Let Us Sing
December 22, 2024 - Matthew 2: 1-12
I don’t know what it says about me but one of the most captivating Christmas stories I’ve come across this season is a T-Mobile ad. Before you judge me too harshly, let me tell you that the production quality and storyline seem like something that should win a short film contest. The live action ad opens on a snowy town where a young girl dressed in blue with ears just long enough to suspect she is something other than your average human throws a snowball at another little girl across the square who is dressed in red and has a nose just long enough to be a character from Dr. Seuss’s Whoville. That little girl is also throwing a snowball and just as the two projectiles would cross in their path, they both explode, revealing a glass barrier between the little girl in blue and the little girl in red. Parents with matching colors of dress and exaggerated facial features appear to shoo the children away from the barrier. It’s clear these two cultures are not intended to meet. But at night one little girl comes out to the barrier with a flashlight and the other signals with her own flashlight from her bedroom window. This begins a friendship played out soundlessly while a retooled Carol of the Bells plays in the background. The two girls find all kinds of ways to connect, making parallel snow angels on either side of the barrier, making silly snow people to surprise each other with, and even bringing a single chair, tea set, and box of cookies each to meet and eat in view of each other. In the final snowy scene, they each come with a gift-wrapped something that they elaborately pantomime is for the other, then unwrap on each side their own side. The little girl in red opens a delicately wrapped box to reveal a brick. The little girl in blue opens a ribbon tied bag to reveal a large rock. The scene fades as their gifts fly sharply through the air, aimed at the barrier between them, and then our viewpoint pans out to show that each little city exists entirely in its own snow globe, each neighboring the other now with a large hole on each side.
A message on screen reads: “connection begins when barriers break.” The gospels are full of stories of Jesus breaking barriers. He ate with people who were considered sinners. He talked with and healed people who cultural customs forbid him from interacting. He called together a strange group of folks who wouldn’t have otherwise been closely connected to travel cross country with him talking about what being loved and loving others really means. But well before all of that, barriers were broken in the story of Jesus’ birth when shepherds came rushing in from the fields and when in today’s scripture story the Magi arrive from another land, another culture, and another religion to pay their respects to this newborn ruler.
The breaking of all of these barriers creates connection that helps to bring healing not just to the people at the center of the stories but also to all of those of us who have heard the story on its retelling and applied it to the barriers and broken connections in our own lives. Make no mistake though, breaking barriers is not always met with a warm welcome. Ask anyone who has broken the silence on a painful secret and dared to break the false peace by asking to talk about the truth. It seems it’s especially those who, at least in their perspective, benefit from the status quo who are the most willing to violently protect those barriers to connection.
In Matthew, it’s King Herod who wants to know where the baby has been born not so he can pay him homage but rather, as we later learn in his willingness to slaughter any child in the region around Jesus’ age, so that he can violently put down anyone who threatens his ill kept power. We see this on the world stage when journalists and political opponents are jailed or murdered or when whole groups of people are singled out for systematic harassment or violent loss of life.
But we see it in a different way in our own cities, neighborhoods, and families when we meet each other’s differences not with curiosity and respect but with fear and emotional or physical abuse in a desperate attempt to keep the status quo in place. Often we don’t even realize we are part of continuing such harm. Rather we blindly reinforce the status quo because we are taught that sameness means safety and security. If we are the same then no matter what we are doing or how we treat others, we are both okay. If we are different, our thinking too often goes, one of us must be wrong, and it must not be me.
Sometimes drawing boundaries is entirely helpful, especially anytime physical or emotional harm continues to happen and needs to be interrupted. But too often it seems we would rather break our connections and keep our barriers, rather than listen to, welcome, and respect each other in the fullness of who we are. Breaking barriers and connecting with people unlike us can challenge us to see our own actions differently. Breaking barriers can lead us to ask why are things the way they are? Why do I see the world the way I do? And why do other people see the world the way they do? Why can’t there be more safety, prosperity, and joy for all of us? And what will it take to get there?
This is the great hope of connection. It has the power to change the way things are. It has the power to make them better. It doesn’t always come easily. Sometimes it means picking up the pieces or charting a new course home by another road. But it is very often a needed pathway to healing and wholeness. Over two hundred years ago, Joseph Mohr penned Silent Night in the small village of Oberndorf, Austria at a time when Europe was reeling from the devastation of the Napoleonic Wars.
Mohr, a young Catholic priest, wrote “all is calm, all is bright” and “let us sing, Alleluia to our king,” not because all was well but rather in honor of the holy nativity moment past and in the hope of a more peaceful time to come. Two years later, as Christmas approached, Mohr found himself facing a logistical problem: the church organ was damaged, possibly from flooding. With only days to spare before his Christmas service, Mohr asked Franz Xaver Gruber, a local schoolteacher and organist, to compose a melody that could be accompanied by guitar. The result was a hymn of stunning simplicity, a lullaby-like melody paired with lyrics that many of us have memorized, lines that speak of stillness, light, and the hope born on a silent, holy night. That evening, the two performed Silent Night for the first time, never imagining that this modest act of improvisation would create a song that would resonate across continents and centuries.
What barriers or harmful ways of keeping a status quo are we willing to break this season? Who knows what pathways of connection may wind their way through the cracks we create in the places where our hearts have grown hard? Whether it is carried to us in a song, in the glimmer of a star, in a stranger who offers directions, or in a message in a dream, may we be moved by the hope-filled story of restored connections between God and all the earth that was born in a special way that first silent, holy night.
Wherever we go this season may our hearts sing that glorious song of old and a song of hope made gloriously new.
May it be so. Amen.
