AS I WRITE THESE WORDS, I’m just grinning as I reflect on our annual seminary Christmas party last night. The president’s manse was spruced up with outdoor lights, the tree was fully decorated, the cherished ornaments and candles and crèches and Santas were up from the basement, unpacked and placed around the house. The first floor was filled with people — 80 or 90 of them: faculty, staff, local trustees, various alums, retirees and their widows or widowers, 2-year-olds capturing the attention and delight of everybody — and they frequented the dining room table groaning with cheeses and salads and flank steak and shrimp. The desserts were in the breakfast room; the wine and soft drinks in the study. Some people went out to the terrace where the chimenea was burning that piñon wood that makes the most fragrant smoke.
Louisa was there. For 30 years she worked as the seminary housekeeper and now she takes care of a 103-year-old woman. “You’re going to see her through, aren’t you!” I said. And she
said, “Yes, but we’re going to see each other through.”
Jenny was there. She told her mom that she would not be going to her gymnastics class because, she said, “Mom, this party is a tradition!” A third-grader schooling her mother in the topic of tradition!
Robert was there. More joyful this Christmas, I surmised, than in previous Christmas seasons. The death was rawer then and, with some time, he has decided that life goes on.
The house was rocking! The seminary attorney, the operations people, the I.T. nerds, they were all there!
Later, as we helped the caterers clean up the place and as we were giving away shrimp and cookies and leftover flank steak like it was, well, Christmas; one of them — a young woman who does this for a living — looked at me and said, “Everybody here was so … kind.”
That thought stays with me. She was right. It was a party where everyone was kind; and the thought crossed my mind that not every party we attend is like that.
The Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus said, is like a party. And not just one of those sedate wedding receptions in the fellowship hall. No, I think he had in mind more of an organized riot — a great celebration where there are joyful greetings and dancing and people swinging from chandeliers and, piped through the sound system, the psalmist singing, “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it!” The point of the party is that great victory of life over death — and kindness.
I was in New Orleans recently and encountered two or three wedding processions. I remembered how, in the Hebrew tradition, the celebration of life is more important than mourning over the dead — so much so that when a wedding procession encounters a funeral procession in the street, the mourners are the ones who halt so that the wedding celebrants may proceed.
So why are we Christians often so joyless? “Let us keep the feast,” says St. Paul, and what he has in mind is the whole festival of life! The great symbols of the Kingdom of Heaven are celebratory: a man’s wayward son is restored to him, a woman finds a quarter under her couch and invites the neighborhood to a hamburger cookout. Everywhere the great symbols are banquets and feasts, the bread of life and the wine of gladness. You are invited to a party, says Jesus.
And so we had one last night — one marked, apparently, by kindness. And today, I’m remembering that God keeps renewing the invitation. May it be in this year, so crucial in our communion, that we all keep remembering that God’s feast is always prepared. God’s party is always ready.
THEODORE J. WARDLAW is president and professor of homiletics at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
