Don't mess with Christmas!

The Nativity of Our Lord--the transfiguration of Our Lord, series B

In an effort to more evenly distribute the pages of Preaching Helps among the six yearly issues of Currents, I moved The Nativity of Our Lord from the October to the December issue. I also hoped that pairing Christmas with Epiphany and The Baptism of Our Lord rather than the Sundays in Advent might help us to consider both Advent and Christmas in new ways. I did not realize that including the Preaching Helps for Christmas in the December issue could make them too late to be helpful to our overseas subscribers. I do apologize.

I know better than to mess with Christmas. I learned that lesson well in early January of my internship year. The pastoral staff received a letter from some musicians in our congregation that slammed us for the Christmas Eve service. They condemned us for doing the same thing we did every year and called upon us to take advantage of the church's rich treasury of Christmas music and liturgy. Now, I was an eager seminarian who fancied myself somewhat of a liturgist. So I prepared a Christmas Eve service that was very different and presented it to my supervisor a few days later. He smiled knowingly and took me and my Christmas Eve service to the next meeting of the Worship and Music Committee. Those gentle souls patiently explained to me that many people come to church on Christmas Eve to do what they have always done--to sing the same carols, to light the same candles, to look at the same chrismons hanging in the same places on the tree, to hear the same story of angels and shepherds, Mary and Joseph (substitute John 1 as the Gospel reading for Christmas Eve at your own peril! But that's another story), and to receive God incarnate in bread and wine. Rather than doing something new, they suggested, help us to see and hear and experience what we have always done in new ways. Help us to look deeply into the Christmas story. "Really, Craig," one committee member concluded, "don't mess with Christmas!" My innovative order of service was respectfully returned to me, and the committee decided that Christmas Eve worship would remain the same.

As I contemplate Christmas months before the stores start playing Christmas carols and even longer before the church gathers to sing them, it occurs to me that, this Christmas, anyone who gets to do what he or she has always done is quite fortunate. Troops will be far away from home. Thousands in Louisiana have no home to go back to. Many homes will be different because they have been touched by death since last Christmas. As we look deeply into our Christmas worship through the lenses of our lives, what do we see?

As I look deeply into Christmas using the lens of these Preaching Helps, I am struck by the way the manger and the baptismal font are both the meeting places of the human and the divine. In the manger, God took on our flesh and joined us in our life. In the baptismal font, we take on God's Holy Spirit and join Christ in the life of Christ. At Christmas, Jesus was born into our world. In baptism, we are born into Christ's world. If Lutherans can have patron saints, mine is Ambrose, the fourth-century bishop of Milan whose feast day is December 7. Ambrose preached that, in the blessing of the water in the baptismal font, the Holy Spirit comes upon the font, or those receiving baptism, in the same way that the Spirit came upon the Virgin Mary. As the Holy Spirit brought forth a miraculous birth in the womb of the Virgin, so too in the womb that is the baptismal pool the Spirit brings forth the birth of a new creation in a miraculous way. (Ambrose of Milan, De mysteriis 9.59; Craig A. Satterlee, Ambrose of Milan's Method of Mystagogical Preaching [Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 2002], 170.)

I am thinking about the baptismal pool in the Augustana Chapel here at LSTC. In case you have not seen it, water flows continuously from the stone font into a pool in the floor that is large enough to kneel in. I wonder what would happen if, come December, I put a creche smack dab in the center of the pool. I want to think that folks would understand that, indeed, baptism is our Easter, when we are raised to new life with Christ. But baptism is also our Christmas, when God incarnate takes on human flesh in us. I fear they would want to know who messed with Christmas.

Our first contributor this issue is Kristin Johnston Largen. In 2002, Kristin received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union in Systematic Theology, where she studied with Ted Peters. After serving three years at King of Glory Lutheran Church in Arvada, Colorado, she moved to South Carolina in June of 2005, after marrying John Largen, Pastor to the Seminary Community at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia. Currently she is a Teaching Fellow at Claflin University, an historically black college in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Timothy V. Olson and Carrie L. Lewis round out this issue--and get us back on schedule.

I pray that you will make time to look deeply into Christmas and behold the Christ being born anew!

Craig A. Satterlee ([e-mail])

Editor of Preaching Helps