“For we need a little Christmas
Right this very minute
Candles in the window
Carols at the spinet
Yes, we need a little Christmas now!”
Do you recognize these lyrics? I’ll bet
you heard Andy Williams singing them on your local
all-Chrismtas-muisc-‘til-you’re-ready-to-barff radio station. Do you know where
this song comes from? It’s actually from the Broadway musical Mame. There’s this scene in the play
when the characters are having a really rough time, so they decide to celebrate
Christmas early in order to lift their spirits. It’s a great scene.
Whenever I hear this song played on the
radio, I think of the production of Mame
I saw around Christmas time in 1994 at Philadelphia’s legendary Walnut Street
Theatre (the oldest continually producing professional theatre in the United
States, I’ll have you know!). I went with this guy named Melvin Rumpf. Mel was
a professional dancer who’d danced on Broadway. He was African American and, I’m
quite certain, gay. I met him when I was a seminarian. He was my “project” for
my pastoral care class. The professor assigned me, the former actor to, to
visit with Mel, the former dancer. We hit it off pretty well, too.
Mel was living at a now-defunct ELCA
facility called Betak, a nursing home for those suffering from HIV/AIDS. His
AIDS was full-blown, and it was obvious to me that he was dying. Not actively dying,
mind you, but he was most certainly terminal. He had the emaciated frame and
the distant stare of one who would not be long for this planet.
Somehow, this stricken hoofer had come
into possession of two tickets to the Walnut Street, but he had no one to take
him. I borrowed a car from one of my classmates, and the two of us set off on
that cold December night for an evening of live theatre—very possibly the last
one Mel would ever enjoy. I remember that evening, not for the stage
performance (which was excellent), but for Mel’s company. We had a great time
together, made all the more precious by the knowledge that his time was short
and that this was a brief moment of defiant joy in the face of a horrible illness.
So now, whenever I hear “We Need a Little
Christmas” on the radio, I remember that night with Mel and I give thanks that
I had the chance to share it with him.
But this year, I think of another verse of
that song:
“For I’ve grown a little leaner
Grown a little colder
Grown a little sadder
Grown a little older
And I need a little angel
Sitting on my shoulder
Need a little Christmas now.”
I don’t know about you, but, for me, this
has been a pretty rough year. My congregation has experienced death in the
family with the loss of two long-time and much beloved members. I’ve buried
numerous victims of the heroine epidemic, too. There have been devastating
hurricanes in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico. As I write this the wildfires
are still burning in California. An arrogant little man is threatening the world
with missiles from Korea, and Nazis and Klansmen have marched openly in
Virginia. A madman shot over 500 people from a hotel in Las Vegas, and another
demented soul opened fire and killed dozens in a church in Texas.
Sometimes I just feel helpless at the
thought of it all. That’s when I need to turn to the Christmas story—and not a
sanitized, Christmas card version, but the true,
human story behind our celebration.
You see, Mary and Joseph were helpless,
too. They were peasants at the mercy of a powerful and oppressive regime which
ordered them to travel seventy miles over open country while Mary was eight
months pregnant. They were homeless when she gave birth—forced to nestle the
Savior of the World in a filthy trough for animals. The men who came to ogle that
baby were also homeless—“abiding in the field” (literally, living in tents)—and
could offer no shelter to our Holy Family.
The lives of those shepherds, frankly,
sucked. Their lives were hard and brutal on the morning of the day when Jesus
was born, and they would be hard and brutal on the day after. The only
difference might be a new sense of defiant joy, and the knowledge that things
would not always be as they currently seemed to be. It would take time for that
baby to grow up and live into God’s promise, but someday—some glorious day—God’s love and favor would be revealed.
These days we seem to be so hung up on
certainty that we have forgotten the joy of hope.
Christmas and faith are all about believing that there really is light in the darkness.
That’s why we need this story. We need a little Christmas. It’s not just a cute
anesthetic for our worries and sense of powerlessness. It’s a defiant act of
joy. If we can’t appreciate the darkness in it, we’ll never learn to embrace the
light. A poor, unimportant, un-wed teen mom conceived and bore a child in cave
used to stable livestock, and we call him Jesus—the name means “savior.”
When we embrace this child—his love, hos
compassion, his sense of sacrifice, and his sense of thankful joy for what the
Father has already given us—the world will change.
Be joyful and triumphant, my friends, and
have yourselves a very merry Christmas.
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