Christmas Hearts

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

December 12, 2010

Third Sunday in Advent

Christmas Hearts

Isaiah 35:1-10

Psalm 146

We all have our favorite Christmas carols, don’t we?

It may be a tune you learned as a child,

your family all gathered together round the piano singing,

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”

Or perhaps you were in a Christmas pageant

when you were younger

and sang a carol that has had

special meaning for you ever since,

“O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie…”

Or maybe your favorite is one you sing in church

each year on Christmas Eve:

“O Come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant…”

“The first Nowell, the angels did say…”

“Silent Night, Holy Night…”

There’s no shortage of wonderful songs celebrating the season,

songs both sacred and secular that are a joy to hear, a joy to sing.

I have more than 200 Christmas carols and songs on my iPod.

I favor the music and arrangements of John Rutter,

but I also have a lot of popular tunes:

James Taylor swinging through “Winter Wonderland”;

Ella Fitzgerald singing the obscure but lush

“The Secret of Christmas”;

The Beach Boys rocking on “Little Saint Nick.”

A favorite carol on almost everyone’s list

is “In the Bleak Midwinter.”

The words come from a poem

written by Christina Rossetti back in 1872.

The great composer Gustav Holst

set the words to music in 1906.

That’s the version that’s in our hymnal,

but there are other melodies and arrangements,

including my own favorite,

with music and vocal arrangement by Bob Chilcott,

who is probably the closest composer

we have to England’s John Rutter.

Chilcott uses organ, flute, harp, and voices

to create a “MidWinter” that I find

evocative, powerful, and deeply moving:

“In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.”

The song begins with those lyrics

with which Rossetti used more than a little poetic license

to describe the scene on that first Christmas Eve in Bethlehem,

with weather more typical of Buffalo!

Chilcott builds the song slowly,

reaching a crescendo right before the final verse,

which he offers quietly, thoughtfully, even prayerfully:

“What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him:

give my heart,…        

give my heart,

my heart.”

There is no Christmas present

that our Lord Jesus wants more from us

than our hearts.

To give our hearts,

to give our love;

it is to give our very selves.

We are called to love God

with all our strength, all our mind, all our soul,

but to love God with all our heart,

to give our heart, to give our love;

it is to give the very essence of ourselves.

We’re not quick to give our hearts, though.

We are protective of them,

perhaps willing to give a bit,

maybe even a large part,

but not all.

Yet Jesus wants our all,

wants us to give him our hearts fully and completely.

Jesus understands what we struggle to grasp:

that in giving our hearts to him,

we give up nothing,

we gain everything,

at least everything that truly matters.

No, we may not get a new iPad, or a Kinect,

or the keys to a Mercedes,

but those are after all

things that will fade away, turn to dust,

won’t last.

                          

In giving our hearts to Jesus,

you and I get gifts that we will have in this world and the next,

gifts we will have as we await the return of our Lord,

gifts that we will still have when he does return in glory:

Love, peace,

pure joy,

shalom, which means wholeness, completeness.

We will be whole, complete

as God intended us to be.

A few years back at the church I served before I came here,

we invited a woman to come speak at 
a special program we had arranged.

The woman was the sister of one of our members,

and it was so clear to me from the moment I met her

that she was one of those rare individuals

who had truly given her heart completely and utterly to Christ.

What made this woman doubly remarkable

was that the heart she had given to Christ,

the heart she gave to Jesus each moment of every day,

was not the heart she’d been born with.

The heart she gave was a heart that had been given to her

when her own heart succumbed to disease.

A few years before she came to speak to our church,

she had been living like any of us, a busy life:

juggling roles as a loving wife, a devoted mother,

a dedicated nurse, a faithful member of her church.

But she had contracted a very rare disease,

a disease that attacked her heart,

and quickly and methodically destroyed it.

She sought the best possible medical care in New York City

and every doctor she spoke with gave her the same grim news:

without a heart transplant she would be dead in a matter of months.

Now the unfortunate reality is that

there are far more men, women and children

in need of organ transplants than there are organs available,

so that means that priority lists have to be set up:

some will get transplants sooner than others;

some will never receive a needed transplant,

they’ll die before a suitable donor becomes available.

More people need to be willing to offer the gift

of organ donation.

The severity of her condition put her at the top of the priority list

for a heart transplant.

But still she had to wait for a suitable match.

She and her doctors and her family waited,

waited,

waited even as her heart was quickly dying each day.

And then finally the call came – there was a match,

and before she knew it she was in surgery,

her diseased heart removed,

replaced by a healthy heart.

Privacy and anonymity are foundational to organ transplants,

so the woman knew almost nothing about the donor of her heart.

Her doctor shared only what he was allowed to share:

that the heart had come from a 17–year-old boy.

That’s all she knew.

        

She knew nothing about the circumstances of the young man’s death;

she could only imagine 
the grief his parents must have felt in losing their son;

she could only imagine 
how difficult it must have been for the parents,

when moments after their son had died,

probably under tragic circumstances,

they were asked by a doctor they likely didn’t know

whether they would be willing to have their son’s healthy heart

donated to a stranger,

a stranger who would die without it.

Two years after her heart transplant

the woman wrote a short book about her experiences,

and in the book she wrote of the deep emotion she felt

as she thought about the young man whose heart now beat within her:

“I felt as if I knew him personally.

Though I couldn’t see his face, I knew his heart.

I welcomed him like a friend.

He is with me everywhere.

Every time I think of him, I smile;

I think of him with love, respect, and wonder.

There is such joy in my heart.”

This woman’s heart is a Christmas heart;

a heart given in love,

a heart that gives in love.

You and I are called to have Christmas hearts,

every one of us,

hearts given to Christ,

hearts given as we prepare the way of the Lord,

prepare for that day when he will return in glory,

prepare for that day when God’s Kingdom will be established

and we will live as God intended for us to live.

It is the world our texts painted for us,

a world where:

“the eyes of the blind will be opened;

the ears of the deaf unstopped;

the lame shall leap like a deer;

the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.”

It will be a world in which

there will be no children dying because they lack food;

no children dying because they don’t have access to clean water;

no man or woman unable to find a job

even as senior executives claim

tens of millions of dollars in salaries and benefits.

As Mary, the mother of our Lord Jesus

said so eloquently in the song of praise she sang

after she learned she was to give birth to the Son of God,

in the new Kingdom, God will:

“scatter the proud,

bring down the powerful,

lift up the lowly,

send the rich away empty,

fill the hungry with good things.”

This is the world to come,

the world that our Lord Jesus Christ will bring,

the world we await.

It will be a Christmas world,

a world filled with the joy we feel this time of year,

a world where everyone will have a Christmas heart.

It will be a world filled with

“everlasting joy,

everlasting joy and gladness,

[and world where] sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

But even as we live in Advent,

watching and waiting for our Lord to return,

we cannot stand idle.

We have work to do:

we are called to prepare the way,

to make straight the highway,

to make the way ready for the new Kingdom.

And the first step to preparing the way

is to give Christ our hearts,

give him our hearts,

your Christmas gift, my Christmas gift

to our Christmas gift.

When we do that, we will leave the bleak midwinter behind,

and find the joy of everlasting spring.

AMEN