The Difficulty of Preaching About Christmas

Recently I sat with a group of preachers who meet to discuss preaching. We spoke of our efforts during Advent and noted, as preachers often do, that it is hard to preach about Christmas.

How do you say something new about such an old, much-used theme? How do you say something that will be heard in this noisiest of all seasons? How do you say something profound about the events Christians find most deeply meaningful in all of human history. To what do you compare that which is incomparable? (The same difficulty attends our efforts to preach about Easter.)

Part of the difficulty lies in the unique character of the Christ event. It is so exceptional, so profound, that you cannot illustrate it by some other similar event. You can't explain in in terms of other things we know. You simply have to keep coming back to the story of the baby born at Bethlehem.

Part of the difficulty comes from being adults. Christmas, at least our idealized expectation of Christmas, belongs to children. The joy we seek each December is tied to a more simple, carefree time when we were very young. With the passing of the years we have lost much of the fantasy and imagination that thrilled us in those days. It is harder for us to get excited about Christmas, unless our understanding of Christmas has deepened and matured as as the more childish elements dropped away.

Of course, the child's appreciation of Christmas is not all childish. There is profound truth in the childlike sense of wonder and trust. Struggling preachers would do well to reach back and recover the spirit of the child even as they continue to mature as adults.

The answer to the problem lies in going deeper. Theologically, we have a lot to learn about what it means for the Word to become flesh. Personally, we have to face the question, How real is Christ in our own experience? Existentially, we need to understand better the human condition that Jesus came to redeem and the possibilities of a life lived by his grace. Homiletically, we need to admit that our creativity needs renewing and we need to pay more attention to story, drama, poetry, and music as we approach Christmas.

Unless we do these things as preachers and as listeners to sermons, we will grow stale and flat. Doing the same thing over and over again without new resources will become boring. The preachers in my group have all been at it for twenty years or more--in my case, much more. This is also true of many of our hearers. Life has taken its toll on all of us. We grow tired. We run out of ideas and energy. The good news is that Christmas is about salvation from sin, about new beginnings, about God's faithfulness, about the miraculous power of the Spirit, about life. If that is not exciting to us, we have missed the point.

Acedia and Me

Sometimes I encounter a book that speaks to me so forcefully that I want to urge others to read it. Such urging is not always effective. People need to choose what they read, not have others choose it. The present time may not be the right time for you to read this book. But if you think it might be, read Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books, Penguin, 2008).

Norris is author of several previous must reads, including The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace, and Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. She is a poet who writes a lot of prose. She was married to a poet, the late David J. Dwyer. She is a protestant who hangs out in Benedictine monasteries. She is a thoughtful, honest Christian.

Acedia and Me seems to have been a long-term project for her, completed during and after the death of her husband in 2003. It tells you more than you might want to know about the deadly sin of acedia, sloth, uncaring, depression, despair, etc. But it is not just a negative book. It is really a book about life under the rubric of the difficulty of living life fully. Norris draws on Scripture, especially the Psalms, the writings of the desert fathers, especially Evagrius and Cassian, Kierkegaard, modern day Benedictines and Cistercians, psychology, poetry, and most of all, her own experience, especially her marriage to a brilliant agnostic Catholic poet who struggled with serious mental and physical illness.

As I read the book I often thought of particular people I know who struggle with depression, physical illness, or the burden of caring for those who are ill. I hope some of them will be encouraged to read it. It certainly encouraged me.

Words in Search of Wisdom

Blogs seem to need names. I have named this one "Words in Search of Wisdom." Why? Wouldn't "Wise Words" be better? Maybe, but it would also be presumptuous and inaccurate.

Another question: Can words search for wisdom? Isn't that what writers are supposed to do before they write? And are words capable of searching for, much less, finding, wisdom? Do they have the power of action independent of a human agent? No, not really. But in my experience of writing, words do have a life of their own even as they come from the mind and the hand of the writer. At least the process of writing brings into being insights that would not have existed had the writer not put forth some words.

That's what I hear in Joan Didion's declaration: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means.” Or in Rebecca West's explanation, "I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something."

A website on academic writing suggests, “Write to find out what you think. Your thoughts will be somewhat muddled until you get them in writing. Don't go around and around in circles internally until you know what to write. Write before you know what you're going to say.”

Robert Kellogg in The Psychology of Writing suggests that the act of writing can even be therapeutic. "Psychotherapists have also looked to writing as a means of personal restoration. . . People seek meaning in their lives. Not all must write in order to find meaning, but the mindfulness required by writing could well serve as a tool for therapy."

That has been my experience, so I write in order that I may understand (to paraphrase Anselm, who said, "I believe in order that I may understand"). Or, to bring it into the digital age, I blog in order that I may understand.