Greatest Hits

Greetings Earthlings.

The sun is rising bright here in hilly, very chilly Vermont. The stillness is almost hard to comprehend, it feels like my mind and body have been processing chaos for so long: need, disbelief, the sorrow of humanity, endless news stories that make no sense. The cold doesn’t help; for me everything slows down when the world freezes over.

If you’re reading this now then what you’re getting is the rough draft of my final Christmas Eve sermon. There was always a part of me that kept alive the tiny kernel of maybe one more church … “Should I terrorize one more church before I die?” I asked my daughter recently.

A definitive no came from the depth of her 19-year-old wisdom.

No, this is the last one. Ten years, that’s enough.

I was never really cut out for church ministry, from the start. I’m not a team player—that idiotic question everyone conducting an interview was asking not that long ago. I like to get stuff done, which almost always necessitates moving past things like committees and meetings and just doing it. Most institutions love an organizational structure that includes those things, and so I have chafed endlessly for the past ten years of this. I’m not great at waiting for permission; I like to just do and see what happens.

Christmas is a funny one as a church leader. I love the sights and smells, the music of Christmas, but I’m always girding myself for the onslaught on Christmas Eve. One might think a church packed to the brim is every pastor’s dream, but in truth it’s when you kind of go from … we’re here trying to figure this stuff out to we’re here to put on a little play for the guests.

It’s fine, but it’s also truly exhausting and I live for the moment when the church is empty, after the service. When I’m there all by myself, looking at the big tree, turning out all the lights, closing the door and going back out into the Vermont chill. I love the quiet after the chaos.

Our little town, Peru, is straight out of storybook land. Across the street from the church is the general store and it’s a good one. The new owners have done a terrific job of infusing life back into the place. The food is good, the outside lighting is warm and festive and they’re almost always playing the Grateful Dead.

To the left is the village green and right now there’s a skating rink. Often when I drive by there are people playing hockey or just twirling around. When it’s snowing little Peru looks like the inside of the most perfect snow globe.

Tonight we’ll have a bonfire and sing, tomorrow night the Christmas Eve service in the church.

What will I say at my final Christmas Eve service?

Rough draft, here goes:

When I was a kid we went to Catholic service, midnight mass on Christmas Eve. The thing I remember loving most was the incense. There was something about the man in the robes walking around with that swinging incense thing, making the place smell fantastic, that captivated me.

Decades later, when I became a pastor and shopped at the church supply store in Burlington, I was amazed to discover that I could purchase all that stuff and swing the thing around in my own church.

Maybe that was the whole point … the frankincense. The tactile experience of Christmas.

The candlelight, the sounds of the songs, the smells.

The story, after all, is a tough pill to swallow: virgin pregnancy. Wait, what? Unwed teenage mother, young couple wandering in the cold, looking for a place to give birth. No room at the inn? Who the hell would turn away a woman in labor? A star in the sky told the shepards what had happened? What were shepards doing out in the cold at night? Don’t they keep their sheep in a barn in the winter?

It has always seemed that someone took a great deal of poetic license with the Christmas story. And where and when did Santa Claus enter the narrative?

As challenging as the season is for a pastor, Christmas Eve has provided for me my three favorite events in my life as a church leader.

The first happened at my first Christmas Eve service at a small church in a rural Vermont community. I had lived there as a married person over a decade earlier, then left when I wanted a divorce from my husband, whose family had deep ties to that small town. I was not popular in that choice. My husband and I had two young boys and, looking back, I really have no idea what I was thinking. I busted up a marriage, dismantled a nice life and headed off into the impoverished existence of a graduate student and single mom.

Returning to that town as the pastor of the church was very risky, probably dumb. Definitely confusing, even to me.

Except that now, as a person deeply committed to spiritual evolution, I know that following one’s instincts is really the best survival strategy in this life.

That first Christmas Eve I really wanted my boys to be in church, but I knew that their dad’s family (all of whose hearts I had broken by leaving the marriage and town) had their big Christmas celebration on Christmas Eve. In the days running up to the Big Show, I pleaded my case, didn’t press too hard, wanting to respect their tradition, and held onto hope.

The night of the service I watched as the room filled to the brim. I watched from the front as people streamed in from the cold, took their place and waited. No sign of my boys. My heart drooped.

Then, just as we stood to start singing the first carol, I looked at the back door to see the entire McChesney family walking in, dressed in their holiday finest.

They had pressed pause on their Christmas Eve celebration and all of them: my former husband and his wife and their two kids; my former mother and father-in-law; my former brother and sister-in-law and their three kids, and my sons.

I stepped down from the pulpit and walked forward to hug them.

They brought with them, that night, the meaning of Christmas. They embodied it, everything that God meant for us when God sent a rep in the form of a little baby: forgiveness, generosity, love. And, perhaps most important of all: they showed up. They walked through the door of old pain and into the light of celebration and reconciliation.

I love all of them, deeply, and we have spent many happy occasions together over the years. I was with my former father-in-law when he was dying; I visit my former mother-in-law, now in assisted living, often. My former husband, a hunter, is, in fact, supplying us this year with the venison for our Christmas Eve supper.

Forgiveness, reconciliation, humility, love. If you believe in the Jesus story then you understand why God needed to press upon us a role model: to teach us these very things.

I have seen people who consider themselves to be religious or Christian who are truly terrible people.

And I have seen people who would never give themselves those labels who are generous, kind, forgiving, loving and humble.

The other two events from my Christmas Eve Faves were similar in nature: in that same church, a year later, when I was really able to soak in the experience of Christmas Eve as a pastor, at the very end of the service, everyone gathered circled up around the edge of the room and, by candlelight, we sang Silent Night. I stood in the choir loft looking down, singing with them, but also just watching. Looking around the big circle and seeing the various members of that small community, differences put aside, singing silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright, together in the warm glow of the candles, unity through song, for the moment, human perfection.

It was transcendent.

The third best moment was also a circle of singing. The year we couldn’t meet in the church because of the pandemic. That year we built a bonfire on the town green in Peru and everyone came. People streamed in with cookies and cocoa. Skaters skated on the rink, and we joined our voices in song, standing around a fire, together.

It was better than any Christmas Eve church celebration I have ever attended as a participant or hosted as a pastor. It was everyone, together, bonded by our humanity, warmed by a fire, outside in the winter, joining our voices in song … and heaven and nature sing, and heaven and nature sing. Kindness, generosity, love, warmth, community, song, these are why we’re here and if little baby Jesus didn’t come to tell us all this, then what?

Merry Christmas.
xo,mo

That night, as painted by my friend, Bob Ray.