Issue 19 December 1998

Chri stian Ethics Today A Journal of Christian Ethics Volume 4, Number 6 aggregat e issue 19 december 1998 Dayspring Foy Valentine ...And to All a Good Night Edwin S. Gaustad Blessing Myron Madden Two Poems: One to Chew on and One to Lick Kenneth Chafin Truth Telling: An Exercise in Practical Morality Charles Wellborn Hal Haralson Vignettes • Anything Exciting Happen in Anahuac Today? • The Saga of Old Red • The Private Was a Preacher • The Night Cometh Bigotry: An Ethical Evaluation John M. Swomley Sowing and Reaping William H. Griffith Watching the World Go By • Room for God • A Case for Orthodoxy in Ethics Ralph Lynn Christmas Wishes Katherine Nutt Shamburger Kudzu Doug Marlette Dayspring By Foy Valentine Christmas is a time for celebrating. Dayspring’s spirit is caught in Suzy Best’s beloved Christmas No wonder that when I was a kid we shot off firecrackers, lit poem: Roman candles, waved sparklers, killed the fatted chicken, feast - That night when in Judean skies the mystic star dispensed its ed on fruit cakes, and generally made merry. light Christmas is a time for happiness. A blind man moved in his sleep and dreamed that he had It is a time for gifts, for angels, for stars, for music, for joy, sight. and for lights. That night when shepherds heard the song of hosts angelic When Christmas comes, the winter solstice is already past. choiring near The days are getting longer already. In the natural order of A deaf man stirred in slumber’s spell and dreamed that he things, day has begun to conquer night. Things are looking up. could hear. The people of God have special reason to rejoice for “the That night when o’er the new born babe the tender Mary rose dayspring from on high hath visited us” (Luke 1:78). Consider to lean this profundity in its context. A loathesome leper smiled in sleep and dreamed that he was When pregnant Mary went from Nazareth “into the hill clean. country” to see her cousin Elisabeth, herself six months pregnant That night when to the mother’s breast the little King was with John, there was at their meeting a spirited exchange of held secure epiphanies. Elisabeth burst forth first “with a loud voice” glorify - A harlot slept a happy sleep and dreamed that she was pure. ing God; and then Mary’s very soul overflowed with what we That night when in the manger lay the Sanctified who came have come to call her Magnificat, her inspired utterance of praise to save to the Lord. Then, after an unreasonably long visit of three A man moved in the sleep of death and dreamed there was no months with her kinswoman Elisabeth, Mary finally went home. grave. Then, Elisabeth had her baby, and her husband Zacharias, mute And dayspring’s spirit brings to mind the conversion to since the angel of God first broke all this good news to him, lift - Christ of the authentically pious Blaise Pascal. Of this remark - ed his own voice and “prophesied:” able French scientist, philosopher, and mathematician, William Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and L. Hendricks has written, “It would be overly dramatic, but not redeemed his people, without a kernel of truth, to say that everyone who has had an And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of injection, used a thermometer, ridden a bus, used an adding his servant David; machine, or studied higher mathematics has been influenced by As he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets, which have Blaise Pascal” who “was instrumental in the discovery or been since the world began; advancement which made possible all of the above.” Like Saul’s That we should be saved from our enemies, and from the encounter with God on the Damascus road when “there shined hand of all that hate us; round about him a light from heaven,” Pascal’s experience of To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to meeting God was bathed in the ineffable light of what he per - remember his holy covenant; ceived to be God’s “FIRE.” That experience of grace came in The oath which he sware to our father Abraham, that he 1654. His account of it was written on a fragment of parchment would grant unto us, that we being delivered out of the found sewn into his clothing after his death. His enlightenment hand of our enemies might serve him without fear, came, his note revealed, “from about half past ten in the evening In holiness and righteousness all the days of our life. until past midnight; and issued in “certainty, certainty, heartfelt, And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest; joy, peace...joy, joy, tears of joy...everlasting joy...” for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his Does not his experience capture something of the miracle of ways; the new birth? Does it not communicate something of the won - To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remis - der of God’s grace? And does it not radiate something of the glo - sion of their sins, rious light of our God whom James referred to as “the Father of Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the lights?” dayspring from on high hath visited us, Our Creator-Redeemer whose shekinah glory, whose shining To give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow presence, incarnated, has come as the dawn to our dark world. of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. The Dayspring from on high has visited us. The Oxford English dictionary, the best in our language, says Hallelujah. that dayspring means daybreak or early dawn. The word is now Amen. said to be chiefly poetic or figurative. It is generally designated as archaic. Our vocabularies are poorer; however, for our abandon - Editor: Foy Valentine ment of this remarkable word, dayspring. Publisher: The Center for Christian Ethics As Zacharias understood, dayspring speaks of Christmas, of CHRISTIAN ETHICS TODAY is published spasmodically, as funding and energy the dawn of grace, of the light of the world, of unconquerable permit, by the Center for Christian Ethics, Post Office Box 670784, Dallas, Texas hope. 75367-0784. Phone (972) 404-0070 or (972) 404-0050. Produced in the United States of America. Third class postage paid at Dallas, Texas. 2 • DECEMBER 1998 • CHRISTIAN ETHICS TODAY ...And to All a Good Night By Edwin S. Gaustad [Dr. Gaustad is Professor Emeritus, History and origins. One, therefore, should avoid using them, and Religious Studies, The University of California, speak rather of the “first day of the fourth month,” or the Riverside.] “fifth day of the ninth month.” Sacraments? Who needs them, or—more to the point—who commands them? All he Christmas season is a time for joy to the world, and righteous activity is a channel of God’s grace; all life must Tgood will among menand women. Sometimes. be given to redeeming the time and sanctifying the world. Certainly not in Jerusalem, rarely in the courts or the pub - Idleness and “the holiday spirit” are foreign to doing justly, lic schools of the United States, and generally not in the loving mercy, and walking humbly before a sovereign God. mixed memories of what tradition may suggest or require. So where did all the bustle and bazaar quality of today’s All these perplexities and confrontations, and we have not Christmas cacophony come from? Leigh E. Schmidt, in his even yet arrived at the new millennium with its intensified excellent book Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of demands and expectations. American Holidays (Princeton, 1995), describes the steady Let us begin with what more or less sacred tradition and not always edifying evolution of the ChristmasNew seems to require of us in America. And where better to Year holidays in American culture. In the 1820s and 1830s, begin than with the Puritans and their strong religious the giftgiving associated with the beginning of the New commitment? How did they celebrate Christmas? They Year gradually shifted to Christmas where family values didn’t. Christmas was part of that papal calendar, along could compete with the noisy rowdiness of New Year cele - with the Feast of the Epiphany, Ash Wednesday, Ascension brations. And the Wise Men had, after all, brought gifts. Day, All Saints Day, and whathaveyou, that the Puritans Much Protestant resistance to observing Christmas as a fes - were at pains to reject. December 25 could come and go, tivity gradually wore away, though for decades many strug - with Puritans not so much as nodding their heads in the gled to keep some uniquely Christian flavor in the growing direction of a special holiday, and certainly not one of rev - commercialization and emphasis on holiday shopping. elry, indulgence, and wild abandon. As a scandalized Cotton Mather asked his congregation in 1712, “Can you n Philadelphia, the Presbyterian John Wanamaker and in your Conscience think, that our Holy Saviour is hon - I his ever enlarging department store, represented this ser - ored by Mad Mirth, by long Eating, by hard Drinking, by vice to two masters. In his new emporium, opened in 1911, lewd Gaming, by rude Revelling; by a Mass fit for none but Wanamaker took every advantage of the commercial possi - a Saturn, or a Bacchus, or the Night of a Mahometan bilities that the birthday of Christ represented. “He kept up Ramadam?” And the sober, disciplined, temperate mem - a formidable flow,” Schmidt writes, “of store souvenirs, gift bers of Mather’s church would solemnly shake their heads catalogues, newspaper advertisements, trade cards, window at the thought of such a defilement of the memory of the decorations, musical concerts, Santa Claus stunts, and newborn Christ.

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