It is a very familiar story. All the players are there, Mary, Joseph, shepherds, angels, and of course, most importantly, the baby Jesus, tucked safely in a manger “asleep on the hay.” This evening we began with a procession to the manger to lay the baby Jesus down. And as one would expect from the Savior of the world, the baby Jesus has laid there quietly throughout the beginning of the service, and will continue to stay quiet and calm until we are through. Like the old carol proclaims, “the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.” Of course, in this case the little Lord Jesus is a doll, so, you know, that helps with the whole “no crying” thing. Live infants are rarely so accommodating.
Processing to the manger with the baby Jesus reminds me of another procession involving a different infant, this one not as accommodating as the baby Jesus has been this evening. Some of you were here a few months ago when my best friend and her family came to visit and you met her daughter Emma. Emma is now seriously pushing three, a bundle of boundless energy, blonde ringlets, and a mind of her own. The curls are a recent addition, the independence she has had since before she was born.
When Emma was just a couple months old, I was staying with them while I was scheduled to preach at my home church. Worship was at 10:30, and we made plans to be at church around ten. Emma, however, had other plans. I won’t go into detail, other than to say that I put my alb on in their car while Emma’s dad took a liberal read to traffic rules, bailed out of the car as it slowed to a stop in front of the church, walked in as the presiding minister said the amen following the confession and forgiveness, and sidled into my place in the procession as the organist struck the opening chords of the gathering hymn. As I struggled to catch my breath, my pastor handed me the lapel mic, eyebrows raised. “Emma,” I whispered, to which she, the single mother of her own charmingly rambunctious nine-year-old, smiled, gave a knowing nod, and took her own place in the procession.
Babies, children in general, are unpredictable. As anyone who has ever tried to schedule anything with a child in tow knows, they have their own way of doing things. Our baby plays his role well today, but had we a live infant in the manger; it is safe to say that by this point in the evening, we would probably have an empty manger and a rather annoyed live infant somewhere in the hallway.
In fact, if you think about it, there’s actually something a little bit off about the entire manger scene. Let’s break it down. We’ve got Mary and Joseph standing adoringly over the manger, both looking calm and collected, Joseph holding a lantern or a staff, or some other mark of manly protection over his little family. Surrounding the domestic scene are snow-white sheep, kneeling shepherds, a precious moments angel, and three kings bearing gifts, despite the glaringly obvious problem that the kings show up much later in Matthew’s Gospel, and not at all in Luke’s. And in the center of it all sleeps the baby Jesus, oblivious to the chaos around him, peacefully arranged on a bed of itchy hay as if it was a pillow of clouds, arms outstretched in a cosmic embrace. The whole thing is quiet, serene, and smells ever so faintly of the orange-scented cleaner Co-op used to mop the floors yesterday.
What’s odd about this picturesque little scene is that it bears very little resemblance to any actual experience of delivering a baby in a barnyard. Or delivering a baby anywhere, really. Jesus, for one, would have way less hair. And what hair he had would be mixed with hay and goopily plastered to his red, blotchy, misshapen head. Mary, rather than looking like she just delivered a baby on a made-for-TV special, would be tired, sweaty, and red-faced herself. Blissfully happy maybe—probably—but likely not quite so calm and collected. And Joseph? Well, I cannot imagine many first-time dads whose children were just delivered in a barnyard with the composure to calmly hold a lantern. As for the precious moments angel, remember his first words to every single person he met was basically to try to keep them from running away screaming. The actual manger scene probably had quite a bit more “what do we do with the Son of God now” and “look out, I just stepped in sheep poop” than it had fluffy clean sheep and quiet adoration.
The nativity was messy, and I’m not just talking about sheep poop. It was a time before paternity tests, but already the questions were circling about who was the father of this child, born in a stable because his parents could not provide a home for it, despite their best efforts. Attended on by shepherds, outcasts of society, dirty and forgotten. And if we expand our gospel to let the wise men into this strange little scene we also have to let in King Herod, the crazy, violent dictator so threatened by this child that he calls for the death of all children under two and forces the holy family to become refugees in Egypt. The clean, well-lit, orange-scented manger scene is nice, but the story we read in the Bible is way more messy.
Which is good I think because life, like the nativity, is messy. And like the nativity, we often try to create a story for ourselves that glosses over the darkness in exchange for a cleaned up version of the light. But the scriptures invite us to come as we are, bearing our own fears, our own scars, our own shaky insecurities. To come with our moments of “I can’t take the pain” and “whatever will we do now” and the piles of sheep poop that we avoid or not with varying levels of success. We try to clean up these varying versions of ourselves, with results that feel like white-washed sheep around a manger. Maybe, like Joseph, our hands shake this evening as we try to hold the lantern, for the work of keeping it all together is exhausting.
So while it may feel like an odd exercise to clear away the sentimentality surrounding the manger scene, and it probably wouldn’t sell many Christmas cards, but it will do something else. It will help us see that there is space in the story for us. For our hands, dirty as the shepherds, for our fears, wide as King Herod’s. For our stories of things unexpected and prayers for children who didn’t come.
The nativity scene is not something we stand at the edge of, it is something we are intimately a part of. We belong at the manger. We with our pain, our brokenness, our confusion and aloneness are the story. That is what Christmas is all about. The promise that God reached out to humanity and laid divine hands on us, on our sweaty foreheads and tear-stained faces, on our shaking hands and our fearful hearts. Reached out with an angel that left us quaking in our boots and said to us, “Do not be afraid. For to you is born this day, in the city of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” We come to this night not as observers but as participants in a holy miracle. The miracle that Christ was born to us, in us, and that in his birth, death, and resurrection we are made new.
This is hard, and it’s different, to see the story in this way. But I invite you this night to come. Come as you are, come who you are, because to you the Christ child is born. It may feel unfamiliar at first, like a toddler’s first few steps wobbly feet, to approach God in this way. But come, because the hand of God reaches out to steady those steps. And as you come, maybe offer to hold the baby for a bit, to take the Christ child for a walk so that Mary and Joseph can get some sleep. It’s hard work, this being born anew. But we’re all in it together. Thanks be to God. Amen.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Monday, December 29, 2014
Monday, December 22, 2014
"Favored One:" A Sermon on 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16 and Luke 1:26-38
I find our first reading this morning from Second Samuel an interesting choice by the lectionary committee for this fourth Sunday in Advent. We are fully in the midst of our preparations for Christmas, you might have been expecting something more Christmasy. But let’s think about this story for a moment, maybe there’s more here than meets the eye.
