As worshippers fill candlelit churches tonight and Sunday for Christmas services, many will be bringing more than friends and relatives.
Many will carry hopes and expectations for a special holiday religious experience, priests and pastors said this week. Some will be looking for a respite from the busyness of the season or their lives. Others may wish to rekindle a memory of a past Christmas or the warmth of community. Still others, clergy admit, show up reluctantly just to please a spouse or parent.
Whatever the reasons for the crowds, Christmas Eve services tonight and Christmas morning services Sunday present clergy with a teachable moment -- and a challenge.
The congregation will be primed. The sermons probably will be one of the two most listened to of the year. And, with some Christmas-only worshippers in the pews, this may be the clergy's only shot in a year to connect with them.
It can be a formidable task. Christmas sermons "are the most difficult to preach, because there's almost nothing new to say," said the Rev. Clyde W. Oden Jr., senior pastor of Bryant Temple A.M.E. Church on West Vernon Avenue in Los Angeles. "There's no surprise at the end of this. Nearly everyone knows the story," he said. Keeping sermons "relevant and fresh" is important, Oden said.
As they prepare for the big moment, some priests and pastors want to offer worshippers a respite from news of natural disasters, war and political controversy by not mentioning them. Others say they won't hesitate to acknowledge what one called "palace lies" and "stupid wars."
But clergy in both groups said they have a common aim: to point to a transcendent hope in the Christmas story of a loving God's intervention in human history to bring peace on Earth.
"Christ is born to bring the glowing comfort of hope to soldiers in the sands of Iraq and immigrants in the sands of our southern border instead of more fear," said the Rev. Mark K. Smutny, co-pastor at Pasadena Presbyterian Church. "Instead of more false promises, more violence and more grief, when we allow Christ to be born into our hearts, we work to bring his light into our darkened world and we become his agents of hope," he said, quoting remarks he will deliver Christmas morning.
But at Revolution Church in Long Beach, Pastor David Trotter said he wouldn't touch current events. There are differences of opinion on those issues in his predominantly Generation X and baby boomer middle-class congregation, he said.
