Sunday
December 24
Christmas Nuptials
By Marsh Chapel
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Away in a manger no crib for a bed
The little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head
The stars in the bright sky Looked down where he lay
The little Lord Jesus Asleep on the hay
Be near me Lord Jesus I ask thee to stay
Close by me forever, and love me I pray
Bless all the dear children in thy tender care
And fit us for heaven to live with thee there.
People imagine proposals and weddings at Christmas. Often the images are of cities, bright lights, jewelry, red dresses and handsome ties and mink coats.
But Samuel tells of a shepherd king. Mary sings of low estate. Luke recalls an exurban story, in one sense, a story like this one.
In the winter of 1982 we were stationed an hour and a half south west of Montreal. We lived in a large, ungainly, and drafty country parsonage. You knew it was a parsonage because on the front of the house there was a sign, to the left of the porch door, which read: Methodist Parsonage. Just so you know. Whether the sign was meant to apologize for the down at the heal condition of the house, or was meant as a point of clarification about ownership, or was, as it certainly proved to be, meant as a guide for hoboes in need of sandwiches, as they drifted through that little town, know one ever said. But it was more than adequate, more than reasonably adequate for two young parents, and two little children, and one child on the way.
The parsonage was big enough, with two living rooms and an ample dining room, to accommodate some 75 people at one time. We had learned this, and this number, because on the previous Maundy Thursday, the heat in the church had failed, at 10 below zero. So, the service of Holy Communion that evening was convened in the parsonage, with hymns played on the baby grand piano, and people scattered from couch to kitchen to pantry to stairs to window sills. One elderly gentleman sat with the minister’s wife accompanist, right on the piano bench. I think he felt honored. Most later agreed that it was not only the coziest but easily the most memorable communion service they could recall.
Sometime well after the snow had begun to cover the farms and valleys of Burke NY, sometime after November 1, that is, the minister had a phone call from a neighboring farmer. The man asked whether the preacher would conduct a wedding for a non-member. Certainly he would and had and the farmer knew this as well as the preacher so the question in the air or over the phone line was the unspoken question: what are we talking about?
Well, North Franklin County is not a place of endless talk. There is in fact little said, week by week, and month by month, in the north country. Most would agree there that this is the way things should be, allowing as how most things said don’t need saying at all, and those that do need saying need better saying than they mostly get. I personally knew a beautiful young couple, prosperous potato farmers with two children, for three years, and never once heard the husband say a single word. Further, when there is talking it mostly the women talking. The preacher is also allowed and expected to talk, there being I guess some uncertainty about how to categorize the status of the clergy. But even so, the briefer the better, if you please, pastor.
In any event, after a long while of hemming and hawing and not saying, the minister wrangled out of the farmer that the farmer’s hired man wanted to get married. Actually: he needed to get married. He wanted to get married, but he also was in a situation where he needed to get married, too. This took the not usually talkative farmer a long while to explain because he did not directly explain what he was trying to explain. Phrases like ‘unexpected circumstance’ and ‘things moving pretty fast’ and ‘sometimes these things happen’ and ‘they are really good young folks’ were clearly spoken but their actually footing on planet earth was hard, or not possible, to ascertain. Finally the preacher said simply, ‘send them up, I am glad to talk to them’. This led to a meeting in the church office, on a day when the oil furnace was working, and some lumbering, awkward planning for a service to solemnize their marriage.
The couple lived on the farm where the husband worked. They lived in a single wide trailer, which is a trailer exactly half as big as a double wide trailer. Hay bales stuffed around the edges and thankfully covered with much snow for half the year mostly kept the pipes from freezing. Housing was provided for the hired man, just like for the minister, but the trailer was a whole lot smaller and a whole lot more dangerous than the parsonage (at least in most physical ways). Milking at 4am and 4pm, every day, and work, all day, in between, every day. You could rent the movie Frozen River and then know quite a lot about this neck of the woods.
After some talk with his wife that night, the minister suggested that the couple be married on Christmas Eve day, at noon, in the parsonage. It would be a small wedding, and, as his wife thoughtfully suggested, they could put the children down for nap, early, and then use the piano, have some refreshments, and make something happy and pretty.
Christmas Eve day came, with a gust of bitter wind, a snow shower, and then a bleak barely visible sun at midday. A little late, the bride and groom appeared. But their friends, who would sign for them (New York, the Empire State, being one which requires witnesses other than the clergy) had somehow not appeared. The three year-old daughter could be heard crawling and listening from the top of the stairs. The wind blew and the snow fell. Finally, to make the matter potentially legal, a neighbor lady was invited to come and join the service. She and the minister’s wife later signed the license. The minister performed the ceremony. Two carols were sung, Away in a Manger and Hark the Herald Angels Sing. The three year old would appear, and disappear, as the service progressed, and appeared for good when the cookies were served. Other than the words of the wedding themselves, I do not recall that anything else was said. I refer you to the remarks made some moments ago about the paucity of speech along the great frozen St Lawrence river. But no words really were needed. The farm wife, young and pregnant, was simply dressed in a light dress. Her smile, her gleaming eyes, her red cheeks and smile, her evident enjoyment of the home and homely setting were a full epic poem of happy gratitude. And her husband, scrubbed and crammed head long into a tight black suit and wayward tie, was as dignified, reverent, true and terrified as any groom at any time in the 900 or so weddings the minister has thus far done. “Do you?” “I do”. The three year old’s face looked down from the stairs. “Do you?” “I do.” The piano played softly, a little meditation, Love Came Down at Christmas.