So we’ve got the great and powerful King David, chosen and anointed by God as ruler over all of Israel. David, if you remember, came onto the scene when he was just a boy, the youngest son of Jesse, and he defeated Goliath, the great hero of the Philistines, with nothing but a sling and a stone. This earned him a place of honor in the house of the then-king Saul. Saul had been anointed as king by the prophet Samuel but his faithlessness eventually caused him to fall out of favor with God and so David was anointed by God in Saul’s place. This, as you might imagine, did not go over particularly well with Saul, who spent the rest of First Samuel trying to kill David. But eventually David’s forces won out over Saul’s and David was anointed as the second king of Israel.
So here we are this morning in Second Samuel. David is at the pinnacle of his power. After years and years of war, King David was “settled into his house, and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies.” He was the ruler of an empire that stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Syrian Desert and from the Red Sea in the south well into what is now Lebanon in the north. It was a vast empire, and situated as it was on the major trade routes between Assyria to the north and Egypt to the south, it was a wealthy and powerful nation. And so, with all of this power and authority at his fingertips, David decided it was time to build the Lord a house. Ever since Moses had first received them while the Israelites were in exile in the Sinai, the Ten Commandments, the most holy covenant in which God was believed to dwell, had traveled with the people of Israel in a tent. Over the centuries an ark, basically a large trunk, had been created to transport them, but other than that, God’s house was pretty, austere, shall we say. Build God a nice house, seems like a pretty appropriate move, right. King’s got a nice house, people are at peace, God should have a nice house as well.
David’s piety, his faith in God and desire to serve God’s will, certainly played a part in his desire to build a suitable home for God. But it seems like there may be something else going on here. Walter Brueggemann points out that David’s desire to build God a house may also be a bit of royal self-aggrandizement. A powerful house for the powerful God of a powerful king. In a time when wars were quite literally viewed as battles between deities, it would make a big statement. Don’t mess with me, look at the kind of place where my God lives.
But God told David, God didn’t want David to build God a house. God pointed out that through everything Israel had gone through, God had never asked for a house. In fact, God said to David, “I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt, I took you from the pasture, I have been with you wherever you went, and I will appoint a place for my people and will plant them.” And finally, flipping David’s vision of coming into his own on its head, God said to David, “I will make you a house.”
David, for all his good intentions in serving God well, was still focused on what HE was going to do for God, how HE was going to serve God, and HE was going to make God’s presence great. But what God reminded David is that God did not need David to be made great. And, in fact, God was not particularly concerned about being raised up. Because, see, here’s the thing about raising up God, it’s all too easy for it to become less about raising up God and more about raising up ourselves. Do we glorify God because God is good, or because we hope it will somehow earn us more credit or glory? Look how faithful I am, look how good I am at serving God.
So contrast this story from Second Samuel with our Gospel reading from Luke. “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.” Right off the bat, we are dealing with a very different set of circumstances than we had in the palace of the king of Israel. Gone is Jerusalem, center of power. In its place is Galilee, a quiet, overlooked corner of the empire. And not just Galilee, but Nazareth, a tiny village in the backwaters of backwater Galilee. And the person in question? A girl child, in a time when a woman’s value was connected to the men in her life and a child had little value at all. A virgin engaged, but not yet married, to a man named Joseph. Her name, mentioned last, almost as an afterthought, was Mary.
So the angel appeared to a powerless girl from a powerless place in a powerless region and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you!” It seemed like pretty good, if unexpected, news, to be called “favored one” by an angel of the Lord. But the text says she was perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. In this moment I think we see Mary displaying wisdom beyond her years. She recognized something David never did figure out, that sometimes being the “favored one” of God is not all it’s cracked up to be. So she paused, perplexed, by this declaration of favor.
The angel went on and it quickly became clear that Mary’s hesitation was well-warranted. “Do not be afraid Mary, for you have found favor with God,” the angel reiterated. “And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.” Then the angel said a lot more things about how Jesus would be great, would be called the Son of the Most High, would reign over the house of Jacob, and on and on. And I wonder how much Mary heard of that grand speech, or if these words fell on overwhelmed ears. Because despite all this bluster of glory, the angel just told Mary that her prize for being the favored one of God was to be an unwed girl-child with a child of her own. It may have sounded like good news to the angel, but to Mary I kind of think it was down-right terrifying.
I wonder about the pause that followed that pronouncement by the angel. I wonder if Mary’s voice quavered in the moment, if she hesitated, or if she found herself answering before she was ready, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
As we sit on this last Sunday of Advent, in this pregnant tension before the coming of the Christ child, I think the juxtaposition of these two stories tells us something powerful and profound about the way God chooses to be born. There was no question that both David and Mary were God’s chosen. That both David and Mary were favored ones of God. That in both great work was accomplished and God’s glory was made known. But what we see in these stories is that’s God’s manifestation in the world is always in God’s hands and always to our benefit. God did not have David build God a house, because God wanted to be the one to build it. God came to a girl-child in a forgotten corner of the world because God is always showing up in the lost, the least, and the lowly. What we hear in these stories is that God’s presence is not dependent on us. We do not have to get it together to herald God’s coming. But in fact it is in our weakness that God comes. It is in our brokenness that God comes. It is in the quiet voice that steps forward despite ourselves and says I will try again that the Christ child is born.
Christ comes to us in the simplest of wrappings, in bread and wine, in water and word. In phone calls and hand-shakes and frozen hams. When we are scared, God comes. When we are unsure, God comes. Whenever and wherever and whoever we are, God’s presence is made known in our midst. And as Mary sung in the psalm today, in our soul and our spirit and our lives, God’s presence is magnified.
Mary questioned the angel who told her she would carry the Son of God. “How can this be since I am a virgin?” The angel, always the boisterous bearer of answers, responded, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy…For nothing will be impossible with God.”
The Almighty God, creator of heaven and earth took on flesh and was born among us. God came in Christ to experience the gamut of human emotion. God came in Christ to walk and teach and heal. God came in Christ to save us. There is something wildly impossible about a God whose love is so deep and real and vulnerable. But like the angel told Mary so many years ago, nothing is impossible with God. Amen.
