A Christmas Sermon

I'm not preaching on Christmas this year, but here are some thoughts from 2009:

Once upon a time, a tiny baby was born in a cold, stone palace in Jerusalem, a tiny baby prince upon whose shoulders rested the hopes of his people. He was born to an oppressed people in a land controlled by foreign despots who treated its inhabitants like animals, taxing them until they starved, forcing them to haul stones for building projects until they fell exhausted into the dust. The little baby was born in a time of war, in a time when the heavy boots of invading soldiers could be heard pounding back and forth across the country, leaving bloody cloaks and mangled bodies in their wake. He was born in a land in which God’s people had lost hope; wherever they looked it was as if they saw only “distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish,” and they felt themselves “thrust into thick darkness.”[1] The birth of this baby, this new king, became a sign of hope for his people, however. Their prophet, Isaiah, pronounced a loud “Yes” of hope in God’s name, when this child was born. Isaiah took God up on God’s Covenant promises of old and, holding up this child, he committed God to shine light into the darkness of this sad land, to infuse life into this land of death. Isaiah anchored God to the people’s hope in a name that recalled to them and to God who God is: “Planner of wonders, mighty, victorious God, Father for all the future, ruler of peace and well-being.” It was a name that fit neither the tiny baby nor the desolate, abandoned situation in which he was born, but this name made everyone dance and sing with the delight and joy usually reserved for the celebration of a bountiful harvest or a great triumph in battle. It was a name born of hope, a name that demands wholeness, justice, righteousness, and peace without end.

Some seven hundred years later, another tiny baby was born in a dank, dark stable room in nearby Bethlehem, and upon his shoulders lay the salvation of the world. He was put down to sleep in a stone feeding trough for animals, filled with insect-infested hay. He was born to a poor father and a teenage mother, who had been summoned by the occupying powers to a strange city, at a time when the heavy boots of soldiers could be heard pounding back and forth across the country, with men hung on crosses in their wake. He was born in a land in which God’s people had lost hope; wherever they looked it was as if they saw only “distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish,” and they felt themselves “thrust into thick darkness.”[2] The birth of this baby was a sign of hope for all God’s people, however. Hearing of his birth, the neighboring shepherds danced with delight and wonder, “praising God for all they had heard and seen.”[3] These shepherds pronounced a loud “Yes” of hope in God’s name, when this child was born. They took God up on God’s Covenant promises of old and, holding up this child, they committed God to shine light into the darkness of this sad land, to infuse life into this land of death. Later Christians anchored God to the shepherds’ hope, in a name that recalled to them and to God who God is: “Planner of wonders, Mighty God, Father for all the future, ruler of peace and well-being.” It was a name born of hope, a name born from God’s passion for the impossible, a name that demands wholeness, justice, righteousness, and peace without end.

Our Christmas hope is not a weak, fragile shrug of “oh well, things aren’t so bad.” It cannot be frantically conjured up with gifts and lights and carols. It is not a vague and sentimental “nice feeling,” prompting us to snuggle up under the tree, sure that things will somehow look better someday.  Our Christmas hope is a desperately powerful thing that brings true rejoicing in the midst of darkness. French writer Jacques Ellul calls hope the “passion for the impossible”[4] that commits us “to those insane actions which alone are reasonable, to that critical knowledge which alone is constructive, to the relentless scouring of the real which is the only realism.”[5] Hope looks out with open eyes into a darkness where God seems absent or silent at best and demands that God speak again. Ellul writes, “Hope means to be invited, to find the doors shut, to be offended by that, to put in a claim that God operate in accordance with what he had said. Hope uses the most violent means to enter into the Kingdom of heaven, which is our passion, our expectation of joy, our abundance, our reason for acting, our every breath, more precious than each beat of the heart, our assurance of justice and our inner light of peace.”[6]

Hope is indeed like the birth of a child into a dark world: the powerful, living insistence upon future and love where those things seem impossible, brought into the world with determination and great cries, celebrated with great joy. Indeed, true hope cannot be manufactured; it can only be born, born because of and in spite of the circumstances surrounding it. W. H. Auden describes this kind of obstinate hope in his Christmas Oratorio, as the people in darkness cry, “We who must die demand a miracle./ How could the Eternal do a temporal act,/ The Infinite become a finite fact?/ Nothing can save us that is possible:/ We who must die demand a miracle./ … Therefore, see without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking:/ The Inevitable is what will seem to happen to you purely by chance;/ The Real is what will strike you as really absurd;/ Unless you are certain you are dreaming, it is certainly a dream of your own;/ Unless you exclaim—‘There must be some mistake’—you must be mistaken.”[7]

By bravely calling God to account, by speaking for a God who seems silent, hope gives birth to hope. Isaiah’s hope becomes the hope of the shepherds; the shepherd’s hope becomes the hope of the early Church; the hope of the early Church becomes the hope of our ancestors; the hope of our ancestors becomes our hope--if we decide to proclaim it.

