Sermon given by Rev. Frank Clarkson, Sunday morning, December 24, 2023.
Last Sunday, before the service, Clare observed that the places in our living nativity pageant—Nazareth, Bethlehem, the region known as the Holy Land, is the same place that’s racked with violence and suffering and death in these days. Did any of you find yourself thinking of this just now, as we just sang, “O Little Town of Bethlehem?”
The war that Hamas started with their brutal attacks, which then escalated with Israel’s brutal response, it shows now signs of ending, and civilians, many of them children, are bearing the brunt of the violence being displaced, injured, and killed; forced out of their homes, facing lack of food and medial care.
You know this. You know that there’s a serious discrepancy between the aspirations of Christmas: “Peace on earth, goodwill to all,” as the angels sing, as the carols say, and what’s happening here on earth, on this pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan described us.
You know that ours is a violent world. That no matter how much we might sing about peace, how many poems we share about love and goodness, how often we offer our prayers for healing and reconciliation, we humans are a quarrelsome lot. Under pressure, we so quickly revert to our tribal impulses. If you want to create a generation of terrorists, it’s simple: take their land, kill and maim their children, ignore your own principles of justice.
We could argue about who started it, who’s to blame for the Middle East violence, and plenty of folks are doing that these days, and it’s not helping. Sometimes it’s escalating to the point where some angry person takes vengeance on others they perceive as the enemy, whether Jewish or Palestinian. One of the nights of Hanukkah I attended the menorah lighting over at Temple Emanu-El, just up Main Street. Out on their porch there were more Haverhill police officers than those of us in attendance. And we were grateful for their presence. But it was a sobering reminder of the world we live in these days.
I know, this is probably not what you’re looking for on Christmas Eve morning. But stay with me, ok?
Not long after the war started, Maria Popova wrote an essay about this human problem:
“It says something about our species that we have eradicated smallpox and invented vaccines and antibiotics for yellow fever and the Black Death, but war continues to plague us; that in the past century — this supposed pinnacle of enlightened modernity — war has claimed or maimed more of our children’s lives than any virus or bacterium. It says something about both our immense imagination and our immense blind spots: Our species’ failure to eradicate war is a failure of the imagination, a failure to imagine what it is like to be anybody else, without which there can be no empathy and compassion — those vital molecules of harmony, the other name for which is peace.”
She then quotes Israeli historian, philosopher and author Yuval Noah Harari, his words about the war, published in Time magazine. He wrote,
“Most Israelis are psychologically incapable at this moment of empathizing with the Palestinians. The mind is filled to the brim with our own pain, and no space is left to even acknowledge the pain of others. Many of the people who tried to hold such a space… are dead or deeply traumatized. Most Palestinians are in an analogous situation — their minds too are so filled with pain, they cannot see our pain.
“But outsiders who are not themselves immersed in pain should make an effort to empathize with all suffering humans, rather than lazily seeing only part of the terrible reality. It is the job of outsiders to help maintain a space for peace. We deposit this peaceful space with you, because we cannot hold it right now. Take good care of it for us, so that one day, when the pain begins to heal, both Israelis and Palestinians might inhabit that space.”
Is this a vocation we can embrace? To hold a space for empathy, to hold and take care of a space for peace. It is a privilege, isn’t it, to be able to hold and offer that space, in these days.
And isn’t this what we are made for? When someone comes here hurting or in grief, we hold a space for them. We try to be a sanctuary, in the best sense of the word. And this is what our world needs; it’s what our world always needs—people who aren’t so overwhelmed by hatred or pain or trauma, so they can see another’s suffering and be of some use to them, and help start the healing.
We need places and organizations that are holding a space where repentance and repair and reconciliation can happen. At their best, religious communities do this—are houses of hope and healing. At its worst, religion can be used for stoking fires of division and hatred.
Poets remind us that there is a longing, deep in the human heart, for goodness and peace. Prophets tell us there will come a day when, finally, peace comes to reign on earth.
It’s up to us to help move us toward that day. As we heard from Maya Angelou,
We, Angels and Mortals, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.
Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul.
So today, on the eve of Christmas, I invite and challenge us to move beyond blame and despair and toward some healing and some wholeness. Let’s begin with small things, close to home. It might be just showing some kindness at Christmas to that family member who gets under your skin. Asking, “How can I bring some peace to the places I inhabit? Can I trust that my own small efforts can have reverberations beyond what I can see?”
Lao Tsu reminds us:
“If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.”
Please have faith that your kindness and your care does make a difference in the world. And this season invites us into a renewal of this spirit. Of all the Christmas carols, only one of the greatest comes out of our tradition. Edmund Hamilton Sears was a Unitarian minister back in the 19th century. He served several congregations in Massachusetts and wrote “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” in 1849. Some decades later Percy Dreamer praised it for lifting up “the social message of Christmas—‘Peace on earth, goodwill towards men.’”
I love and need the call of Christmas—to ponder, like Mary, the claim that the holy is right here; to listen for the song of the angels and heed their call, to be bringers and bearers of peace. Which is so needed. And is always has been.
“But with the woes of war and strife,” Edmund Sears wrote, “the world has suffered long; beneath the angel-strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong…”
But that’s not the end of the story, he asserts. The time is coming,
“when peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling,
and the whole world give back the song which now the angels sing.”
Rather than giving back pain for pain, rather than adding to the suffering of our world, can we heed the call of Christmas? The song of our better angels, that does abide in our hearts, that whispers, “Peace, my neighbor. Peace, my friend.”
In these days, let us, dear companions, give back that song of peace on earth, let us hold a space for that spirit, so that one day, the whole world will be singing its blessed tune.