Christmas at Hogwarts

Christmas Eve 2007

Isaiah 9:2-4, 6-7 Ps. 96 Titus 2:11-14 Luke 2:1-20

Why, a friend asked me, do they celebrate Christmas at Hogwarts?

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is the site of much of the Harry Potter books, a gloomy and foreboding castle somewhere in the north of England. It’s a made-up place, with a made-up world-view about good witches and bad witches, and certainly no baby Jesus. Christmas means, will I get a sweater or chocolates, more like a big old Yuletide winter solstice celebration – but they call it Christmas. Everything about their Christmas is happy, often providing some of the few happy moments poor Harry every gets.

Well, they must not read much of the Bible at Hogwarts, because we’ve been reading some texts of terror. First there are all those Old Testament prophets and their words about the end time, the terrible day of the Lord. Then, the one phrase that has appeared in several of our readings is: “Do not be afraid.”

“Do not be afraid, Zechariah, “says the angel who announces the birth of John the Baptist. “Do not be afraid, Mary,” the angel says again, “for you have found favor with God.” “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife.” And then more angels, now to a group of shepherds: “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news.”

Something must really be frightening people, if the first thing these angelic messengers have to say is “Do not be afraid.”

What must you see when you see an angel? Light, I imagine. Light from light, a terrifying vision – is this what is meant by true God from true God? This begotten one, through whom all things are made? It is a fearful thing, this God made flesh, God among us, God coming to save us from our sins.

I think what we know, and what those Hogwarts Christmas revelers do not know, is that being a Christian means we look those fears in the face everyday – for our terror is not of evil or of death, but we are afraid that it might all be true. That God has come among us to save us from our sins, our sins which are so close to us that you may say God has come among us to save us from ourselves. What we are afraid of is that this is true, and if it is true, then we will be changed. No longer business as usual, but a whole new news.

It’s tough, being a Christian, living with this Good News that is here, but with so much more to come. Here but not yet. We live in this middle time, this “time being,” as W. H. Auden says:

…To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.*

We’ve heard the good news, we’ve seen the child: now how do we live in this time being? How do we keep alive this glimpse of glory we see tonight as we continue to live in the midst of the ordinary?

This is a very ordinary place, and like it or not, we are very ordinary people. But here in our midst, between us and around us, in what we do for each other and what we do for other people, you can see, you can just see, that glory shine.

Want to read more about For the Time Being?
Here is an excerpt from this article by William C. French ... For Auden, our ordinary existence is lived out in a post-Christmas world where “The Christmas Feast is already becoming a memory. . . . And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.” His concern in the poem is not simply to speak of the Nativity events but rather to draw out their incarnational impact upon the mundane world of the everyday. And what could be more boring, more deadeningly mundane, than the cabin-fever periods of February?