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Christmas Eve and Day at Advent Lutheran Church in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. December 24, 2014. The Wonder of it All. Candy Canes, Chocolate Coins and Halo Mandarins. The Sights, Sounds and Smells of Christmas Once Again!!
For several of you this will be the first Christmas with an empty chair at your dinner table. A poem by Nicholas Gordon expresses the poignancy of loved ones physically missing from our lives, especially at Christmas.
Can anyone explain the glow of Christmas?
Holidays are candles in the night.
Rebirth comes from family and friends
In one bright blur of food and talk that ends
Still burning as a peaceful inner light.
There is no way to substitute for Christmas.
Miss it and no circumstance feels right.
All my heart's with you, yet I must miss this
Season thick with love and rich delight.
We do remember them. When someone asks, us "Do you remember?" immediately our mind goes to work like the search engine on our computer traveling back through years of time and accumulated experience. Sorting through thousands if not millions of bits of information to connect to that one special, important moment that we are searching for.
To not only simply find it, but having found it to re-experience, to re-live it. That is the wonder of memory.
That’s how children, and indeed the child that is within us all, experience the wonder of Christmas. Just as we on every Christmas Eve here at Advent enjoy the beauty of special music, solos, organ preludes and postludes, the late night service with candle flames that seem to dance like little fairies around our darkened sanctuary.
Every year at Christmas we have a theme and a reminder of why we celebrate and just what we remember. On Sunday, December 14, our Sunday school children told the story of Christmas using the letters that spell this special night with each letter representing why it is important that we remember the meaning and tell the story otherwise it would most certainly be lost.
As is also our tradition here at Advent, each Christmas we have something to take home with us after worship to remind us of, and to keep alive, the message we have heard and participated in.
This year there are three things. The universal red and white symbol of Christmas throughout the world the Candy Cane. Sweet candy to remind us of those sweet childhood memories and the wide-eyed innocence of a time when everything seemed magical and the weight of life's inadvertent challenges and problems had not been made real for most of us.
What you may not know is that candy canes were initially a straight stick of white candy. The color red was added later, and the crook at the top later still.
They were hard to make because the canes had to be bent manually as they came off the assembly line in order to create their 'J' or shepherd’s staff shape, and it was a Catholic priest named Gregory Harding Keller, who came up with the solution to solve this problem. He invented the Keller Machine that automated the process of shaping straight candy sticks into candy canes. There are many legends about the candy cane but that really is its only historic connection to Christianity.
You will get a Gold Coin that is really chocolate. Remember those from your childhood? This is actually an ancient Jewish tradition. On December 16 our Jewish sisters and brothers celebrated Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights that falls every year near Christmas.
In Israel the coin called Hanukkah gelt bears the image of the same menorah that appeared on Maccabean coins 2,000 years ago.
So when you take your gold coin home this evening remember that our celebration of the birth of Jesus, who was after all a Jewish baby, has deep roots that stretch back 2,000 years, right about the time that Jesus was born.
And our third gift this evening is a very special one a sweet mandarin. Many of us remember how something as ordinary as a mandarin or a simple orange seemed like a treasure in our childhood.
Smelling, peeling and dividing the sweet slices and then popping them into our mouth, what a sweet delight and what a joy!
These particular little treasures are called halos. The trademark shows a very happy mandarin with a halo above it. Further reading tells you that this company deserves the halo for who they are. Everything about this fruit is natural, healthy and good for you.
This company is a refreshing shift in the paradigm of greed and bigger is better thinking and outsourcing products when they can be made or grown right here in the good old USA. The halo company hands out healthy fruit to the homeless on a regular basis, and gives a portion of their income to Feeding America which provides 1.3 million meals mostly to children..
And no matter what else you do this Christmas, this evening, tomorrow and in the next few days please take time to remember how blessed your life has been and through the gift of memory re-live the wonder of Christmases past, even as this one in a few hours will be added to your memory bank.
Speaking of memory this very night marks exactly 100 years since a most amazing thing happened. It is because of that event that I title my message this Christmas; “We Interrupt This War…because if we ever needed the image of peace it is now, because we are a nation at war!
As we celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace the world is at war in many places, and so is our nation at war with itself….Whites against blacks, blacks against whites. Citizens against police, police against citizens. Republicans and Democrats fractured like never before. We are a nation at war with itself. Our theme at... Advent this year is; "We interrupt this war..."
The Christmas Truce of 1914 has become one of the most famous and events of the First World War. Late on Christmas Eve 1914, men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) heard Germans troops in the trenches opposite them singing carols and patriotic songs and saw lanterns and small fir trees along their trenches.
Messages began to be shouted between the trenches. The following day, British and German soldiers met in no man's land and exchanged gifts, took photographs and some played impromptu games of football. They also buried casualties and repaired trenches and dugouts.
The truce was not observed everywhere along the Western Front. Elsewhere the fighting continued and casualties did occur on Christmas Day.
After 1914, the High Commands on both sides tried to prevent any truces on a similar scale happening again. Despite this, there were some isolated incidents of soldiers holding brief truces later in the war, and not only at Christmas.
A glimmer of hope that indeed humankind may one day learn to live in the peace that God intended and Jesus was born to teach us about.
Perhaps this is what inspired author Cappy Hall Rearick to pen this wonderful piece that expresses that peace, that elusive yet possible condition that both Old and New Testaments give witness to is indeed within our grasp but only if we but want it. We Interrupt This War.
“We interrupt this war for doctors to heal, teachers to teach, and students to learn. We interrupt this war to marvel at sunsets, listen to music, and to laugh. We interrupt this war for poets to rhyme, sculptors to chisel, and writers to paint pictures with words. We interrupt this war to feed the hungry, build new schools, and to stamp out ignorance.”
May peace come with justice to a war weary and suffering world, and may each and every one of us be agents of that peace in our homes, in our work places and in this community.
Merry Christmas, God bless you one and all! Amen.
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