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The following message for the moment is delivered by the Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled "Once Upon a Lonely Christmas." The reading this morning is taken from four places in Holy Scripture. We begin first with the wisdom literature, the book of Proverbs chapter 4 verse 3. "When I

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was a son with my father, tender the only one in the sight of my mother, he taught me and said to me, 'Let your heart hold fast my words. Keep my commandments and live. Do not forget and do not turn away from the words of my mouth. Get wisdom. Get insight.'" And then from the prophets, specifically from Micah chapter 4,

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beginning at the verse numbered 1. "It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains and shall be raised up above the hills and peoples shall flow to it. And many nations shall come and say, 'Come, let us go up to the mountain

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of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and we may walk in his paths.' For out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between many peoples and shall decide for strong nations afar off and they shall beat their swords into plowshares

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and their spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree and none shall make them afraid. For the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. For all the peoples walk each in the

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name of its God, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever." And then this reading from the Gospels, John chapter 1, beginning at the verse numbered 1. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through

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him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came for testimony to bear witness to the light that all might believe through him. He

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was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light. The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not. But to all who received him, who believed in his

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name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. We have beheld his glory as of the only Son from the Father. And may God bless to us and to our understanding

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these readings from his Word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Once, upon a lonely Christmas, I learned some things I'd like to share with you, from my heart to your heart. Go back with me 35 years to 1956. I was doing graduate

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study in Scotland and decided to go to Switzerland over the Christmas holidays for winter sports. My dearest and oldest friend, a buddy since junior high days, was stationed in Germany at that time with the Air Force, and he was to come down and meet me at Davos in Switzerland, and we were going to have a great winter

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adventure together. Davos sits 8,000 feet up in the Strela Alps. You get there by Cog railway. It's a town that looks very much like a Christmas card. Oceans of snow came down the slopes of the mountains. Waves of snow moved across the meadows, flooded and rolled down into the streets, and then lapped up against the

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second floor windows of the little Swiss chalets. We were picked up at the railroad station by sleighs, drawn by great big horses whose deep breaths made mist against the cold air, and we were tucked in by bewhiskered sleigh drivers, who then, with the bells ringing, took us quickly to our hotels. It was too good to

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be true, but it was true for a little while. My buddy was already there at the hotel, and we had a grand reunion and then dinner together, and we began to make plans, and while we were making plans, a telegram was delivered to our table. Those were tense days in Europe, and the telegram ordered him to return

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immediately to base. Within one hour, he was gone, and I was alone. I could not speak the language of most of those about me. I knew absolutely no one in the town. The peaks, which before had looked so splendid, now seemed like barriers that separated me from everything that I really loved. The blue sky of the day had

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been turned into the black sky of the night, and the fun that everybody else was having seemed to accentuate the sadness that I felt. It was the loneliest I'd ever been at Christmas. I went up to my room after dinner, turned off the light, stretched out on the bed, and flipped on the radio. They were singing

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Christmas carols from the frown of the world. The first one, that noted German carol, "Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht," and then an American carol, "O little town of Bethlehem." And they came to those lines, "Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light. The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight."

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And somehow that line spoke to me as I was there in that darkness, for it's about the light that was coming into the world in Jesus Christ. God does not want us to live among shadows. Christmas was the announcement that the Word had become flesh, that the light had come and the darkness was not able to overcome it.

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And here I was, lying in the dark, contradicting Christmas, holding close to shadow. William James, the noted psychologist, wrote that emotion is a state of mind manifesting itself by a sensible change in the body. And I recognized that sitting there in the dark only magnified my misery. I was

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going to have to get up and get out of that place if I was going to lift myself out of this loneliness. And so, even though it was late in the evening by this time, I went downstairs and out onto the white streets. I learned that a mass was being held in a small church up on the Bremer Buhl, one of the Strela Alps,

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and I decided that I would hike up to the church for this midnight Christmas mass. It wasn't mountain climbing of any kind. I'm not built for that kind of activity. It was just a little upward toiling. The stars were very bright, the snow crackled underfoot, the twelve winds of the Alps blew stiffly into my face,

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and little groups of people walked beside me and would look over and say Frohweinachten or Bon Natale or Feliz Navidad, Merry Christmas, whatever their language happened to be. I seemed to be in a kind of cloud factory, if you will. All about me was a white mist which came and then floated away. It would coil in

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upon itself and then disappear. And I seemed to be part of the mist. It was as if I had left my body behind and was pure spirit. Somehow I had escaped my physical frame. Socrates says that the body is the prison house of the soul. Well, I felt that in these moments I had somehow broken out of that prison house,

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and ideas came and were with me for but a moment and then were gone again. Wordsworth wrote, "Wandering lonely as a cloud." Yet I found myself feeling a little less lonely because I was being lifted above to purity and peace. I was coming out on top of what troubled me. I have felt this experience at other times,

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almost always when I've been outside someplace where I could exercise. There is a lift that comes with that. The Bible says, "As a man thinketh in his heart so he is." When you climb a mountain, when you stretch your legs, when you move out, you expand your heart and your view of life expands simultaneously. And as it

