12/10/61

Scripture: Philippians 2: 4-11; 14-15.

Yesterday the Christmas tree came into our Church. Where it now stands, there has been a big Christmas tree every year for many years. I have seen a score of them, and they were being put up in this church long before I came here. Tonight the couples of the Ark are going to decorate this tree. And it will stand there in all its beauty for the next three weeks or so.

There is something warming and happy about a Christmas tree. Part of it is the beauty of the tree itself. Part of it is the variety and color of the decorations puts upon it. Much of it is in the associations which we have accumulated in our years of experience with Christmas trees.

I remember well the Christmas trees that appeared in the living room of the family home when I was a child. And the tree that appeared in the village church on Christmas Eve was a thing of such beauty that the memory of it still excites me!

Last Sunday, we abandoned the customary type of sermon in favor of a story. Christmas is a time for stories. And so I want to take some time to tell another story today. And, again, this story is not mine, but is essentially one that Hamlin Garland has written and called “My First Christmas Tree.”

The author begins by saying that they never had a Christmas tree in the valley where he lived as a child. Indeed, his own father never saw a Christmas tree in a family circle until the writer grew up and set one up in his household where the grandfather could come and see the grandchildren around it.

They did celebrate Christmas. Sometimes there were gifts; and sometimes -- well, there wasn’t much money for gifts in some years. The boy did receive a wonderful sled one year, and a little 20-cent tin horse on rollers. Probably his father had to trade at least a cord and a half of wood to get these prized gifts.

They always hung their stockings on Christmas Eve, father and mother along with the kids. And on Christmas morning father and mother would laugh over the ears of corn or the potatoes which they found in their stockings. Maybe the mother’s laugh had a kind of tear in it, for she loved the pretty things that could seldom be had while they eked out a living in that valley.

On one Christmas day, the boy saw a neighbor driving by with a barrel of apples in his sleigh. The comfortably fur-coated neighbor had a son, about 12 or 13 years, beside him. When the son saw this boy, he reached into the barrel, took out an apple and hurled it at him like a show ball. The apple missed him, but bored a neat round hole in the snow behind him. He turned, dug that delicious bomb, and enjoyed eating it so much that he could still remember, vividly, how good it smelled and tasted after 40 years had passed.

Well, when our lad was 10 years old his family moved to Iowa prairie land. Life proved more prosperous there, and the Christmas stockings always held a toy of some sort. And the mother’s stocking often had in it some gay little piece of jewelry or a new comb or brush. But the very thought of a family Christmas tree seemed to them only for the very rich.

Then did come a time when a Christmas tree appeared at the neighborhood Sunday School program. Preaching services and Sunday School were held in a school house some distance away from the boy’s home. The boy was about 15 or 16 years old now. He walked across 4 miles of snow to see it.

The temperature was about 10 degrees below zero. It seemed too cruelly cold to take horses out. So the boy and his brother started out, clad in long-visored caps, mufflers, tall boots and warm old coats. The snow was deep; they walked in the tracks made by horses and sleigh runners; the vapor from their breath rose from their mouths like smoke; and they moved now at a swift walk, now at a trot in order to keep warm and to get soon within the sight of the school house lights and the sound of singing.

The school house was a poor little building with no tower or bell, and with but 3 windows on each side. But it seemed imposing to the boys as they crossed the threshold and stood against the wall among people who packed the room to the door. The boy felt a bit strange, for he and his brother had attended Sunday School only very irregularly. They wanted to see that Christmas tree. They gazed at it with open-eyed marveling. It was a pine tree set up where the pulpit usually stood on Sundays.

While they looked, some other boy looked at this fellow and said, “Say, you forgot to comb your hair!” It wasn’t true. His cap always mussed up his hair when he pulled it off. And the hair was pretty long and was probably none-too-skillfully cut by his mother with her shears. Anyway, he was embarrassed, and he leaned back harder against the wall. He felt hot and kind of guilty, as well as shaggy.

But that tree! -- that wondrous Christmas tree! It didn’t have many candles; it didn’t glitter with golden apples or colored Christmas tree balls. But it was loaded with presents! And the girls in their bright garments, coming and going about the tree made this boy forget his own shabbiness. He listened to the songs and the recitations for an hour and a half or so, watching every motion of the superintendent who directed the ceremonies.

(I can remember how my own father, then a Sunday School superintendent, used to work up the excitement of the kids until they could hardly stand it when the bells jingled outside and Santa Claus climbed through a window to wish all the boys and girls a Merry Christmas). So it was on the night of this story! The old fellow climbed through the window, wished everybody a Merry Christmas, explained that he was terribly busy on Christmas Eve with so many places to go; and asked a couple of the girls to help pass out the gifts.

Probably most of the presents hanging on the tree were bags of pop corn, or cornucopias of candy. At any rate our lad and his brother expected nothing and they began to feel just a bit envious and rebellious when even the neighborhood rowdies were given something. They forgot that they came from a long way off and seldom got to Sunday School anyway -- they only knew they were being left out.

But suddenly his brother’s name was called and a lovely girl with a gentle smile handed the brother a bag of popcorn. And when she came to this boy, “here’s something for you,” he was so surprised and grateful that he had no words to thank her. 40 years later he was still able to remember that outstretched hand, that smile, those sympathetic eyes that understood how he had felt until that tiny package of candy was placed in his hands!

