“Going Down a Dark Chimney”

December 11, 2005

Scripture Reading:  Isaiah 61 and Luke 1:46

Rev.  Dr. Carol L. Kerr 

Blue Point Congregational Church

One Christmas Eve when Gavin was six years old, we were sitting around a roaring fire in our living room.  It is our tradition to have a fire burning on Christmas Eve and in the enthusiasm of the holiday we had stuffed as many logs and kindling and newspaper into it as we could and set it ablaze.  It was a huge fire.  Even though we were several feet away on the couch we were peeling off our sweaters, socks, and getting damp under the arms.  The logs didn’t just crackle, they regularly made gun shot noises as sap exploded in the conflagration.  A log, or I should say, a red hot coal in the shape of a log, started to move on its own as if alive rolled off the heap onto the hearth.  Dave picked up the hook, but his unbuttoned sleeve hung dangerously close to the log as he placed it back in.  “Watch out!  Watch out!” I cautioned. 

In was in the middle of this scene Gavin suddenly got very upset.  He said, “Oh no.  Everything is ruined!  Santa cannot come down that fireplace tonight.  He will burn!”  It was obvious and logical, with the roaring fire we had made it impossible for Santa to descend down the chimney and deliver his bag of gifts without becoming Crispy Kringle.  As a parent, though, I quickly evoked the ever present and ever helpful explanatory powers of magic.  I said that Santa has magic powder that he shakes down the chimney so that if there is a fire it is not hot and won’t burn him.  Dave smirked and piped in, “Why Santa just thinks of everything!”

It was just one more attempt on my part to salvage the belief in Santa for Gavin, one more year.  There was rampant disbelief encroaching from all sides.  Skeptical children in a skeptical age were spreading rumors that Santa was made up.  There was a bombardment of commercial Santa’s everywhere we went that year.  So many that a thinking child could suspect the source like when some gives too many explanations for a simple question you begin to suspect they do not know the truth at all.   

This was not the first time I found myself suddenly spinning out a long answer to various Santa puzzlements.  One year we had left the orange Toys’R Us price tag on a few presents.  Gavin spotted them and asked, “Why does Santa get so many presents from Toys ‘R Us?  I thought elves made them at the North Pole.”  Suddenly, I find myself rambling on like a Wall Street analyst, “Well, they had to give the elves a break and so they made a deal with Toys ‘R Us who can manufacture these toys faster and cheaper.  The elves are good at packaging and shipping!”  Then after Christmas once Gavin questioned why we had in the barn the same print of wrapping paper that Santa used.  I scrambled, “We do, do we?  What a coincidence!  You know, I wonder if Santa sometimes arrives at the roof of the house and realizes some of those silly elves forgot to wrap a few presents.  So he looks around the house for paper to wrap at the last minute before putting them under the tree.  Elves are so silly sometimes.  They tell you they are going to do one thing and suddenly they are taking a vacation in Ireland to play with their fairy cousins at the worst possible time!”

After providing so many explanations for Santa I would feel guilty.  I never lie.  I am brutally honest most of the time.  This was so unlike me.  Many parents like my sister who seem so much more straight thinking than I just tell their kids that Santa is like a fairy tale but we could have fun pretending anyway.  It is something every parent in America wonders:  Should they perpetuate the belief in Santa or not?  Should they tell their children what seems to be the truth that Santa does not exist?  We dread the day when they look us in the eye and challenge us on the charade.  We hang our heads.  Their eyes tear up. 

I wonder why do I struggle to keep this hope in Santa alive in my children?  Why did I go along with it in the first place?  Was I just swept along by a culture rampantly and rabidly commercial.  Isn’t Santa just a pawn for retailers to get kids to get us to get them gifts?    For instance, I learned that the bright red coat that we see Santa wearing was invented by Coca-Cola when they wanted to use Santa in one of their commercials a long time ago.  So they made his coat red to match the red Coca-Cola logos.

But, when you look at Santa through a child’s eye, an eye not yet jaded and worn by the advertisements and the hype, Santa is quite wonderful.  Santa’s coming down the chimney and landing in the bed of hot coals was the most catastrophic worry Gavin had about him.  As I scrambled for an explanation I wondered who thought up the idea of Santa coming down the chimney anyway?   It’s an odd idea.  Coming down the chimney is dangerous business, Gavin was right.  The chimney is small, dark, dusty, hot and dangerous.  Why not have Santa come in through the door like normal. Even the window would be better.   How can the man bring gifts to the world through such a difficult aperture with incineration waiting for him?  Why must he gain entry to each family’s living room in a contorted and painful way?  A difficult birth canal. 