So we’ve got the great and powerful King David, chosen and anointed by God as ruler over all of Israel. David, if you remember, came onto the scene when he was just a boy, the youngest son of Jesse, and he defeated Goliath, the great hero of the Philistines, with nothing but a sling and a stone. This earned him a place of honor in the house of the then-king Saul. Saul had been anointed as king by the prophet Samuel but his faithlessness eventually caused him to fall out of favor with God and so David was anointed by God in Saul’s place. This, as you might imagine, did not go over particularly well with Saul, who spent the rest of First Samuel trying to kill David. But eventually David’s forces won out over Saul’s and David was anointed as the second king of Israel.
So here we are this morning in Second Samuel. David is at the pinnacle of his power. After years and years of war, King David was “settled into his house, and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies.” He was the ruler of an empire that stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Syrian Desert and from the Red Sea in the south well into what is now Lebanon in the north. It was a vast empire, and situated as it was on the major trade routes between Assyria to the north and Egypt to the south, it was a wealthy and powerful nation. And so, with all of this power and authority at his fingertips, David decided it was time to build the Lord a house. Ever since Moses had first received them while the Israelites were in exile in the Sinai, the Ten Commandments, the most holy covenant in which God was believed to dwell, had traveled with the people of Israel in a tent. Over the centuries an ark, basically a large trunk, had been created to transport them, but other than that, God’s house was pretty, austere, shall we say. Build God a nice house, seems like a pretty appropriate move, right. King’s got a nice house, people are at peace, God should have a nice house as well.
David’s piety, his faith in God and desire to serve God’s will, certainly played a part in his desire to build a suitable home for God. But it seems like there may be something else going on here. Walter Brueggemann points out that David’s desire to build God a house may also be a bit of royal self-aggrandizement. A powerful house for the powerful God of a powerful king. In a time when wars were quite literally viewed as battles between deities, it would make a big statement. Don’t mess with me, look at the kind of place where my God lives.
But God told David, God didn’t want David to build God a house. God pointed out that through everything Israel had gone through, God had never asked for a house. In fact, God said to David, “I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt, I took you from the pasture, I have been with you wherever you went, and I will appoint a place for my people and will plant them.” And finally, flipping David’s vision of coming into his own on its head, God said to David, “I will make you a house.”
David, for all his good intentions in serving God well, was still focused on what HE was going to do for God, how HE was going to serve God, and HE was going to make God’s presence great. But what God reminded David is that God did not need David to be made great. And, in fact, God was not particularly concerned about being raised up. Because, see, here’s the thing about raising up God, it’s all too easy for it to become less about raising up God and more about raising up ourselves. Do we glorify God because God is good, or because we hope it will somehow earn us more credit or glory? Look how faithful I am, look how good I am at serving God.
So contrast this story from Second Samuel with our Gospel reading from Luke. “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.” Right off the bat, we are dealing with a very different set of circumstances than we had in the palace of the king of Israel. Gone is Jerusalem, center of power. In its place is Galilee, a quiet, overlooked corner of the empire. And not just Galilee, but Nazareth, a tiny village in the backwaters of backwater Galilee. And the person in question? A girl child, in a time when a woman’s value was connected to the men in her life and a child had little value at all. A virgin engaged, but not yet married, to a man named Joseph. Her name, mentioned last, almost as an afterthought, was Mary.
So the angel appeared to a powerless girl from a powerless place in a powerless region and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you!” It seemed like pretty good, if unexpected, news, to be called “favored one” by an angel of the Lord. But the text says she was perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. In this moment I think we see Mary displaying wisdom beyond her years. She recognized something David never did figure out, that sometimes being the “favored one” of God is not all it’s cracked up to be. So she paused, perplexed, by this declaration of favor.
The angel went on and it quickly became clear that Mary’s hesitation was well-warranted. “Do not be afraid Mary, for you have found favor with God,” the angel reiterated. “And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.” Then the angel said a lot more things about how Jesus would be great, would be called the Son of the Most High, would reign over the house of Jacob, and on and on. And I wonder how much Mary heard of that grand speech, or if these words fell on overwhelmed ears. Because despite all this bluster of glory, the angel just told Mary that her prize for being the favored one of God was to be an unwed girl-child with a child of her own. It may have sounded like good news to the angel, but to Mary I kind of think it was down-right terrifying.
I wonder about the pause that followed that pronouncement by the angel. I wonder if Mary’s voice quavered in the moment, if she hesitated, or if she found herself answering before she was ready, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
As we sit on this last Sunday of Advent, in this pregnant tension before the coming of the Christ child, I think the juxtaposition of these two stories tells us something powerful and profound about the way God chooses to be born. There was no question that both David and Mary were God’s chosen. That both David and Mary were favored ones of God. That in both great work was accomplished and God’s glory was made known. But what we see in these stories is that’s God’s manifestation in the world is always in God’s hands and always to our benefit. God did not have David build God a house, because God wanted to be the one to build it. God came to a girl-child in a forgotten corner of the world because God is always showing up in the lost, the least, and the lowly. What we hear in these stories is that God’s presence is not dependent on us. We do not have to get it together to herald God’s coming. But in fact it is in our weakness that God comes. It is in our brokenness that God comes. It is in the quiet voice that steps forward despite ourselves and says I will try again that the Christ child is born.
Christ comes to us in the simplest of wrappings, in bread and wine, in water and word. In phone calls and hand-shakes and frozen hams. When we are scared, God comes. When we are unsure, God comes. Whenever and wherever and whoever we are, God’s presence is made known in our midst. And as Mary sung in the psalm today, in our soul and our spirit and our lives, God’s presence is magnified.
Mary questioned the angel who told her she would carry the Son of God. “How can this be since I am a virgin?” The angel, always the boisterous bearer of answers, responded, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy…For nothing will be impossible with God.”
The Almighty God, creator of heaven and earth took on flesh and was born among us. God came in Christ to experience the gamut of human emotion. God came in Christ to walk and teach and heal. God came in Christ to save us. There is something wildly impossible about a God whose love is so deep and real and vulnerable. But like the angel told Mary so many years ago, nothing is impossible with God. Amen.
Monday, December 15, 2014
I am Not: A Sermon on 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 and John 1:6-8, 19-28
Maybe I’ve been listening to too much talk radio, or reading too many letters to the editor, but this year I feel especially ready for Advent to come. With the news bouncing from the Ebola crisis, to the protests across the country over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, to ISIS, to the summer rush of unaccompanied minors, to the release this week of the torture report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, this has felt like a year of crying out with the psalmist, how long, O Lord. How long must we wait for your coming. And so Advent, a season where we wait with hopeful anticipation, like one waits for the promised arrival of a dear friend or family member, feels sweet on my tongue and long awaited. A deep sigh of relief that God really will come and really will make all things new. [pause]
So I don’t find Paul particularly helpful this morning, with his laundry list of things to do. Rejoice!, says Paul. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances. Do not quench the spirit, do not despise the words of the prophets, test everything, hold fast to what is good, abstain from every form of evil. Paul! I want to say, take a breath, take a look around. Rejoice? Give thanks in all circumstances? Seriously? Hold fast to what is good, abstain from every form of evil, ok, yes, probably I ought to be doing those things, but they are way harder to do than they are to say. Give me a break here Paul!
