Minutiae vs. Memory

Scripture Lesson: Luke 2: 1-20

Dr. Matthew S. Brown

December 24, 3006

If Scrooge’s ghost of Christmas Past were to disturb your eggnog enhanced slumber, where would that history obsessed apparition take you? Would it be the glow and warmth of a candlelit, poinsettia besotted sanctuary, the spruce of the Chrismon tree competing with the mustiness of the old building for the attention of your nostrils?

Would it be that last Christmas Pageant into which you allowed yourself to be recruited? Your high school freshman face was flush, a combination of nerves and embarrassment as you began your spot lit, slow walk down the long aisle, tugging at the burlap costume that was irritating the acne on your neck? As preschool angels sang their shepherd song, you muttered again and again to yourself, “I can’t believe I’m doing this!”

Would it be stringing popcorn with your mom or eating popcorn with the whole family wrapped in blankets around the sturdy, mahogany encased Magnavox? Maybe Bing and his family were singing holiday favorites while sitting in a sleigh amidst a set covered with artificial snow. Or, was it Ingrid Bergman in a black nun’s habit taking a break from saving St. Mary’s just long enough to try a swing with a baseball bat?

Where would Scrooge’s uninvited apparition take you?

Would it be the memory of ice-skating on a frozen pond glowing in the moonlight or on a rink below the lights of the Rockefeller Center tree?

Would it be the awkwardness and tension of those first moments in the foyer as the frowning in-laws made their way up your sidewalk. After ten years of making the arduous, kids screaming in the back seat, interstate trek for the command Yuletide appearance at your mother-in-law’s, you had put your foot down! We’re not going anywhere this Christmas! If they want to see us, by golly, they can just point that old Buick in our direction!

Well, they came, but they sure weren’t singing Fa La La as they sat and brooded around your lovely Heavenly Ham. It was 63 degrees outside, but if he’d have been invited, Frosty would not have melted at that holiday table.

Would it be the annual neighborhood Holiday gathering of your childhood, the one where you wrestled with the choice of fudge or those curious little green cookies formed from Corn Flakes, melted marshmallow, food coloring, and topped off with a cinnamon drop? I remember choosing the green cookie of fused flakes, thereby eliminating the work and potential parental reproach that goes with picking those nasty walnuts out of the fudge.

Thinking, always thinking.

And speaking of nuts, I’ve never had a chestnut in my whole life, but when Nat King Cole sings about them roasting on an open fire, a flood of Christmas memories rush forth. Some Christmas memories warm your sentimental heart while others just make you shudder.

A tour through our Christmas memories reveals both trauma and treasure and each year we expend a whole lot of energy and experience a whole lot of anxiety as we work to make this the year a treasure is created and a trauma is avoided. I will buy the perfect present, set the perfect table, say the right thing and hold my tongue the rest of the time.

Sometimes our efforts will work and many times they will not. Christmas will be Christmas, the day we celebrate the gift of God to the children who have never been very good at opening it, sharing it, or taking care of it. How many here have had the experience of going to great lengths to acquire the gift the child just had to have, only to find yourself, two hours after it has been opened, picking up its broken pieces or at the least threatening to take it away because of all ruckus raised? Sometimes, you have to wonder if God has any regrets about entrusting us with the gift. I remember seeing a billboard once with the simple assigned quote: “Don’t make me come down there!” - God.

An honest survey of Christian History or an objective observation of contemporary church squabbles and general Christian self-righteousness could make one question the wisdom of God in entrusting us with so wondrous a gift of love as was revealed in Jesus Christ. One could imagine a fed up God uttering the words that most parents have uttered at one time or another. “You know we can put that gift back in that box and take it back to the store if you can’t handle it any better than that!”

But Christmas will be Christmas and our Lord again welcomes us to his holy holiday table. It is an invitation we have not deserved to celebrate a gift we have often neglected and failed to nurture or share. Gratefully, it is a gift beyond our control. As much as we try to tie up our Christmases and our world with pretty little bows with everything arranged according to our tastes and wishes, God refuses to play along, and believe it or not that is part of the grace of Christmas.