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does, you feel better. Soon the little church was just ahead of me, the plain little place. But inside the walls were lined from front to back with freshly cut pine trees, lighted with real candles by little Swiss boys in red robes with high stiff white collars. And the place was redolent with the running resin of

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those trees. The church quickly became very crowded, so crowded that they opened the windows and the light spilled out onto the snow, kind of puddles of light, if you will, and people who couldn't get into the church were standing in those places so that they could see and they could listen. Everyone was in skiing

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attire, bright hats, bright scarves, bright coats. There was a little Swiss band down in front, five instruments, playing Christmas carols. The entire service was conducted in German. And German is not a language which is mine. And yet somehow I was blessed by every moment of it. That's because great things happen in

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worship. The Bible says, "Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together." Take a place like this place where we are now gathered. I've knelt right there with a boy who gave himself to Jesus Christ. I've stood right there with parents who looked down into the dead face of their son and then straightened up and with

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what strength they had, walked up the aisle and out of the church. I have seen weddings performed there where vows were made and sealed with a kiss. I've heard mission speakers who have literally offered their body and their blood in the service of Christ bear testimony here. The Holy Spirit fills this place

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from time to time and Christ walks here and he touches people and he holds their hands and he wipes away their tears and he corrects them. And it happens here. It happens in places of praise and worship. This place is a place of miracles. So there I was in the Swiss Alps in a place of miracles. And even though I

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couldn't understand the language, my mind went back to other similar services of which I'd been a part. I could remember Christmas candlelight services from when I was a very little boy. The deep voice of my dad, the beautiful soprano voice of my mother, the kind of shaky tremolo of my grandmother, and my brother who never

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sang but on Christmas Eve at least moved his lips. And our faces all very soft because of the candlelight. I discovered on that Christmas Eve 35 years ago that when you're in a place like this, memories come back, especially if you let the Spirit lead. All kinds of things came into my mind. How over our mantle every

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Christmas was a picture which I had drawn in the fourth grade. A Madonna and child, probably the only blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jewish girl Madonna that's ever been. My dad would get Christmas first. We always knew that the Spirit had descended upon him when he brought home a five-pound box of Dimling's candy. He

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was the first person who went downstairs on Christmas morning, and then we'd hear the train start up and he would yell, "He's been here!" I sold Christmas cards and my brother sold Christmas wreaths to buy Christmas presents. Even before that, I remember how once I bought my mother a butter dish. It cost 39 cents at Murphy's.

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I was thrilled with it, thought it was a marvelous gift, wanted to get it home quickly, so I ran and I dropped it and it broke into a thousand pieces and my heart into as many pieces. And when I got to my grandmother's home, she gave me another 39 cents to buy another butter dish, and I had Christmas two times that

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year. We always hid one present in the house for each person who was there, usually the best present. And on Christmas Eve, you were allowed to open one gift and then there, well, you know what I'm talking about. The words of Proverbs sum it up. "When I was a son with my father tender, he taught me and said

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to me, 'Let your heart hold fast to my words and do not forget.'" Do not forget. Christmas is a time for remembering, especially the remembering of people. Christmas requires people. Once, a couple of years before that, I had been in Kaufman's very early on a Tuesday morning, and I had gone up to the eighth

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floor to buy phonograph records as a Christmas gift, and I had become very interested in what I was doing. And I suddenly became aware of the fact that everything was very quiet. In those days, the stores down here were crowded. Not so anymore. But then, I suddenly became aware of the emptiness, and I took my records

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and I went over to the counter and the girl took the card and the rest of it, and then she said, "Now, sir, we'd like to ask you to leave the building immediately. There's a small fire in the building. It's not dangerous, but please go down the escalators." The escalators, of course, had stopped running. And so I

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had to walk down eight floors. It seems that this little fire had been discovered just shortly after I came into the building, and the managers of Kaufman's very wisely simply closed the doors and kept the people on the outside outside, and didn't tell anyone inside about it, just let them drift out as

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their shopping was done, and slowly the building was emptied. But going from floor to floor in that huge department store was very eerie. All the Christmas decorations were there, and there were clever displays, and oddly enough you could still hear the Christmas music playing, and there were stacks of gifts,

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more gifts than any person could ever use. But it was not Christmas, because there were no people. All the Christmas was gone. But there in that little Swiss church up there on the Bremerbuehle, there was Christmas, because there were lots of people. I remembered how when I was in high school one Christmas day, our

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family was having a grand time, and in the middle of the afternoon there was a knock at the door, and I went. It was one of my best buddies, Jack, and I was surprised to see him on Christmas Day, thinking he would be at home with his family. And he came in and he asked if we could talk, and the house was so full of

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people we went upstairs to my bedroom to talk. And we sat there and he told me of how his mother and father were lying home at drunk, stupefied by drink, asleep on the floor in the midst of unopened presents. And ever since my friend Jack told me that, I've despised these ads put out by booze companies at