One loving neighbor, a jubilant three year old, a fairly green preacher, and his creatively generous wife, were present to attest to a wedding, a union of hearts and souls, on a cold winter day, in a forgotten patch of rough land, now some thirty five years ago. I can see that piano, taste the cookies, hear the carols, feel the hands, sense the candles as if it were an hour ago, and in some ways it was, just an hour ago.
There are a lot of fine and treasured forms of theological learning which one can and must acquire in the six brief semesters of divinity school. Augustine and Pelagius, Luther and Erasmus, Wesley and Calvin, Barth and Tillich, Amoun of Nitria, the documentary hypothesis, the second aorist, filioque and the teleological suspension of the ethical. All of these and all that stands in between one can and must receive, while there is the time and freedom to meet and know them.
The practice of ministry, the privilege of the practice of ministry, however, is learned on the piano bench, over cookies, in the smaller living room, at $9,000 a year, in a drafty old manse, with a toddler spying, and a tiny but ever so majestic event—declaration of love, ‘til death us do part. There is a temptation, when one is in school, to think reality begins and ends with the library or the internet or the reputation of a beloved teacher. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, reasoned like a child, thought like a child. When I moved into the parsonage, I had to give up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly. It is a big world, full of need and waiting for love.
When the boots were donned, and the gloves and coats put on, the bride, in the hour of her wedding, kissed the child and hugged the pianist. To the minister she gave her hand, and with that Methodist handshake gave the gift of meaning, lasting meaning, in the work and struggle of ministry, wherein one works and struggles to find and keep the grace to put oneself at the disposal of others. On the last day of Advent, in the year of our Lord 1982, at least one preacher was given the privilege of seeing the privilege of life in ministry. It was a sort of Advent Carol. An Advent Carol, lingering like lasting beauty always does, in the eternity of memory. What a privilege to live and be in ministry. There is nothing like it, not in all creation. What a privilege. Amos Wilder saw and said so, in his poem of a similar event:
Brother and sister in this world’s poor family,
Jack and Jill out of this gypsy camp of earth,
Here is where the injustice is greatest
And you feel it obscurely,
And you have a right to storm within yourselves
And seek sanctuary in one another’s shabbiness.
This boy and this girl with all their abandonment and futility,
Folly and dereliction,
Whirled from ignominy to ignominy,
Condemned to all the wretched chores of the community-
O tribute of forlorn humanity! Come for his benediction whom they have
blasphemed,
And somehow sense that they touch- what?
God, the Higher, all that they have missed:
Innocence and mercy and compassion…
But the Son of Man of the wedding feast haunts such occasions
and understands you.
He can turn water into wine and such shame and loss into gain
In some world, some time;
I heard the organ roll behind the snowfall
and saw in it the confetti of the heavenly bride chamber,
Glimpsed the sons of the bride chamber rejoicing
In that City which is full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof,
Before the Father whose face the angels of
little children do always behold.
That 1982 North Country Christmas Eve, the door closed, and the minister and his wife smiled and hugged each other, and sent the daughter back up to nap.
Then a knock came again at the door. There stood the groom, gloves off. He had something he had forgotten. He had something he wanted to give. Not to say, but to do. Not to speak, but to act. Not to describe, but to give. I refer you to the demography of verbal silence along the frozen St Lawrence offered some moments ago. He held out his hand, with bills rumpled and folded there in. He looked down, and then quickly up at the pastor. He gave four dollars. He was truly proud to give it. And I was truly proud to receive it. I only wish I had had the sense to put the bills away as a physical reminder of the day, that day of blessed, real Christmas Nuptials.
At every turn, as we come to Christmas, we are reminded that faith is born in trouble, like that little bit of faithfulness was born on Christmas Eve so far away and so many years ago. We are reminded of the lowly entrance our Lord makes into life. That night, at age three, our daughter sang in church, for the first but not the last time:
Away in a manger no crib for a bed
The little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head
The stars in the bright sky Looked down where he lay
The little Lord Jesus Asleep on the hay
Be near me Lord Jesus I ask thee to stay
Close by me forever, and love me I pray
Bless all the dear children in thy tender care
And fit us for heaven to live with thee there.
– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.
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