A Homily for the Nativity of the Lord
Readings:
Vigil Mass: Isaiah 62:1-5 Acts 13:16-17, 22-25 Matthew 1:1-25
Mass During the Night: Isaiah 9:1-6 Titus 2:11-14 Luke 2:1-14
Mass at Dawn: Isaiah 62:11-12 Titus 3:4-7 Luke 2:15-20
Mass During the Day: Isaiah 52:7-10 Hebrews 1:1-6 John 1:1-18
Standing over the hot stove cooking supper, the colored maid, Arcie, was very tired. Between meals today, she had cleaned the whole house for the white family she worked for, getting ready for Christmas tomorrow. Now her back ached and her head felt faint from sheer fatigue. Well, she would be off in a little while, if only the Missus and her children would come on home to dinner. They were out shopping for more things for the tree which stood all ready, tinsel-hung and lovely in the living room, waiting for its candles to be lighted.
This is the opening of Langston Hughes’s 1934 short story “One Christmas Eve.”
Arcie needs her employer to come home quickly. She still needs to buy Christmas presents for her own 5-year-old son, Joe. Like so many before and since, she lives paycheck to paycheck.
But our contemporary, commercial Christmas faces too many challenges to arrive undamaged. When she finally does come home, “the missus” must short Arcie two dollars this week. “The children have made me run short of change, buying presents and all.”
Like other poor folk, Arcie must take what life gives. She’s focused on hurrying home to pick up Joe and to go shopping for her own Christmas presents before the stores close.
There is freshly fallen snow, and a Christmas tree in front of city hall. The main street is hung with bright red and blue lights.
“I hears they got a Santa Claus downtown,” Joe said, wriggling into his worn little coat. “I want to see him.”
But Arcie has other rushed and resigned plans. A dollar is spent getting Joe mittens and other things he needs. Another 49 cents goes to the A&P for hard candy. Whatever toys Joe might receive will be found in the dime store.
They pass a movie theater. Joe would like to see the films, but his mother tells him that this is not Baltimore. It is a small town in the South, and Blacks are not allowed. She instructs him to wait outside the dime store while she shops for his Christmas gifts.
Like many children, Joe expands on his mother’s permission. There are so many pretty store windows to see!
In the lobby of the moving picture show, behind the plate glass doors, it was all warm and glowing and awful pretty. Joe stood looking in, and as he looked his eyes began to make out, in there blazing beneath holly and colored streamers and the electric stars of the lobby, a marvelous Christmas tree. A group of children and grown-ups, white, of course, were standing around a big man in red beside the tree. Or was it a man? Little Joe’s eyes opened wide. No, it was not a man at all. It was Santa Claus!
Santa is handing out candy canes, not toys, but Joe desperately wants one. Of course, the boy goes in. He meets systematized antipathy, not deeply personal rancor.
Why is it that lots of white people always grin when they see a Negro child? Santa Claus grinned. Everybody else grinned, too, looking at little black Joe—who had no business being in the lobby of a white theater. Then Santa Claus stooped down and slyly picked up one of his lucky number rattles, a great big loud tin-pan rattle like they use in cabarets. And he shook it fiercely right at Joe. That was funny. The white people laughed, kids and all. But little Joe didn’t laugh. He was scared. To the shaking of the big rattle, he turned and fled out of the warm lobby of the theater, out into the street where the snow was and the people. Frightened by laughter, he had begun to cry. He went looking for his mama. In his heart he never thought Santa Claus shook great rattles at children like that—and then laughed.
Joe finds his mother, who is wearily and worriedly searching the festive streets for her son. What can she say to this child who has learned so early that the Christmas proclaimed by the angels is not what we sell today? We market something that is supposed to make you feel the cherished fantasy. If you do not, perhaps you did not spend enough.
There is a Christmas we sell and a Christmas the Lord offers. You do not receive much of the first without cash, though all the money in the world cannot take away our sorrows, our troubles, our pain. Somehow, as we mature, we are taught not to mention our maladies, or the world’s, to those who are celebrating the season. We must not ruin the magic.
Arcie dismisses all of that. “He’s just a old white man,” she tells little Joe.
Then there is the Christmas the church continues to proclaim and to celebrate.
Say to daughter Zion,
your savior comes! (Is 62:11)
In this Christmas, there is nothing to purchase, nothing to earn.
The kindness and generous love
of God our savior appeared,
not because of any righteous deeds we had done
but because of his mercy (Tit 3:4-5).
We do all we can to make our streets and homes look festive, but we cannot adorn the heavens, cannot fill them with “good news of great joy that will be for all the people” (Lk 2:10).
And suddenly there was a multitude of the heavenly host with the angel,
praising God and saying:
“Glory to God in the high
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests” (Lk 2:13-14).
One Christmas you can buy with your earnings; the other you must await. You must silently receive it entering your life as grace. One Christmas exists to distract us, at least for a while, from the troubles of the world and our own personal heartaches. Not a bad thing. But of course, diversion is not deliverance.
The other Christmas announces the inauguration of the Lord’s own response to the evil and the suffering of the world. He must assault our self-wrought alienation from God. And so, he is born a poor boy, one destined to be rejected, to suffer and to die.
He was in the world,
and the world came to be through him,
but the world did not know him.
He came to what was his own,
but his own people did not accept him (Jn 1:10-11).
Joe’s mother has little enough money for presents and even less time for words, but she draws a line between a store-bought Christmas that cannot save and the one that can.
“Huh! That was no Santa Claus” Arcie explained. “If it was, he wouldn’t a-treated you like that. That’s a theatre for white folks—I told you once—and he’s just a old white man.”
“Oh…” said little Joe.
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Photo by Wallace Henry on Unsplash
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