Sermon Title: "Holidays, Holy Days, and Hollow Days"
Date: November 29, 2009
Minister: Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

Last Wednesday, on Thanksgiving Eve, I attended the tree lighting ceremony over at Spinnaker Bay.  For at least five years, our Bay Shore Bells have been playing Christmas selections for that occasion.  Everything you see here when the handbell ringers play on Sunday mornings they pack up and set up outside on the greenbelt.  They play between 5:30 and 5:58.  Then, after a countdown to 6:00 p.m., all the trees and the lights on the railings around the dock simultaneously come on.  Some man, perhaps the president of the homeowners’ association, proclaimed, “I now declare the holiday season officially open!”

It was good to know that someone could discern and declare that it is now officially open, even though we on the church worship staff have been working since September on planning it.  And the retailers who were eager to open their stores early on “Black Friday” had to discern which goods to order back at the beginning of this year.

There is another way we in church life know the season is “officially open.”  We recognize it through the beginning of Advent—these four Sundays preceding Christmas—and also the beginning of the Christian liturgical year.  The seasons of Advent and Epiphany were officially set by a church council in the mid-Sixth Century.

There are many customs we observe during these seasons of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany.  However, if we had to choose one medium through which people have tried to convey love during this holiday we’d look no further than the Christmas card. 

Depending on the source, card sales have been anywhere between four and seven billion dollars annually.  Christmas, being the most popular of holidays, provides an enormous market for the card industry.  From Black Friday through the next couple of weeks, the traffic-jammed greeting card aisle at any retailer is only rivaled by the traffic out in the parking lot.  Whether it’s the seriously religious themes or the sacrilegiously humorous variety, customers pore over, ponder and wa1ver in trying to find the perfect box of cards or individual card that puts into words what they cannot pen for themselves.  The sales figures alone express the customer’s attempt to say and do what the psychotherapist Victor Frankl contended was our attempt “to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.”

This is what the apostle Paul does when he pens his own greeting card message.  Just like the messages you send on your cards, Paul’s words are intended to reach his readers’ and listeners’ innermost core of being, their hearts and souls.

It you can imagine today’s epistle lesson as a greeting card, on the front it would say,

“Now we can give thanks to our God for you.” 

Open up the card and he continues: 

“We thank God for the joy we have in his presence in your faith.

prepare the way for us to come to you! 

May the Lord make your love for one another and for all people

grow more and more and become as great as our love for you.” 

(1 Thess. 3:9, 11-12, Good News Bible)

This greeting has more—like a Christmas letter we stuff inside the card.  Paul’s vision, he says, is seasoned with hope, the hope that he and his company of the faithful will eventually return to visit with the brothers and sisters in Thessalonica.  This is a living hope that’s rooted in the providence of God.  It’s a hope that’s the hallmark of Paul’s vision:  he has complete confidence in God’s time and God’s calendar.

No wonder, then, that Paul’s words of encouragement, offered in the midst of hardship when followers were persecuted for following Christ, travel deeply into the hearts of friends in Thessalonica.  This is the same encouragement people need today in the midst of hardship.  Because these holy days, these holidays, are for many hollow days.

The dictionary defines “hollow” as without substance, worth or character…a cavity, hole or space, a void.  Psychologists call the phenomenon Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD.  For years we simply called it the Winter Blues.  Now SAD is recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a subtype of a major depressive episode.

SAD is linked to issue of light and length of days.  It occurs most frequently in these darkest and shortest days of the winter, not because of the temperature or how many times you’ve heard Jingle Bells at the mall.

It seems that no other holiday can elicit feelings of sadness and loneliness like the Christmas season.  All five human senses go into overdrive during December.  It might be a favorite carol sung here in church;  the smell of a particular food item or pine;  the sight of decorations; the memory of a loved one that was always involved in decorating the tree or baking a specialty or sitting at a particular place at the table;  exhaustion from shopping or sickness that can take a terrible grip on a person’s emotions, feelings or attitude.  From sadness to anger, people can get so fed up with living out the stereotype of the “perfect Christmas” that they want to escape the entire experience.

