May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
I think for many of us, Christmas is the time of the year when we feel closest to our sense of tradition. Many of our traditions would seem strange without their long history that we have inherited. Cutting down a tree, bringing it inside, decorating it with baubles, forgetting to water it, watching it die rapidly, and then slowly shed its needles all over your sitting room is a strange practice, I am sure. But still I am looking forward to getting my tree and going through all these steps as I do every year. Why do we do this?
There are historical answers, of course—legends about Saint Boniface cutting down the sacred groves of the Germanic tribes. There are more recent and probably more relevant facts—Queen Victoria’s Christmas tree honouring her German husband Prince Albert, and so on. But these historical facts do not explain why we put up Christmas trees. I am American, so maybe elements of Britishness elude me, but Queen Victoria is not especially on my mind while I am decorating my tree.
The real reason why we do these things is tradition. But what is a tradition? Traditions recollect a past by remaking it in the present. There are of course many things we do repeatedly, but we do not brush our teeth because of tradition. Habits, even well established ones that have been handed down for generations, are not necessarily traditions. Traditions are about meaning—they use the past to give us a sense of the self, and a sense of our place in the community.
I put up a Christmas tree because that is what we do at Christmas; it is what my family does, it is what my church does, and it is what my culture does. So, doing that connects me to the whole community by appealing to our stories, our moments, our shared memories of the past.
In that sense, Christmas is about my childhood, and about my parents’ childhood. We do what we have always done, and the feeling that we have always done it also helps inspire what I want for my own kids. When I put up a tree or hang the stockings, I am, as the saying goes, making memories for them. This idea of making memories is a curious way to think about the future—as something already in the past, already remembered. But it shapes the way that we hope for our children’s future, rooted in our own memories of the past.
I start with this because I think that it can help us make sense of what is going on with the way that the sense of the past and the future are connected in our biblical passages today. Each of them appeals to the past in different ways. The Old Testament reading from Malachi is striking for a number of reasons. The New Testament interprets this passage as a prediction about the coming of John the Baptist.
But when we read it in its own context, we find something more complicated. The name of the prophet Malachi is actually just the Hebrew word for “my messenger” or perhaps “my angel,” who is referenced in the opening verses of our passage today. This messenger brings judgment against the priests administering the Temple for their offering of low-quality sacrifices. Sometimes it seems like the writer of the text is himself the messenger, while at other times he seems to be imagining another messenger bringing fulfilment to his words, anticipating a future continuation of his tradition.
Regardless, this is a passage about the reform of cultic practices, probably in the Persian period during the time of the reconstruction of the Temple shortly after the restoration of the Israelites from the Babylonian exile. See, you all knew it was a mistake that Jackie asked the Old Testament scholar to preach.
But I actually want to take that seriously for a moment to reflect on the way that hope is not a fixed vision. The writer of Malachi speaks to concerns of his own day and age, in all the particularities of his historical moment that are extremely far removed from those of John the Baptist, let alone from us. What makes this passage relevant is the appeal to hope—hope that God is still doing something, bringing renewal, at a time when things seem very far gone. It is this hope that gives the story its continued resonance across the ages.
Malachi’s hope for transformation is not wholly fixed in the future. Our passage from Malachi ends with the verse that says, “Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years.” In other words, he anticipates a renewal of the past. Or slightly differently, the past grounds his sense of hope for the future, which remains alive because it is firmly planted in the experience of the present.
Hope is situated at the strange intersection of the past and the future in the shifting present. We look backwards to look forward, and we look forwards to live.
When we get to the new beginnings imagined in our gospel passage, John the Baptist is preaching repentance and forgiveness. He is the figure in the Christian tradition most often associated with the “messenger” of Malachi, but he is not bringing judgment or cultic reform; he is calling the people to renewal. And again, the gospel writer looks backwards in order to understand, calling on texts from the prophet Isaiah: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall become straight, and the rough places shall become level ways, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”
In these quoted verses, Isaiah is speaking about the return of the people from exile in Babylon as the beginning of a renewal. And here too, he borrows language from the Israelites’ own legendary past in the Exodus story, returning across the wilderness to a homeland prepared for them. The point, of course, is not to rewrite or replace the older stories, but to locate the meaning of their present hopes and troubles in the echo of the past that shapes who they are.
That same pattern is happening in the gospel passage, as John the Baptist is imagined in the words of Isaiah, who imagines his own present in the images of the further past in Moses. And yet both Isaiah and John the Baptist, though they reach into the past, also imagine a new future transformation. The future seems alive because of the vitality of the past that gives birth to it.
These prophets are not merely recollecting old stories. The past to them is not a dead memory. It is the basis for their attempts to seek renewal in their own time. It grounds their hopes for a future that they then set about trying to build.
This is what I want us to understand. The Christmas season is about traditions—about our memories. But I don’t just mean memories of our own childhoods or the cultural memories of the Christmas tree or carol services. I mean that it is about these recollections of these stories of the ancient past that tell of hope, renewal, and transformation.
If we are not careful, we can fall into the habit of absorbing them into a pastiche of sentimentality. The baby in the manger becomes a cute story about animals, starlight, and familial joy. We lose the sense that the story has meaning; we forget to make it our own. We only observe the traditions; we forget to embody them.
If the story of Christmas is about the unexpected in-breaking of divine love that transforms us, then that gives us a profound narrative on which to ground our sense of who we are—as individuals and as a community this season. The stories we tell ourselves do have the potential to shape us, but only if we make them our own.
So for example, Christmas reminds us of family—for good and for ill—partly because the story itself centres on a family, and also especially because of the centrality of the home in our traditions. But many of our relationships are broken or dingy from years of neglect. If the past is not merely a story, but a living hope for our own renewal, then we cannot afford to ignore the cracks or dust in our own lives. We all have regrets. Sentimentalism papers over them; but hope seeks healing.
Do not waste the memory of the past. Christmas is not an aesthetic; it is meant to be a lived experience of hope and renewal.
This idea is actually deeply embedded in the Christian calendar. We are in the season of advent, which remembers part of the Christmas story—particularly about the period of anticipation leading up to the birth of Jesus. But the Christian church has not merely set aside this to be a time recollecting the period of anticipation before the coming of the Messiah. We do this because the church, too, waits for the return of Jesus.
This can sound strange and foreign to our ears, if by the Second Coming we imagine the fantastical cataclysms born from disaster movies wedded to our dim recollections of the book of Revelation. But another way of understanding the imagery of the Second Coming is as a manifestation of divine love and resurrection hope made visible in comprehensive renewal. It is a vision of the past—of the mythic past of creation, of the moments of Exodus renewal, of cultic communal purification, of Christmas hope—all reborn as a future of hope realised. To appeal to this past and anticipate this future is to remind ourselves that we belong to the middle of this story, right here and now. If advent is about memory and anticipation, it is also about how to live out that hope in the present.
The words of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist from the Benedictus speak to this precisely. He recollects the promises made to the ancestors, including King David, and well before him, Abraham. But he also speaks of the new day that is breaking: “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
This hope is as yet obviously not fully realised. We still live in a world torn by violence and death. Our own lives, protected as we may be from the contingencies of war, are still marked by broken relationships, violation, and hurt, and we live in a society that too often is content to cover over or ignore the suffering of others to preserve our own comfort and ease. We have the opportunity instead to make a difference—to bring healing, grace, and forgiveness, and find beauty in God’s world, starting in the relationships closest to us and expanding outwards into our communities. We look backwards to look forward, and we look forwards to live. The expectations of advent are our invitation to remember, but also to hope, and so to be renewed.
Amen.