Christmas as the Eye of the Storm, and other wisdom gleaned from old sermons

A sermon preached by Jack Cabaness                                                                                    

First Presbyterian Church of Katonah, New York                                                       

December 13, 2015

As a preacher, one of the things that I like to do is to read through old sermons. On my bookshelves I have everything from sermons preached by Jonathan Edwards in 1743 in Northampton, Massachusetts to sermons preached by Barbara Brown Taylor in 1995 in Centerville, Georgia.

Many of the sermons, even by the masters, quickly become dated. 

They don’t seem to be very relevant to the church of today, even if they are interesting snapshots of church history. But sometimes old sermons do have staying power, and we do well to listen to them again.

More than sixty years ago the great Lutheran preacher Edmund Steimle preached a Christmas Eve sermon entitled, “The Eye of the Storm.” He began his sermon by describing his first-hand experience of Hurricane Hazel, which hit his hometown of Philadelphia.

In Steimle’s words,

Unlike most hurricanes, which lose much of their force when they turn inland, this one hit with all the fury of a hurricane at sea: drenching rains, screaming winds, trees uprooted, 

branches flying through the air, broken power lines crackling on the pavement.

It was frightening.

Then suddenly there was a let-up, a lull. Shortly after, all was still. Not a leaf quivered. The sun even broke through briefly. It was the eye of the storm.

“All was calm, all was bright.”

And then all hell broke loose again: Branches and trees crashing down, the screaming winds, the torrential rain, the power lines throwing spark on the pavement. But that was a breathless moment, Steimle wrote, when we experienced the eye of the storm.” (Edmund Steimle, “The Eye of the Storm,” in A Chorus of Witnesses: Model Sermons for Today’s Preachers, Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdman’s, 1994, pp. 237-242).

Steimle went on to say that Christmas itself is like the experience of the eye of the storm. Before Jesus’ birth—long before—there was Israel’s time of slavery in Egypt, followed by the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile in Babylon. There was the oppression at the hands of the Greeks and later of the Romans. It was a stormy history.

And then, following the calm of Jesus’ birth, there was the massacre of the male children under the age of two by King Herod, there were schemes to end Jesus’ life, and, in the end, there was the crucifixion.

It was a stormy time, and Jesus’ birth was the eye of the storm.

Steimle’s metaphor of the eye of the storm seems especially pertinent for our own time. We know first hand how Christmas is often juxtaposed with tragedy. The 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami that killed nearly a quarter of a million people took place on the day after Christmas. Tomorrow, December 14^th, is the third anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shooting. And thus it is appropriate and timely, although depressing, for the Gospel writer Matthew to juxtapose the story of the massacre of innocent children with the Christmas story.

And the land in which Jesus was born is no less turbulent today than it was in Jesus’ time. We find ourselves in the midst of the storm. In the Gospel passage I read earlier, did you hear how it said that King Herod was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him? We know something about that, don’t we? A poll released by the New York Times indicates that Americans have a greater fear of terrorism now than at any time since the Sept. 11^th, 2001 attacks. We are well-acquainted with fear.

And we are well-acquainted with grief. There is the empty chair to contend with, the stocking that stays folded in the box. The first Christmas without a loved one is often the hardest, but any Christmas can become the occasion to see whether the hurt has let up any since this time last year. And when the death of the loved one takes place on or near Thanksgiving or Christmas, this time of year is forever tinged with the experience of grief.

When the Gospel writer Matthew quoted the prophet Jeremiah about Rachel weeping for her children, the prophet said that Rachel refused to be consoled. And we can see why. No parent wants to outlive his or her child, whether the child is 4 or 5 or 45. Children are supposed to outlive their parents, and the grief is especially painful when children beat their parents to the grave.

In the midst of all this fear and grief, what are we to make of the Christmas story?

Is the Christmas story simply a misleading calm in the midst of the storm that falsely lures people out of safety before the rest of the storm strikes, or is it an intimation of the deepest truth we know?----that in the midst of everything and in spite of everything, there is a peace that passes understanding.

The purpose of Christmas is not to get us to forget all the storms that rage about. If we simply try to ignore the storms, we risk reducing Christmas to nothing more than nostalgia and sentimentality or to the deep depression that grips so many this time of year.

When we celebrate Christmas, what we celebrate is not peace apart from pain, conflict, suffering, and confusion. Instead, Christmas is a peace like the peace in the eye of a hurricane, a peace smack dab in the middle of it all, a peace that does indeed pass all understanding.

In the Christian story, the great God who created the Universe and everything in it, gets born into a very ordinary and real human life, and becomes just as vulnerable as any one of us at the moment of our birth and throughout our moment-to-moment lived lives.

While all Jerusalem trembles in fear, a baby is born in Bethlehem. While King Herod stokes the fears of his people and overreacts with violence, God reaches out to us in love and joins us in our vulnerability.

As my friend Ray Roberts, a Presbyterian pastor in Virginia, points out, there is all the difference in the world between healthy fears and anxieties and being possessed by a Spirit of fear, which is destructive. He writes that when we no longer trust God, we seek to secure our own existence.

But the trouble with that is that we can’t.

Only God is a Mighty Fortress.

The impossibility of securing our lives against every possible imaginable threat puts us in fear lock down.

It makes it impossible for us to take even modest risks in the name of love, such as reaching out to refugees fleeing violence in the Middle East, and we forget that Joseph, Mary, and the baby Jesus were themselves refugees fleeing violence in the Middle East. (See raymondrroberts/tumblr dot com, post entitled “The Real Decline,” December 5, 2015)

José y Maria

I wish, more than anything, that I could declare to you that the storm is over, but I cannot.

What I can tell you is that God is with us in the midst of the storm.

What I can do is to remind us that we are in the season of Advent, a time when we remember the word of the angels who said, “Fear not.” They said this because Jesus was coming into the world, and because Jesus embodies the perfect love that casts out fear.

I can tell you that in spite of everything, Christmas is coming. And on Christmas we rejoice in the fact that the storm—the destruction, the violence, the fear, the grief, the hopelessness—does not have the last word.

But God—who gives us this peace in the midst of the storm—has the last word.

And the last word is the Word that became flesh and lived among us.

All glory and praise be to our God. Amen.