Nigerian priest and novelist Uwem Akpan opens us up to Christian hope in our day in his book of short stories called, Say You’re One of Them. At the end of each one of his stories, stories that take place in the deepest darkness imaginable in our world, a child runs away into an unknown future. “Say you’re one of them, one of these children” he seems to be saying to us, “what kind of future will it be? Will you decide for life or death? Will you chose hope or despair? Will you speak for God, or remain silent?” In his first story, “An Ex-mas Feast,” Akpan describes a family’s desolate Christmas in a Nairobi slum. Let me borrow his setting for a minute.

Once upon a time, a tiny baby was born in a shack made of plastic in a Nairobi slum. He was born to an indebted people in a world controlled by huge corporations and foreign economic interests. The little baby was born in a time of unrest, in a time when the heavy boots of corrupt policemen could be heard pounding back and forth through the slum, rival gangs leaving bloody cloaks and destruction in their wake. He was wrapped in plastic bags to keep him dry in the rain while his older sister took him out to beg. He was put to sleep in a beat-up cardboard box and ravaged by malaria-bearing mosquitoes as he slept. He shared his mother’s milk with his twin sisters who were still nursing. He was born in a land in which many people had lost hope; wherever they looked it was as if they saw only “distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish,” and they felt themselves “thrust into thick darkness.”[8]

Tonight, remembering God’s presence in a stable over 2000 years ago, will we pronounce a loud “Yes” of hope at the birth of this child and millions like him? Will we take God up on God’s Covenant promises of old and, holding up these children, commit God to shine light into the darkness of this sad world, to infuse life into this land of death? Will we anchor God to the people’s hope in a name that recalls to us and to God who God is: “Planner of wonders, mighty, victorious God, Father for all the future, ruler of peace and well-being?” It is a name that will make us dance and sing with the delight and joy of abundance. It is a name born of hope, a name born from God’s passion for the impossible, a name that leads us to live in expectation, to pray with determination, and to act courageously for wholeness, justice, righteousness, and peace without end.  Amen.

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[1] Isaiah 8:22

[2] Isaiah 8:22

[3] Luke 2:20

[4] Jacques Ellul, trans. C. E. Hopkin, Hope in Time of Abandonment (New York: The Seabury Press, 1973),  197.

[5] Ibid., 201.

[6] Ibid., 184.

[7] W. H. Auden, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio,” in Collected Longer Poems, 138.

[8] Isaiah 8:22

A Meditation on the Magnificat

Nora Gallagher begins her latest book with a quote from James Michener’s Chesapeake:

“The ultimate source of the Susquehanna River was a kind of meadow in which nothing happened … merely the slow accumulation of moisture from many unseen and unimportant sources, the gathering of dew, so to speak, the beginning, the unspectacular congregation of nothingness, the origin of purpose... This is how everything begins—the mountains, the oceans, life itself. A slow accumulation—the gathering together of meaning.”[1]

It is also how the Incarnation begins: with a slow accumulation—the gathering together of meaning. Life-size bronze statues stand today in the courtyard of the Church of the Visitation, on the quiet outskirts of the little village of Ein Kerem in Israel: Two women in silhouette, willowy and graceful despite the bumps of growing pregnancy beneath their long, flowing robes … Mary, just an innocent teenage girl, and Elizabeth, an older woman made wise by years of disappointment, by slow years of waiting. Bellies almost touching, they lean in to each other, face to face, whispering of strange things--Sharing the secret of new life in the sunlight, by a spring. Until the Holy Spirit comes down, that is, and songs of praise are drawn out from them, songs that grow beyond anything that they could imagine.

