Once upon a time I wrote a sermon that had an amazing half-life on the web, being referenced around the globe.
It was written while I served our Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Tempe, Arizona. I no longer recall the exact circumstances around the why of it, but I suspect that Sunday was the 26th, as the subject and title of the sermon was “Boxing Day.”
It appears there was relatively so little available on the web related to Boxing Day that google searches would usually pop my sermon on the first page. I was told by the church’s web manager it was the number one hit they would get for quite a while.
I don’t think there was all that much of value in the sermon. I certainly only recall one good line, and it was a throw away. I announced the title to the staff, and our music director Kelly Walker asked what was Boxing Day, anyway? To which I said I didn’t yet know. To which she said, “Oh, James, what if it turns out its the anniversary of the British forcing the Chinese to buy opium? Then what will you do?”
Of course it isn’t about the Boxer rebellion, nor about pugilism, nor about getting rid of the boxes after Christmas.
Today both Wikipedia and Snopes have concise explorations of this holiday, also called St Stephen’s Day in England.
In fact Boxing Day is a bit of a mystery even to those who observe it, and its exact beginnings are simply lost in the mists of time. Today it is a holiday in much of the former British Empire, it means most people get the day off from work. I guess it wasn’t that big in England in the eighteenth century as it didn’t become anything here on this side of the pond. The only certain thing about Boxing Day was that in the relatively recent past it was the time when you gave presents to your social inferiors. Your peers got their presents on or before Christmas. Where social superiors fit into this scheme I don’t know…
I suspect the connection to St Stephen is simply its association on the calendar. The 26th being the feast of St Stephen, by tradition the first martyr of the Christian church. It was, by the bye, St Stephen’s execution where not yet St Paul admitted to holding the cloaks for those doing the heavy work…
(Here in my original posting, I said of Stephen that he is the subject of one of the more bizarre iconographic traditions in our culture. And how I can’t think of St Stephen without thinking of the homoerotic photograph of Yukio Mishima, the novelist and dabbler in Japanese right wing politics and posted it above. Of course, as Uncle Weasel pointed out, St Stephen was stoned. It was St Sebastian that got the arrows…)
In any case, I hope this strange day that follows that even stranger but very, very interesting day we celebrate as the feast of the invincible sun, as the culmination of an orgy of mutual acquisition, and the birth of a babe proves a quiet and lovely time…
Today is not a bad time to just stop, to breathe a bit, and to notice…
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