Here is a Christmas sermon on John 1 from five years ago. I cut and pasted the transcript below, but I have not edited it!
Merry Christmas!
+JM
The first time I ever went to church was on a night like tonight. It was a cold and crowded Christmas Eve. My mother made me go. When she said through my bedroom door, get dressed in something nice, we’re going to church. Somewhere a needle scratched clear off a record.
At that point in my life, the closest I had ever come to church was with Kevin McAllister and Old Man Marley in Home Alone. We’d never gone to church before. We sat up in the balcony in some of the last seats left. From the discreet removal of the balcony, I learned for the first time that Silent Night had more than one verse. And I discovered that the wise men whom someone called the Magi
were conspicuously missing from the gospel lesson that the woman in the ugly Christmas sweater read to us. I was a teenager, and I didn’t want to go. Why would anyone want to ruin Christmas by going to church? I thought. I didn’t want to get dressed up. I didn’t want to sing songs that others knew better than me. I didn’t want to listen to a middle-aged gas bag preach at me.
And try to make it all go down easier by telling lame jokes and making tame pop culture illusions.
Now I’m the middle-aged gas bag some of you were forced to endure. And fair warning, lame jokes are the only sorts of jokes the geezers will let me get away with on Christmas Eve. So don’t get your hopes up.
But that Christmas Eve, God got to me. And now I’m up here. I’m up here now because someone years ago forced me to sit out there on a night like tonight, even though I felt so woefully out of place as to feel unwelcome.
My point is that I know firsthand how Christmas Eve is a night when all sorts of people gather from different places in life and do so for a variety of reasons. Whoever you are, from wherever you have come, and whatever the reasons that brought you here,
Welcome.
Welcome. And you might be an every Sunday regular listening for bits of sermons you’ve already heard. Welcome. You might be parents of amped up kids, kids on sugar with sugar in their veins and Santa on their minds. That might be you. Meanwhile, you’re sitting there wondering if you’re out of scotch tape or double A batteries and if the CVS and the ABC will still be open by the time service is done.
So welcome. Maybe you yelled at your wife on the way over here tonight. Welcome. Maybe you’re like Alan Rickman in Love Actually and have a present hidden in your pocket that your wife thinks is for her. If so, A, Joni Mitchell never makes a good gift, and B, welcome.
Maybe you’re secretly relieved your sister won’t be coming this year. Welcome. Maybe you’re giddy with spite that your ex-husband won’t see the kids this holiday. Welcome. Maybe you’re terrified you can’t make it through another Christmas on the wagon. Welcome. Maybe you can’t believe to see your Trump-loving neighbor here tonight. Welcome.
Maybe you can’t believe to see your Trump-hating neighbor here tonight. Welcome. Maybe all the images of the baby Jesus this season just make you think of the baby Yoda, and after five weeks and seven episodes of The Mandalorian, you just want to strangle that little green Benjamin Button.
Welcome to you too. Tonight, all of you are as welcome as the next person, because contrary to what you may have heard, Christianity is not a club of good, pious, religious people making their way up to God. Christianity is about God coming down, God coming down in Jesus Christ to people like us.
people whose goodness is inconstant, people whose piety is imperfect, people whose morality is convenient and whose faith is unreliable. All of us, we’re all guests tonight of the God who has come down to us in the flesh to dwell with us. We’ve all been welcomed as God’s guests.
just as you are.
Here, I’ve got a Christmas story for you. Ellen Baxter is the founder of Broadway Housing Communities in New York. In the 1970s, as a psychology student at Bowdoin College, Baxter set out to discover a more humane way to treat the mentally ill. As an undergraduate, she faked her way onto a psychiatric ward with a bogus diagnosis of dangerous depression so that she could observe how the patients were treated.
She left convinced that America’s American culture’s obsession with improving and fixing and changing ourselves had infected the mental health system too. We’re stuck on recovery. I heard her tell NPR. We’re stuck on recovery. But when you fail to deal with people as they are, when you’re dead set, determined to fix them and change them, you end up changing them for the worse because you erode their humanity.
