“What Do You Want for Christmas?”

Christmas Eve Service

December 24, 2006, 7 pm 

 Scripture Reading:  Luke 2:1-20

Rev. Dr. Carol  L. Kerr

 Blue Point Congregational Church

What do you want for Christmas?  That is a question we hear again and again during the Christmas season.  The youngest of children get asked this question while sitting on Santa’s knee at the mall.  “Well little girl, what do you want for Christmas?”  Parents ask their kids this, “Johnny what do you want for Christmas?”

 Lists are written.

Many are sent straight away to the North Pole.  

Many are also held in reserve by the parents.

Dave and I have our kids write out lists so we can keep track of it all.   Lately they have instructions not only what to buy, but what not to buy.  This year after requesting certain video games there was an attached warning “Do not be scammed into getting strategy guides and stupid accessories!”   Food requests such as a case of root beer are accompanied with the contingency that they are to be drunk unless by permission!  Recently our children also let us know, that they do not want anything we think is “educational” like the boy electronic set we bought last year.  We in turn scare them by threatening to go around the house and find all the unused education gifts of Christmas's past and rewrapping them to give again!

What do you want for Christmas!  Children are asked this but so are adults.  We adults and parents ask each other.  The timing of when this question is asked I think as a counselor tells a lot about who the person.   For instance, how many people here ask this question before Thanksgiving?  How many start asking it after Thanksgiving?  Who has asked the question in July?  I know a mother of a friend of mine, she asks people what they want for next year’s Christmas the day after this year’s Christmas so she can take advantage of the after Christmas 70% off sales.  Of course, there are the ones who ask the question the week before Christmas.  Is anyone brave enough to raise their hand that they do this?  Yesterday?  If you don’t raise your hand that’s ok.  (But, we know you are out there!)

Of course if you want to see desperation, go to L.L. Bean at about 10pm Christmas Eve.   I once was the minister at the Freeport Church.  They have an early Christmas eve service at 8pm  and then they traditionally had an 11 pm service.  I had nothing to do between these two services and so went to L.L. Bean.  There I saw a bunch of pick up trucks in the parking lot.  Inside were roving groups of men, two or three together.  They were looking around and saying in thick Maine accents “What do you think she wants this year?  What did I get her last year?  Do you remember?”

What do you want for Christmas?  Kids are great at answering this question. .   As soon as toy catalogs arrive in the mail (Legos, Discover, Scholastic, Toys R Us), kids will go through and circle everything they want.  Which often ends up to be just about everything on the page. 

However, I have found that the older I get the more I am stumped.  It gets harder for me to come up with an answer, “What do I want for Christmas?”  My mind goes blank like the branches on the trees.  I wonder to myself, is this some kind of a lack of imagination that age brings on?  A kind of creeping Christmas wish Alzheimer’s?  On the other hand, I wonder, maybe it is because I have been too tired with the responsibilities of Christmas preparations that I just can’t think.  Dave and I joke with each other saying the problem is that as we get older what we want for Christmas gets outlandishly expensive.  So,  we will amend our questions to, “What do you want for Christmas under $10,000?” 

What do you want for Christmas?  It is a question that is asked over and over again.  Surely the people asking might be checking us off their list.  Or, they might not even listen to what we say.  Gloves, another tie, a book?  No matter how overused, I think it is in fact the most important question we can ask the Christmas season.  In fact,  it can be a soul-piercing question.  The problem is not that what we wish for is too big, but what we wish for is too small.  Too many of us live with our hopes scaled down.  It is much too small even if Dave and I do ask for presents over $100,000 dollars.  This is because the question – “What do you want for Christmas?” -  when taken to its ultimate conclusion is this question:  What do you want out of life that if it happened you could say, “Now I could die in peace; I could die happy today?”  What do you really really want for Christmas?  What would that be?