Given our culture’s eager embrace of all that is Christmas and its consumerist love affair with the season, what might the church do these days of the Advent season leading up to Christmas in helping people avoid the hollowness of the holidays?

Advent is a time to recover the theology of the Incarnation—God entering human time in the person of Jesus.  The emphasis on family and presents, caroling and chocolate—both hot and See’s—is all fine and good.  But listening to the meditations on the Advent candle each Sunday, and/or taking part in a family Advent ritual as you will see provided after worship in the Concert Hall, can help people to rediscover that this Christmas season, at the heart of it, is so much more than our culture’s secular celebration of Christmas.

These holidays, when viewed and experienced as holy days, help people to savor the Savior’s presence in the world.  When people dread these days, it’s because of feelings of emptiness, exhaustion or hollowness.  One pastor, Robert Hardy put it thus:  “I would rather focus on the power of a ministry of ‘presence’ [as in Christ being present with us] than a ministry of ‘presents’ [as in gifts].”

The coming month of Advent should be a hallowed time, not a hollow time.  These are the days to bring to folks the God whose Son was born to live, days to give hope for a future that rests in God, a future whose seeds are planted in the present situations we face in our everyday lives.

These holy days of Advent leading to Christmas are days to come to church to sing the great Advent hymns of preparation and the Christmas carols proclaiming the God who lives in our now and who invites all people to live in them fully.

This is what Paul meant when he said, “We thank [God] for the joy we have in his presence because of you.”  The key word in Paul’s greeting is “presence.”  God always lives in the present.  God is love.  God is here and now.  Christmas is not just an observance of an historic event that took place 2,000 years ago.  God is… God lives in the present situations of people, of all people, of you and me, of the person sitting next to you and those who live with you.

When people refuse, or neglect, to find God in their present, in their now, their days become hollow days, not hallowed days.  That’s why Paul cared enough to send the very best greeting he could send.

Still, we’ve got to be careful.  The church’s task is to do more than create a warm and cozy, lush and lovely candlelight experience for you on Christmas Eve.  We can do this by paying special attention to those who are vulnerable.  Send Christmas cards, make phone calls, not just to those on your regular list, but do something that will express to people that we’re aware that they lost a loved one during the holidays, or that this is their first Christmas without a beloved family member, or that they may be alone yet again this Christmas, or that they’re separated by thousands of miles from a family they love, or a child in Iraq or Afghanistan. 

The spiritually sound thing the church can do is to reach out this Advent and Christmas season to the lost, lonely, forgotten, abused and oppressed people who are within sight of us each and every day.  And, it has to be done genuinely with compassion and not with condescension.

The best way Christians can reach out to all people this Christmas—and I know this may sound a little silly—is to be real, live greeting cards!  Find people where they are in life, not where you think they ought to be.  Bring to people’s lives a smile, a greeting, a sense that they are recognized and valued, no matter who they are.  Greet the valet with a smile and a hello when you hand over your car keys.  Listen for the waitress’ name and call her by it when she serves you.  Say hello to the homeless person on the street even if you can’t help them.  Put at least a dollar in every time you pass a Salvation Army kettle.  It helps the agency, and gives a boost to the bell-ringer.

Wherever believers go this season, they are the living greeting cards God sends to all people.  Jesus, the reason for the season, was God’s ultimate, consummate greeting to the world of God’s love and grace. 

If we become living greeting cards, we express to people who feel alone that they are not alone.

Living greeting cards show people that they are loved.

Living greeting cards work to release people from oppression and injustice in a world that’s not always fair and just.

Living greeting cards bring strength and encouragement to the weak and discouraged.

Care enough to sent the very best this Advent and Christmas.  Be God’s living greeting card this season.

 

(Sermon inspired by the sermon, “The Hollow Days,”

Homiletics, December 3, 2006, pp. 36-41.)