Ellen Baxter’s research through old medical journals and psychology articles led her to a modest village in Belgium named Heil. According to those dusty journals, Heil had the highest success rate of recovery for the mentally ill. At the center of Heil is a church dedicated to Saint Dymphne, who was martyred in Heil in the seventh century.
Saint Dymphna is the patron saint of the mentally ill, which is why, beginning in the eighth century, Hile became a pilgrimage destination for the mentally ill. Five centuries later, starting in the 13th century, the residents of Hile began boarding those pilgrims into their homes. Hile became a place where everyday people, farmers, bartenders, blacksmiths, ordinary people welcomed insane strangers
into their homes, no questions asked. Just as they were, no matter the risks. Welcome them like you would a beloved aunt or uncle. By the 19th century, this practice of hospitality earned Hile the nickname Paradise for the Insane. And by the turn of the 20th century?
By the turn of the 20th century, this Christian practice became a public system where doctors now place patients into the homes of hosts who have no idea what diagnosis their guests bring with them. By 1930, over a quarter of all the residents of Heil were mentally ill, about 12,000 people. According to Ellen Baxter, the average length of stay for a guest with a host family, and notice they call them guests, not patients.
The average length of stay for a guest is 28.5 years. Meanwhile, a third of all of the guests stay with their host foster family for almost 50 years. They take these broken, crazy guests into their homes, and they live with them. In many cases, they die with them. Ellen Baxter.
want a grant fellowship to study for a year studying in Hile. She describes going from house to house in Hile, interviewing foster families, asking the same questions and always getting the same answers. Do you find it to be a burden? No. Do you find it tiring? No. Do you find it painful? It’s just life. A bus driver told her.
Over and over again, she says, I heard the same response from host foster families. Host families would shrug their shoulders in reply that crazy is just a part of normal life. It made me wonder if I had stumbled upon a race of angels. But Ellen Baxter says she still didn’t understand why the villagers of Hile were so successful at rehabilitating guests, more successful than modern medicine.
And these are people with serious mental illnesses. She didn’t understand what made it all work until she met someone that she calls the buttons guy. The buttons guy was a middle-aged man, a boarder who every single day would twist all the buttons off of his shirt, nervously twirl them off slowly every single day. And every single night, every single night,
His host foster mother would sew all the buttons back onto the button guy’s shirt. Every day for 30 years, he twists them off and every night she sews them back on. What a waste of time. Ellen said, she said when she first heard the foster mother describe what she did in order to live with the buttons guy.
You should sew the buttons back on with fishing lines so he can’t twist them off.” And the host mom reacted with something like offense. No! No, that’s the worst thing you could do, she said. This man needs to twist the buttons off. It helps him to twist the buttons off every day. You don’t understand, she explained.
In order to accept the mentally ill into your home, you first have to accept what they’re doing. You have to accept their oddness and their idiosyncrasies. You’ve got to let them take their buttons off. Being with them, she said, is the first step in being able to do anything for them.
And that’s when Ellen Baxter stumbled upon what she calls the solution of no solution. Once she knew what to look for in Heil, she said she saw it practiced from house to house. What freed guests for healing and rehabilitation was the way their hosts refused to treat them as people with problems to be fixed. Instead, they just welcomed them into their homes to share life with them.
The hosts acceptance of their guests without any expectation of changing them is itself the elixir with the power to change them.
Ellen Baxter calls what she found in the homes of Hile, quote, the strange healing power of not trying to fix the problem.
the church, we call it grace. And it’s why we call this story that gives us Christ’s gospel. It’s good news.
You know, John doesn’t give you the Christmas story the way Matthew or Luke tell it. John doesn’t mention Caesar or a census or a star over the city of the shepherd king. There’s no manger, no donkey, neither a Joseph nor an angel. John gives you his Christmas story by telling you that the word which spoke the stars into the sky became flesh and dwelled with us. The law, God’s
expectations for who you should be and what you should do and how you should change and fix yourself. That’s the law. The law came through Moses, John announces. Grace, the strange healing power of not trying to fix the problem, has come through Jesus Christ.
The Word became flesh and lived with us, John says in his Christmas story. And the word John uses there for word is the same word the Old Testament uses for the tabernacle, the makeshift tent the Israelites pitched as they wandered in the wilderness.
