Put Christ into Christmas! (4)

Third, when we put Christ into Christmas, our lives are redeemed by our faith in love as the greatest thing in the world. High on a hill in Melbourne, Australia, stands a beautiful building known as the Shrine of Remembrance. It commemorates the people’s sacrifice during World War I. It is a thing of beauty and majesty with its Doric columns, its pyramidal dome, and its lanscaped terraces. The central hall is a great empty room lined with marble pillars. The only object in the room is the Stone of Remembrance, a sheer sheet of marble into which are cut simple words which speak beautifully of the power of love. Overhead in the dome is a small opening. After long and difficult study of the order in the universe, the architect so fixed the position of that opening that at exactly 11:00 o’clock in the morning in November 11 for one thousand years a beam of sunshine will pour down upon the Stone of Remembrance and illumine the one word “Love” in the inscription reading “Greater Love Hath No Man.”

This is a very noble gesture of man to show his regard for love as one of the great forces of life. Yet at its best it is a cold and cheerless effort compared with the ever-living monument arranged by the Heavenly Father to remind men through the centuries of the love that saves, lifts, and redeems life. For a fullness of time the divine Architect of the universe caused the light of the divine love to shine upon a child in a stable. Henceforth through all the centuries of time men shall stand in humility and awe at the remembrance of this event. It was an event that enthroned love as the divine law of life.

Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love Divine;
Love was born at Christmas,
Star and angels gave the sign.

Worship we the Godhead,
Love incarnate, Love Divine;
Worship we our Jesus;
But wherewith for sacred sign?

Love shall be our token,
Love be yours and Love be mine,
Love to God and all men,
Love for plea and gift and sign.

Can this love redeem us today from our follies, our stupid hatreds, our sins? Can it cope with the evil forces in our kind of world? Why not dispense with Christ and all this talk of love? The answer is easy: love is our only hope.

A top research chemist of Princeton, Hugh Scott Taylor, made a startling statement. He said that if we lumped all the sources of power available to men in 1939—steam, electricity, internal combustion engines, TNT, and so on—and called them one, then the potential power available to men just eight years later, in 1947, was forty million times that amount. Is there any counterbalancing power on earth equal to the job of controlling and directing that physical power for the weal instead of the woe of man? Yes, only one. Is it in the military, in the laboratory, in money? No. It is in the power of love. Here is God’s everlasting gift to men. No other gift do the weary-footed, fear-stricken children of men need more than this. It is a gift free to all for the asking. It is ours when we put Christ at the heart of Christmas.

This love is no weak and spineless thing. It does not spend itself in vague and quieting commonplaces. Nor does it exhaust itself in tarnished tinsel and phony Santa Clauses. It is gentle, kindly, forgiving, and comforting, to be sure. But it is also strong, vital, revolutionary. It is a love that disturbs our easygoing ways with a vision of God’s hopes and dreams. It is a love that flames in indignation against the ugly and vicious aspects of life which deny God’s love and hold in contempt the Christ of Christmas. It is a love that laughs. It is also a love that weeps in agony over the cruel inhumanities and the brutal exploitations of life. It is a love that disturbs our narrow ideas with the awareness that God’s gift is for all men. It is a love that gives and suffers in defense of its own against all who hold it in mockery and scorn.

When we put Christ into Christmas, this divine love is born again in our own hearts and homes and world. Without him life becomes stagnant and diseased, bitter and self-destructive. God at Christmas would remind us that love is still supreme. He would have us know that only in its light and power does life have a chance to be cleansed and purified, redeemed and restored.

Christ of all the Christmases there have been, hear my
Prayer fot those who have no Christmas.
For the darkened millions who go to bed hungry
tonight, and all the nights.
For the children in whose homes the candles have been
put our these days by war, and pestilence and fear.
For boys and girls whose hands press against store windows
while their eyes devour the glories they can never touch.
For those whose hearts are torn by hate, twisted by prejudices,
crippled by narrowness and pride.
For these who have no Christmas this day, Christ of deathless
love, let thy presence come with joy and healing in its wings.

—Percy R. Hayward, “For Those Who Have No Christmas” in Young People’s Prayers


December 18, 2007