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Local clergy see hope as their holiday theme Their sermons will offer reassurance and emphasize making every day count By BILL VARBLE Mail Tribune Hanging above the Rev. Anne Barton's desk is a print of a famous painting by the great Flemish artist Peter Brueghel called "Coming Into Bethlehem." Here are ice skaters, a snowball fight between three boys, a kerchiefed woman with a load of firewood. Here are soldiers, a crowd at an inn, the sun slipping down to the horizon. It's easy to overlook Joseph and Mary, even though they're in the foreground. He leads a tired donkey, her shoulders are stooped with weariness. The painting furnished Barton with the subject of her Christmas sermon. "It's a way for us to get into the idea that Bethlehem happens every Christmas," she says. "For Brueghel it happened in this village. For us it happens here. If we were doing the painting, what would the details be?" Barton is among the many clergy faced with coming up with a Christmas sermon and looking for an inspiration. The Rev. Bob Larson, of the Ascension Lutheran Church in Medford, says he thought about tying his sermon in with the events of Sept. 11 and decided against it. "I'm not doing that," he says. "I feel strongly that people need to be reassured and encouraged, given a sense of hope." Larson says that although Sept. 11 cost many Americans their sense of being untouched by the harsher winds of history, things aren't that different from the way they've always been. "Jesus was born into a mess, and 2000 years later we're still in the middle of it," he says. Larson plans to tell parishioners a story from Dec. 24, 1914, in France, the eve of the first Christmas of World War I. Almost a million men had been killed or wounded in just a few months of war. Across no-man's land that night, a British soldier heard a German soldier singing "Silent Night," and he started singing too. Other soldiers on both sides joined in. On Christmas Day many are said to have laid down arms and met in the middle, swapping photos and even playing soccer. "Their master for a few hours wasn't a country or an army but the Prince of Peace," Larson says. The Rev. Joyce DeGraaff of Medford's First Presbyterian Church also plans to tell a story. This one is about daffodils. A daughter, after much coaxing, gets her mother to go and see five acres of daffodils planted one bulb at a time over 45 years, every hue of daffodil imaginable: yellow, saffron, white, beautiful colors, all on the side of what used to be a bare mountain. "The mother has a life-changing experience," DeGraaff says. "She realizes that life is a journey, not a destination. That we're called to make each day count. And that it's a series of small steps. But it's never too late to start. There is one catch, she says. "Don't wait." The story ends with this advice: "Work as if you don't need the money, love as if you've never been hurt, and dance as if no one is watching." Barton, who says her sermons are often metaphorical, says Christmas is a kind of time machine, and we can play the game with Brueghel by looking for Mary and Joseph and the donkey coming into town. "Not only ours, but all the other Christmas Eves as well, all are present here tonight," she says. She plans to bring in an ancient Celtic notion of "thin places" - places where the veil between the worlds is stretched so thin that heaven touches earth. She says such places may be physical places such as sacred groves or rivers, or births and deaths, or just a glorious day that causes us to marvel in creation. "Bethlehem itself is a thin place," she says. But like the busy villagers in Brueghel's painting, she says, we can be so preoccupied with the daily little dramas of our lives that we may still not recognize the action that is stealing in. "In our Bethlehem," she says. "Maybe it's not so different after all. We're all still human." Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.