Leo’s Christmas Sermons

Leo the Great was the Bishop of Rome from 440 to 461. During that time, he famously treated with Attila the Hun and convinced him to leave Rome alone for a while. Over the course of his career, less famously, he preached, as I understand it, at least eight sermons on Christmas day, seven of which have survived. (I reach this tentative conclusion since the ones included in the Eerdman’s Library of the Fathers on ccel.org are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8.)

These sermons were exactly what I was hoping they would be and, truth be told, was afraid they might not be. The celebration of the birthday of Christ, says Leo, is a day to celebrate God’s gift of redemption. We so often read “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” to mean that God allowed his Son to be sacrificed on the cross. (I heard that interpretation in yesterday’s sermon at my own local, twenty-first-century church.) But God the Father gave us the Son in one sense at the Incarnation and in another sense on the Holy Night in Bethlehem.

Leo tells us that Christmas is also a time to celebrate the Trinity and Christ’s dual nature in one Person: full divinity and full humanity. No anathemas here as in many theological messages in these early centuries. Paul says that the one preaching the false gospel should be cursed, not the one who believes the false message. I don’t want to pronounce my own anathemas against those who pronounced anathemas. I just wholeheartedly support Leo’s desire to use Christmas Day to preach the true gospel without drawing lines through the Church visible.

He does draw a line, however, between those who worship Christ and those who worship the sun – or who think that Christmas is really only about worshiping the sun as its daily time above ground starts to lengthen. And yet, while Leo tells people not to worship creation, he doesn't tell Christians to despise creation either: “And so, dearly beloved, we do not bid or advise you to despise God's works or to think there is anything opposed to your Faith in what the good God has made good, but to use every kind of creature and the whole furniture of this world reasonably and moderately.” And this seems to me a central part of the Christmas message: that if God was willing to take on flesh and humanity in all its mundane materiality, then that physicality must have been created good. God made the land and the sea and the sun and the moon and the stars and the fish and the birds and the beings that creep on the earth, and He saw that they were good. It must be right to enjoy them as long as, as Augustine says, our love for them is subordinate to our love for God – not just less than, but subordinate, in that enjoying earthly gifts leads to enjoying God.

Some Christians have worn black because they thought they must be modest in appearance in order to be good Christians. I don’t judge their decision about what they must do to quell pride; I just don’t want them to tell the Ghost of Christmas Present he can’t wear green. Some Christians have served God in poverty. I don’t judge their deliberation to conquer the lust for wealth; I just don’t want them telling nephew Fred that he can’t share a joyous Christmas meal and games with family and friends. Some Christians have made worship a solemn and silent thing. I don’t doubt that they have found Christ in the quietude; I just don’t want them telling Bob Cratchit he can’t slide down the ice with some neighborhood boys “in honour of its being Christmas Eve.”