Changing Seasons; New Year’s Challenge

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As the days of Advent dwindled this year, I saw myself grasping–begging it not to go.  There’s something sweet about the way nights have been dark and quiet with hot tea, a fire in the ‘place, and a craft project in hand.  It almost feels like we’ve been building a ship, lovingly sanding the boards, carefully melding them together, adding sail and rudder and varnish.  Now, though, the dry dock about to be filled and the supports are ready to give way, and it’s time to test all the preparation we’ve made.  We’re going into the fray, the incarnation is coming; just when waiting and preparing got really comfortable, the adventure begins.

I think I sort of forgot about the adventure, the incarnation–I preferred to ponder the waiting.  There’s not much you can do when you’re waiting, you just keep your head down, say your prayers, do your work.  When the water rushes in, you suddenly have to swim, to put to the test all the pondering, learning, and preparing you’d done.

Many autumn days (long before Advent began) felt like this, too.  There was too much that threatened to push in and change things–to make me into a new kind of person; exhausting me out of bad habits and shoving me into good ones.  I resist.  I cling to tv shows and drag my feet to yoga class.  I lie in bed in the early morning, willing myself back to sleep, though my journal, and books, and coffeemaker all lie ready to be used.  Just keep your head down, do your work, say your prayers, don’t look around.

Christmas is here, and even now (especially those of us in clericals), we begin to look forward to Epiphany, which pushes in on us with great, blinding, demanding light.  Epiphany’s a little like New Year’s–it says to us, “Here’s an enormous, dizzying, life-changing gift…  What’re you going to do with it?”  As W.H. Auden said in the poem I read in church last Sunday,

…Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.

For a month in 2013, I had no job, no contract to promise a job, no illusion of my independence from God (my husband is a Ph.D. student, no real income there, either).  It was the most peaceful, joyful month of my entire life.  I knew in the deepest way possible that God was truly our only hope and foundation–my paycheck, my functioning as a parish priest, my local support network (largely), had all been asked of me if we were to continue following God’s call.  So we prayed, and we plunged.

We’re called to live in a way that our lives look insane if our triune God does not exist.

“It was God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.”

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Gospel Lesson: John 1:1-18

Epistle: Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7

In the 1950’s, there was a missionary named Jim Elliot who felt called by God to go to Ecuador to minister to native peoples there.  Along with his team, he started to build relationships with a particularly remote tribe—first dropping gifts from their missionary plane, then working toward introducing themselves, continuing to clear the way with more presents to show their goodwill.  Finally delegations from each group met.  On this big day, Jim took a photo from his pocket to show the tribespeople that the missionaries were friends with a member of their tribe.

Having never seen a photograph, they assumed that Jim had eaten brother, since he had taken the likeness of this person out of his body to show them.  They murdered Jim and his companions immediately.

I wonder if we sometimes make the opposite mistake about Jesus.  I wonder if we take Jesus to be just a picture of God—only an image or likeness, but not really God himself.  They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, but if I had my choice I’d take the thousand words every time—there’s so much more to learn from studying a description of someone than reducing a whole person to a single photograph.

Our Gospel passage today is bursting with poetic description of God; it harkens to another description of God elsewhere.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  That description goes on to reveal that God created humanity “in God’s image”—which means that we ourselves are a sort of photo in some way—and when God created humanity, he furnished a place for his people to live and provided for their every need.  You know this story—here’s where the montage of Adam and Eve frolicking and eating and naming animals fits in—and then something goes wrong.  (you can imagine the sound of  a pin dragging against vinyl) Adam and Eve decide that God may have been lying to them after all, and they test the truth God had told them—whether it really did matter so much how they lived.

Now we really learn something about God: that evening, arriving for their daily walk, God calls out for his companions, his cherished creatures.  They’re hiding—they know they shouldn’t have tested God and shouldn’t have doubted that God was telling the truth, but they really would rather not face up to it.

We’re not that different, are we?  Instead of recognizing our crookedness, we bury it and move on.  I read a story this week of a professor who, when his desk got too full of letters to be answered and tasks to complete, he’d spread out an edition of the New York Times and then start over as if his desk was clean.  We paper over our sins, too, instead of owning up to them before God.