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Christmastime. Wise men still choose. That's a blasphemy. He just wanted someone to unload all the hurt on, and so I became the cup into which he poured his pain, and then he was gone. And it dawned on me as I remembered him there in that land so far away on a Christmas Eve, that it's not the moments that we

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are helped that give us the best blessings, but it's recalling the moments when we have helped other people. Those mean the most. That's the way it was high on that alp that night. You see, I told you the church was crowded with people, and I also told you it was 1956, but think a moment. In October of 1956, the

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Hungarian people had revolted against their Soviet overlords. A man named Emery Nagy had led the fight for freedom in Hungary. And those of you who are old enough will remember hearing the broadcast that came out of Hungary pleading for the rest of the world to come to the aid of that little nation. On

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October the 30th, they declared themselves to be free and independent, and on November 1st, hundreds of Russian tanks and thousands of Soviet troops crossed the border. It was a bitter battle. You remember the pictures of teenagers throwing Molotov cocktails at Russian artillery? And of course, the

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Russians won, and thousands were executed, including Emery Nagy. And a hundred sixty thousand people fled Hungary, never to return again. The Free Nations never did come to the aid of Hungary, except to put little Red Cross stations along the border so that the people could be received as they came out of that

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country. And some of those places were in Switzerland. So just seven weeks before this had happened, and that night in that church on that mountain in that country so far away, that Christmas Eve, the congregation had more Hungarians in it than any other kind of person you might be able to think of. And they had no jobs

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and no families and no assets and no country, and most of them were very young. And I had been feeling sorry for myself. And when we began to sing all together "Silent Night," someone had the wisdom to reach out and link arms with another, and it spread very quickly around the room until we stood there holding on to each

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other. Seven different languages I could hear at the same time, singing "All is Calm, All is Bright," and yearning with all our hearts for the Prophet's words to be true, that they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and neither nation shall lift up sword against any other nation

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and neither shall they learn war anymore. And we sang "Christian Refugees," if you will, in an insane world, a world that has for 2,000 years tried to stamp out the light of Christmas, Jesus. But the fire was still burning. The world was very dark, there's no surprise in that, the world is always very dark. There's no

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news in that. But the flame of faith in Jesus Christ was still alive, and that is good news. All the armies of evil had not been able to extinguish it. And so we stood there holding on to each other and singing about its coming, its being with us, and its ultimate victory, calm and bright. It was another miracle. So once

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upon a lonely Christmas, feeling gloomy when I went, I sat in the church and thought about the sin of the world and the plight of humankind and the incredible moral depravity of just about everyone. And my heart was aching, but there was a star shining, for the Word had become flesh, the true light had come

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into the world, and the darkness had not been able to overcome it. And thinking about that puts a tremendous transfusion of hope into your heart. We live in a world where all the best things are crucified and buried, but on the third day they all rise. That's what Jesus meant when he said, "In this world you

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will have tribulation, but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world." So the Mass was over, and we started down the hill. I'd met some new friends and I was walking with them, and the twelve winds of the Alps still blew, but it had become a good night, and all the loneliness and despair had somehow vanished away. It was

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largely gone. And why? Because the Word had become flesh. Because in the midst of that circumstance, I had changed my perspective, for as a man thinketh in his heart, so he is. Because I went to a place where wonders are. That's the reason we are not to forsake assembling ourselves together. That I had there the

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richest kind of memories, "Hold fast to my words and do not forget." And I focused on other people, not upon myself, and it's more blessed to give than to receive. And I got a hope transfusion in my heart, because in the midst of the tribulation there was the promise. He has overcome the world.

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Well, that's my Christmas sermon for this year, but before we pray, I hope you feel relaxed. I hope you'll take a moment right now to look at the faces of those whom you know and love who were seated near you. And if someone very special is beside you, reach out and take their hand. And if one whom you have loved and lost

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a while is gone, then feel with all your heart their special nearness at this hallowed and gracious time. Feel the power of beauty and goodness here. Feel the love this is, and the hope this is, and the expectancy this is. Claim it all for yourself and never forget it, so that sometime, somewhere, you might say to

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someone what I said to you as I began talking with you this morning. Do you remember the words? "Once upon a lonely Christmas, I learned some things I'd like to share with you from my heart to your heart." [silence]

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Let us pray. [silence] Our Father, grant that busyness might not blind us to beauty, that our responsibilities might not rob us of the royal promise of this time, that the

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press of our responsibilities might not push out of our consciousness the knowledge that the light has come into the world and the darkness has not been able to overcome it. And in those moments when we feel most lonely, remind us that in thy spirit thou art there with us always. Give to us treasured memories and

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the opportunity to serve, and some circumstance which will remind us and scratch deep into a surface of our hearts the truth that regardless of how much tribulation there is in the world, Jesus has overcome it. And that means no matter how much darkness there is in us, his light can still flood us with joy. We

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pray our prayer in the name of the infant of Bethlehem. Amen. [Awkward silence.]