I'll have a blue Christmas

For such a festive holiday, Christmas has no shortage of wistful, melancholic songs associated with it: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, I'll Be Home for Christmas (If Only in My Dreams), Blue Christmas, and virtually all of the songs on my favorite Christmas album--Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas--are arranged in such a way as to bring out the melancholy. Even the Christmas hymns express this. One of my favorites is What Child Is This, an old English folk melody, which has lyrics like these:

Why lies He in such mean estate,
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christians, fear, for sinners here
The silent Word is pleading.

Nails, spear shall pierce Him through,
The cross be borne for me, for you.
Hail, hail the Word made flesh,
The Babe, the Son of Mary.

In a religious sense, that melancholia exists because implicit in the incarnation is the crucifixion, as the lyrics quoted above make brutally clear. Furthermore, reading the account of the annunciation in Luke 2 you see that Mary's initial response to the angel's announcement is not joy but fear, which Yeats' poem The Mother of God, which I posted on earlier, captures so well.

I think emphasizing the melancholic aspects of the holiday may be one way of combating the relentless commercialization of Christmas.

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SERMON: The Great Omission (Mt. 28:16-20)

This sermon was delivered at Yale Divinity School in 2020 for the class Sacred Moments in African-American Preaching. I begin with a simple observation. Of the four canonical gospels, Matthew is the only one that ends with the words of Jesus. Mark, Luke, and John all end in the narrator’s voice, but Matthew closes with the words of Jesus. Mark ends at the tomb, with the women fleeing in terror and amazement. Luke ends with the disciples in Jerusalem, praising at the temple. John ends on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, with a dialogue between Jesus and Peter. And here Matthew ends with the disciples in Galilee, meeting Jesus at the mountain where he had directed them. Matthew gives Jesus the last word. But before we get to those last words, there are three other words in this passage that I call to our attention because I find them astonishing. Let me read verse 17 once more. “When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some do...

On this date in history

On July 19, 1997, my life, which had been going pretty darn well, took a turn for the even better. Along with my roommate and bandmate Jeff, I cohosted a Regressives "fan appreciation party" on the roof of my apartment in Hell's Kitchen. In fact, I still have a copy of the invitation, which promised an "early morning dogpile on John Schneider" (unless I'm confusing that with one of our New Year's parties). I'll spare you the details since this is a family blog, but suffice it to say that at approximately 7:15 PM, a petite Asian woman wearing expensive sunglasses, a dayglo lavender miniskirt, and 5-inch platform shoes knocked on my apartment door. Already feeling in good spirits, I opened the door with a sweeping, dramatic gesture and proclaimed, "It's the woman from the deli!" She must have been wondering whether she had the right apartment because I was the only one there; everyone else was up on the roof. In retrospect, I'm amaz...

Where have I been?

What a presumptuous question! But this is a blog, after all, and presumably someone is reading it--that's what the blog's statistics indicate, anyway. I haven't posted at all since Christmas because during my two weeks "off" for Christmas break I: prepared the children's Christmas sermon with my pastoral partner, Dan Yang; wrote the senior high curriculum for the winter youth group retreat; and prepared a seminar for the retreat on the Old Testament. All that took place the first week. The second week was spent at the retreat, from which I got back just in time for the New Year's service. So going back to school on January 3 was actually a welcome break from my break. Since I've been back on campus I've been immersed in my readings for Christianity's Cultured Critics, my course for the fall short term. The readings are not light (Hume, Kant, Schleiermacher, etc.), and I have to keep a daily critical log and prepare a group project for the l...

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