I think the Thessalonians probably struggled with Paul’s laundry list of activities as well. Life was not always awesome in Thessalonica either; they dealt with economic insecurity, threats of terror, a Roman governmental system unfairly weighted to benefit natural-born Roman citizens, really a lot of the same issues and concerns we face today, the writer of Ecclesiastes put it well, “there is nothing new under the sun.” Plus, the first letter to the Thessalonians was written not all that long after the time of Christ. They were expecting an imminent return that should have happened, well, yesterday. Faithful believers, of the generation whom Christ had addressed, remember the ones who would not pass away? Well they were passing away, and the Thessalonians didn’t really know what to do about it, what that meant for the promise. So for Paul to give them this checklist in the middle of all this, probably felt pretty overwhelming. But then, Paul closes with these words: “May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.” May the God of peace himself sanctify you. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this. Paul ended this laundry list of ways to live with a promise. A promise that God is faithful, a promise that all things will be accomplished by God.
So Paul says: Rejoice, be thankful, cling to what is good, abstain from evil. But in the end, whether you rejoice or not, whether you are thankful or not, whether or not you cling to what is good or abstain from evil, the one who is coming is faithful, the one who is coming is blameless, the one who is coming is good, conquers evil, and on this lies the promise. So these things we are to be and to do come not out of our own abilities, but out of Christ who fulfills all that is promised. God is the actor in the sentence. We rejoice because God is faithful, not God is faithful because we rejoice.
I think John is a great example of that in our Gospel reading for today. Right at the beginning we learn that John was sent by God. John’s very existence in the story came out of God’s action, and not of John’s own doing. John did not hear God’s voice and respond; he did not discern a need. No, John was sent by God to testify to the light. He didn’t even have light himself, he was just supposed to talk about it. He was just supposed to stand in what felt like darkness and say, hey, guess what guys, I know you can’t see it, but there’s light. Now that feels like something that even I could do.
So John was talking about the light, and people started to get confused that, even though it still seemed pretty dark, maybe John was the light. So then we get this amazing little interchange between John and the religious leaders. Where the religious leaders are like, “who are you?” And John gives possibly the most unhelpful response ever, “I am not the Messiah.” Great, so we’ve checked that off the list. Who else aren’t you? A dinosaur, Governor Snyder, Justin Verlander, the Pope? Some studies put the number of people who have ever lived at around one-hundred and eight billion, so if we try to figure out who someone is by listing who they are not, we could be here for a while. But for John, who he is not is the most important identifier of who he is, it is the detail that makes everything else in his life make sense, that makes everything he does worth doing; the knowledge, the confidence that there is a Messiah, and it is not him.
Well the religious leaders want more than that, so they prod more. OK, so you’re not the Messiah, “are you Elijah?” “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” “No.” “So who then are you?” He said, “I am the voice of the one crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord.” And then he redirects the attention of the crowd, “Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me.”
Because the thing John knew was, dark as it seemed, there was light. They could see John not because John was the light, but because the light of Christ had already come into the world. All John had to do was show it to them.
So I have an example of this for you. I’m not someone who hears God’s voice audibly. Some people have deep, verbal conversations with God, and that’s great but that’s just not the sort of prayer life that I’ve ever had. But I remember the summer I was working as a chaplain in a retirement community when I was called upon to visit one of the residents who was in the Intensive Care Unit at the local hospital. To gain entrance to the intensive care wing, you had to ring the buzzer outside a set of menacingly large grey doors. I remember staring up at those grey doors, feet shaking in black dress shoes so new they still squeaked, I’d purchased them specifically for that summer, shiny nametag labeling me as a “student chaplain” pinned to the collar of my shirt, thinking, “dear God, I have no idea what I am supposed to do here. I don’t know this person, I don’t know what to say, I don’t even know what it means to be a chaplain.” I didn’t even realize my words were a prayer until what I can only describe as a voice from within my chest responded, “I don’t know what you’re going to say either, but quite frankly, it doesn’t matter. Your presence is not the one that matters here, mine is. What I do know is that whatever you say, you’re not going to say any of it from this side the door, so you might as well walk in.”
You are not the messiah, I am not the messiah. But what we can do, what we do, what God uses us for, is to point to the Messiah. To point to the one whom John the Baptist said, stands among us whom we do not know. John is a great example for us of how to say, you know what, I’m not God, I’m not going to get it right all the time, I can’t save the day. But I know the one who is, I know the one who can, and I can point the way to that one for you. I can show you, I can tell you about the one who is that in my life, about where you can find that one in your midst.
This is what God sends us into the world to do. To testify to the light. To testify that in the midst of whatever is going on, Christ is there. And because we are confident in who we are not, we can be confident in whose we are. We can be confident in Christ’s presence. And we can be confident that the one who sent us into this world is faithful. Amen.
So I don’t find Paul particularly helpful this morning, with his laundry list of things to do. Rejoice!, says Paul. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances. Do not quench the spirit, do not despise the words of the prophets, test everything, hold fast to what is good, abstain from every form of evil. Paul! I want to say, take a breath, take a look around. Rejoice? Give thanks in all circumstances? Seriously? Hold fast to what is good, abstain from every form of evil, ok, yes, probably I ought to be doing those things, but they are way harder to do than they are to say. Give me a break here Paul!
I think the Thessalonians probably struggled with Paul’s laundry list of activities as well. Life was not always awesome in Thessalonica either; they dealt with economic insecurity, threats of terror, a Roman governmental system unfairly weighted to benefit natural-born Roman citizens, really a lot of the same issues and concerns we face today, the writer of Ecclesiastes put it well, “there is nothing new under the sun.” Plus, the first letter to the Thessalonians was written not all that long after the time of Christ. They were expecting an imminent return that should have happened, well, yesterday. Faithful believers, of the generation whom Christ had addressed, remember the ones who would not pass away? Well they were passing away, and the Thessalonians didn’t really know what to do about it, what that meant for the promise. So for Paul to give them this checklist in the middle of all this, probably felt pretty overwhelming. But then, Paul closes with these words: “May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.” May the God of peace himself sanctify you. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this. Paul ended this laundry list of ways to live with a promise. A promise that God is faithful, a promise that all things will be accomplished by God.
