Preaching Through Holy Days and Holidays

By Roger Alling

Preaching Through Holy Days and Holidays is the eleventh in a series of books devoted to presenting examples of preaching excellence from parishes in the Episcopal Church. These sermons, collected from clergy around the country, focus on preaching the Holy Days and Holidays of the church and secular calendar. Contents include sermons for:
*the High Holy Days (Christmas Eve, Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Easter Evening, and Pentecost)
*major festivals (The Presentation of Our Lord, Ascension Day, The Transfiguration of Our Lord, All Saints’ Day)
*Feasts of various saints
*celebrations of ministerial vocation (The Baptism of Our Lord, The Nativity of John the Baptist, the ordination of a bishop, the renewal of ordination vows)
*civil holidays (Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving) and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Release date: Feb 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9780819225412

Book preview

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HIGH HOLY DAYS

CHRISTMAS EVE

Christmas Trees

Luke 2:1–20

Emily J. Schnabl

IF YOU HAD ASKED me last week what comes to mind when I think of Christmas trees, three images would have popped into my head. The first would be putting up the family Christmas tree. Dragged by my father down slippery Chicago sidewalks to our apartment, then set up by the three of us—all having strong (and different) opinions about which way it was leaning, which was its best side—all of us sticky and scratched by the time it was finally in place. With its treasured ornaments and rituals, that annual tree reminds me of shared family moments.

Then there is the fantasy tree—the one children got to eat breakfast under in Marshall Field’s Walnut Room. It stretched for eight floors in the department store courtyard. You could gaze at the top while waiting for Santa. That tree reminds me of winter holiday enchantment.

Being Gen X, one of my trees is the Charlie Brown Christmas tree, its funny bare branches reminding me of the least likely, the littlest, the underdog, coming out on top at the most important moment.

But on Friday evening’s news I saw another tree I have not been able to get out of my mind. Did you see it? It wasn’t a tall tree. It wasn’t even real. There were no presents underneath. Instead of gracing a living room bay window, it was set among the rubble of the destroyed home of a Palestinian Christian family in Bethlehem. Its ornaments were not family heirlooms or expensive creations—they were spent rifle casings the family found among the ruins of their home.

Aesthetically it was uglier even than Charlie Brown’s tree. But, standing in a ruined house in the little town of Bethlehem, in danger of being toppled by yet another tank or bullet, that tree speaks more to me about the Christmas story than any other tree I’ve ever seen.

We tend to forget, I think, about how fragile and dangerous was Christ’s coming into our world. How tenuous was Mary’s life once it was discovered she was unmarried and pregnant—public shame being the least of her worries. Childbirth in those days was risky even for wealthy women, let alone for a young woman of uncertain means traveling in her ninth month of pregnancy from Nazareth to Bethlehem. The registration toward which Joseph was heading was part of an oppressive tax system administered by corrupt officials.

God chose an unstable time, an unsettled place. Just as our Palestinian sisters and brothers did not wait to restore their house to perfect order before they put up their Christmas tree, God did not wait for us to get it right before coming into the world. The Palestinian family took what was around them—plastic, metal, concrete—and put up a sign of hope. God took what was around—a small country, a poor woman with an amazingly understanding husband, a stable next to an inn, and gave us a baby to be our sign of hope. God didn’t wait for us to get our house in order. God came anyway.

As the angels said, that is good news of great joy. It is such good news that generations of turning Christmas into a spending, partying rush has not diluted its power. If there were not such power and truth at the heart of Christmas, it would not have survived. Holidays come and go—we don’t celebrate too many Roman or medieval feast days, after all—but the fact that God enters the rubble of our lives as a vulnerable infant cannot be overcome by free holiday shipping and three months of Christmas Muzak. The fact that God comes down as a baby, asking humans to hold him, feed him, and treasure him, cannot be overcome by rushing around, trying to put together the perfect Christmas.