          The Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise, does not begin with theological statements about God. It does not begin with a recitation of the history of Israel or a recounting of the grand miracle of creation. It does not begin with meaning. It begins with her amazement that God has come to her, a poor Jewish peasant girl from the Galilee. She knows that her life has been nothing special, yet she also knows the songs of other mothers who have found themselves miraculously with child, old mothers like Sara, barren mothers like Hannah who, centuries before her, sings in thanksgiving for her pregnancy: “My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God … There is no Rock like our God.”[2] 

Mary begins with her own experience, her own experience of transformation from emptiness to the fullness of life: from girl to mother, from milking goats and hauling water to speaking with angels, from shivering in the cold to being wrapped in the loving-kindness of God, from lowly peasant to Mother of God. Slowly, as she continues speaking, her words shift from her own situation to the experience of her people, from her own transformation to all of the times in Israel’s history that God has lifted oppression, fed the hungry, punished the unjust, or raised up the poor. It is as if her words get away from her, radiating out across time, gaining power and strength and meaning until the words themselves seem to cause the transformations of which she speaks: He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, * and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, * and the rich he has sent away empty. He has come to the help of his servant Israel, * for he has remembered his promise of mercy.

I heard this week about a controversial setting of the Magnificat by the contemporary composer Conrad Sousa that depicts for us in music the growing power of Mary’s song. It begins quietly, softly, in very simple melodic lines. But as it continues, it grows in musical complexity and even dissonance. Sounds begin to fly haphazardly around the room, as if the world is falling apart, as the music stands for the shattering of preconceptions involved in divine transformation. Suddenly, the unpleasant whirling of noise stops—and there is silence. Only after a long silence does the choir break in with peals of “Glory, Glory to God in the Highest.”[3]

          Just as meaning comes to Mary in slow accumulation—in a long history of insignificant people and strange divine acts—and bursts forth in a slow crescendo in the midst of intimate conversation, so too meaning comes to us, as “the slow accumulation … from many unseen and unimportant sources.” Just because we don’t realize what is going on until after the shattering silence of transformation, does not mean that God was not in what we perceive as insignificant beginnings. So often, we Christians want to find our meaning in the generalities of morality, the generalities of doctrine, grasping at the air of Truth or Goodness that surrounds general concepts. I remember thinking when I was younger that meaning must come from outside of me, already wrapped by God in golden paper like a lovely Christmas gift. Mary shows us, however, that meaning grows out of our own amazement, that it must be discovered in reflection, in shared conversation with others, and that it is true when it grows beyond anything that we can control.

Christian philosopher Paul Ricoeur explains that we truly know God only in particularities, in what is individual, unrepeatable, and unique. For Ricoeur, God is revealed in the face of a particular, irreplaceable, individual human being; in the particular moment captured in a work of art; in the uniqueness of a glimpse of the natural world, at a certain time, in a certain light.[4] Think about it: Doesn’t God come to you today when the voices of the choir come together to touch your heart in just a certain way, in just a certain moment? Doesn’t God speak to you in the love of a fellow human being who is as unique and irreplaceable in this world as their own fingerprint? Isn’t God revealed in a certain landscape, when the sun happens to come through the clouds in a certain way that might never happen again were you to visit that place hundreds and hundreds of times? Doesn’t God speak to you in a certain translation of a certain verse of scripture, read at a certain time of day? God is revealed in particularities. It is only in sharing those particular experiences, in mulling them over with others, in incorporating them with your own story and the story of your community, that it all comes together—and then blows you away.

In our spiritual lives, we have more in common with Mary than we think. I believe that is the reason that Mary’s prayer of thanksgiving resonates so strongly with us. That is why her words speak at all to us comfortable Christians here today. It seems as if Mary’s words should frighten us, for we are the mighty who are about to get knocked off of our thrones. We are the rich of this world who are about to get sent away hungry. But instead of frightening us, Mary’s words of world-altering upheaval seem to warm even our own well-fed, complacent hearts. That is because Mary does not begin with proclamations of condemnatory Truth. She begins with amazement over God’s place in her own story, just as we do. The images of liberation and joy over the end of oppression are the meaning that grow from her story, from our shared story, and we recognize their difficult truth in our own hearts.

          Who are you? What is your ordinary, particular story? When was the last time that you shared your experience of God with a loved one, in the quiet, in the sunlight, by a spring? If you try it, though, watch out. For the words that you utter will belong to God, and they will shake your world to its foundations.

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[1] Nora Gallagher, The Sacred Meal (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009), 1.

[2] I Samuel 2:1-2.

[3] According to what I remember as an acquaintance told me about the piece. I was not able to find a copy of this in order to listen to it for myself!

[4] Paul Ricoeur, L’unique et le singulier, (Liege : Alice Editions, 1999), 46-47.