So Paul says: Rejoice, be thankful, cling to what is good, abstain from evil. But in the end, whether you rejoice or not, whether you are thankful or not, whether or not you cling to what is good or abstain from evil, the one who is coming is faithful, the one who is coming is blameless, the one who is coming is good, conquers evil, and on this lies the promise. So these things we are to be and to do come not out of our own abilities, but out of Christ who fulfills all that is promised. God is the actor in the sentence. We rejoice because God is faithful, not God is faithful because we rejoice.
I think John is a great example of that in our Gospel reading for today. Right at the beginning we learn that John was sent by God. John’s very existence in the story came out of God’s action, and not of John’s own doing. John did not hear God’s voice and respond; he did not discern a need. No, John was sent by God to testify to the light. He didn’t even have light himself, he was just supposed to talk about it. He was just supposed to stand in what felt like darkness and say, hey, guess what guys, I know you can’t see it, but there’s light. Now that feels like something that even I could do.
So John was talking about the light, and people started to get confused that, even though it still seemed pretty dark, maybe John was the light. So then we get this amazing little interchange between John and the religious leaders. Where the religious leaders are like, “who are you?” And John gives possibly the most unhelpful response ever, “I am not the Messiah.” Great, so we’ve checked that off the list. Who else aren’t you? A dinosaur, Governor Snyder, Justin Verlander, the Pope? Some studies put the number of people who have ever lived at around one-hundred and eight billion, so if we try to figure out who someone is by listing who they are not, we could be here for a while. But for John, who he is not is the most important identifier of who he is, it is the detail that makes everything else in his life make sense, that makes everything he does worth doing; the knowledge, the confidence that there is a Messiah, and it is not him.
Well the religious leaders want more than that, so they prod more. OK, so you’re not the Messiah, “are you Elijah?” “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” “No.” “So who then are you?” He said, “I am the voice of the one crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord.” And then he redirects the attention of the crowd, “Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me.”
Because the thing John knew was, dark as it seemed, there was light. They could see John not because John was the light, but because the light of Christ had already come into the world. All John had to do was show it to them.
So I have an example of this for you. I’m not someone who hears God’s voice audibly. Some people have deep, verbal conversations with God, and that’s great but that’s just not the sort of prayer life that I’ve ever had. But I remember the summer I was working as a chaplain in a retirement community when I was called upon to visit one of the residents who was in the Intensive Care Unit at the local hospital. To gain entrance to the intensive care wing, you had to ring the buzzer outside a set of menacingly large grey doors. I remember staring up at those grey doors, feet shaking in black dress shoes so new they still squeaked, I’d purchased them specifically for that summer, shiny nametag labeling me as a “student chaplain” pinned to the collar of my shirt, thinking, “dear God, I have no idea what I am supposed to do here. I don’t know this person, I don’t know what to say, I don’t even know what it means to be a chaplain.” I didn’t even realize my words were a prayer until what I can only describe as a voice from within my chest responded, “I don’t know what you’re going to say either, but quite frankly, it doesn’t matter. Your presence is not the one that matters here, mine is. What I do know is that whatever you say, you’re not going to say any of it from this side the door, so you might as well walk in.”
You are not the messiah, I am not the messiah. But what we can do, what we do, what God uses us for, is to point to the Messiah. To point to the one whom John the Baptist said, stands among us whom we do not know. John is a great example for us of how to say, you know what, I’m not God, I’m not going to get it right all the time, I can’t save the day. But I know the one who is, I know the one who can, and I can point the way to that one for you. I can show you, I can tell you about the one who is that in my life, about where you can find that one in your midst.
This is what God sends us into the world to do. To testify to the light. To testify that in the midst of whatever is going on, Christ is there. And because we are confident in who we are not, we can be confident in whose we are. We can be confident in Christ’s presence. And we can be confident that the one who sent us into this world is faithful. Amen.
Monday, December 8, 2014
Just the Beginning: A Sermon on 2 Peter 3:8-15a and Mark 1:1-8
A line caught my attention while I was reading the Gospel last week. So much so, that I was tempted to comment on it, but on principle I don’t go off manuscript because there’s no telling where I might end up. So instead it’s been rattling around in my brain as I prepared for the sermon this week. The line was Mark 13, verses 30 and 31, where Jesus said: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” I was caught as I was reading by the contradiction in that statement. Jesus said this generation, meaning, one would assume, the one that was alive two thousand years ago, would not pass away until the things Jesus had spoken of would take place. But in the same breath he said that heaven and the earth itself would pass away, but his words would not. These are strange words two thousand years later, but imagine how they must have sounded to the people hearing them for the first time. Especially after the crucifixion, after what had felt like the sun darkening and the powers of heaven being shaken. They were looking for Jesus to come again, right then, immediately.
But then Jesus didn’t come again; at least not in the way they were hoping. Things kind of went on as they always had, and as more and more time passed, the urgency of waiting for Christ’s return lessened. The “stay awake” that Jesus urged in Mark got harder as the time after Christ’s presence on earth got longer, the memories more distant.
That distance, that sense that the things Christ promised about his return were so far away as to be unreal, or at least unremarkable, is the problem the writer is addressing in the second reading this morning. This letter was written a ways after the crucifixion, some scholars date it to even a hundred years after. “The generation” that Jesus had spoken to had more or less “passed away” by that point, and the new generation of Christ followers didn’t feel the same urgency that their forefathers had. Maybe even doubted that Christ would return. So the writer of second Peter assures them they are not waiting for nothing. “But do not ignore this one fact, beloved,” the letter reads, “that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” The writer highlights that same contradiction Jesus spoke of in Mark, that God’s sense of time is not the same as our sense of time. That a “generation,” even “a thousand years” looks very different to the one who formed the cosmos. But, the writer of Peter goes on, it’s not that God has just lost track of time. Like Jesus said, “this generation” and then ten, twenty, a hundred years went by and suddenly God was like, “my gosh, where did the time go?!” No, the writer of Peter said, “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” God is not slow, but patient. God is waiting, working, biding God’s time until everyone has been drawn up into God’s cosmic embrace, until all the world has been brought to salvation.