God took a poor young woman and asked her to be the mother of God. God used a stable full of animals and made it the birthplace of the Prince of Peace. God took rough shepherds and made them the messengers of good news. Bullets become ornaments on a Christmas tree; our weaknesses and sins become the glory of God.

The lights of Christmas enchant and delight, but they also reveal the cracks in our lives we work so hard to paper over. That Bethlehem Christmas tree didn’t paper over the cracks, didn’t hide the truth. It told the truth. Soreness of heart is real. And Christ’s coming doesn’t fix that soreness in ways we want it to. When we fix the world the way we want it to, eventually it goes wrong, and we destroy even more in the process. No, God says, let’s do it my way, with my own life and death and new life.

The childhood visions of Christmas are still real. Christmas is about the rituals we share as families. Christmas is about fantasy and delight. Christmas is about the underdog getting the best present under the tree. But even those wonderful things are shadows of God’s love for us, a love that finds its way in through cracks and rubble. On this Christmas, we open ourselves to beholding signs of hope that the dear Christ has entered in, two thousand years ago in Bethlehem, in Bethlehem today, in our hearts here and now.

Emily J. Schnabl is Curate of St. George’s Church,

Belleville, Illinois.

ASH WEDNESDAY

What a Paradox Faith Is!

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Mary Frances Schjonberg

WHAT A PARADOX this night is! In a few moments, I will invite you forward to smear ashes on your forehead—perhaps the most visibly enduring of Christian rituals. There is no physical evidence on Sunday afternoon that we have received communion in the morning. You can’t tell just by looking if someone has been baptized or confirmed. But the smudge of ashes, the sign of the cross on your forehead—that is visible to everyone.

I will admit that I went to the bank this morning before the noon service, just so I wouldn’t have to walk around with these ashes on my forehead. But God sometimes is a trickster. I forgot I had a chiropractor appointment this afternoon. So there I went with my ashes. To my relief, when I walked in, I saw that the chiropractor and people in the waiting room had ashes too.

Why, then, does Jesus tell us to beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them? Some in Jesus’ time made a show of their prayers, hoping to impress onlookers and, perhaps, God. Why does Joel, an early practitioner of the sound bite, put it more succinctly still? Rend your heart and not your clothing? In his day, people demonstrated repentance for sin by tearing their clothes and covering themselves with ashes. Ashes symbolized insignificance. Ashes are all that is left after the glory of fire.

The ashes we use tonight come from the palms we used last Palm Sunday—the day we wave branches in an almost defiant faith that welcomes Jesus into Jerusalem. Defiant, because we know Good Friday is coming, that Jesus will die; yet still we cheer his coming. What a paradox faith is! When we bury people, we commend their souls to God, acknowledging our mortality: All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. What a paradox faith is!

We are dust and to dust we shall return. This is, I think, what Joel and Jesus are after. All of our worship, all of our ritual comes down to this: In the end, none of it will save us. What will save us is our faith in God stored up in our hearts, not the material things that rust and turn to dust—just as we do. What a paradox faith is!

The Greek gods were said to envy our mortality, knowing that who could not die could not love with the same intensity, could not see the world charged with the same beauty as mortals do. Yet our God broke the bonds of immortality; came to live and die with us. What a paradox faith is!

Ours is a culture trying to pretend death does not happen, that if we could only find the right formula, we would live forever. And we are unprepared for death when it comes.

So, tonight, we will wear, above our eyes for all to see, over that place many traditions regard as the window of the soul, the most important public symbol of our faith: We are dust and yet, because of God, we live.

Mary Frances Schjonberg is Assistant Rector of Christ Church,

Short Hills, New Jersey.

MAUNDY THURSDAY

Carter Brown’s Gift

Exodus 12:1-14a; John 13:1-15

Mark Hollingsworth Jr.

