{"id":195,"date":"2013-12-24T13:11:54","date_gmt":"2013-12-24T18:11:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/?p=195"},"modified":"2014-12-03T21:31:49","modified_gmt":"2014-12-04T02:31:49","slug":"the-star-and-the-cross","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/?p=195","title":{"rendered":"The Star and the Cross"},"content":{"rendered":"<body><audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-195-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/The.Star_.and_.the_.Cross-WW.mp3?_=1\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/The.Star_.and_.the_.Cross-WW.mp3\">http:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/The.Star_.and_.the_.Cross-WW.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/The.Star_.and_.the_.Cross-WW.pdf\">The.Star.and.the.Cross-W&amp;W<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Watching &amp; Waiting<br>\nThe Star and the Cross<\/p>\n<p>Texts on Christmas Eve 2013<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWishing you an old-fashioned Christmas\u201d\u2014jingles the message inside a yuletide card on my desk.\u00a0 The water-color painting printed on its face renders a scene in a room of very blue walls and very high ceiling.\u00a0 The tall be-appled Christmas tree stands on top of a dining table.\u00a0 In separate chairs, mother and father are occupied with their books.\u00a0 (Books? you say.\u00a0 Ah, but this is an \u201cold-fashioned\u201d Christmas.) Three dogs cavort among three children, three toys, and three cats in front of a fireplace so huge a man could walk in it but for the roaring fire climbing up in it.\u00a0 Through sixteen uncurtained window panes, the night imposes a part of its immense burden on the domestic scene, which seems to push with all its might against that dark.\u00a0 This little painting works a wonderful Christmas spell.<br>\nWhat is it about an old-fashioned Christmas that so draws us to its warm hearth?\u00a0 And what is it about our modern Christmas frenzy and that marshmallow music in the malls that lays waste to a Christmas deeply dreamt?\u00a0 All sorts of answers come: commercialism, materialism, a false sense of history, withering family traditions, forgetting of life\u2019s enjoyments, and so on.\u00a0 These probes are not exactly wrong, but they don\u2019t go deep; they only name symptoms of a social problem.\u00a0 The heart of that problem appears on the other side of those sixteen glass panes partly admitting the dark in the little painting.<br>\nChristmas only \u201cworks\u201d if its lights play against real dark.\u00a0 That is why, according to Christmas cards and carols unnumbered, \u201cthe snow lay on the ground, the stars shone bright.\u201d\u00a0 The snow, the cold, and the dark do not direct our thoughts to history, but rather our hearts to a mystery\u2014that over against a darkness unwilling to dicker death with us, light shines.<br>\nThe drama is universal and personal.\u00a0 In A Christmas Carol, Dickens masterfully manipulated metaphors of light against real darkness\u2014the brilliant spirits coming at midnight to show hateful or hopeful pasts and futures; the bright good will in the Cratchit family set against its poverty and the threat to tiny Tim\u2019s life; and, of course, Scrooge by night and Scrooge by Christmas Day.\u00a0 Personal confrontation with forces of evil and destruction is the first fact of the story of our life.\u00a0 This is why even a little dab of dark in a water-colored window is dark enough to make a real Christmas present\u2014to show that a \u201clight shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.\u201d\u00a0 Ask anyone whose Christmas was once infused with fear for a loved one\u2019s life, whether that season bore a new measure of the meaning of Christmas.\u00a0 If there came some light in that darkness, the great glad tidings tell.<br>\nIf you marvel at children\u2019s edgeless zeal for this season, only remember that their whole lives are plunged in elements of weakness and uncertainty.\u00a0 Though mostly not burdened with this thought, they know from the marrow of their bones that this world is armed to crush whatever little life moves unprotected in its paths.\u00a0 A child\u2019s dazzlement at Christmas is her shout of joy absolute that there exist great powers who shelter me, a little lamb, in the middle of the world\u2019s storm, shepherds who supply my need and more.\u00a0 That attitude, that prayer\u2014which is the essence of true religiousness\u2014brings peace to any child of any age from one to one-oh-two\u2014yet only if life\u2019s light and shadow are somehow held near in mind, in honesty, and not denied.<br>\nThe problem with modern Christmas is plain: Denial! Too much light, and no darkness in which to wonder at it.\u00a0 The secular songs are merely cheery.\u00a0 The stars . . . are Hollywood stars set up on man-made stages. The malls glow too bright.\u00a0 The gift-giving business, often a burden, is too light a thing to touch \u201dthe hopes and fears of all the years . . . met in Thee tonight.\u201d\u00a0 To say it too plainly, Americans dreaming of a white Christmas will never rest in peace while their light, bright, white dream is still driven by denial of all the wrongs in our long history, our hate and racism, our wars, our greed.<br>\nBut Christmas wasn\u2019t for denial. The story of the baby born at night was never meant for merriment alone.\u00a0 I often wonder as I wander among the gospels whether it was the sign of the Cross that first brought the idea of a westward leading star to a gospel-sayer\u2019s eye and helped him shape his story.\u00a0 For without the Cross, we can never find the Babe.\u00a0 Without the Cross, the Star leads nowhere but to another birth, glad or sad, long or short, then done and dead. The Cross is our star, our guide, our surety, our light through storm and evil, and finally, our joy and our hope; that light by which we may see and say at once all that we have done and not done; that light under which we can hold and be held in solidarity with all whom we have done ill, with all the crucified peoples of the world, even the dead, and all their children.\u00a0 The Cross has the light we must follow, the light which \u201cyonder star\u201d but dimly foreshadows.\u00a0 By this sign, hidden and holy, we can without the least self-consciousness become like children again, ready to receive all the fabled stories of this night as children do, as Christmas Presence, spread beneath the wing of great power holding in the Night.<\/p>\n<p>Rev. Stephen H. Phelps<br>\nThe Riverside Church \u00a0in the City of New York<br>\n\u00a9 2013 Stephen H. Phelps<\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cWishing you an old-fashioned Christmas\u201d\u2014jingles the message inside a yuletide card on my desk.  The water-color painting printed on its face renders a scene in a room of very blue walls and very high ceiling.  The tall be-appled Christmas tree<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermon-2013"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=195"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":203,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions\/203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}