Well, a hundred years is one thing, but here we are, two thousand years later, and one might be wondering the same questions that seemed to be plaguing the people to whom the letter of Peter was addressed. What are we waiting for? Did the day of the Lord come and we missed it? Is the day of the Lord ever coming at all?
In Advent we talk a lot about waiting, Advent is the season of waiting. And that can feel, well, boring, really. After all, who likes waiting? It conjures to mind images of sitting in the DMV, being stuck in traffic, standing in line. Waiting feels passive, or frustrating, like the control has been taken away from you. God’s going to come, in God’s good time, so you just sit tight until God gets around to showing up. Except the writer of Peter promises us it’s not like that at all. Yes, “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” But it’s not that God’s just hanging out, God is patient, working away at bringing all to redemption. And the writer of Peter said, “in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.” But more than that, the writer of Peter went on, there is something for us to do while we are waiting. We are to “lead lives of holiness and godliness” because such lives are not just about something to do while we’re waiting, but in fact hasten the coming of the day of God.
So by waiting, by actively waiting, we in fact become a part of the new thing that God is doing in the world. Waiting for the day of the Lord is not a passive activity, something that we have to just sit around twiddling our thumbs until God deigns to make an appearance. Waiting is an opportunity for us to be a part of God’s creative presence in the world. It is an invitation to live into the redemption that God is bringing even now.
This gets us back to our Gospel reading for this morning. Last week Advent started, sort of randomly it seemed, at the end of Mark. This week, we hear the start, Mark one, the reading even started, “The beginning.” Actually, this Gospel reading starts even before the beginning. We call this book of the Bible, the Gospel of Mark. But its author titled it something different. Mark one, one is actually the title, “The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ.” This is not announcing the beginning of the story; it is announcing that the whole story is the beginning. Everything that followed, from John the Baptist appearing in the wilderness to the stars falling from heaven to the crucifixion to the empty tomb, all of that is just the beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ.
This is a bit of an aside, but for me stuff like this is really what makes the Bible come alive, what makes the Bible a living word. It’s these places in scripture where the Bible itself is like, look, this is only the beginning. The Bible itself, rich and full and clear as it is about the message of God’s love and God’s salvation of the world, is like, hey, everything here is only the beginning. God is bigger, more powerful, more graceful that can ever be contained, even in a book as long and as rich and as full as this. Mark isn’t the only place the Bible makes this claim. John’s Gospel says it, the poetry of Genesis sings it, the prophets hope proclaims it, the imagery of Revelation illustrates it. The scriptures themselves testify that in them we find the beginning, the place where we can meet God, so that the rest of God’s amazing story unfolding before us can be seen. The Bible does not promise an end to our questions; if it did it would be a dead word, a closed story. What the Bible promises us is that it teaches us how to look for the answers. We come here, to this sacred book, because we know that it shows us Christ, so that we can see Christ in the world around us.
The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ. Everything here, in this Gospel, in this Bible, everything we’ve experienced, is just the beginning, just a foretaste of the feast God is preparing for God’s creation. The best thing you can imagine, it’s just the beginning. And the worst thing, the darkest place, the biggest ending, endings as solemn as the slam of a rock against a tomb, the starkness of a cross, all of that is not the end of the story, it is merely the beginning. The worst thing that can happen is never the last thing that will happen. Because after the cross comes resurrection; after the closing of the tomb comes the stone being rolled away. After death comes life. So we wait. Not passively, but actively. Waiting, watching, working to restore the kingdom of God, knowing that such work hastens God’s coming into the world. And we do all this because God promises that this is just the beginning. Amen.
But then Jesus didn’t come again; at least not in the way they were hoping. Things kind of went on as they always had, and as more and more time passed, the urgency of waiting for Christ’s return lessened. The “stay awake” that Jesus urged in Mark got harder as the time after Christ’s presence on earth got longer, the memories more distant.
That distance, that sense that the things Christ promised about his return were so far away as to be unreal, or at least unremarkable, is the problem the writer is addressing in the second reading this morning. This letter was written a ways after the crucifixion, some scholars date it to even a hundred years after. “The generation” that Jesus had spoken to had more or less “passed away” by that point, and the new generation of Christ followers didn’t feel the same urgency that their forefathers had. Maybe even doubted that Christ would return. So the writer of second Peter assures them they are not waiting for nothing. “But do not ignore this one fact, beloved,” the letter reads, “that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” The writer highlights that same contradiction Jesus spoke of in Mark, that God’s sense of time is not the same as our sense of time. That a “generation,” even “a thousand years” looks very different to the one who formed the cosmos. But, the writer of Peter goes on, it’s not that God has just lost track of time. Like Jesus said, “this generation” and then ten, twenty, a hundred years went by and suddenly God was like, “my gosh, where did the time go?!” No, the writer of Peter said, “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” God is not slow, but patient. God is waiting, working, biding God’s time until everyone has been drawn up into God’s cosmic embrace, until all the world has been brought to salvation.
Well, a hundred years is one thing, but here we are, two thousand years later, and one might be wondering the same questions that seemed to be plaguing the people to whom the letter of Peter was addressed. What are we waiting for? Did the day of the Lord come and we missed it? Is the day of the Lord ever coming at all?
In Advent we talk a lot about waiting, Advent is the season of waiting. And that can feel, well, boring, really. After all, who likes waiting? It conjures to mind images of sitting in the DMV, being stuck in traffic, standing in line. Waiting feels passive, or frustrating, like the control has been taken away from you. God’s going to come, in God’s good time, so you just sit tight until God gets around to showing up. Except the writer of Peter promises us it’s not like that at all. Yes, “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” But it’s not that God’s just hanging out, God is patient, working away at bringing all to redemption. And the writer of Peter said, “in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.” But more than that, the writer of Peter went on, there is something for us to do while we are waiting. We are to “lead lives of holiness and godliness” because such lives are not just about something to do while we’re waiting, but in fact hasten the coming of the day of God.
So by waiting, by actively waiting, we in fact become a part of the new thing that God is doing in the world. Waiting for the day of the Lord is not a passive activity, something that we have to just sit around twiddling our thumbs until God deigns to make an appearance. Waiting is an opportunity for us to be a part of God’s creative presence in the world. It is an invitation to live into the redemption that God is bringing even now.