The problem is that most of us do not really know the answer to that question.  You want to write a book?  That’s not it.  You want to make a lot of money?  You won’t be happy.   There is a web site called Post Secret.  Have you ever gone to it?  There a person can post there deepest secret along with a post card that visually expresses how they feel.  The irony is that even though it is their deepest secret, and the ones closest to them do not know they have it, they post it on the web for the world to read.  Post Secret is an amazing and moving web site to visit.  

When you read it it soon becomes apparent that people don’t even know what would console them.  They wish for something, but even as they are wishing it, they know it won’t work, won’t do the trick.  For instance,

* “After I shoot my gun I feel strong and accomplished and in control…for  about an hour.” 

* “I don’t know what I did to lose your friendship, but not being able to talk to you, or even send you this Christmas card is killing me.”

* “Sometimes I wish I could be as stupid, privileged and shallow as the kids on Laguna Beach.”

* “I don’t know how to tell my brother that I need him right now, more than ever.  We haven’t talked in so long.  I still love you, brother.  (Please just call….plain and simple)

Rev. Mark Buchanan’s father died in 1996.  His mother began to send him and his sister his personal effects, and among them was a letter.  It was a letter his dad wrote to his mother as a traveling salesman.  Then he spent a lot of time out on the lonely road, eating in smoky diners, sleeping by himself in roadside motels.  He wrote this letter in 1967 from the Stockdale Motel in Grand Prairie, Alberta.  He says:

I’ve lived so long in anticipation of something breaking for us, but if something ever did, my mind would break with it and I would wind up my illustrious career cutting out paper dolls.  The impetus of constant failure has propelled me to the verge of idiocy already.  The knowledge of my educational and personal limitations has all but destroyed my self-confidence and has made me, I’m afraid, very negative. 

This letter, these secrets are heart breaking.  People don’t even know what to wish for.  They don’t know what will console them.  They have no idea what could satisfy them so that they could say, “I could die now and it would be o.k.” 

That is why we have come here tonight. We have come to find the answer to the question “What do you want for Christmas.”  We come for the answer to this question which we cannot answer on our own – we are too limited, our imaginations are too small.

The prophet Isaiah says, “The people who walk in darkness have seen a great light.  On those who live in shadows, on them God’s light has shone.”  And in the dark of a stable in the town of Bethlehem, the light is given to the world.    There is nothing else big enough.  There is no hope big enough.  There is no consolation big enough – except this small babe born unto us. 

It is this child that teaches us that there is no wish we can have for the future that is not already hidden in the present.  We only have to look at the present through the lens of  love to see it.  I would like to read to you another letter which was written by Fra Giovanni to Contessina, Pont ‘Assieve about what she really wanted for Christmas.  He writes that she already has it, if she only learns to take it.   It is written on Eve 1513.  (SEE INSERT)

I salute you.

Would that the peace of heaven might reach you through the things of earth.  There is nothing I can give you which you have not.

But there is much, very much, that while I cannot give, you can take.  No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today.  Take heaven.

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant.  Take peace.

The gloom of the world is but a shadow, behind it, yet within our reach is joy.  Take joy.

There is radiance and glory in the darkness could we but see, and to see we have only to look.  I beseech you to look.  Life is so generous a giver but we judging its gifts by its covering cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard.  Remove the covering and you find beneath it a living splendor woven of love by wisdom with power.  Life is so full of meaning and of purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering that you will find that earth but cloaks your heaven.

And so this Christmas time, I greet you.  Not quite as the world sends greetings.  But with profound esteem and with prayer that for you now and forever the day breaks and the shadows flee away. 

What do you want for Christmas?  The Christ child will gives it to you and to all of us, we have to simply take it - heaven, peace, and joy.  In this child, all the intimate hopes you’ve ever had and all the cosmic yearning there has ever been come together.  Don’t you want something as big as that?  Don’t you want to live with that kind of holy purpose?    In the winter light a red cardinal appears among the barren branches.   Miracles flair.  What do you want for Christmas?  The only answer to that question is:  Jesus the Christ.