Christmas A Rare Opportunity to Touch The Soul
Kathleen C. Mandeville

THERE you are, the one chosen to preach the word on Christmas Eve. Your parish is gathered, looking up at you with demanding, expectant faces. The time for frenzied preparations is over; Advent, the season of long waiting and distant yearning is over.

This is the moment of truth when you as a preacher have the rare opportunity to touch the souls of your congregation with something more than mad shopping and family feuds. This is the moment when you give your Christmas gift to your people, people whom you love, who frustrate you, people with whom you work, pray, cry, laugh, struggle. Full silence in the sanctuary as you mount the pulpit. A daunting thrill. The ancient story. Another chance to incarnate it anew. What will you give them?

BE NOT AFRAID
You, of course, have been hard at work, organizing, delegating, counseling, working to hold your own spiritual center amidst the frenzy of the season's preparations. Somewhere you have managed to carve out the emptiness needed to quiet your mind and heart so a Christmas message for your congregation can be born and take flesh.

Or perhaps you haven't managed it all. Everything is too much. Now you realize why all the Advent propers deal with the end of the world. You are dry and spent, and nothing comes as you sit in your office begging the Holy Spirit to make its visitation and bestow inspiration.

On one particular Christmas Eve when I was in exactly this desert, yes, dry and barren with no sermon and three hours to "show time," my director of music fixed his long eye of history with 20 years of Christmas Eve liturgies behind him on my anxious, newly ordained face, "Just remember what the angel of the Lord said to the shepherds, Kathleen. 'Be not afraid."'

BUT MARY KEPT ALL THESE THINGS, PONDERING THEM IN HER HEART
So preach your fear or whatever deep feeling it is that is in your heart. Find the kernel of emotional truth where you, the preacher, are living this Christmas. All authentic preaching begins here - in the particularity of the moment. Where are you? Chances are your congregation is there, too. Like Mary, let that truth gestate in you. Ponder it. Embrace it. Go into labor. Let that truth be born.

AND THIS WILL BE A SIGN FOR YOU
Then find where your truth and the truth of the Christmas story meet. The great thing about the Christmas story is that it contains just about every truth, every emotion. The ancient primal story. We never tire of hearing it, but we yearn for fresh re-tellings.

Always in parish life, in the life of a particular people in the mystery of their own incarnations, there are signs of God's presence among them. Seek these signs during the Advent journey. Recount them on Christmas Eve. Recast for your congregation its particular, sacred history. Like the wonderful line of Phillip Brooks' hymn, "O Little Town of Bethlehem......... and Christmas comes once more," when did the particular moment of "good news of great joy" become flesh?

My parish, St Clement’s in Manhattan, where I served as Rector for IO years, was both a church and a theater. Our sanctuary doubled as an off-Broadway theater complete with lighting grid, thrust stage and bleachers instead of pews.

Our main theater company, whose financial contribution to the church was a good chunk of our budget had been pressing for a complete reconstruction of our shared worship/performance space. The congregation was nervous about the prospect of a dramatic change in our worship space. Finally, the company received a major grant for renovation and we, the church, could drag our feet no longer. Architects were hired, plans were drawn up and a series of endless negotiations began.

Demolition and construction were slated for the week before Christmas; it was the only "window" in our busy performance schedule. Periodically with growing anxiety, I would go into the sanctuary to watch our space being dismantled and the piles of sawdust mounting up. The hope and promise made by all with good intention were hat the project would be finished by Christmas Eve. Of course, as these things go, it wasn’t.

On the day before Christmas Eve when I arrived in the morning, there was a strange little bundle tied up in brown paper and string on our front steps, amidst the usual litter of crack vials, used paper coffee cups and condoms. I opened it and found a creche scene, rudely primitive, formed out of a mud-like clay, lacking in detail but embodying a crude power. No note or any sign of who had left it.

Somebody obviously thought we needed this sign, and indeed we did. Our Christmas Eve that year was celebrated on bare wood bleachers with none of the usual white linen and ornate silver trappings. We did manage to sweep up the sawdust though and give thanks for the crude and primitive power that God's incarnation had manifested among us in what I called "our two creches" in my Christmas Eve sermon.

THERE WAS NO PLACE FOR THEM IN THE INN

This "good news of great joy" always brings with it a radical demand for a new way of living. When birth arrives it demands room; it rearranges our priorities; it usually makes a mess. On high holy Feasts like Christmas and Easter many parishes experience an inundation of visitors. These include guests and perhaps members of the extended parish community, such as participants in various outreach programs or parents of children in an after-school program, or regulars at the soup kitchen or food pantry. If there are issues of inclusion and exclusion in your parish, Christmas Eve may be just the moment to address them.

A particularly rowdy, dirty group of homeless men came one year to St. Clement’s Annual Christmas dinner. Our dinners were family affairs - people off the street parishioners' parents and siblings, theater folk who had nowhere to go on holidays- always a weird and wonderful mix, though everybody did not necessarily get along.

This year the group of men managed to annoy somebody’s mother from the suburbs. Tensions rose, inevitably. Quick as he could slide his small body behind the piano in our downstairs parish hall, my director of music again saved the day. Small in stature but big in presence, he boomed out the opening lines to "Jingle Bells Rock." He had an amazing sense of the pastoral ministry of music. By the time we got around to the chorus in "Angels We Have Heard on High," the homeless guy and the suburban mother, both of whom it turned out had great voices, were standing next to each other harmonizing.

I preached this story the next day at our Christmas morning Eucharist. Later, the senior warden who had been upset because one of the prostitutes in our peer-aids outreach program had knocked over a free-standing baptismal font in crack-induced rage - a rare occurrence but nonetheless a major calamity - had calmed down enough to say that he realized that to do real neighborhood ministry meant the building would have to take some wear and tear.

Reaching in and touching the wonderful soul of a congregation is tender business on any occasion; it demands both delicacy and strength, but the spiritual "ripeness" and the heightened liturgical aesthetics of Christmas open the hearts of our people. So take heart. And challenge them. We all desire in some deep, dark place to receive the miraculous, just to attend the "mysterious possible."

Kathleen C. Mandeville was formerly Rector of St Clement’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan. She lives at Rokeby Form in Barrytown N. Y, and is working on a book about eros and the sacred