On that evening, God knew exactly what had happened and where his creatures were; he could have come rushing in, screaming, demanding that they leave immediately, as if he was a righteous landlord.  But that’s not the description of God that we’re shown here at the very beginning of Scripture.

Scripture begins with a God that is so full of love that he dreams each of us up out of nothing.  Then, when each of us, as we all do, decides to test out whether God is really telling the truth, he gently asks what it is that we’re doing—giving us a chance to tell him the truth and to own up to our schemes.  We grab a New York Times, or a fig leaf, to try to cover up the mess we’ve made, even though God can already see the mess.  The God who’s described here in the pages of Genesis is the same one described in the first verses of the Gospel of John—the God full of grace and full of truth.

Being full of grace and truth sounds lovely, but I argue this morning that it makes God very off-putting.  That same professor didn’t cover his desk with a newspaper just once, but did it habitually—when he finally died, they dug down many layers of newsprint, finding all sorts of unpaid invoices, unanswered inquiries, and unfinished assignments.  Can you imagine the horror he might have felt if this practice had been discovered and challenged while he was alive?  God knows all the layers of newsprint we’ve used to paper up our lives.  Even when I’ve lost count of the path and number of lies I’ve used to cover up various deeds—done and left undone—God knows each and every one.  God is full of truth, and that sounds kind of terrible.

Thomas Keating, a 20th century monk, says that when it starts to dawn on us just how many layers of deception we’ve built our lives on, we think we’re getting worse, but truly, we’re just realizing how bad off we always were, and that, he says, is an enormous grace.

We look up at God from the bottom of our crumpled-paper and sticky-sin lives, and he reaches down and scoops us up in his hand, brushing away the debris.  This is grace.  While truth is hard, I think grace might be harder.  The law, our epistle says, was our disciplinarian before Christ came.  The law, or rule-following, lets me continually hit myself against a wall when I do something wrong.  I punish myself and pay for the wrong I’ve committed.  All the time, I’m trying to be dependent only on myself.

This isn’t how we were made to be, though.  We were made to be in the midst of God’s grace and truth.  God’s grace is the hand that comes down to the cave of our sin and scoops us up and out of it—we don’t have to run ourselves against a wall, we don’t have to sit in the dog house for months on end; we’re forgiven.  The hard part is to accept God’s grace, to live as if we are truly forgiven, not punishing ourselves any more, but acknowledging honestly the shortcomings we suffer.

I’ll close with a bit of a poem by W.H. Auden:

Well, so that is that.  Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes —

Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic.

The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,

And the children got ready for school.  There are enough

Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week —

Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,

Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully —

To love all of our relatives, and in general

Grossly overestimated our powers.  Once again

As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed

To do more than entertain it as an agreeable

Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,

Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,

The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,

And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware

Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought

Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now

Be very far off.

 

God is full of truth—he knows what’s under your newspaper.  God is full of grace—he brushes away all the debris by his death on the cross and resurrection.

Will you accept his hand?

A Sermon for Christmas Day

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Catskills“The hills are alive with the sound of music!”

Perhaps that’s not the song you came to church to hear today, but that’s what we just sang in the psalm together.  “Let the hills ring out with joy before the Lord.”

What is joy?  When do we experience joy in our daily lives?  Novelist Zadie Smith argues in a recent essay in the New York Review of Books that though we humans often experience pleasure—perhaps over a great tumbler of whiskey or a dog’s sweet companionship, joy is a much more rare and complicated emotion that is necessarily overwhelming and entangled with fear.  It is the sort of thing that we could not bear to experience often, but when we do, we laugh and cry and can’t catch our breath and whether or not the event or its results are sustained, our lives are forever different for having experienced it.

What a miracle happened on Christmas!  As we glimpse the enormity of this moment—just as when the shepherds saw the whole sky filled with bright angels—we burst forth with shouts of joy.  In this moment, a joyful song we’ve sung before doesn’t fit—we need a whole new way of communicating to try to express this new age of God’s rule.  This marvelous thing so unlike anything that’s happened before, we need a new song, a fresh account of God’s deliverance.  Even the past looks different now that we know that God is here, in this place.  Now.

