How the Adult Angels Wanted to Cancel Christmas E-Book

Axel Schwaigert

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 73

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

A collection of short stories about the meaning of Christmas today. Every year we approach the miracle and the mystery of Christmas: God became human for us. This is what we celebrate, even if we sometimes forget it in the stress and hectic of the advent season. But how do we really prepare for Christmas? These stories for children and adults talk about stars and angels and miracles, and about us. Perhaps they are just a stories. But perhaps the one or the other thing happened just that way.

Leseprobe

In loving memory of my mother

Rosel Schwaigert

We miss you

Thank you

I want to say thank you to everybody who helped that this little book became a reality. Thank you to Isabell for the wonderful little drawings and her creativity.

Thank you to my family for their support. A special thank you to my brother for nagging me again and again, asking: “How is you book project doing?”

Thank you to Mary Smail, Mia Brirggs, Andrea Offner and Ken Dimmick for helping to transform my text into real English.

Thank you to my teachers at Episcopal Divinity School for encouraging me to express my thoughts in stories.

And a thank you to my congregation, Salz der Erde MCC Gemeinde Stuttgart, for letting me tell these stories in our Christmas service in the first place. Thank you all.

Contents

A Short Introduction

How the Adult Angles Wanted to Cancel Christmas

Clarence, the Messenger Angel

What Happened After the Holy Night

How it Came that the Little Soprano Angels sang over the Manger

How the Little Angel and the Little Star Tried to Find the Perfect Place For the Birth

A Short Introduction

Thousands of dusty volumes of sermons line the shelves of seminary libraries all around the world. And I say dusty because nobody every pulls them down to read. Printed volumes of sermons almost make we want to reevaluate whether or not the printing press was really a good thing. I would go so far as to say that printed sermons are unreadable and unhelpful. Call the sermons essays and maybe I would give them more value. But sermons are a speaking art. There should be pulpits involved, and clergy vested according to their own traditions, and...most importantly, a congregation of interested people who are actually paying the preacher to preach. The cling on his every word. The skill of his vocal technique brings life to the scholarly and inspiring words.

So if all this is how I see volumes of sermons, why you might ask am I writing a foreword to this new volume of sermons from the Rev. Dr. Axel Schwaigert? The answer is simple. These are not really sermons. Yes, I know they were written as sermons, and delivered before Dr. Schwaigert's congregation, who clung to his every word, but they are something much more than sermons. They are stories with homiletical background.

Growing up in Germany, Dr. Schwaigert represents the culture that brought the world the Grimm's Fairly Tales, Wagner's Ring Cycle, and countless myths and legends from the witch infested Black Forest to haunted Harz Mountains. Dr. Schwaigert knows that the greatest truths far exceed human language's ability to express it with clarity. Metaphor, irony, and hyperbole are needed to bring us anywhere close to the truth of such infinite subjects as God, Christ, Salvation, and Love.

This wonderful volume of “sermon-stories” offers the listener or now that they are printed, the reader, the chance to enter into the childlike world where cows can talk and angels can pout. The point is not to avoid the big serious issues, but to talk about big and serious issues in ways which bring new light to the murkiness we theologians and parish clergy find ourselves. When reading these “sermon-stories” we don't fall asleep. We don't wring our hands in panic trying to remember our classical Greek declensions. We don't argue with the writer and slam the book against the wall. But we do smile. We might laugh. We definitely pursue the plot to the very last word, before uttering our own joyous Amen. Thanks be to God.

Read these stories and enjoy. That is definitely what Dr. Schwaigert would want. Read these stories and meditate on what they say, and what they don't say. Just read them for yourself or to others and later read them again. The perfect antidote to dusty scholarly shelf-fillers.

The Rev. Canon Kenneth Dimmick

St. Catherine’s Anglican Church Stuttgart

How the Adult Angles Wanted to Cancel Christmas

It was already a few days before Christmas, and the mood in heaven was extremely bad. The angels were angry: there was no way they would continue! There was a storm building among the angels. Even the clouds, on which the angels normally played their harps, looked more like a distant thunderstorm. Gabriel, the head-angel finally called a general assembly of all the angels and saints, so they could discuss the problem. All the famous, and not so famous saints came. From the strong Guardian angles with their huge, white wings to the most fragile music angel all where there.

The first speaker made a point: “The humans on earth don’t deserve Christmas! Instead of being joyful and meditating on the season they are focused on consumerism and hectic racing around. Instead of peace on earth, they have fights under the Christmas tree and wars all over the place. Why should they get to celebrate a holiday which seems to be important only for the retail industry?”

“Exactly!” the next angel agreed. She was the one who was responsible for the weather. “First, they dream about a white Christmas, with jingle bells and sleigh rides, and perfectly white Hollywood snow. But when we give them snow, they complain about the temperature and the traffic chaos! And on top of that: Global warming is their own fault. And can anybody explain what romance in front of a fire place has to do with Christmas?”

“I totally agree” grumbled the holy bishop Nicolas of Myra. “They reduce me to somebody who brings presents and now I am just a poster guy advertising a certain sweet American soft drink… just can’t remember the name…”

“Yes,” interrupted Saint Augustine, the chief theologian and Father of the Church, “Humans no longer even know about the structure of the calendar year of the church! And if you ask anybody on the street about the meaning of “Incarnation theology”! Nobody knows! They just scratch their heads. It is the most important term in systematic theology and …”

The rest of his lecture was shouted down in a general clamor that sounded something like this: “The humankind does not care about real meaning of Christmas anymore! They do not even deserve Christmas! And the best would be if the angels just would decide to do away with Christmas altogether!” Gabriel, one of the big angels finally summed it up by concluding that Christmas seemed to be useless for the humans anyhow. So the angels and saints might as well use the time, as the humans did - take a nice vacation somewhere in the sunny south. Hawaii or the Bahamas are very nice this time of year.

While a fight started at the gathering of angels and saints about where they should go for a Christmas vacation, three little angels were sitting to the side and were all puzzled. They had listened to the adults and did not understand at all why they were so upset or what the fighting was all about. In their opinion Christmas was such an important celebration. It was so beautiful. They had tried to speak up, but none of the adults had listened to them. They tried to speak about love, and peace, about courage and hope but the arguing was too loud.

That the adults wanted to do away with Christmas… the little angels could not believe it. Sad, they folded their halos and left with hanging wings. On a out-of-the-way cloud they sat down and thought about what they could do. To talk to the adult angles was out of the question. That simply would not work. Adults never listened. They could go directly to God, and head to the heavenly throne. But they did not have the courage to do that.

But, then they got another idea: they could go down to the humans themselves and bring them the real Christmas. Yes, that was something they could do! And if the adults did not want to help, then the little angels would do it all by themselves! Each one of them would fly down to earth, carrying only what they had recently learned in their short existence as angels. They said, “Let the adults fight if they want!”

And so, the three little angels headed out the bring Christmas to the humans on earth. They started out together and once they landed on earth, each of them choose a direction. So off they went!