Through a child’s eye, though,  think of that ride that Santa takes on his sleigh.  Think of the splendor and power of it.  Like a shaman he rides past the stars and the moon.  The reindeers’ antlers gather the wisdom of the darkness.  The vapor exhaled from their nostrils blow secrets into each child’s heart.  The chimney of course is the vertical reach  of each house up to the heavens.   Like an antennae chimneys wait for a transcendent signal or a sign.  So arrives this great red figure after his cosmic journey.  He can only come down the chimney because it alone was waiting for him thrust up to the sky in the silence of the night.   The great man bearing gifts from afar. 

Isn’t that just a little like Jesus.  I know it seems blasphemous to compare Jesus to Santa Claus, but from this point of view they are not so different.  Jesus too comes from heaven to earth.  Jesus too has to squeeze into the tight darkness of our reality.  It is a dangerous descent.  He could get stuck.  He could burn.  Immanuel is risky business.  But, Immanuel comes none the less bearing gifts of hope.

Rabbi  Hugo Grynn was sent to Auschwitz as a little boy.  In the midst of the concentration camp, in the midst of the death and horror all around them, many Jews held onto whatever shreds of their religious observance they could without drawing the ire of the guards.  One cold winters’ evening, Hugo’s father gathered the family in the barracks.  It was the first night of Chanukah, the Feast of Lights.  The young child watched in horror as his father took the family’s last pad of butter and made a makeshift candle using a string from his ragged clothes.  He then took a match and lit the candle.  “Father, no!”  Hugo cried.  “That butter is our last bit of food!  How will we survive!”  His father replied, “We can live for many days without food.  We cannot live a single minute without hope.  This is the fire of hope.  Never let it go out.  Not here.  Not anywhere.”

Many people would argue that Grynn’s father was living in a fantasy land like that of Santa Clause.  How can hope ever be sustained in such a place as  Auschwtiz with its dark chimneys bellowing smoke of bodies?   Still hope was able to enter despite the fire at the bottom of those chimneys.  Was this a story about nothing more than magic powder being thrown around?  Was this some sort of fabrication on the father’s part?  One could say, yes.   How can God enter such a world and become human without incinerating into flames.   But, Grynn’s father said no.  He believe in believing.  I believe in believing too.  That is why Santa Claus, even Santa Claus, is so important. 

Peter Storey is a United Methodist pastor who helped lead the church’s struggle against Apartheid in South Africa.  He once said, It has been given to only a few of God’s prophets to see the results of their witness.  Moses didn’t.  Jeremiah didn’t.  Nor did some of God’s modern witnesses – peacemakers like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Alobert Luthuli.  Yet they remained true.  They did so because their strength was in God.  They could give themselves wholly to the struggle for real peace, justice and reconciliation because it was God who steeled their determination and God who would not cease to work, even when they could labor no more.  For them it was sufficient to know that they had played their part as brothers and sisters of Jesus, children of God, peacemakers…

Many told these peacemakers that these were just Santa Claus.   Yet they continued to hope confident in the final outcome, even if they never lived to see it.

Christian hope is in the future that God has in store.  Everything we do now is based on that future.  The Christian models himself or herself not upon the many and often abysmal failures of the past that humans have been responsible for.  Rather the Christian models himself on the things promised in the Bible and not yet seen.  Santa wears a jolly red coat trimmed with lush white fur and  a shining black belt, the Christian is robed in garments of salvation and arrayed in righteousness like a bridegroom and bride adorned for their wedding (Isaiah 61). 

God is coming to be with us.  God is squeezing into this small and stubborn reality.  God is coming into a humanity often cruel. This is Jesus.  And he is coming not just to a far away land.  But Jesus is squeezing down into each on of our living rooms, right where we are.  He is coming for each one of us.  No matter how hard our chimneys are to get down and how much sin kindles our fires.  He is real and loaded with gifts. 

So I think it is not so bad believing in Santa Claus if you are a child.  Even though the commercialism has made the powerful meaning of the man practically forgotten.  Let them believe in someone who comes from far away.  Let them believe in someone who bears gifts, and will do anything to get them to us, even climb down chimneys with hot fires below.  Let them dream about the secrets of the stars that this one knows and shares with his reindeers.  Yes, someday they will find out that he doesn’t really exist.  But this one will be replaced by an even  greater gift giver who is real and needs no magic but uses faith, hope and love.  This is Jesus, Immanuel, God with us.