He and his brother walked home as though the snow had turned to puffy clouds! The moon was near setting and snow crystals sparkled with tiny lights. Sentinel dogs barked in farm yards and wolves answered from the ridge. And it was all sheer joy after that Christmas tree in the school house! How dark was their house when they got home and how warm it felt. The boys made straight for the cupboard for a piece of pie, a doughnut and a glass of milk! It had been a wonderful evening!

When the boy was grown, he could afford a finely-tapered fir tree in his house, with gold apples, and crystal ice points, and colored candles, glittering angel figures swinging in ecstasy from its branches. His children loved their Christmas tree. But they could hardly love it more than he had loved the Christmas days when one orange was not a breakfast fruit but a casket of spiced incense from the far-away lands of the South.

Hamlin Garland says, “This was our compensation -- we brought to our Christmastime a keen appetite and empty hands. And the lesson of it all is, if we are seeking a lesson, that it is better to give to those who want than to those for whom ‘we ought to do something because they did something for us last year’.”

Well, that is a good Christmas tree story for telling on the day our Christmas tree is brought into the church. Christmas trees have been brought into the churches of this worshipping congregation for a good many years now. This church is nearly a hundred years old. It came into being when trees were in a specialized sense, the life of the land -- not only small Christmas trees, but the great trees of centuries-old forests, then to be cut and made into the lumber required for the fast growing young nation.

The logging camps brought human needs that could be met only by growth of villages and towns and then cities. As population pushed westward, the institutions of people came too. Not the least of the signs of frontier growth was the coming of churches. It often happened that about the only sign of church was some itinerant preacher, or an occasional minister coming into a churchless community to preach the word for a little while.

But these efforts grew, as the conviction increased in the hearts of people that they must have, and be, the church! And so the very first churches of a century ago began to appear in Grand Rapids, Wisconsin --- the Congregational Church among them. Late in March of 1862, in an ecclesiastical council called for that purpose, ten charter member were organized as a church. Little by little their numbers and enthusiasm grew. In 1864 they framed their first church building and the following year they finished it. In it they worshipped; they taught and they learned of Christ in Sunday School. As an early record says, “Through these vicissitudes the cross of Christ was planted in the wilderness.”

For some, the church was a meeting place for those who had come “from the east.” But, much more than that, it was a fellowship for the preaching and teaching of the gospel to all.

The Congregational Church grew until it needed different quarters. For years, it was housed in a building on the Centralia side of the Wisconsin River. Then that house of worship was outgrown. Once again the congregation built an edifice on the Grand Rapids side of the river, near the end of the bridge - this present house of worship. Its cornerstone was laid in 1910 and it was dedicated late in 1911, just over 50 years ago. It was then a new, solid, substantial, pleasant, useful edifice. And it has been a good home for this congregation for half a century.

Now, frankly, we have growing pains. Our sanctuary is still adequate, so far as space is concerned, while we have two services on a Sunday. But the Sunday School is urgently in need of more room, better arrangements, more modern facilities in every way. New occasions teach new duties. And the new times made some kind of revision or expansion more and more urgent.

We are not without hope, or the means, to build new facilities for this church if we set our minds to it. And this is something to which all of us should be setting our minds in study and planning.

But our trustees and our church council know that any adequate plan for the future -- not just the next two to five years, but the next 30, 40, or 50 years --- requires space. That is why the church trustees have come before this congregation at least 3 times in recent years with recommendations that we buy available properties. That is why they will put before us again today a resolution to buy a piece of property. And we must consider it in the light of years to come! The effectiveness of our witness to the people who come to our city in this second half of the 20th century in involved in our decision. We are at a crossroads in our history.

But we are more than a few people gathered around a Christmas tree. We are more than the occupants of a house of worship and learning -- old or new. We are a community of Christians acknowledging the Lordship of Christ. Last Sunday, I referred to the statement of faith of the United Church of Christ. A few lines of it are again printed at the beginning of our order of worship for today. “We believe in God.” We believe that He comes to us in Jesus Christ, our Lord.

When Dr. Leslie Cooke of England spoke to the General Council of our Congregational Christian churches in Philadelphia last summer, he addressed the delegates on the subject: “Jesus Christ; The Lord and Light of Life.” “This is the heart of the gospel,” said Dr. Cooke. “Jesus who walked the hills of Galilee, taught by the lakeside; Jesus who laid hands on blinded eyes and leprous bodies; who blazed with anger in the temple, stood his trail before Pilate, stumbled to Calvary beneath the burden of his cross, who was crucified, dead and buried and was raised from the dead -- this Jesus is Lord.” And “the essence of the Christian Gospel is that, in obedience to the Lordship of Christ, life is led to fulfillment, the way is opened into the broad land of true liberty --- to which a man may journey with singing and arrive in joy.”

“This is what the church is” -- “people who acknowledge His Lordship.” “Neither constitutions, sacraments nor ministry nor anything else created the church. Only Christ. Where Christ is, there is the church and nowhere else,” says Dr. Cooke.

And as to the home of the church, it is not a school house, nor a lodge building, nor a YMCA, nor a town hall. When circumstances require it, Christian folk can gather to worship and learn in such places. But a church needs a building that expresses our obedience to the Lordship of Christ. Let us now, and in days to come, seek His guidance in arranging and building such a home for such a church.

-----------------------

Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, December 10, 1961.