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Message from Pastor Peter Marty

Christmas mail

By Pastor Peter Marty

I cannot possibly be alone in this department: There is a large basket of greeting cards in our house that won’t go away. Every season or two it gets moved to another room. If it is not my wife’s impatience with this bundle that won’t disappear, it is mine. Dwelling in a kind of purgatory, suspended between their first opening, and their eventual death in the recycling bin, these cards seem too precious to toss.

I can’t say I re-read many of them. I don’t. I have never counted them. They simply exist as a bundle of memories — cards that St. Paul people sent several years ago, upon the occasion of my tenth year of ministry at the church.

It is a little embarrassing to share this secret of the basket that keeps getting moved. It feels like you have now been let in on a house and a life that are not all put together — both of which are partly true. Memories are powerful, though. We must not treat them lightly. When they are encased in words, they become even more potent, more timeless.

If saving stacks of dusty cards indefinitely seems a bit peculiar, counting them is even more peculiar. That’s what J. Barrie Shepherd does. He privately counts his Christmas cards when no one is looking. The total only gets announced through a whisper. He is smart enough to know that his wife does not approve of this activity. If the truth be told, he doesn’t either. He calls his counting exercise a “gross and empty calculation.”

How do I know such personal information about J. Barrie Shepherd? Well, he put it into a poem titled, Christmas Mail. “What kind of fool would poll his friendships, success, even Christmas spirit according to the total of these pretty, colored cards?” Yet, he keeps on counting. “There is a buried treasure somewhere in these [cards],” says Shepherd. It is a treasure that inspires him to keep looking for ways to “bind fond memory into future hope.” So, he sends out his own Christmas cards each year — a ritual of correspondence that reminds him that memories have a future.

I don’t know what you make of people who all but photocopy their datebooks from the last year and call it their “Christmas letter.” But before you dismiss such behavior as entirely impertinent to your life, think of it as their attempt to “bind fond memory into future hope.” There is a little of that in every card we write, send, save, or even count.

The story out of Bethlehem you will hear on Christmas night may seem old. You may have parts of it memorized. But we tell it again, and sing it all over, because in it we see both fond memory and hope for the future. If Jesus didn’t come to turn our memories into hope, and our losses and deprivations into gain, I don’t know why he came.

This One, whom St. John calls “a word with flesh on it,” is like a greeting card of which we cannot let go. He is buried treasure in a basket of straw. He is a word that can transfer your memories from 2009 — fond as they are, or not — into a hope-filled future.

Christmas joy to you!

Pastor Peter Marty,

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