PASSOVER AND MAUNDY THURSDAY. These two great observances of faith, celebrated around the world today, speak loudly of that for which we make space. They invite us to reflect on our availability to God, our openness to what God wants to bring us.

Through Moses and Aaron, God directed the children of Israel to make room in their lives for God to act, instructing them to gather as families, and to prepare a hasty meal of roasted lamb, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs; and to eat the meal hurriedly with loins girded, feet sandaled, staff in hand—packed and ready to go. Each family was instructed to mark the front door with the blood of the lamb, so that the spirit of God would pass over that house, sparing it from the plague intended for the Egyptians. This is a story about being available to God, making room for God to act; it is about readiness to receive grace, about responsiveness to the relentless generosity of God’s love.

The story of Jesus’ washing the disciples’ feet on the night before he died addresses the same issue. So here, on Maundy Thursday, the one presiding at this service washes the feet of communicants, symbolically proclaiming the servanthood of God in Christ. It is a liturgical practice with which I have struggled. I first encountered it as a theological student, serving as a seminary intern in San Francisco. To a conservative son of New England it seemed contrived, this bathing of already well-scrubbed feet and drying them off with fluffy Cottonelle towels. It was particularly off-putting when the foot-washer brandished a pair of scissors to snip through the nylons worn by an ill-prepared foot-washee. It struck me as undignified—behavior inappropriate for church. It seemed particularly Californian.

Massey Shepherd, the great scholar and presbyter of the Church, a staid Southerner, allowed that he would consider washing on Maundy Thursday only the feet of any who had walked a considerable distance to church along dusty, dirt roads, barefoot.

I don’t want someone washing my feet in church. It is too intimate, too personal. I am something of a prude. Thus I find great comfort in St. Peter’s response to Jesus’ invitation: You will never wash my feet. But very recently I have been helped to consider in a new light this thing that Jesus did and have been challenged to let it open me more fully to the intimacy God offers me in the process of my spiritual conversion. The help came from an extraordinary young friend.

When I met Carter Brown, he was a fifteen-year-old high school freshman fighting a particularly vicious form of cancer. The eldest of three boys, he was well over six feet tall, and loved all the things adolescent boys love—basketball, friends, music, boogie boarding. I met him shortly after his cancer had recurred and was attacking his bones. Over the course of our visits we talked for hours about the things in life that intrigued and delighted us. He asked me countless questions about myself—what foods, movies, and music I liked, what it was like being a priest, what it was like being an adoptive parent. It never felt like he was prying, rather that he was making a space for me in his life, and thereby a space for me in my own life, where I could just be who I am.

Carter was in and out of the hospital and the cancer clinic regularly because the disease in his bones was affecting his blood production and was extremely painful. But basically Carter was able to be at home, and during the day he lived on a couch in the living room, spending time with his family and friends. A couple of days before Carter died in early March, my six-year-old son and I were visiting with him. His parents and brothers were there. Friends came in and out. Carter was lying on the couch, under an old quilt. Though he was on considerable pain medication, the discomfort in his bones, especially his legs and his hips, made him move around a lot, as he tried in vain to get comfortable. All movement made the cuffs of his pajama pants ride up his long, thin legs, which made him more uncomfortable and a little chilly. So he asked me if I would help him. Lifting up the quilt, he asked me to pull the cuffs of his pajamas down so they would cover his aching legs. A simple request, but, making it, he made a place for me that defined our companionship as no words could. Allowing me to serve him in that seemingly insignificant way, he offered me a glimpse of the kind of intimacy God yearns to have with each of us.

On this Maundy Thursday, when I think of Jesus’ hands gently washing the tired, sore feet of his disciples, I remember adjusting the legs of Carter Brown’s pajamas, and drawing the soft, old quilt over his feet. And I wonder if I can make such a place for Jesus in my life. I wonder if I can let him get that close. I wonder if I can allow him to serve me. I wonder if I can be so available to God that I won’t miss the precious, painful, glorious gifts God is ceaselessly trying to give me.

