The Old South Church in Boston
Christ or Kris Kringle?
Sermon by Jennifer Mills-Knutsen
November 30, 2003 Jeremiah 33:14-16, John 3:16-21
The title of today’s sermon is “Christ or Kris Kringle?,” However, this particular sermon also has two subtitles, a disclaimer, an objection and its rebuttal, all of which we must first get out of the way. Subtitle number one is simply an explanation of the main heading, offering a more detailed insight into what follows. That first subtitle is, “Why Jesus is Better than Santa Claus.” There is the argument for you, plain and simple. So, my claim thrust out so boldly, I must move apace to that disclaimer, which is as follows: The following sermon in no way, shape or form denies the existence of Santa Claus. Nothing contained in the following should be construed as a polemic against the existence of Kris Kringle, Saint Nick, Father Christmas or any other such person. In other words, do not think for one minute that this preacher doubts the power or the existence of the jolly old elf in the red suit. So, with the disclaimer over, on to the objection and its rebuttal.
Today, as you have already heard, is the first Sunday in Advent. Strict followers of the liturgical cycle would be quick to object to my topic today as premature. Advent, they might say, is not Christmas—Advent is the season of darkness, anticipating the coming of the light of Christ into the world. It is the time when we watch and wait, hope and pray for the Messiah—it is too hasty, they might chide me, to leap ahead to Christmas Day. We cannot skip the waiting. Perhaps some of you today might carry the same objection—so, like any good debater, I came prepared with my rebuttal, which goes like this: “I agree! Advent is a sacred time of preparation and waiting for Christmas day, and I have no intention of skipping Advent and preaching Christmas on November 30. But we live in a world that already has. In the instant-gratification culture of consumer capitalism, the Christmas season of shopping and spending stretches from Halloween to New Year’s Day, and over the next four weeks of Advent we will all be inundated with images of Santa Claus and his Christmas plans. To wait until December 25th would be too late—in fact, my hope is that today’s sermon helps us prepare for the coming of Christmas by thinking critically about who it is we are anticipating.” And hence my rebuttal leads to the necessary second subtitle below “Christ or Kris Kringle?”: “For whom are we hoping?” “For whom are we hoping?”
In the life of the church, the theme of this first day of Advent is hope, as you have already heard in the lighting the first Advent candle, and in the scripture from the book of Jeremiah, which proclaims with confidence that God’s promises for justice and righteousness will be fulfilled. In the life of the church, this is the hope for the Messiah, the baby Jesus whose arrival we greet at Christmas. However, our lives are not confined to church life, and the world around us is asking us to get ready for two supernatural arrivals on Christmas Day: Jesus and Santa. Each creates a great deal of hope, anticipation and excitement prior to their coming. Each arrives with good news, with gifts. Each promises fulfillment, joy and wonder—but in what way? What happens if we put these two Christmas guests side by side and compare the promises of their coming? What makes Jesus better than Santa Claus? For whom are we hoping? Christ or Kris Kringle?
There is an e-mail floating about on the web that tries just such a comparison, and I thought some of the responses were quite clever. For example, Santa rides in a sleigh, but Jesus rides on the wind and walks on the water. Santa fills your stockings with goodies, but Jesus supplies all your needs. Santa lives at the North Pole, but Jesus is everywhere. Santa has a belly like a bowl full of jelly, but Jesus has a heart full of love. On and on, like that. These are simple reflections, but I think the author of this e-mail was onto something. What does Jesus promise, and what does Santa? How do they measure up?
Let’s start with a closer look at one of the points this anonymous author makes: Santa lives in the North Pole, but Jesus is everywhere. Think with me about the North Pole for a minute. It’s a magical, mystical place, inhabited by joyous elves with no other occupation than year-round toy-making, plus reindeer that can fly. The cares and worries of the real world have no place at the North Pole—no one gets older, no one dies, no one experiences pain or violence. It sounds like a wonderful place, and, by contrast, quite different from the place that Jesus inhabits. Our anonymous author says that Jesus is everywhere, but I’d like to make that a bit more specific. Jesus chose to dwell not in a faraway castle removed from humanity, or even in heaven, but right here on earth, among us. Jesus takes on human pain and death in order to know life and love with all of its blood, sweat and tears. The North Pole and the elves do sound nice, but we all know our lives don’t resemble that much at all. We live in a world where joy coexists with pain, celebration falls alongside struggle, death is a part of life. Jesus lives in that world too. He doesn’t just fly through one night a year, but manifests himself wherever there is suffering, loneliness, anguish or grief. In the words of today’s gospel: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Jesus chose not to dwell in a heavenly castle inaccessible to all but happy elves, but to come and dwell among us, here on earth, and in that very act of solidarity, throw open the gates of the heavenly realm to us all.
And for Jesus, it really is all of us, regardless of our deservedness. The song tells us that Santa is making a list and checking it twice, he’s gonna find out who’s naughty and nice. I know you all were probably far more well-behaved than I, but I spent many a Christmas Eve worried that I’d made it on to the wrong list that year, and would wake to find nothing but a lump of coal at the bottom of my Christmas stocking. Santa’s gift-giving and goodwill depends on our good behavior. Theologically, you might call Santa’s system of dividing the naughty from the nice, “contingent grace”—grace dependent on the worthiness of the recipient. Only the good receive the gifts. But God, in Christ, practices what we call a prevenient grace—grace that comes before, a grace that comes before we are ready for it, before we are worthy of it. It comes while we are still sinners, and it comes again when we sin again.