Advent Light

In his book Resurrection, Rowan Williams compares the disorientation of Jesus' followers at the Resurrection to our confusion after the lights have suddenly been switched on in the morning. In both cases, it takes awhile for our eyes to adjust to an unexpected, blinding light. We squint and blink, not quite sure of what we are seeing, until the world comes back into focus. I like this image for Resurrection, yet I would add that the light that we await at Advent comes more like the dawn on a cloudy day.

On my two-hour drive to Western Kentucky every Sunday, I start out in darkness. The sky is wrapped in thick black cloth that hugs my car like a shroud and keeps my eyes fixed on the small segment of road right in front of me. I can only see the narrow path illumined by my car's headlights, a limited path that ends in the darkness of the unknown road. I think that we often imagine God's light to be like those headlights, a focused beam that we can point into the future and swivel across our world, advertising divine presence and calling attention to our cause. 

While my eyes are fixed anxiously on the narrow beams ahead of me, however, God's light is silently sneaking up behind. On clear days, a routine glance in the rear view mirror shows slivers of pink and coral light slowly peeking through the hills and trees. I smile at the subtle beauty of a new day. When it is cloudy, though, I can't see the delicate hints of the light to come. Behind me, the blackness of the night just gives way imperceptibly to gray--gray that grows brighter and brighter until I suddenly realize that I can see, and that my car's precious head lights have become superfluous.

In Advent, there is no blinding light that we must accommodate, no flash of Glory. There is only an imperceptible dawning, an acknowledgment that, while my eyes were set on controlling the darkness, God has ushered in the light of day--a light in which stables and trees, poverty and richness, the beauties and horrors of the world are made visible and, once again, await our attention.

A different kind of waiting

 In Advent, we wait for God to come, like Mary waited to give birth. The world becomes God's womb, a dark place, closed in on itself, yet holding a hidden speck of bright light that will soon burst into radiance. A shadow of fear does hang over the waiting of pregnancy--fear that something might go wrong, fear of losing that which is unseen, yet already treasured. But in general, the kind of waiting experienced in pregnancy is expectant waiting, the kind that shows itself to the world in a glowing, enigmatic smile. It is impatient waiting, the kind that bubbles with barely-contained joy.

Last week, I experienced another kind of Advent waiting, however, different from the eager countdown of days before a baby comes. I sat beside my mother's body, awaiting the transport to the funeral home. With no one to talk to, I looked around the small room where my mother had spent the last four years. The bedspread lay crumpled in a chair,no longer folded meticulously across the foot of her bed. Someone had turned on too many lamps, even the ones that she always forgot to light. She lay in bed, as if sleeping, but her spirit had clearly left her face, along with the anxious wrinkles around her eyes. Time stood still in that stuffy little room, a womb in which presence was giving birth to absence. I knew that when the men came with their gurney to take her body, I would not see her face again, at least in this life. I knew that when she left that room, there would be, for me, an empty hole in the world. I waited resignedly and deliberately for that inevitable moment, though, as the minutes crept silently by, afraid to call attention to themselves. It was the opposite of incarnation.

Thinking today about these two different kinds of waiting, and reflecting on mothers, I was reminded of Zbigniew Herbert's poem, "Mother." He likens a child to a ball of yarn, unwinding from a mother's lap to spill out into the world. The mother, however, holds onto the end of the string, winds it around her finger protectively, and waits, even though she knows that the unraveled yarn will never return to her "knees' sweet throne." She waits, as her "outstretched arms glow in the dark like the old town." 

Doesn't God wait for us like a mother? While we tremble in fragile expectation for God, doesn't God stretch out steady and determined arms for us, the children who might never return? As we wait for life, and for death, and for life again, I think that impatient expectation might be over-rated. A moment in those timeless, glowing arms, a holy moment in between the bustle of life and the silence of death, is to crawl back into the lap of God.

The Queen of Flowers

Years ago, I bought a beautiful rose bush with delicate pink buds, like those on fine china. The flowers opened like the sky at dawn, and everyone who passed by praised their beauty. But I was not a faithful gardener. When the sun beat down in the summer, I often forgot to provide water. When pests came to eat the leaves, my eyes were elsewhere. I didn't provide the food that my plant needed in order to grow, yet when I noticed that my rose bush was dying, I blamed its own delicate constitution and the inordinate amount of care that it seemed to demand. Soon, the branches were dry and brittle, the flowers gone, and sharp thorns pointed empty and accusing fingers toward the sky. I gave up on growing roses.

