“WE NEED A LITTLE CHRISTMAS”
A Central Unitarian Church Sermon
Charles O’Reilly
Sunday, December 25, 2016
About six weeks ago, the Rev. David Horst, our minister, got in touch with me about my role as Worship Associate for the service on November 13. That service was coming up five days after the presidential election, and David wanted to make sure that he and I were on the same page as far as dealing with a sensitive issue.
In the course of our conversation, David said, "Have you ever thought of doing a sermon here?" I mentioned that I had done a few, most recently in April 2013, something called "Why Religion Will Survive the Internet", but that time commitments had gotten in the way of my doing another. I didn’t say it then, but I also admit to not always having a sermon in me. After all, I’m not a professional preacher, so it’s not incumbent on me to come up with 20 minutes of material every week.
Later on, David said, "You’re signed up to do another service this fall, right?" I told him, "Actually, it’s not really until winter, but I took the service on December 25." That’s when he dropped the bomb: "Well, I hope this doesn’t discourage you, but I’m not going to be here that day." I stared at him, as well as you can stare at someone over the phone, and said, "I knew you were leading up to something! I guess that means I have to come up with a sermon now."
Actually, I think David knew that I had given the occasional sermon here in the past, and so he may well have thought I might be receptive to the idea of doing one today. I thank him for giving me the opportunity and putting his trust in me this morning.
And so, as John Lennon put it, this is Christmas. Last night, we gathered here as a much larger community, and, as David put it, we told the old stories and sang the old songs. There are very good reasons for sticking with that ritual, lighting the candles, singing "Silent Night", greeting our friends from the congregation, wishing them the merriest of seasons, and then going off to celebrate with our own families or friends. Then we get up this morning, perhaps with our children excitedly tugging at us to get up and find what Santa has left under the tree, perhaps still hung over from last night’s revelry, or perhaps just acknowledging the sunrise and being thankful for another day.
(Last night, when I got home from visiting some friends, I looked up at the sky and saw Orion, the Hunter, staring back down at me – just as he does every winter. So maybe there is still some order in this world.)
Christmas is, indeed, a special holiday. It has transcended religion to be celebrated in many sectors of the world. It is as much a secular holiday as it is a religious one. Government offices and most banks will be closed tomorrow. Alternate-side parking rules will be suspended. Aside from essential services, most people will get the day off. (Retail is the exception this year, of course, given that the 25th is on a Sunday. The stores will be absolutely mobbed tomorrow. You won’t catch me anywhere near a mall, thank you very much.)
I believe that Christmas is so important to all of us because we need it. The title of this sermon is "We Need a Little Christmas," and yes, I was thinking of the song when I came up with it. Of course, I had to look up the history of the song, and I was stunned to find out that we’ve only been singing it for fifty years. I’m 55, so I’ve been hearing the song on the radio for essentially my whole life. But it was only written in 1966 – the same year that brought us the Monkees’ "I’m a Believer", the Beach Boys’ "Good Vibrations", and the Beatles’ "Yellow Submarine."
If you’re a musical theater buff, you’ll have to pardon me while I work through this exposition. My mother was the theater fan in our house. She was an elementary education major at Fordham University in the early 1950s, but she always liked music and theater, and so she took a theater elective along with her friend Connie from Washington Heights, who became the matron of honor at my mother’s wedding and, later, my godmother. Among the folks in their section was a guy named Alan Alda, who went on to have a modicum of success on stage and screen. But I digress. My mother was the one who insisted on having WNEW on the radio. That’s WNEW-AM, the one that played all the standards from stage and screen and The Great American Songbook. She would have known the history I’m about to present. If you do, too, then please bear with me, because I found this fascinating.
"We Need a Little Christmas" was written for the musical "Mame", which opened in 1966 with Angela Lansbury in the title role of Auntie Mame. (The part was supposedly written for Judy Garland, but her handlers said she was too far gone by then to handle eight performances a week.) Then Lucille Ball played her in the movie version a few years later. Auntie Mame came of age in the Roaring Twenties as a well-to-do lady who could afford to live the bohemian life and hang out in arty circles. But then her brother died, and his ten-year-old son Patrick – her nephew – became her ward. Would this stop our Mame? Hell no. Mame tells him, "Life is a banquet, and most poor SOB’s are starving to death."
Indeed, that was the reality of the late 1920s (and it’s echoed to a lesser extent in 2016). The One Percent were really well-to-do, while the rest of us were muddling along. Now I remember my mother, who was born in 1931, telling me that while she was raised during the Great Depression, she never found herself wanting. It helped that her father always had a job; he was a Teamster and deliveries had to be made. It was the folks who had made millions during the speculative bubble of the late 1920s but then lost everything in the 1929 stock market crash who started jumping out windows.
Mame lost her fortune too, and had to go to work for the first time in her life – and you can imagine how that worked out. But she was incorrigible, and a month after the crash, she decided that she, her servants, and Patrick all "need a little Christmas now" to cheer them up. Patrick sings, "But, Auntie Mame, it’s one week past Thanksgiving Day now!" In other words, it was too early for Christmas. The heck with that, Mame replies. Put up the stockings, break out the holly, start singing carols – it’s past time for Christmas!