Remember Jesus’ associates during his time on earth—not good little boys and girls or magical elves, but troubled souls and trouble-makers. Sinners, prostitutes, Samaritans, tax collectors, fishermen—there was room in Jesus’ circle for all kinds. Why? He says, “I have come not to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Matthew 9:13) Which means that, with Christ’s prevenient grace, there might just be room for us in his circle too—and we need not spend restless nights worrying if our good behavior has earned it. We haven’t earned it, but it has already been given to us. As often as we quote John 3:16, I find it hollow without going on to the next step, verse 17: “God did not send the Son into the world in order to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Jesus comes in love, and offers that love to all of us, no matter what.
Which leads me to another comparison between Jesus and Santa. The love that Jesus practiced was pretty radical stuff. Hanging out with Samaritans, lepers and women—that challenged the entire ordering of the ancient Jewish world. Jesus overturned exclusionary social stratification dividing the pure from the impure and clean from unclean; he challenged an unjust economic system where the rich got richer and the poor got poorer; he unmasked the operations of a political empire that ruled only for its own gain and not the people’s needs. And all this started at his very birth—arriving in a lowly stable, surrounded by poor shepherds, yet immediately a threat to King Herod and his kingdom. Jesus was an affront to all systems of oppression, everywhere. What about our friend Santa? Think with me for a minute about our current social, political and economic system, and how Santa fits in to it all.
In this measure, I’m sorry to say that Santa fares quite poorly. You might initially think that a guy who goes around giving away free toys to all the good children actually challenges the economic system of “you get what you pay for,” that Santa’s generosity somehow undercuts self-centeredness and greed. But this is where Santa’s magical world at the North Pole again causes us troubles—Santa has an unlimited supply of toys, renewable without cost and without end, not to mention loads of elf-helpers to organize, wrap and deliver, and the ability to rest for 364 days after the holiday all-nighter. We don’t have those luxuries. Yet we try to imitate Santa by spending and spending in order to keep giving and giving, buying and collecting toys for all ages. Have you heard that saying? “What happened to the good old days, when you stopped buying gifts when you ran out of money?” Because we don’t have Santa’s magic, we too often end the holiday season broke and exhausted.
Even more, our imitation of Santa is actually the hinge holding together the consumer capitalist system. The Christmas season accounts for between one quarter and one third of retail income for the entire year. And, as any economist, liberal or conservative, will tell you, our system of consumer capitalism does not work by evenly distributing wealth across the populace, but gives more to those who have and takes more from those who don’t. Our Christmas imitations of Santa are helping the rich (like retail owners, credit card companies and advertisers) to get richer, while the poor (those of the middle and lower classes who are overspending in order to keep up with what Santa brought the neighbors or their children’s classmates) get poorer. You see, then, that it crosses over also into social stratification—reinforcing the social divides already in place, because both children and adults have learned to mark our social status by comparing what Santa brings us, with what Santa brought our neighbors or classmates.
Yet, because we feel good when we model ourselves after the jolly old elf who gives from his magical supply, we ignore the dangers of our spending habits and overlook those who are profiting handily off of us. Because we use the quality of our gifts to express the quality of our love for our friends and family, we brush off the social disparities and status motives inherent in our gift choices. Santa, then, actually works to uphold the current economic and social system, and to mask its problems from us. Whereas Jesus throws back the curtain to name the forces causing wide disparities between rich and poor, Santa covers them up in a cloak of fantastical generosity. Whereas Jesus bridges social classes, the differences in the gifts that Santa brings help define them. Whereas Jesus challenges the economic system, Santa Claus reinforces it.
So there it is. That completes my argument—why Jesus is better than Santa Claus. I make the case not to be the Grinch, nor to urge you to opt out of recognizing Saint Nick this year. The expectations in our culture around Santa Claus and gift-giving in his honor are so high and so thick that it is unreasonable to expect that we could ever completely opt out of Santa and his celebrations, certainly not without alienating ourselves from friends, family and co-workers. But perhaps that’s just further evidence of the powerful forces Santa’s image helps to maintain. So no, as I said in my disclaimer, I don’t think you must do away with Santa to be a good Christian—I’m not sure you even can. But I make this case today because, as I said at the beginning, today is the first day of Advent, the season of hope and expectation. And I want to invite you to think critically about who it is you are hoping for and who it is that might satisfy your deepest longings.
Who is this Savior, Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God-With-Us? He is not much at all like Santa Claus, some mystical being who only dips his toe in the real world, who offers a contingent grace and gifts only for the good, who shores up the ways of the world, whose gifts lose their luster by Christmas afternoon. The Savior for whom we are hoping, the God whose advent we are anticipating, engages in the real world with all it blood, sweat and tears, its living and its dying, so as to be fully present to us as human beings. The Savior for whom we are hoping offers us prevenient grace, a grace that comes before we are deserving, before we are ready, before we even know we need it. The Savior for whom we are hoping loves all people, the sinners and the saints, the outcast and the in-crowd, the troublemakers and the troubleshooters. The Savior for whom we are hoping takes on the forces of the world that divide us, challenges the powers that confine us, and overturns the systems that oppress us. And that kind of Savior is worth hoping for.
But you know what’s even better? That is the kind of Savior that came to us 2000 years ago in a small town in Galilee, and that is the kind of Savior that is coming to us even now, again this year on Christmas Day. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray.
Loving God, thank you for the gift of your son Jesus Christ, beacon of hope for all the world. Help us during these Advent and Christmas seasons to know Christ as our most precious Savior, lover and companion of us all, that we might be transformed to imitate Christ in all we do. Amen.
* Many of the ideas in this sermon are heavily indebted to the book Christmas Unwrapped: Christ, Consumerism and Culture, edited by Richard Horsley and James Tracy, especially the essay, “Santa Claus as an Icon of Grace” by Max A. Myers.
The Old South Church in Boston
645 Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02116
(617) 536-1970