The next spring, I noticed new growth slowly creeping forth from the gnarled stem and rising toward the sun. The leaves on these low branches looked different than the original leaves, however--smaller and less elegant. When the new blossoms came, bright and full, they too were different--they were not curled mysteriously into themselves but were flat and open to the sky. The specialists told me that this new growth was the real plant coming to life; the old one that had died had been grafted onto this wild stem in order to create a delicate work of man-made perfection to fit our ideals of the perfect rose. To me, the new growth seemed miraculous, a sign of God's invisible grace, turning failure into flowers, bringing truth to light.

The hybrid rose--Queen of the Flowers, magnificent in beauty, delicate in perfection, dangerously regal with thorns--reminds me of our metaphor of Christ the King.We need an image for the power and splendor of God, an image that we work hard to maintain in an often dry and barren world. But God is at work underneath that glorious image, creating new life when and where we least expect it, "making peace through the blood of [Christ's] cross." Abundant life is not found in the hybrid flower but surges deep within the neglected stem. Like the criminal hanging next to Jesus on the Cross, we just need to recognize and claim it.

When I neglect my soul and my world, O Christ, you continue to abide somewhere deep within them. I give thanks for the wild, new growth that you secretly nourish, the invisible love that turns my barren failures into strong and hearty fruit. Amen.

Amazing Grace

I know well the cold flush of fear that sends its paralyzing ache into my fingertips. And feeling perplexed is a familiar challenge that nudges my mind and puts a sparkle in my eye. But why am I so rarely amazed, O God? My pale appreciation of the world comes and goes without internal fanfare. Your wondrous presence washes over me in waves, yet my heart lies buried beneath the hard-packed sand, a tiny sea creature sending only a few fragile, airy bubbles toward the surface. Am I so sophisticated, O Lord, that ordinary wonders do not phase me? Am I so spoiled by your loving care that I've grown as cold and numb as a long-time addict, requiring ever larger doses of grace just to plod dully through the day? Startle my soul, Lord. Pull open the arms that I hold wearily and warily over my heart, and let a warm profusion of amazement pour forth.

An All Saints' Day Meditation

I had never thought about how our well-meaning adoration might have frozen the hearts of the Saints until I saw the statue of the Virgin Mary out on the lake at Loretto. That hot summer day, I sat on a bench surrounded by the glory of God in nature. God's Spirit flowed through the water, sparkling on the top of every wave; it sang in the birds' joyful chorus, and danced in the ballet of the turtles. There, in the midst of light and shadow, surrounded by an abundance of life, I saw chalk-white Mary, trapped on a concrete block in the middle of the lake, dwarfed by the majestic pine trees at her back. She looked resigned but unhappy under the hot sun, knowing that she was too heavy to float, that she would sink if she were to step off of her small, island perch. All of a sudden, I could picture her shedding the heavy stone with relief and padding softly through the fields, her robes bending back the tall grasses, her scarf blowing in the cool breeze, her kind eyes smiling in greeting at the world around her.
Inside the thick walls of the Church, our plaques and statues seem to pull us into God's presence. Yet when we take our holy story outside, we need to give it the freedom to live.
Holy Mary, come and walk with me around the lake, and smile.  

My first post

One day at school, they gave us old cigar boxes to decorate as presents for our mothers. I remember cutting out old greeting cards and gluing them onto the outside of my box with generous blobs of Elmer’s Glue. After more coats of glue and shellac, the gaudy cigar ads were completely covered by shiny, overlapping pink roses and glistening purple pansies, by golden curlicues and drawings of wide-eyed kittens. The trouble was that the box was forever sticky around the edges from too much shellac, and the carelessly découpéd corners stuck out as testimonies to my childish enthusiasm. Inside, the box still smelled like cigars.

I sometimes feel as if I have cut words out of the Bible to shellac over the cardboard cigar box of my faith. The scissors of my brain cut wide swaths around “Salvation,” “Righteousness,” “Law,” “Grace,” “Life.” I paste them all over my faith in random abandon, creating a child-like gift for God, a gift that remains unkempt around the edges, with rough corners that are ready to peel away at any moment. What do the words really mean when they are taken out of their context in Scripture and glued onto my faith? When curious fingers try to pull back the edges to peek underneath, do they find treasure or just ads from days gone by? Is the box empty inside, carrying only a sweet, musty odor? If I just put the cut-out words inside the box, then no one will see them. If they are peeled away, then they will be lost. I want to find a glue that holds without stickiness, a form that fits smoothly to the box and transforms it completely. Is that glue my own integrity?