“The Reason for the Season”

Palm Sunday

April 9,2006

Scripture Reading:    Mark 11:1-11

Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr 

Blue Point Congregational Church 

“The reason for the season” -   Remember that slogan? -  “The reason for the season.”   It is used at Christmas suggesting that we stop our frantic activity of shopping, and partying, and cookie making, and think about the true meaning of the season.  Many sermons are preached on remembering the reason for the season.  My dog tenaciously holds onto any stick I try to take away from it.  The harder I pull, the harder my dog pulls.  Ministers are like that around Christmas.  The more commercialism encroaches on the holiday the harder we bite down on the reason for the season and won’t let them take it from us.  Sometimes I can drag my dog around the yard and he still won’t let go.

It is hard to do, hang on to the true meaning of Christmas.  Often no matter how much we try we still get inundated with the crazy rush of it all.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the Christmas holiday.  I have a silly part of me that loves Santa Claus, cookies, bubble lights on the tree.  But, still there is the feeling after the presents are opened and the meal is eaten and we are about to take a long awaited nap, that we have missed the reason for the season.  We chewed through the whole stick amazingly fast.  There is some disappointment  and vague guilt.  Did I miss it?  Did I miss the reason for the season?  Did all that commercialism win out?  I try to think, maybe I caught it a bit in the church service, or the time I put $10 in the Salvation army can.     Although those things were good, something always seems to be missing. 

Christmas was four months ago.  It seems like another world from today doesn’t it?  But it was only now that I realized why we have such a hard time capturing the reason for the season back then.  I dare say it is not entirely the fault of commercialism and all the hype.  The more I think about it the core of the problem is entirely different.  The problem is that the meaning of Christmas cannot be found in Christmas at all.  This is because the meaning of Christmas can only be found in Easter.  Easter is the reason for the season.  The manger is not the reason for the season, nor are the angles singing “Gloria,” nor are the three kings bearing gifts and the star which guides them.  It is the death and resurrection of Christ that arches back and gives depth and profound purpose to the birth of Christ.   My dogs chew on a sticks that drop from an enormous and ancient maple tree in our yard.   

In a few minutes we will be having a congregational reading where the familiar Christmas passages are set side by side with passages for Holy Week.   The meaning of Christmas suddenly gains intensity and power next to them.  The tenderness, joy, poverty and love of the Christmas season is only now fully understood.  For instance, the people around Jesus who admired him so much at his birth became the people who shouted crucify him!  The kiss of his mother Mary is mirrored by the kiss of his betrayer Judas.  The jealousy of Herod who tried to the trap the three wise men into telling him where Jesus was born fore shadows the deadly actions of Pilot who ordered Jesus and not Barrabus to be executed.  Angels appeared announcing good new of great joy in contrast to scoffers pacing back and forth underneath the cross of Jesus taunting him, “He saved others, let him save himself.”  He was wrapped in swaddling clothes at the beginning and wrapped in a linen shroud at the end.  Jesus who is a new born babe is wonderful.   But nothing compared to the mighty, everlasting, alpha and omega, Prince of peace who is the resurrected Christ.

Merry Easter?  If Easter is the reason for the season of Christmas, people outside our faith often wonder and think that we have it wrong.  They wonder why we spend so much time and money on Christmas and relatively little time on Easter.  One Jewish man commented to a minister:

Looking at the Christmas thing as a man raised in a Jewish home, the big celebration in Christianity should be Easter.  No Easter, no Christianity.  So all the focus on Christmas, at least to me, seems misdirected.

 

Why Christians don’t whoop it up more at Easter is a mystery to me.  How inspirational!  How joyful!  That is the time to toast each other, lay gifts, attend worship services, pack in the rich food.  Something really substantial and holy to remember.

However, when you think about it, how can it be any other way?  Can you imagine the mall piping in background music of “Sacred Head Now Wounded” or “Were You There When they Crucified the Lord?”  Oh, that would really get people in the shopping mood!  Are children suppose to stand in line for something other than the Easter Rabbit?   What are we suppose to do instead?  Have them scale a life size cross like a rock wall, with a man dressed up in a costume of a Roman Solder holding onto belaying ropes for safety so the mall won’t get sued? 

Sure we celebrate Easter with our kids.  But most of our traditions are folklore such as colored eggs and the Easter bunny.  In a way, that is how it should be.  Easter is not really kids stuff.  It’s pretty bleak trying to tell a young child how Christ died which you have to do in order to have the resurrection make any sense.  You can’t just say,

“Oh we are so happy Jesus got resurrected today!”