The narrator of this night’s sacred story, Luke, tells us that the journey to Bethlehem was not for a family gathering, or a festival, or even a honeymoon. They went because the emperor said they must. “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered… All went to their own towns to be registered.”

The census was an act proclaiming and symbolizing Augustus’s sovereignty over what was understood by the Romans as the civilized world (New Interpreter’s Study Bible). Ironically, however, this demonstration of state sovereignty would be the setting in which God would demonstrate for all history the futility of all human efforts to control. Caesar could make the couple go to Bethlehem, but he couldn’t get in the way of God’s plans to bring into the world a Savior, a messiah, the King of kings.

The story we read on this night and the meal we share this night offer us the opportunity to step back and breathe, if just for a moment. Go ahead, take a deep breathe. Up to the moment you entered those doors there is a good chance that your heart has been racing, your feet have been flying, and your mind has been obsessing – all a part of your effort to control your encounter with Christmas. But Christmas will not be controlled. You expend so much energy and effort seeking to make Christmas right, that you completely miss that which is actually memorable when it comes.

Columnist Anna Quindlen suggested that the “essence of the season lies in figuring out what… is passing minutiae and what is enduring memory.”

Think about it. You stand in long lines at dawn or travel to every retail outlet in the city for the privilege of buying the maddeningly elusive item that will be readily available everywhere in two weeks; and if found purchased and given may be forgotten, discarded, handed down, or lost by the recipient within two years. It’s not the toy, it’s the relationship between giver and recipient that’s essential.

Breathe, and consider what in your experience of this Christmas is passing minutiae and what is the stuff of enduring and cherished memory. Maybe that is something of what Mary was pondering in her heart on that holy night; separating out and casting off the frustrations of the journey, the inconvenience of the accommodations, the incomparable pain of the delivery without even the assistance of a midwife – casting those irritations aside so that she could fully behold the light of life she swaddled in her arms.

Christmas will be Christmas. Stop trying to control it and allow yourself to experience it. Don’t allow the minutiae to obscure what may be a most memorable blessing.

The angels spoke of good news of great joy that will come to all people. In the church office over the past couple of weeks, we’ve had the privilege of watching that joy being spread as members and friends have dropped off gifts for the angel tree project, an annual tradition through which the congregation in partnership with a school provides a Christmas blessing of gifts for families in need.

O, it’s not much of an effort for us to participate. It’s just another name on our gift list. One more thing to do. Out of the abundance which we take for granted, another family experiences a blessing. It’s nice. But I don’t think I understood the significance of it all until my friend Mike Price dropped by to drop off his gift.

Now, Mike’s a busy man, traveling all around to keep a number of Linens and Things stores humming along during this crazy and crucial time of the retail year. And when he’s not managing the flow of comforters, cuisanarts, and colanders, he’s chasing three beautiful little children around the house with Emily.

But Mike’s journey to the church that day was anything but one more item to check off the Christmas to do list. He was truly energized about doing this.

You see, Mike shared with me that many years ago, he was the small boy who answered the door when a family from some church he’d never heard of came bearing Christmas gifts. He knows what it means. Mike’s eyes glowed as he remembered the family giving him a Nerf Football. Any number of thirty or forty something folks here will remember how cool it was when that new product hit the market. Mike said, “It was really something to have a Nerf Football in my neighborhood.”

I’m betting Mike just flat wore that football out. He must have. He later became the high school quarterback. He would never forget the blessing of that gift and he would count it a great privilege to be a part of an effort to give another child that same blessing. Mike knows the difference between the minutiae and the stuff of cherished memory.

In the mall the other day, I heard a couple fussing with one another about something, or more likely, about nothing. Anyway, with a little too much venom in the voice, the wife said to the husband, “Can we just get through Christmas?” It was obvious that the minutiae had taken over and choked out any hopes for cherished memories. It can happen so easily.

Christmas will be Christmas. Stop trying to control it and allow yourself to experience it. Don’t allow the minutiae to obscure what may be a most memorable blessing. For Love has been born today. Amen.

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