Christmas in America, so I thought today, for just a few minutes, we might linger together on our memories of Christmas. So let us relax and remember just for a moment our favorite parts of Christmases past:
What are your earliest memories of Christmas?
Who did you gather with to celebrate?
What are some of the memorable presents you received? What presents were the most rewarding for you to give?
Does your grandparents’ house come to mind? Or your old childhood home? Or the house where you live now?
What does your Christmas tree look like and how has it changed over the years of your life?
What are the tastes of your Christmas memories? Sweet potatoes? Ham? Turkey? A kiss on a relative’s cheek?
What are the smells? A fireplace? A spruce tree? Bread in the oven? Grandparents’ houses?
What is the feeling of Christmas? The touches you remember? Hugging loved ones? A new sweater? The sap of the tree? Cleaning dishes with family? The leather of a football? Paper cuts from wrapping and opening presents?
Now imagine every one of those memories is gone. With a puff of smoke, poof—all of these memories vanish from your mind—someone sticks a pin in the inflatable Santas—pssshhhhht—the batteries are pulled out of Christmas ties and the lights dim, and all our Christmas memories simply disappear. Instead of Christmas there is merely the month of December, uneventful except for the yearly chill of winter air and the anticipation of New Year’s celebrations.
Because this is exactly how our lives would be if the only gospel in our Bibles was Mark. Fortunately, our Christmas stories of Jesus’ birth are preserved in the books of Matthew and Luke, but it is well worth considering why in the world Mark chooses to start his life of Christ the way he does and how this Christmas-less passage can speak with us today.
Our passage is, indeed, the very opening segment in Mark’s story of Jesus’ life and not only is the birth of Jesus absent, but also the entire childhood of Jesus is missing in Mark’s account. Instead of Jesus’ early life, the text opens, rather abruptly, with vague quotations from scripture and the story of a strange man named John the Baptizer in the wilderness.
But Mark’s skipping of Christmas was not something that was been frowned upon by our Protestant ancestors. Indeed, what is particularly striking is that for hundreds of years, many Protestants like us agreed with Mark. For centuries after the Protestant reformation in the 1500’s, Christmas was seen as a “popish” celebration characterized not by simplicity and faith, but by excess and materialism. This was remarkably true in this country, especially after the American Revolution when Christmas, much like tea in lieu of coffee, fell by the wayside as a British import.
Our Puritan friends up in New England in 1659 even passed an anti-Christmas law and Christmas didn’t even become a national holiday here until 1875—thanks to advertisers and consumerism, of course. And, interestingly, Christians who today urgently call for putting the “Christ” back in Christmas and who refuse to say “Happy Holidays” in place of “Merry Christmas,” were the very last people to adopt Christmas as a sacred institution. It was the churches that finally gave into the secular drive for a grandiose Christmas that eventually granted the holiday its peculiar power. And the problems of Christmas shopping are no new phenomenon. Though I would guess no holiday shoppers were trampled to death as in today’s world, Harriet Beecher Stowe did write all the way back in 1850 of “every shop and store glittering with all manner of splendors . . . for people that have more than they know what to do with now.”
Now for you Christmas lovers out there, don’t get too upset. There is no call here for an immediate cease and desist order on Christmas. Rather the question is more about how can we benefit from Mark’s account of a stripped-down Christmas and advent.
Because Mark doesn’t rid his book entirely of the advent story, he just shifts the emphasis away from the birth of Jesus, toward the baptism of Jesus by John. Advent, for Mark, is not the beginning of Jesus on earth, but the beginning of his life of ministry with baptism. Mark pushes the story forward so that time is spent where he feels most appropriate—on the life and ministry of Jesus. And perhaps this reveals one of the largest drawbacks of our current Christmas emphases. The 4 to 5 weeks of advent is spent “waiting” for the gift of the baby Jesus. That’s almost one-tenth of the entire year.
We wait for our gift. We wait for our gift. Sometimes it seems as if our Christmas tradition of gift-giving has been transferred upon Jesus, so that Jesus himself, instead of being wrapped in bands of cloth and lying on a manger, is instead covered with colorful paper and placed under tree, waiting to be unwrapped—a simple possession that, if we’re good enough, becomes ours on Christmas morning. Jesus, though still the center of the holiday, is like the gooey center of a chocolate truffle, that simply melts away the minute after it’s tasted. Sweet for a moment when lying in a manger, but then he grows up, becomes demanding and simply melts away from our thoughts.