This gets us back to our Gospel reading for this morning. Last week Advent started, sort of randomly it seemed, at the end of Mark. This week, we hear the start, Mark one, the reading even started, “The beginning.” Actually, this Gospel reading starts even before the beginning. We call this book of the Bible, the Gospel of Mark. But its author titled it something different. Mark one, one is actually the title, “The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ.” This is not announcing the beginning of the story; it is announcing that the whole story is the beginning. Everything that followed, from John the Baptist appearing in the wilderness to the stars falling from heaven to the crucifixion to the empty tomb, all of that is just the beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ.
This is a bit of an aside, but for me stuff like this is really what makes the Bible come alive, what makes the Bible a living word. It’s these places in scripture where the Bible itself is like, look, this is only the beginning. The Bible itself, rich and full and clear as it is about the message of God’s love and God’s salvation of the world, is like, hey, everything here is only the beginning. God is bigger, more powerful, more graceful that can ever be contained, even in a book as long and as rich and as full as this. Mark isn’t the only place the Bible makes this claim. John’s Gospel says it, the poetry of Genesis sings it, the prophets hope proclaims it, the imagery of Revelation illustrates it. The scriptures themselves testify that in them we find the beginning, the place where we can meet God, so that the rest of God’s amazing story unfolding before us can be seen. The Bible does not promise an end to our questions; if it did it would be a dead word, a closed story. What the Bible promises us is that it teaches us how to look for the answers. We come here, to this sacred book, because we know that it shows us Christ, so that we can see Christ in the world around us.
The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ. Everything here, in this Gospel, in this Bible, everything we’ve experienced, is just the beginning, just a foretaste of the feast God is preparing for God’s creation. The best thing you can imagine, it’s just the beginning. And the worst thing, the darkest place, the biggest ending, endings as solemn as the slam of a rock against a tomb, the starkness of a cross, all of that is not the end of the story, it is merely the beginning. The worst thing that can happen is never the last thing that will happen. Because after the cross comes resurrection; after the closing of the tomb comes the stone being rolled away. After death comes life. So we wait. Not passively, but actively. Waiting, watching, working to restore the kingdom of God, knowing that such work hastens God’s coming into the world. And we do all this because God promises that this is just the beginning. Amen.
Monday, December 1, 2014
Unsatisfied: A Sermon on Mark 13:24-37
The Gospel reading for this week seems both strangely out of place and frighteningly pertinent. Frighteningly pertinent in a week where the 24-hour news cycle pumped out story after story of protests breaking out across the nation,—radiating, but almost detached—from the epicenter of Ferguson, Missouri and the shooting death of eighteen year old Michael Brown. But this reading seems strangely out of place for Advent one, the first Sunday in our journey toward the birth of the Christ child, the first Sunday of this new church year. Next week, Advent two, the lectionary reading is what you would expect for a beginning, Mark 1:1-8. It will even start out “The beginning…” But this week, the first Sunday of a year devoted to the Gospel of Mark, we start here, close to the end of Mark, with this strange and dramatic reading about the moon darkening, the stars falling, and the powers in the heaven being shaken.
As I was watching TV on Monday night and my brainless sitcom was interrupted by the announcement of the grand jury decision, as I read the paper or listened to NPR, the words of this Gospel reading kept running through my mind. I’m not going to share my opinion this morning because, quite frankly, I don’t know enough. I’ve never been to Ferguson, Missouri. I’m not a person of color. I wasn’t with the Grand Jury during the trial, I have read very little of the evidence. I don’t know who is at fault, who is to blame, if any one person could be held accountable. What I will say is that I see no winners. And I see something wrong with a world where an eighteen year old could feel so disillusioned with his life that he would charge a police officer, a world where a police officer could be so fearful that he would sense a threat from an unarmed eighteen year old. Was this an isolated incident, it would have been tragic. But the hard statistics are black teens are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white teens. People of color make up twenty-five percent of the U.S. population and sixty percent of the prison population. Whether or not it was a factor in this specific incident, racism is real, and it is pervasive, and it can be fatal.
But this lectionary text was not chosen as a commentary on world affairs, it was chosen for Advent. A season more closely associated with calm, with candles twinkling, with preparing for the birth of a baby. And yet, every year, Advent one starts us out with these strange apocalyptic texts proclaiming the end of the world. Keep awake! Advent one proclaims, keep awake because you do not know the day or the hour in which these things will take place, in which the Son of Man will come in glory.
But the fact that the readings for advent one always seem jarringly out of place is precisely the point of starting advent with them. Because the birth of the one we are waiting for is just as jarringly out of place and unexpected. The prophets proclaimed a Messiah would come, and a baby was born. The stars foretold the birth of a king, and pointed the way to a stable. Herod feared a threat to his kingdom, from an infant attended by cattle and shepherds.
And yet, this baby, away in a manger, lowly infant so tender and mild, sleep in heavenly peace, this baby would shake the foundations of the earth, cause the sun to darken and the stars to bow, this baby would be everything the prophets proclaimed, more than Herod could have dared to fear, greater than the message of salvation spelled in the stars.
The good news of Advent is that Christ comes in the middle of everything. In the middle of the mess of creation, in the middle of the mess of a stable, in the middle of the mess of our lives, that is precisely where the Christ child is born. Christ comes not in a place carefully prepared for him, but right into the brokenness and the heartache and the pain of a world in need of salvation. Starting Advent here reminds us that salvation is not something we do for ourselves; it is grace. Grace from the God who’s hands formed creation, and who’s hands are still at work molding and shaping and creating our world today. No matter how messy or broken or painful things look. How out of control, how fragmented; the promise of Advent is that Christ comes in the middle of all of that and makes all things new.
The world Jesus was born into was not ready for a savior. Herod was a brutal dictator, Mary was a poor, teenage mother, Israel was conquered by the Romans. Rioting, struggle, oppression, and violence were common and real. It was no place to raise the Christ child. But it is where a savior was born. Because God does not wait for humanity to clean up its mess before God sends salvation. In fact, God sends salvation in the midst of humanity’s mess. In the form on an infant unexpected. In the form of a barefoot prophet. In the form of a king on a cross.
So the question for us this advent season is not what do we have to do to prepare for the Christ child, but where is the Christ child already present? Where is God’s reign already being felt? Where is the kingdom already being made new? And how can we join in the work of God’s kingdom on earth?
The promise of Advent is that in the middle of what looks like ending, God is bringing a new beginning. It promises God comes not in scrubbed up, painted over, ready-to-go places, but a God who comes where God is needed most. And, more importantly, Advent promises that this new world is not just a future promise; it is a present reality. Advent promises that when you are feeling broken, hurt, lost, or alone, God is there. God is with us in every aspect of our lives, in every place where God is needed.
