Living Christmas

A sermon preached at St. Francis by the Lake Episcopal Church, Canyon Lake, TX.
The lectionary readings for Christmas can be found here.

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Merry Christmas! Having grown up in a Christian denomination that didn’t use any type of liturgical calendar, the song The Twelve Days of Christmas always confused me. And to add to my confusion, when my dad was stationed in Germany, my mom adopted the use of an Advent Calendar, the kind with the 24 little doors that is used to count down the days from December 1 until Christmas, and so the twelve and the 24 never made sense to me.

That is until as a young adult I found the Episcopal church and learned that Advent and Christmas are two different seasons in the church year and the twelve days starts on Christmas Day. And then I learned that the song isn’t just nonsense about a romance between a shop-a-holic and neurotic farmer. The song is actually a form of catechism, and although there isn’t much original source evidence that it started out as such, it’s an effective way to give us something to ponder while singing the interminably long song. And beside, such backward meaning making is fairly common in ChurchLand. For instance, the candles on the altar were once used simply to light the book the priest used because there wasn’t electric light, and now we make them symbols of the light of Christ and still use them even though we have electricity.

It’s easy to see the True Love as a symbol for God. I preach a lot about God’s love because our culture has diluted and shrunk love down to whether or not we like a certain food or movie and because so many of us grew up hearing more about how we can earn or lose God’s love than we did about how God loves.

God’s love is such that God chose to step into creation as a human being, born a fragile and vulnerable infant. The kind of love that is willing to become like another rather than the distorted love that insists others become just like us before we can love them. This is the love we celebrate during Christmas.

God’s love that we see in the person of Jesus is self-giving love. But, don’t confuse self-giving with self-denying. Jesus was both God and Human, he didn’t deny his divinity as he took on our humanness. Self-giving love isn’t about denying who we are created to be but recognizing that God created all humans as good and in God’s image and that we are most fully human when we work together in relationship with God and each other rather than just looking our for ourselves.

Today is the first day of Christmas when our true love comes as one who would lay down his life for us. Partridges are birds known to fiercely protect their young, even giving their lives to do so.

Jesus said that he came to fulfill God’s law, not do away with it. And so on the second day, Turtle doves are symbols of love and faithfulness, and the two remind us of the two testaments Old and New, all of the stories of how our faith ancestors experienced God pointing to the coming of Jesus, then, now, and some day, to teach us how to love as God loves.

Beyond day two, however, the actual items are not so plainly connected to what they’ve come to represent, but let’s keep going and see if we can make any other connections.

On the third day of Christmas God offers us the opportunity to grow into the virtues of faith, hope, and love. I’m not sure about how these connect to French hens, and since the actual gifts in the song have changed through the centuries, I’m fairly sure it’s the number that’s important more so that the actual items.

On the fourth day of Christmas God offers us the Good News as told by the four writers of our gospel stories, proclaiming the love of God – the life and teachings of Jesus to shape and guide our lives as we do our part in bringing about the kingdom on earth as in heaven.

On the fifth day, we ponder the law of God as given us by our faith ancestors in the first five books of what we call the Old Testament. The God in the stories of the Old Testament and the God of the stories in the New Testament is the same God. God didn’t change, God didn’t come up with plan B because plan A failed. Jesus says he came to fulfill the law. God has spent the entirety of human history reminding us that if we would live as God says we are created to live – in loving relationship with God and each other – we would thrive in the kingdom on earth. We keep deciding we know better. And yet God stays true to us. Something to ponder as you hold the notes for ‘five gold rings’.

Six geese a laying are to remind us of the creation story, not to lock us into a pharisaical belief that God created all there is in six literal days, but to remind us of God’s amazing power and perhaps, with the ‘which came first’ conundrum, to keep our egos in check. God is God and we are not.

I’ve read that the seven swans are supposed to be in reference to the seven virtues of the Spirit named in the Messianic promise in Isaiah 11, but I only count six there: wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, and fear-of-the-Lord. So let’s use it to remind us that the number seven is Hebrew numerology is about being complete. We are only complete, only whole, in relationship with our Creator and that as we follow Jesus we learn to become more and more like him.

Jesus gives 8 ‘blessed are’ statements that we call the Beatitudes in the sermon on the mount that instruct us on the fulfillment of God’s law. Perhaps as we sing the song, we pray to be more concerned with living as Jesus teaches us in this sermon that we are about forcing the Ten Commandments to be posted on walls in public places.

Nine ladies dancing are the nine fruits of the Spirit that Paul gives in his letter to the Galatians. I so appreciate that it’s ladies dancing for the fruit of the Spirit. These are the attributes that all Jesus Followers are to exhibit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Please notice it says ‘self-control’ not ‘control others.’

Ten lords leaping are the Ten Commandments. I choose to interpret this as the way men have tried to leap over the intended use of these commands of God. God gave them to teach us what God’s will for us is – how to love God and each other well, not so we could attempt to use them to force others into submission to our will.

And as we come near the end, eleven pipers, representing the eleven so-called faithful disciples, leaving out Judas Iscariot. But what about Peter’s predicted denial? What about the other nine or ten, depending on which version you read, who fled and hid instead of standing at the foot of the cross with the women? This should teach us grace and forgiveness instead of using it to build our egos about how we’d never deny Jesus.

At at long last, the twelve drummers. How many of you predicted this would be the symbol for the disciples? But no – it is for the Apostles’ Creed which summarizes the tenets of our belief. Remember that an apostle is one who is sent out. In that sense we are all apostles, we are sent into this world to proclaim the love of God for all people, as remain disciples, life long learners of the Way of Jesus.

Our relationship with God isn’t about counting days on a calendar or defined by symbols, it is lived. From the beginning, God’s plan was to be in relationship with us, to come to us and show us how to love. This is the good news of Christmas Day, on each of the twelve days of Christmas, and every day of the year, and throughout all eternity. Amen.