There’s little else we can do with our joy but to sing, even the hills and seas are alive with the Promise that God fulfilled in becoming human on Christmas Day.  After centuries of oppression, exile, and dispersion, The Promise has come to fruition.  God has come to earth, he’s come into the middle of the mass of humanity and become human himself.  God has made himself as close to us as he possibly can.  It’s like how doctors treat pre-mature babies in the hospital—they’re administered skin-to-skin contact from their parents as if it was medicine.  Resting on their father’s chest, or feeling their mother’s hands on their back, is as powerful as any manufactured pharmaceutical we have devised.  God’s touch, his own hand and arm, as the psalm tells us, brought forth this miracle for our sake.  God came in Jesus to heal us.

God has made good on his Promise now—today—Christmas.  We are so precious to God that, given the choice to exist in peace and quiet and perfection for eternity, which, after Christmas morning with little kids, might sound pretty good, or to exist with and among humanity, he chose us.  God has chosen never to be except to be in relationship with us.

Joy isn’t the only thing we feel today, nor is it the only thing that Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and others at Jesus’ birth felt.  Just as they had questions about what life would mean and look like in light of this new reality, we do too.  God’s companionship is the only answer to all the questions.  Why can’t a brother and sister acknowledge the brokenness between them and reconcile on Christmas?  Why can’t parents and grandparents set aside their pride and stubbornness and entrust their son and grandson to God’s capable hands?  Why are children shot and spouses beaten and people starving?  Our only answer to evil is that despite its presence in the world, God’s presence is with us too, and God’s love is more powerful than brokenness and death and destruction.  The Promise God made to Abraham and to his descendants, the Israelites, is the same promise we can now claim as humans, because Jesus came as a human to save all people.  God gave us Jesus out of his love, and Jesus is the touch that allows us to survive.  He is the image of the invisible God.  Jesus is God-with-us.

This truth, this joy that is revealed to us in Christ’s birth, this is the steadfast love that God is showing us.  God has remembered his mercy and truth toward the house of Israel, he’s fulfilled his promise this morning.  We sing a new song because a new thing has happened—something incomparable to all other experiences we’ve ever had.  God reaches out and touches us.

To offer back to God our joy and thanksgiving at this marvelous gift, we gather together our harps, our trumpets, our organs, and pianos, and violins, and flutes.  But even with these and with our own voices, the effort is paltry in comparison to the new thing God has done.  Let us gather up the noise of the whole world—the roaring sea with its clapping waves and the ringing music of the mountains—all oriented to shout praise to God for this great gift he has given to humanity and to all creation.

Joy to the world!

Visitors

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20131224-112559.jpgA visitor comes in to the church at the 4pm service a little late–maybe only ten or fifteen minutes before the service begins; she hadn’t really committed to coming to church, but an urge had struck her an hour or so before, and she thought to herself, “if not at Christmas, then when?”, so she came.  

She hadn’t been to church in a long time, and though the thought of seeing people she knew and of doing something at not-the-right-moment during the service almost made her turn around and not enter the door, she drew a deep breath and stepped over the threshold.  

The pews are packed.  She walks further and further up the aisle, trying to find just one seat she could slide into.  Two-thirds of the way up to the front of the church, she spotted a pew that had only one woman in it; gathering up her courage to speak to someone, she approaches the woman, “Is there room here?”  The woman’s head snaps toward the visitor, “Oh!  Well, no.  My family is coming.”  The visitor quietly nods, and shuffles off.  Other “empty” spots are all already spoken for.  

The visitor ends up standing against a wall, no seats available for the stranger in the midst of Christ’s body.

Jesus said, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the Word of God and do it.” (Luke 8:21)

Are we so concerned to keep familiar people near to us, and to look out for those who share our genetic material that we forget those whom Jesus himself has told us are of his own family–the strangers, the poor, the orphans and widows?