Don Friesen
A Boxing Day Special
This morning, while you are gathered here, many more people are gathering at the malls to grab as many of the Boxing Day specials as possible! When my children were pre-schoolers and didn't know Christmas from Thanksgiving, I would trudge off to Canadian Tire on Boxing Day to get most of their Christmas gifts – at half-price! This week one flyer that after another came into our household advertising their Boxing Day Blow-outs! The only deal you're going to get here today is a two-for-one special – two sermons for the price of one!
Many think that Christmas has become very commercialized, but Boxing Day has become nothing but a day to genuflect before the god of consumerism. For many retailers Boxing Day has become the day of the year that generates the greatest revenue. It is estimated that in 2009, in the United Kingdom, up to 12 million shoppers took off for the malls, up almost 20% from the year before. Long line-ups at these sales are legendary, a chance to rush-and-grab, and occasionally trample the less-driven consumers.
Boxing Day has become synonymous with sales, a chance to use the gift cards we received the day before. Its origin, however, is less clear. The least imaginative explanation is that this is the day that we clean up the clutter of the empty boxes that held our Christmas gifts, and place them, with due diligence, into the black recycling bin. At our house I do that immediately after sharing our gifts, and then I also do a tally of all the bills, just in case the experience of giving and receiving gifts gave me too much joy!
Boxing Day is also not about returning unwanted gifts to the stores in the boxes they came in, ... or ... about fists flying after spending one too many days with relatives. It's also not about killing animals, although one of the traditions of Boxing Day is to go fox hunting, an opportunity for normally sane adults to dress in blazing-red riding gear, drink themselves stupid, and then, accompanied by a multitude of yapping dogs, give chase to fox!
Unlike Christmas, which still retains its original message, intent, and the name of the person whom we honour on that day, the origins of Boxing Day is almost forever lost to human memory ... almost ... except that we know that its original intent was generosity, and that it has a connection to the Church. Boxing Day traditions long included giving gifts to the needy. It may go back to the early Christian era, when metal boxes were placed outside churches to collect special offerings, and then on Boxing Day churches opened the boxes and distributed the contents to the poor.
A variation of that tradition comes out of the United Kingdom, where it became a custom in the nineteenth-century for tradesmen to collect their Christmas boxes on the day after Christmas in return for good and reliable service throughout the year. Yet another variation is that the servants of wealthy landowners were allowed to take that day off to visit their families, and as they left, the landowner gave each servant a box containing gifts. And yet another variation is that people would save one of their still-wrapped Christmas gifts and donate it to charity on Boxing Day.
Most of the stories about the origins of Boxing Day have a common theme. It was a day of giving to the poor, helping the helpless – a theme long forgotten as we rush off to the malls to buy ourselves gifts. It would take a bizarre series of contrivances to turn God's generosity into a day of shopping, but, unfortunately, we've done so.
What a contrast to the Holy Family, who were warned in a dream, not to flee to the malls but to flee to another country! Under cover of darkness. To become refugees. A tyrant was in power, and a terrible campaign of infanticide began soon after Christ was born. (Matthew 2:16-18) Ultimately the tyrant was no match for God's protection and leading, and after first escaping to Egypt, Mary and Joseph, and their child, Jesus, settled in Nazareth, where, Luke tells us, "the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favour of God was upon him." (Luke 2:40) Mary and Joseph were able to say, with Isaiah:
The origins of Boxing Day may be lost in the mists of time, but the day after Christmas is also known in the Church as the Feast of Saint Stephen. We meet Stephen in the book of Acts. He appears in only two chapters of Acts, a seemingly minor character in the biblical drama, but he is commended highly. He is described as "a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit" (Acts 6:5), later as "full of grace and power, (who) did great wonders and signs among the people." (6:8) Stephen was one of seven chosen as the first deacons of the Church, their qualifications that they be "of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom". (6:3) Their task was to "devote (them)selves to prayer and to serving the word," and to look after the needs of Greek-speaking widows among the Christians in Jerusalem.
