Treasuring The Words

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams: Christmas Eve 2013

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 2

All around this great land of ours, Christmas trees are glowing in bay windows and the corners of rec rooms, sparkling with the delightful radiance of a hundred billion twinkling LEDs.

Underneath that warm radiance, resting silent and bewrapped, a pile of presents roughly the size of Wisconsin, one that will be mysteriously added to overnight until the mass of gifts becomes so large it seems to stretch the boundaries of time and space itself, creating a shiny seasonally wrapped wormhole that extends into another dimension, a parallel universe made entirely of tinsel.

And in that impossible pile of presents, there are two conundrums.

First, every one of them has been picked out with care, and every one of them is precious, but in the Christmas morning feeding frenzy, that sense of connection that a gift creates between giver and recipient sometimes gets rushed on by.  It’s hard to know whether or not that sense of treasure extends for more than four seconds.  

“Ohlookit’smyveryfavoritethingever” (toss) 

“Ohlookit’smyveryfavoritethingever” (toss) 

“Ohlookit’smyveryfavoritethingever” (toss)

And second, it’s hard in this season to look at those boxes and wonder just where all that stuff is going to go.  Buying a second home seems sometimes to be the only option but, really, covering one mortgage is enough.  Maybe we can just curl up and live on top of our piles of presents, like Smaug nestled on his gold.

As the years have gone by, and my children have grown and grown and grown, the gifts of the past have piled up on top of one another, treasure upon forgotten  treasure, until the pressure of all of those piled up treasures may actually have started turning some of those plastic toys back into fossil fuels.

And so in preparation for this season, they and I will go through the strata of their rooms and storage bins like archeologists on a dig.  Mingled in with the long abandoned Leap Pads and battery-less doodads, the gifts and trinkets from seasons past, it is amazing how much of that stuff no longer matters, and can be given away or recycled.  

But we’ll find other things, things that are genuinely treasures.  These are the objects we pause over and find ourselves spending time with.  Because digging through mess, you always find forgotten treasures that make you linger, and only very rarely are they the sparkly and expensive gifts from years past.  Some of them are fondly remembered toys.  Most of the things that matter, though, are different.

The things that matter are made of humbler stuff.  They are little books filled with bright crayon drawings done in the hand of a little boy who has vanished, replaced by a teen who now towers over me.   They are stories and doodles in old kindergarten composition books, words that speak in voices long passed.  And coming across those old words written in a small and uncertain hand, you sigh that they grow up so fast, and you put those little bits of paper into the keeper pile.

Those are precious words, words to treasure, even though their market value comes nowhere near to that of a PS4.  Words can be like that, as we carry them with us through life, particularly those words that tell us the story of important things.

Here in the story of Christmas that Luke tells us every year, it is words that are the treasure of the season.  There are no wise men in this telling of the story, no gold and frankincense and myrrh.  That’s how dear old uncle Matthew’s Gospel tells it.

For Luke, though, there are not gifts brought, at least not the sort of gifts we’re used to on Christmas.  The shepherds who arrive aren’t the kind of folks who’d have been able to manage much of a gift anyway.  For all of our warm fuzzy images of the life of a shepherd, they lived a day-to-day subsistence, just trying to make it to the next meal.  It was not an easy life, and it was not a job that got any respect.  

And yet as Luke tells it to us, it was to these struggling, just barely making it souls that a message was brought, a simple word to be carried to Mary and Joseph, the parents of a tiny newborn forced to live out in the barn, themselves living just barely on the edge of making it.  Those words they bore are pretty much the only possessions they had to their names, but they were treasures nonetheless.

The message brought to them was one that changed them, that told them that something important and transforming was about to take place.  The message they bore was one of an old promise fulfilled, one that goes deep back to the stories told by the prophets.  

In the clutter of this season, in the mess and rush of it, it’s easy for us to lose sight of the significant and actual treasures that come at this time of year.  We rush along, and if we’re moving as quickly as we feel obligated to move, we lose time to reflect over the time we are given with one another.  As gifts pass between loved ones tonight or tomorrow, remember to take time to ponder the blessings of family and friendship that lie behind those gifts.  

That’s why we stop for a moment, and slow down this evening, and catch our breaths.  We remember that Mary received those strange and marvelous words for the treasure that they were.  And in the great groaning table of this season, we remember that she gave herself time to linger over them, to let them settle into her.

In that story, of a little child, we have an example of the kind of humble gift that really does matter.  It’s the gift of a life that would turned over completely to the cause of love and justice in the world.  In that life, so new and so precious, there is hope for restoration and forgiveness and mercy, of a message of Good News, offered up to all. 

It’s the kind of message that changes how we understand ourselves and our world, the kind of words that can make the world anew if we give ourselves the time and the focus to let them settle in to us.

Let that treasure rest in your heart.  Give yourself time to ponder it, time to appreciate it, time to set it aside as a precious thing. 

May it be a Merry Christmas, for you and for me, AMEN.