Like I mentioned in the children’s sermon, this year for Advent, I invite you to be open to the presence of this promise. Open to see the new and unexpected places in which God is making the world new. Maybe in big ways, but also in small ways. Advent is in peaceful protests in the midst of violence; advent is also in the sound of children, the quiet of the snow, in the smile of a friend. Advent is in the women of the co-op, sharing what they have and finding abundance in each other. Advent is in folk who mop the church, straighten the hallways, bake pies, and bring napkins, so that our building is ready to welcome guests. Advent is the phone calls you make to each other when someone is not at church, the rides to worship, the prayers and the praise and the promise. Advent is in the social justice team advocating for the neighborhood, the property committee fixing the garage door in the snow, thirty-seven fabric bundles for women in developing countries, all of these and more are promises of advent in our midst, of Christ coming to make all things new, and of our hands, our feet, our hearts and voices at work in the process of creation.
As I was reflecting on the sermon for this week, I came across a quote from theologian Henri Nouwen. The article had nothing to do with advent or with current world events, it was actually about an art exhibit in Texas, but it seemed amazingly pertinent to this coming of Advent. Nouwen said, “You are Christian only so long as you constantly pose critical questions to the society you live in… so long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo and keep saying that a new world is coming.” Advent promises us that a new world is coming, and yes is already here. So stay awake, keep watch, because Christ is in our midst. Amen.
As I was watching TV on Monday night and my brainless sitcom was interrupted by the announcement of the grand jury decision, as I read the paper or listened to NPR, the words of this Gospel reading kept running through my mind. I’m not going to share my opinion this morning because, quite frankly, I don’t know enough. I’ve never been to Ferguson, Missouri. I’m not a person of color. I wasn’t with the Grand Jury during the trial, I have read very little of the evidence. I don’t know who is at fault, who is to blame, if any one person could be held accountable. What I will say is that I see no winners. And I see something wrong with a world where an eighteen year old could feel so disillusioned with his life that he would charge a police officer, a world where a police officer could be so fearful that he would sense a threat from an unarmed eighteen year old. Was this an isolated incident, it would have been tragic. But the hard statistics are black teens are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white teens. People of color make up twenty-five percent of the U.S. population and sixty percent of the prison population. Whether or not it was a factor in this specific incident, racism is real, and it is pervasive, and it can be fatal.
But this lectionary text was not chosen as a commentary on world affairs, it was chosen for Advent. A season more closely associated with calm, with candles twinkling, with preparing for the birth of a baby. And yet, every year, Advent one starts us out with these strange apocalyptic texts proclaiming the end of the world. Keep awake! Advent one proclaims, keep awake because you do not know the day or the hour in which these things will take place, in which the Son of Man will come in glory.
But the fact that the readings for advent one always seem jarringly out of place is precisely the point of starting advent with them. Because the birth of the one we are waiting for is just as jarringly out of place and unexpected. The prophets proclaimed a Messiah would come, and a baby was born. The stars foretold the birth of a king, and pointed the way to a stable. Herod feared a threat to his kingdom, from an infant attended by cattle and shepherds.
And yet, this baby, away in a manger, lowly infant so tender and mild, sleep in heavenly peace, this baby would shake the foundations of the earth, cause the sun to darken and the stars to bow, this baby would be everything the prophets proclaimed, more than Herod could have dared to fear, greater than the message of salvation spelled in the stars.
The good news of Advent is that Christ comes in the middle of everything. In the middle of the mess of creation, in the middle of the mess of a stable, in the middle of the mess of our lives, that is precisely where the Christ child is born. Christ comes not in a place carefully prepared for him, but right into the brokenness and the heartache and the pain of a world in need of salvation. Starting Advent here reminds us that salvation is not something we do for ourselves; it is grace. Grace from the God who’s hands formed creation, and who’s hands are still at work molding and shaping and creating our world today. No matter how messy or broken or painful things look. How out of control, how fragmented; the promise of Advent is that Christ comes in the middle of all of that and makes all things new.
The world Jesus was born into was not ready for a savior. Herod was a brutal dictator, Mary was a poor, teenage mother, Israel was conquered by the Romans. Rioting, struggle, oppression, and violence were common and real. It was no place to raise the Christ child. But it is where a savior was born. Because God does not wait for humanity to clean up its mess before God sends salvation. In fact, God sends salvation in the midst of humanity’s mess. In the form on an infant unexpected. In the form of a barefoot prophet. In the form of a king on a cross.
So the question for us this advent season is not what do we have to do to prepare for the Christ child, but where is the Christ child already present? Where is God’s reign already being felt? Where is the kingdom already being made new? And how can we join in the work of God’s kingdom on earth?
The promise of Advent is that in the middle of what looks like ending, God is bringing a new beginning. It promises God comes not in scrubbed up, painted over, ready-to-go places, but a God who comes where God is needed most. And, more importantly, Advent promises that this new world is not just a future promise; it is a present reality. Advent promises that when you are feeling broken, hurt, lost, or alone, God is there. God is with us in every aspect of our lives, in every place where God is needed.
Like I mentioned in the children’s sermon, this year for Advent, I invite you to be open to the presence of this promise. Open to see the new and unexpected places in which God is making the world new. Maybe in big ways, but also in small ways. Advent is in peaceful protests in the midst of violence; advent is also in the sound of children, the quiet of the snow, in the smile of a friend. Advent is in the women of the co-op, sharing what they have and finding abundance in each other. Advent is in folk who mop the church, straighten the hallways, bake pies, and bring napkins, so that our building is ready to welcome guests. Advent is the phone calls you make to each other when someone is not at church, the rides to worship, the prayers and the praise and the promise. Advent is in the social justice team advocating for the neighborhood, the property committee fixing the garage door in the snow, thirty-seven fabric bundles for women in developing countries, all of these and more are promises of advent in our midst, of Christ coming to make all things new, and of our hands, our feet, our hearts and voices at work in the process of creation.
As I was reflecting on the sermon for this week, I came across a quote from theologian Henri Nouwen. The article had nothing to do with advent or with current world events, it was actually about an art exhibit in Texas, but it seemed amazingly pertinent to this coming of Advent. Nouwen said, “You are Christian only so long as you constantly pose critical questions to the society you live in… so long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo and keep saying that a new world is coming.” Advent promises us that a new world is coming, and yes is already here. So stay awake, keep watch, because Christ is in our midst. Amen.
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