(Never mind that she was doing this a week after Thanksgiving and it seemed like a radical idea at the time. Now, of course, we’re in the thick of the season by then. I recall that by 1966, Santa Claus was arriving at the Garden State Plaza on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. And now some stores have Trim-a-Tree sections out in September. I think it was the late 1960s when a Peanuts cartoon contemplated Charlie Brown going to the store looking for a Halloween costume on October 30. Charlie Brown came back saying, "Are you kidding? They were busy putting up Christmas decorations!")
The setting of "We Need a Little Christmas" also explains why at least one recording of the song that I remember hearing ends with an orchestral quote from "(There’ll Be) A Hot Time in the Old Town (Tonight)". Funny thing, I couldn’t find that version anywhere when I looked for it on the Internet a couple weeks ago. It would make sense, though, as "Hot Time" was written in 1896, and Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders used it during the Spanish-American War as a marching song. It would have fit right in with Mame’s flamboyant spirit.
There’s also a significant line in Jerry Herman’s wonderful lyric that I didn’t get until I read up on the musical. Mame sings, "For I’ve grown a little leaner, grown a little colder, grown a little sadder, grown a little older." Knowing the context of the musical, and the book and stage play from which it derives, it fits in perfectly.
But why, exactly, do we need a little Christmas? We’re talking about a holiday that was derived from a Roman winter festival. That celebration, in turn, was derived from solstice observances that likely predate recorded history. The Christian church turned it into a commemoration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, whom they venerate as the Messiah. What makes that so important?
Strip away the bacchanalian history of Saturnalia and the religious overtones that the Church imposed on Christmas, and you’re left with a celebration of the light – the same thing we’re celebrating with the start of Hanukkah today. It’s a basic human impulse. The days were getting shorter and shorter, but since December 7, sunset has been coming a wee bit later in the evening here in the northern hemisphere. And since the solstice on Wednesday, the overall length of daylight has increased infinitesimally. We’ve been through the dark, but light always prevails – and that calls for a celebration.
Many of us gathered here this morning recognize that we’ve been through a dark period, especially as far as our political views are concerned. And depending on the events of the next several years, we could be in a darker place for a while. But just as the sun inevitably begins its northward journey, we look for the light and we find it within ourselves and shine it brightly for the world to see.
For me, the path that led to this sanctuary began in the last week of 1981, when I stopped attending Catholic Mass. I didn’t make a Christmas service at all that year. Besides being the most wonderful time of the year, the solemnity of Christmas is a holy day of obligation in the Catholic Church. You’re supposed to attend Mass at Christmas and Easter at the very least. But I didn’t get there on Christmas – and I never went back. To this day, I’ve only returned for the occasional wedding or funeral.
Now this led me to a crisis of faith. God didn’t smite me with a thunderbolt because I broke a cardinal rule. So what other rules are artificial? What beliefs can I set aside? Effectively, I spent the next four years in the desert. Finally, on the night before Easter in 1986, I opened my journal – which, thanks to our friends Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, had migrated to electronic form – and started typing a new entry, which I titled "On God or the Lack Thereof." It was my first crude effort to build my own theology. The key sentence in that document was, "Organized religion is organized superstition." But I also admitted to still having a love for Jesus, one I celebrated in a Summer Services sermon I gave here 13 years ago entitled, "I Love Jesus, Whether He Existed or Not." I continued in that 1986 journal entry:
"My life is guided by a pressing need to love my fellow man. I’m trying to be a caring, loving, selfless human being, to the best of my ability. Which is exactly what Moses was looking for when he came down from the mountain. I don’t need to be superstitious and ‘worship’ a God who was a figment of someone’s imagination 4000 years ago – and I’m certainly not going to be a hypocrite and show up in church one or two or 52 or 365 times a year. I’ve got to continue to devote my life to others. And I’m certainly not going to deny those others the right to practice whatever religion they choose. And I’m certainly not abandoning Christmas – the greatest feast of love this world has."
It took me another fourteen years to recognize that even then, in 1986, I was a Unitarian Universalist and I didn’t know it. Finally, in February 2000, I was introduced to this congregation. I showed up, and it took roughly one service for me to know I had found my spiritual home, one that gives me the freedom to be the believer I need to be and put those beliefs into action.
Many of us think Christmas in its current form celebrates commercialism at its worst, but it really celebrates Jesus, a man who preached unconditional love. The sick, the imprisoned, the foreigner – he loved them all and made sure they knew that the grace of the God of his understanding was with them as well. And that needs to be our takeaway from Christmas. Love – the love Jesus and other visionaries showed us, love for no other reason but the sake of being – is the spirit of this church. Our mission, beyond becoming our best selves, is to minister to each other in love, and then to go out and serve the greater community. We are celebrating the gift of presence this month, and it’s on each of us to be present for ourselves, for each other, and for the world. If it’s been a long time since we’ve felt "good-neighbor-y", it’s on us to grab that spirit and run with it.
When Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge awakens from his Christmas Eve nightmare, he is a changed man. He vows to keep Christmas in his heart the year round. That’s what we need to do. There will be setbacks in the public arena. There will be troubles in our personal lives. As they say, life happens. But if we keep our mission in mind, our lives and the lives of those around us will be that much brighter. The spirit of Christmas is, or at least should be, unquenchable. As the song from the musical "Rent" reminds us, there are 525,600 minutes in a year, and it doesn’t matter which of those minutes we’re in: we need a little Christmas right this very minute.