If I can’t let Jesus wash my feet, how can I let him die for me?

Mark Hollingsworth Jr. is Archdeacon of the

Diocese of Massachusetts.

EASTER EVENING

Decorating the Easter Tree

Acts 5:29-33

Nancy Casey Fulton

THE LAST FEW YEARS I’ve noticed a proliferation of Easter trees: living trees, their branches still bare, decorated with colorful eggs. Not too long ago, in a client’s home, I saw a wooden Easter tree, beautifully decked out with tiny eggs, chickens, and rabbits in green, pink, and yellow. I have to admit, Easter trees don’t capture my imagination the way Christmas trees do, so I’ve never had one. A few weeks ago, however, at a clergy conference, our presenter suggested that we don’t know how to decorate the Easter tree. He showed us slides of his own family’s Easter celebrations when he was a child. On one slide was an Easter tree standing bravely in the bare landscape of late winter. It took me a few minutes to realize that by Easter tree, he meant the cross.

We don’t know how to decorate the cross: what an odd comment that seemed at the time. But I haven’t been able to forget what he said, because I believe that his words strike at the heart of the problem Easter presents us. Compared to Easter, Christmas is a warm, fuzzy holy day—in spite of the baby Jesus being born to poor parents in a stable on a cold night, in spite of the threat to his infant life from Herod the King. Thanks to Luke, we have a sweet telling of the Holy Family, and at Christmas we gather with our families and deck out our houses with the warmth of greens, soft lights, and beautiful colors.

Easter isn’t the same kind of holy day, coming as it does on the heels of Holy Week. The shadow of the cross is always at the corner of our vision. The wounds on Jesus’ hands, feet, and side do not disappear with his Resurrection. We want to glory in the brilliant light surrounding the empty tomb, as well we should. The Resurrection should be a celebration.

But if we forget about the cross—the Easter tree—we are in danger of diminishing the triumph of Our Lord. And if we deck it out with nothing but the trappings of the secular world, we are in danger of forgetting what it means to be Christians. In our narthex we have placed the old cross that used to stand on top of this church. For Lent, we trimmed it simply with symbols of the Crucifixion: a crown of thorns, a whip, a purple chasuble draped to remind us of the cloak of Jesus. Last Sunday we added palms. And you might have noticed this morning that the Altar Guild has tucked some lily blossoms into the crown of thorns to remind us that Christ has risen. There is also a butterfly, placed there by the children at their Good Friday Stations of the Cross, to symbolize resurrection. Palms, crown of thorns, butterfly, and lilies tell us the story of Holy Week: the triumphant entry into Jerusalem, the terrible mockery and death, and the glorious victory over death. The hard reality of the cross stands in the midst of Easter joy, as it must.

You might also have noticed on the cross six purple squares of paper. The children who took part in the hands-on Stations of the Cross on Friday added their names, a reminder that they are part of Jesus’ death and Resurrection, as are we all through our baptisms. Yes, we glory in the Resurrection, but that is only the beginning for us. Jesus reminded his followers that they must take up their crosses and follow him. We are given on this day the promise of eternal life, but also the burden of embracing the cross: we need to feel its weight, and feel its strength, for it empowers us to act in Jesus’ name.

So how do we decorate the Easter tree? I’ve thought about that a lot this week as I’ve kept vigil with friends whose daughter was dying, and as I wrote a homily for her funeral yesterday. Do we hang her suffering and her parents’ sorrow on the Easter tree? And the lost boys of the Sudan—many of them settling in Michigan—deprived of family and home through years of tribal warfare: do we hang their vulnerable bodies and souls on the Easter tree? And the young African-American man, shot dead when he ran from a police officer in Cincinnati not long ago: do we hang his senseless death, and his mother’s grief, and his city’s fear on the Easter tree? And Timothy McVeigh: do we hang his unrepentant spirit and the legal system’s