But Mark proposes a different scenario than simply waiting for our gift. Advent, Mark proposes, is not about waiting, it is about preparing our bodies and our minds for the ministry of faith and life to which we are called.
Our passage from Isaiah today, the same passage used by Mark, is centered upon the activity of preparation. Listen to what Isaiah says: “Prepare the way of the Lord / make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level and the rough places a plain. Then [and only then!] the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.”
Preparing for the advent of Jesus and preparing for our journeys of faith require actions, both spiritual and physical. Valleys and mountains do not level themselves and desert pathways aren’t built without sweat and exertion. Poor people are not given food by mere prayer and homes for the poverty stricken aren’t built by wishful flights of fancy. Faith requires action; and action results from our internal struggles of repentance as we seek to live more holy lives.
John, with his adamant call for repentance and simplicity, certainly wouldn’t fit well into some of our Christmas celebrations, as I have yet to see an 8 foot tall inflatable John the Baptist calling desperately for repentance placed in anyone’s yards! And I doubt this will come anytime soon!
And should we be surprised? Is not the gift-wrapped Jesus under the tree much easier to deal with than the Jesus who is grown up, the Jesus who demands that we live holy lives, the Jesus who casts out demons, and the Jesus who was executed for political subversion?
Part of Mark’s message for us today seems to be that as we prepare for the coming of Jesus we keep in mind the responsibilities that the adult Jesus requires of us, and not simply stay silently staring at the baby sleeping in strands of cloth. Because the Gospel of Mark helps us to see that advent is not a single, detached event. It is rather the beginning of a pathway; the start of a course of ministry. Advent calls us to repentance and helps us prepare ourselves for the sometimes difficult, sometimes heart wrenching, sometimes lovely journey of faith.
And perhaps this is one reason why there was so much skepticism of Christmas celebrations among many earlier Christian groups. The more parties we have, the more symbols of Christmas that are created, the more mythologies that are constructed, the more we are pulled away from the stripped-down advent called for by Mark through the teachings of John the Baptist. Not gold and jewels and Rudolph sweaters, but camel’s hair frocks, leather belts, locusts and honey. Because it is the simplicity a stripped-down advent that can nudge us into an urgent faith which hears and responds to the adult Jesus’ calls for righteousness, peace, love, and forgiveness.
There is a song written by Ramblin’ Jack Elliot that is sung stirringly by the recently departed folk singer Odetta that goes something like this:
I'll pawn you my watch
And I'll pawn you my chain
Pawn you my gold diamond ring.
If this train runs me right
I'll be home tomorrow night.
I'm nine hundred miles from my home.
The train I ride on
Is a thousand coaches long.
You can hear that whistle blow a hundred miles.
If this train runs me right
I'll be home tomorrow night.
I'm nine hundred miles from my home.
When Jesus is baptized by John in the Gospel of Mark and the advent of his ministry arrives, it is as if he steps on that train, sheds himself of all but the essentials of faith and life, and his 900 mile journey begins. For Mark this is the very birth of Jesus. The birth of his public life and ministry, and the beginning of the miraculous story where people are healed, where the poor are nurtured, where the powerful tumble down, where exploitation ends and where peace and love reign supreme.
And perhaps hearing the infant-free Gospel of Mark can help us shed our own gold watches and chains, our diamond rings, and focus on the 900 miles ahead of us. Let us look inside ourselves at this advent time, and consider the repentance that we each need. And let us look outside ourselves as well and see the need of our neighbors and help them. And let us willingly strip down the excesses of our lives, the superfluous parts of our faith, until we are clothed simply with camel’s hair and leather belts, and then let us jump upon that rumblin’ thousand car train to begin anew the advent of our own stripped-down journeys of faith.
B.K. Swartz, Jr., “The Origin of American Christmas Myth and Customs, http://www.bsu.edu/web/01bkwartz/xmaspub.html, December 6, 2008
Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The First New England Christmas” as quoted on http://www.watertownfirstpres.org/sermons/12-11-05.html. December 6, 2008.