“What’s resurrection Mommy?” 

“Oh, that is when someone comes back after they died!”

“Did Jesus die?”

“Yes, he did.”

  “How did he die?...”

 “Well, honey he was crucified.”

  “What is crucified?”

  “Not good, honey.”

  “Jesus wasn’t good?”

 “No, Jesus was good, but the other people were not good.  Crucified was when people are nailed onto…”

I mean what can you say to a kid at that point.  You have gone way beyond any recommendations for G or PG or PG 13.  You are into R ratings because of the violence and horror.  It is troubling for kids when in the C.S. Lewis’s children book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Aslan gets sacrificed on the stone table by the white witch.  A lot of young kids can’t handle it.  Christmas is a much better holiday to get hyped up about. 

Christmas is about the universe giving birth.  Easter is about the universe bearing witness.  Kids can understand new born babies and giving birth.  Kids cannot understand bearing witness.  They simply don’t have enough experience.  After all, there are situations that we adults don’t understand entirely.  Why do bad things happen?  Read the newspaper any day any time.  This week Jill Carroll arrives home safely.  But what about all the other hostages who are still held captive or worse still the ones that have been beheaded?  Then there is Enron and all those hard working people who lost their life savings.  Then Moussaoui who taunts the family of the victims of 9/11.  Always, there are more people killed in Iraq. 

A German pastor wrote a play.  In it groups of people are waiting for the last judgment.  One group is a band of Jews, a sect that has know little but religious, social, and political persecution throughout history – including Nazi extermination camps.  They demand, what right does God have to pass judgment on them?  Especially a God who dwells eternally in a secure heaven. 

Then there is a group of American blacks.  They wonder what authority God has who has never experienced the misfortune of people.  Who has never known the squalor and depths of human degradation to which they were subjected in the holds of slave ships.

A third group is composed of people who were the butt of jokes and sneers.

There are hundreds of groups scattered across the plain, the poor, the afflicted, the maltreated.   Each group challenges God.  What right does God have to pass judgment on them?  People in horrible pain from disease, people suffered from Hiroshima, a blind mute…

All these groups finally get together and read their conclusions to God.  They determine, in order for you, God, to judge us, you must be born a Jew, the circumstances of your birth must be questionable, you must be misunderstood by everyone, insulted, mocked by your enemies, betrayed by your friends, you must be persecuted, beaten, and finally murdered in the most public and humiliating fashion.

Then a brilliant, dazzling light illuminates the entire plain.  One by one those who have passed judgment on God fall silent.  For emblazoned high in the heavens for the whole world to see is the signature of Jesus Christ.  It says, “I have served my sentence.”

Easter is the universe bearing witness to the suffering of humankind.  It is God coming down to us so God knows what it feels like to be us.  Christ walks our walk.  Christ knows what it is like to be in our shoes.  Christ knows what it is like to be us because Christ was one of us.  It is not an impersonal universe ruled by an impersonal God.  Through Christ God says “I care.  I really care.” 

Frederica Mathews-Green writes:

Easter tells us of something children can’t understand, because it addresses things they don’t yet have to know:  The pain, the loneliness, and the hovering fear of meaninglessness, humans inhumanity to each other.  Yet right smack in the middle of it we find Jesus, going through it with us, and present to us in ways we cannot understand, much less explain to children.  Jesus, vibrant and full of life, and compassion that transforms suffering and integrates it into illumination of God and higher life. 

The Christmas season starts at the beginning of Advent.  Throughout the season there is a steady increase of activity – partying, traveling, backing food, partying more, more food, presents, spending, wrapping, decorating.  Easter starts at the beginning of Lent.  Instead of increasing the pace we slow up,  pair down, and give up things.  Christmas is filled with the sound of carols.  Twinkling lights are hung everywhere, on the tree, outside in our lawn, in our windows.   Most of all, Christmas Eve our service is a candle lighting service.  At the end the whole sanctuary is filled with the warmth of these candles, everyone holding one, a glow creates a halo around the congregation.  Holy Week culminates in our Maundy Thursday service in which silently the candles are snuffed out one by one.  Preparing for Easter we give up on the candles entirely.    Instead, we wait for the great light that rises.   It rises without partying, without singing, without food, and presents, without any effort that humans possibly summon.  A Christmas candles held next to the Sun are consumed by its brilliance. ---The universe bears witness.