As God’s people journeyed for 40 years from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land, God journeyed with them in the tabernacle. The Hebrew word there is dabar. It’s the same word the Bible uses to describe the 10 words of God, the 10 commandments sealed inside the ark. It’s the word the Bible uses when Moses hides himself in the cleft of a rock in order to catch a glimpse of God’s glory.
And it’s the word the Old Testament uses for the Holy of Holies in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, the place Jesus calls his father’s house. The Holy of Holies was where God lived. The Dabbar was where God met man.
But not just anyone could meet God there at the curtain into the Holy of Holies. We’re too broken by sin, the Bible says, even to come close, let alone be welcomed into the place where God lives. Only the high priest of Israel, on behalf of all of his people, could venture near the Dabur, and even the high priest first needed to be made acceptable.
Even the high priest had broken too many of God’s expectations, God’s law. So the high priest first needed to fix his own sin problem through ritual purification. Only then did the high priest come near God’s home.
You see it? Dabar, word. Mary’s womb is the holy of holies and in her baby the Dabar became flesh and lived with us. John says in his Christmas story, and notice there’s no high priest in this story. Nothing has been required to render you acceptable furs.
Ellen Baxter describes another guest she met in Hile named Des. Des suffered tears every night that bloodthirsty lions were about to pounce through the walls to eat him. It wouldn’t work to tell him the lions aren’t really there. It wouldn’t work to try to convince him that he should change and be not afraid, his foster mother, Tony, explained.
Instead, every night, Tony and her husband would rush outside, banging pots and pans and roaring like lions themselves to scare the lions away. And that would work every time, Tony explained. He could rest. And then, eventually, one day, Dez wasn’t afraid of the lions anymore. And then, one day, the lions weren’t there anymore. But this is important, she said.
Making him unafraid of the lions, curing him of his tears, was not our goal. Our goal was simply to welcome Des into our home, just as he was, and to share our life with him.
Now maybe you don’t twist the buttons off your shirt every day, day after day. And you might not think bloodthirsty lions are about to leap out of the walls to eat you, but we all suffer delusions. We all suffer delusions and we all hear voices. I some of you might be crazy enough to think that you’re basically a good person.
And therefore, you don’t need Mary’s boy to live for you the life of perfect faithfulness that God requires of all of us. And some of you, some of you might be so insane, you actually think the sins you’ve sinned are somehow too great for Jesus Christ to have forgotten them forever in his grave. And some of you might just be deluded enough to think that you’re bad.
that your resentments and your jealousies, your broken relationships and your bitter strings of regret, you might think that somehow they put you beyond God’s mercy. That’s playing crazy. Some of you might actually think that because you tweet the right opinion or post the right position on Facebook that you’re righteous.
That’s crazy!
Meanwhile, some of you might think that you’re the only person here tonight who doesn’t have it all together. You might think you’re the only person here whose family is a disaster or whose marriage is a train wreck. Or you might think you’re the only person here who doesn’t believe most of what I’ve preached and therefore it doesn’t apply to you. We all suffer delusions. And we all hear voices in our heads. Voices telling us that we are unlovely.
or unlovable, voices telling us that we are inadequate or unforgivable, voices that never tire of pointing out all the ways we fall short of a standard that exists only in our heads, voices that never quite go away and quit their whispering that the gospel news is too good to be true.
If I have one Christmas wish tonight for people like you, people like us, if I have one Christmas wish, it’s for you to see what John wants you to see. That in Jesus Christ, in the humanity of God, God has welcomed you into his home.
This is paradise for the insane.
You know, in what the church calls the incarnation, God has taken you into himself, not as a patient to be changed, but as a guest to be welcomed. God has welcomed you into the home that is Christ’s body and wrapped you in the gift of Christ’s own perfect righteousness to live with you and die with you.
without any expectation or need for you first to be fixed. In Jesus Christ, God dwells with us, sewing our buttons back on and banging away our imaginary lions until all is calm and bright and we can rest. John, in his Christmas story tonight, calls that grace.
And even an unbeliever like Ellen Baxter can testify to its strange healing power.
So Merry Christmas and welcome home. Offered to you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