Stephen might have had an illustrious career except that he crossed paths with the wrong people, out-argued them, and for this was dragged out of town and stoned to death. Within two chapters Stephen is chosen, commissioned, gives the longest speech in Acts, if not the Bible, and is killed – a brief, but memorable ministry because he became the Church's first martyr, the protomartyr, and he was given a feast day the day immediately following Christ's birth – and it was placed there almost immediately after the establishment of the Christmas celebration. We have sermons from early on in the Church's history which refer to Saint Stephen, and call him an "imitator of the Lord". (St. Gregory of Nyssa, December 26, 386 A.D.) And, like Jesus, Stephen died praying for the forgiveness of those who killed him. (Acts 7:60)
It didn't take long for the Church to shatter the tenderness of Christmas by marking the violent execution of Saint Stephen on the very next day! Why didn't the Church place his feast day in Lent, so that we could hold on to that Christmassy feeling a bit longer? Not that retail outlets will do so; no doubt some stores will have Valentine's Day displays up by the end of the week!
Saint Stephen, you may be interested to know, is the patron saint of several things. He is the patron saint of Serbia, and of horses. And in a strange and savage irony Stephen is also the patron saint of stone masons, and those with headaches, a connection reinforced by artists, who often portray Stephen with a pile of stones and with a wounded head!
Stephen became, in the eyes of the Church, a martyr and a mentor, and his witness ripples across the centuries. His mention appears in various historical places. Twenty years ago, on the last Sunday of the year, I told the story of Thomas à Becket, and then read the Christmas sermon he preached in the year, 1170. Becket mentioned Stephen in that sermon, saying:
Another historical outcropping comes to us from the familiar but seldom-sung Christmas carol, "Good King Wenceslaus". Wenceslaus was the king of Bohemia – now part of the Czech Republic – in the tenth century. He was a Christian martyr, thanks to his mother and his brother, both of whom opposed Christianity, and he was eventually killed by his brother in front of the doors of the Church (938 A.D.).
Wenceslaus is the patron saint of Czechoslovakia and is regarded as a symbol of Czech nationalism. He is honoured with Wenceslaus Square, which stands in the centre of Prague and which in 1989 became the site of mass demonstrations that helped end the Communist dictatorship there.
The carol, "Good King Wenceslaus," was written (John Mason Neale) in 1853, the music itself Finnish and 300 years older. While lots of scorn has been heaped on the carol by musicians, who consider the text doggerel – one critic calling it "ponderous moral doggerel" – it celebrates the good king who went out on St. Stephen's Day to share his goods with the poor. The snow was covered with the blood of the king's freezing feet, but, says the carol, "Heat was in the very sod which the saint had printed." What the good king did he did to the least of his subjects for Christ, in honour of the first holy martyr.
Like Stephen, who was commissioned by the Church to share goods with the poor, Good King Wenceslaus' gifts of flesh, meat, wine, and firewood were made to a poor fellow whom he observed struggling through the snow on the day after Christmas. And then, concludes the carol, after the manner of Stephen, the first martyr and our mentor:
"(We) will recount the gracious deeds of the Lord, the praiseworthy acts of the Lord, because of all that the Lord has done for us, and the great favour to the house of Israel that he has shown them according to his mercy, according to the abundance of his steadfast love." (Isaiah 63:7)
Thanks be to God for His generous love.
In Honour of Saint Stephen
"Not only do we at the feast of Christmas celebrate at once our Lord's Birth and His Death: but on the next day we celebrate the martyrdom of His first martyr, the blessed Stephen. Is it an accident, do you think, that the day of the first martyr follows immediately the day of the Birth of Christ? By no means. Just as we rejoice and mourn at once, in the Birth and Passion of Our Lord; so also, in a smaller figure, we both rejoice and mourn in the death of martyrs." (T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, page 49)
Like Stephen, Thomas Becket also crossed paths with the wrong people, and four days after he preached that sermon he was killed in a side chapel of the cathedral in which he preached it. Reportedly his last words were: "Willingly I die for the name of Jesus and in defence of the Church."
"Therefore, Christian(s), be sure,
A common theme of both Boxing Day, in the early days, and Saint Stephen's Day. May it inspire us to act likewise.
wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor,
shall yourselves find blessing."
Quotations of Scripture are from the New Revised Standard Version, unless otherwise noted.