Several weeks ago I read a review in the New York Times of a book, The Ice Harvest, by Scott Phillips. The review was favorable, the reviewer thought Mr. Phillips moved past stereotypical, pasteboard characters and explored the terrain of Wichita, Kansas, where the novel was set. I have some friends from Wichita who have lived in the Chicago area for a number of years, I like Wichita, and so I bought the book as a gift for my Kansas friends.

Big mistake.

The story is not a nice one, not one good Methodist folks from Wichita could relate to. The Ice Harvest takes place on Christmas Eve, 1979. The protagonist of the novel is an attorney named Charlie Arglist. He is the local consigliere for the Mob, and he has a number of scores to settle before he flees town with a huge amount of cash he has stolen from the Outfit. The story takes place in a variety of strip joints, nightclubs, honky tonks, three different beleaguered homes and is rife with profanity, promiscuity and drunkenness. My friends were dismayed that I would even suggest such a book for them, much less buy it as a gift.

After reading the novel, I've thought a good deal about its people, their situations and the hopelessness that pervades their existence on what is a typical Christmas Eve for a lot of people in North America. You and I don't hang around very much with folks like Charlie Arglist and his friends - people who will have nowhere to go tonight, people estranged from former spouses and children, people who will drink too much, who will have no vivid memory of what Christmas means.

But we do know and hang out with a lot of people who are not too dissimilar from Charlie Arglist, and, I dare say, some of his type are in worship this morning. That is, we know and sometimes we are people who live life on the surface, who don't reflect on what we have become or what our lives mean or the consequences of our behavior. You know folks like that. I certainly do. And, to tell you the truth, I sometimes envy them. While Christmas is a time of joy for me, a time when our children and grandchildren will be here, it is also a time when I reflect and meditate on all these Christmases I have preached and led worship and failed so many times. Christmas is ultimately about God's grace, but I get more and more discouraged by the ungracious, unforgiving ways we relate to each other.

So Charlie Arglist and his ilk are not to be totally blamed; they are products of American culture. Every one of us lives so much of life by rote, by custom, by appearance that we forget the reality beneath. It's very difficult to look inward and reflect on our motives as well as our actions, so it's easier to live on the surface. As no other season does, Christmas catches us in that dilemma: shall we live by its glitz and gifts, lights and latitude or shall we hear the Good News?

Years ago, in a central European town, the older townspeople could be seen making the sign of the cross as they passed by a certain ordinary-looking wall. When a visitor asked why they were doing that, nobody knew. The visitor's curiosity led him to begin chipping away at the layers of whitewash and dirt covering the wall until underneath he discovered a beautiful mural of Mary and the child Jesus. Generations before, the townspeople had had a reason for making the sign of the cross as they passed the mural, but succeeding generations had only learned the ritual. They continued to go through the motions without knowing the reason.

That's the danger of Christmas. We will go through the motions and forget why.

So, it's in the Letter to the Hebrews that we find the surprise about God's intentions at Christmas. To tell you the truth, I have avoided preaching from Hebrews for a good deal of my ministry. Until this week, I thought of it as pretty ethereal, somewhat removed from our way of thinking, esoteric. It has all those images about Jesus as the High Priest, about sacrifices and the Holy of Holies and burnt offerings.

Then, in one of those moments James Joyce calls "epiphanal," when the lights go on, I read a dialogue between two Christians, one of them like me, old and jaded with an ossified theology and the other young, vibrant, reading the Bible through fresh eyes. The younger one exclaimed, "Hebrews is all about the humanity of Jesus! Those images are about God becoming human!"

I hate it when some young whippersnapper like that makes an old guy like me go out the door and come back in!

Moreover, in reading more deeply in Hebrews, I discovered that today's Epistle Lection relies on my favorite from the psalter, Psalm 40. The writer to the Hebrews seems to know that Our Lord loved that psalm also and believes that Jesus quoted from the fortieth psalm himself at one or more points during his ministry: "Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure."

The author is able to use Psalm 40 to show that the single offering of the body of Jesus far surpasses the multiple offerings of animal sacrifices that were offered "according to the law" (verse 8). More important, it provides Scriptural basis for showing that a single life prepared by God and thoroughly committed to doing God's will represents the truest fulfillment of God's intention.

