A Partridge In a Pear Tree

A.J. Muste first delivered this Christmas sermon in 1951 at the First Unitarian Church of Schenectady, New York. It was later published in the December 1976 issue of Fellowship magazine by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Nyack, New York.—The Editors

Sitting in a railroad station some days before Christmas the perfect text for a Christmas meditation in our time came to me. A chorus sang the song which begins: "On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me a partridge in a pear tree."

You have to be very serious, full of a great desire to please your true love, and you have to have some understanding of the unfathomable wonder of life, to think of such a Christmas gift for him or her as a partridge in a pear tree.

On the other hand, it must be confessed that a partridge in a pear tree is not only a merry idea, but a little mad. It makes no sense at all—or all the sense in the world—depending on how you look at it, and that's Christmas.

The first Christmas was a Partridge in a Pear Tree affair. The miracle of the ages took place. This is the great turning point in history. Here in some great sense, God entered into human life and into the stream of history.

But how? The angelic announcement points out the contrast. "There is born to you this day in the city of David, a Savior who is Christ, the Lord." But then: "This shall be the sign"—the incontrovertible proof—"ye shall find a babe, wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger." Cattle will be standing around. His father is a carpenter. He is born away from home because there is an emperor who is having all his subjects registered for purposes of conscription. Clearly this makes no sense. This is not the way God comes. But it has made all the sense in the world, like the partridge in a pear tree.

We are clearly living in a time when something like a Christmas miracle has to happen if we are to be saved. It is a time when we need to be sane, to try not to lose our heads. Yet it is also a time for faith, which is of course a form of insanity. If we are too solemn or conventional about it, it is certain that we shall not find the way out. As in all great crises, so now we need something which makes no sense and yet makes all the sense in the world.

It is by no means certain that we shall achieve this quite amazing integration of sanity and of the kind of foolishness which St. Paul recognized as wiser than the wisdom of the world. We are quite literally a nation which is in the process of committing suicide in the hope that then the Russians will not be able to murder it.

We have the choice, the terrible choice such as a real crisis in human affairs always involves, when either way colossal risks have to be taken: the choice of being among those who recognize the whole Christmas business for the impractical thing it is and therefore repudiate and kill the Christ child or being among those who accept this child as King of Kings and Lord of Lords—and perhaps go with him to a green hill not so far from Bethlehem on which a cross was erected for him and a crown of thorns pressed on his head, as the Christmas wreath with its blood-red berries reminds us.

If we are going to try this imaginative approach, perhaps we should send a few thousand young men and women next year on an expedition to our enemies, each with a partridge in one hand and a pear tree in the other.

The trouble with the diplomatic and other missions we send to our enemies these days is that they have nothing of this sanity and madness of Christmas about them. Political missioners always go with things like Point IV in one hand and an atomic bomb in the other. Christians carry a Gospel or a cross in one hand but an atomic bomb in the other, which is not at all the way in which the early Christians "conquered" the Roman empire. That was done by unarmed men and women who went around telling these foolish stories about a manger and a cross and such things ...

This idea of rivalry in putting on Christmas projects sounds foolish, of course, but that is because we live in an age when an atomic armaments race seems to make sense to a lot of people, and a commission of learned theologians approves of having the United States use atomic bombs under certain conditions "in retaliation, with all possible restraint." A partridge in a pear tree certainly isn't half as crazy as that.

In many fields today in this country, and elsewhere in the world, our hope rests on the individual who will act whether any one else does or not, who will refuse to go along with the human sheep who can so easily be transformed by drill and indoctrination into ravening wolves. Ignazio Silone, in his novel Bread and Wine, tells of this individual who lives in "the Land of Propaganda" which is "built on unanimity" and who persists in saying No "in his neighbor's ear." What if they catch and kill him? "Killing a man who says No is a risky business because even a corpse can go on whispering No. And how can you silence a corpse?"

There we have the mysterious and beautiful paradox of life again: these corpses that are so alive and merry in a world where so many live who have become mere machine parts or wooden soldiers, incapable of true merriment.

So—not in spite, but because of the fact that it is a troubled and dark time—may each of you have a Merry Christmas. May each of you get your partridge in a pear tree, and find the partridge in a pear tree to give your true love.

May the peoples of the earth, too, become capable of the high seriousness and foolishness of putting partridges in pear trees in the place of atom bombs and synthetic peace doves, capable of finding the Lord of all in a manger, capable of doing the thing that makes no sense and yet makes all the sense in the world, namely, beginning with peace instead of finding ways to peace, since there is no way to peace, peace itself being the way.