The passage is significant not only because of its explicit use of incarnational language about Christ's birth but also because it links the Incarnation with his atoning death. We cannot celebrate the moment of his birth in isolation from his teachings, his exemplary life, his death and his resurrection. It's a package. It's all one reality.

And that theological truth points to Charlie Arglist's problem with Christmas. It's our culture's problem with Christmas, the church's issue. We want the sweetness and light, the angels and the shepherds and the magi in isolation from Christ's life and death. But we have to remember that the Gospel writers wrote their story from the Passion backward. They knew how the story ends. It was the ending that enabled them to make sense of the beginning.

When I was in Thailand several years ago, I bought a silk tie at Jim Thompson's shop (not named for our state's former Governor - he's rich but he's not famous in Thailand like the former CIA agent/silk merchant by the same name). It's a beautiful tie with many elephants woven into its design. I wore it to a hearing at the State of Illinois building a couple of years ago, and one of my Democratic friends was outraged. "How could you wear such a tie with all those Republican elephants all over it?" I tried to explain that this tie had nothing to do with American party politics, but she wouldn't listen. So, she had Ben Silver send me his catalogue, in which was a tie with donkeys on it.

I've been intrigued with Ben Silver for a long time. He runs a discreet, somewhat shabby shop in Charleston, South Carolina, where he overcharges the tourists but he makes a lot more money from the Ben Silver Collection. You can purchase blazer buttons or cuff links with the crest of hundreds of colleges or universities. Or ties with your school color or crest.

But what about those of us who never went to college? Well, Mr. Silver has figured out that market too. You can buy buttons that have a crest reading Colegium Pulsationum Durarum (College of Hard Knocks) with the seal in the form of a pick and shovel against an industrial construction site. The perfect gift, says the catalogue, for "the self-made individual."

The only problem is that there is no such thing as the self-made individual. We are who we are by the grace of God, because of the gifts we have received in patience and love and forgiveness from others, because of the kindness, as Blanche DuBois says in A Streetcar Named Desire, we have "depended on the kindness of strangers."

When you open your gifts this Christmas, take a moment to remember those gifts that have already been opened in your life: someone who loves you unconditionally; the way God keeps interrupting your life and turning you back, putting your feet, as Psalm 40 says, on the rock; and the mystery we celebrate today, that God has become one of us, fully divine and fully human at the same time, a secret, as John Calvin said of the Lord's Supper, "too lofty for either my mind to comprehend or my words to declare."

You know that White Castle at the corner of Roosevelt and Canal, down on the near South Side? It's like Hopper's painting, The Night Hawks, filled all night with city workers, laborers, railroad people, wanderers. I remember being in there late one night (or early one morning) when a big, hulking waiter in a dirty T-shirt came up and said to a man down the counter, "What's yours, Mack?" The man replied, "Give me two eggs, scrambled, and a few kind words." The waiter clomped off and in a few minutes returned. He slammed the plate carelessly in front of the customer. As he turned away, the man asked, "Wait a minute, what about some kind words?" The waiter looked at him, "Oh, yeah, sure. Don't eat dem eggs."

Goodness knows, we need kind words, but more than that we need words that begin to probe life's depths instead of leaving us sliding along its smooth, shiny surface. Words like these from Hebrews that bring us back to the central truth of the faith. Flannery O'Connor, that wonderful Catholic Christian from Milledgeville, Georgia, one of our generations greatest storytellers, declared, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd." That's the Christmas message that cuts across all our pretenses and logic. It's odd but it's God's truth.

The church's business, you see, is to go out of business. In the perfect world to which Christmas calls us, a world of peace and joy and compassion, there would be no need for the church. But the church, like every other institution, quickly gets into the business of perpetuating itself. You organize a committee, and the first task of the committee becomes keeping itself going. Which means that it often forgets why it was organized in the first place. The church's business is the world which our Savior loved and for which He died.

This beautiful, French-Gothic sanctuary and this building, the tallest church in the world, do not exist in and of themselves, or for us, the members and friends of First Methodist Church. They point toward a higher reality, the one to which Christmas calls us: that God has become human, that God's own Son took on all our limitations and temptations, our fears and foibles, our desires and deeds, and transformed them into a life of sacrifice and service, a life of giving and glory, a life of concern and compassion.

It's foolish, but it's our faith.