Anchoring a Name

          “How great is Jehovah,” we sang one recent Saturday night and at the Christmas Pageant. I loved this new song; I loved the way it claimed for us the justice-loving God of the Old Testament Prophets. I couldn’t help but cringe, though, at the Jehovah chorus and the way in which we were throwing around the sacred name of God, the very name that those same prophets would not utter aloud. For Jews, both in ancient times and today, God’s Name is too holy to be spoken. When Moses asks God for God’s name at the Burning Bush, God answers Moses mysteriously, “I will be who I will be.” God is beyond any name, any limitation or definition that we human beings might place upon God. When praying or reading aloud from scripture in English, Jews refer to God as the “Holy One,” or even as “Hashem,” the Name.   

        Where then, you might wonder, does this word “Jehovah” come from? When writing God’s most holy name, the Hebrew Scriptures use the four consonants of the Hebrew verb “to be,” the verb disclosed at the Burning Bush. One cannot, after all, just leave a blank on the page! Later, Medieval Jewish scholars, who would not change even a letter of the sacred texts that they were copying, added the vowels for “adonai” or “Lord” underneath these holy consonants, so that readers would know to say “Lord,” rather than God’s Name, as they read. When we Christians refer to God as “Jehovah” or “Yahweh,” we are cluelessly taking the four sacred consonants of God’s name and pronouncing them together with the vowels for “adonai,” as if the holy combination is supposed to be a regular name. Using Jehovah or Yahweh as a friendly first name for the Holy One is an abomination for Jews and might also give us Christians pause. To name something is indeed to have power over it, to define it, to pin it down. How can we creatures give a name to the Creator of all that is?  

 Today in our church calendar we are celebrating the Feast of the Holy Name, a remembrance of the day, described just briefly in our Gospel reading from Luke, when the 8-day-old baby Jesus, like all Jewish baby boys, was brought to the priests be circumcised and to receive his name. On no other day is the particular Jewishness and maleness of Jesus more strongly emphasized. Today we see the tiny, fragile newborn boy marked with the sign of the covenant between God and Israel. We see him become part of the chosen people, receiving the name whispered to Mary by the angels: the Hebrew name Joshua, like the strong leader who brought down the walls of Jericho and led his people into the Promised Land. The name that the baby boy was given, whether we translate it as Joshua or Jesus, means, “He saves.”

The paradox here, of course, is that Joshua, the little naked Jewish boy squirming helplessly on the table as the knife is sharpened, is also, for us Christians, the great “I am,” the incarnation of that same Creator God who is too mighty to name. How can the unpronounceable, universal Name become this particular baby Jesus? How can God, who is neither masculine nor feminine, be circumcised? How can the Creator become flesh that bleeds? As W.H. Auden puts it, “How could the Eternal do a temporal act,/ the Infinite become a finite fact?”[1]

African-American theologian Jacquelyn Grant points out some of the theological choices that we make in wrestling with this paradox of names in her book, White Woman’s Christ and Black Woman’s Jesus.  She believes that white believers are most comfortable thinking about Jesus as The Christ, the universal and abstract Savior who rose from the dead to sit at God’s right hand. Black believers, on the other hand, are more comfortable with the human Jesus, the fellow-sufferer who knows and condemns oppression firsthand. We all tend to fall on one side or the other of the naming question. While I can marvel on Christmas at the miracle in the stable, I find that, left to my own devices in my personal prayers, I am often praying to a Father who is an abstract “ground of being,” and to a Jesus who has somehow left his maleness and his Jewishness on the pages of the Bible, becoming for me the detached voice behind his teachings, a risen Christ who left earthly particularities behind at Easter. I can’t help but relate to the shock of the altar guild member who was scandalized when author Barbara Brown Taylor looked at a church painting of a bare-chested Jesus and dared to wonder aloud why the painter did not paint him with any body hair.[2] We know that Jesus was a man, but our sense of his holiness washes away the down-to-earth details.

Instead, what the African American portrayal of Jesus brings to our spirituality is exactly what today’s Gospel intends to point out to us: that Jesus, as a real man being made part of God’s Covenant, living as a real first-century Jew in a real body, blesses our real lives and our real bodies, planting the wild freedom of the Creator within the tiniest corners of creation, giving the infinite significance of the Name above all Names to our particular names, binding each of us inseparably to the heart of God. Just as God blesses the Israelites in our Old Testament reading by “putting God’s Name” upon them, so God blesses humanity by putting God’s Name upon a baby who is both God and man.

A friend of mine recently wondered if the pejorative name, “anchor baby,” might not be a helpful contemporary metaphor for the scandal of the Incarnation. If you have been following the heated debates over immigration in this country, you will know that an “anchor baby” is a child born to illegal immigrants, a child born to “anchor” the rest of the family to this country, since all children born on U.S. soil automatically become citizens. On the one hand, this name, full of racist overtones, presents us white Americans with the challenge of imagining God coming to us as a baby given the name “Jesus” (Spanish pronunciation) by the angel--God as an illegal immigrant, the ultimate outsider—God who has “emptied himself and taken the form of a slave,” as the Apostle Paul writes in our Epistle for today. On the other hand, this name provides us with the image of the anchor, something that holds us fast, something that gives us security in the storm. We can imagine God stubbornly anchoring Godself within creation, holding on to each of us with the desperation of a family looking for a way to survive.

An invincible anchor and a vulnerable child unwanted and ignored by society … such is indeed the paradox of Jesus’ name, and of our own names, too. We are all vulnerable children, wandering through an uncertain landscape, watching people, places, and years come and go, foreigners to others and to ourselves. Yet we have also been anchored, in our very creation, to the One who was, and is, and is to come. In the little baby named Salvation, who grew up like we do to live, and love, and suffer, and die, yet who shows us what God’s life looks like on this earth, our names, too, glow with the glory of our Creator. What a marvelous Anchor for us to grasp, as we are carried into a new year …

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[1] W.H. Auden, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio.”

[2] In Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World.

Ready

“Are you ready for Christmas?”[1] we ask each other, as we try to make polite conversation during Advent. In response, we either shake our heads despairingly and mutter, “No, I’ve hardly started” or we modestly chirp, “Yes, just barely. I just got everything done.” The trouble with Christmas, however, is that we are never prepared; we are never ready. There is always that one gift that we should have given, that one card that never gets sent; there is the one batch of cookies that burns and leaves the tin half empty; there is the relative who gets sick and can’t join the celebration, the child who throws up on the new Christmas dress, the dog who eats the ornaments off of the bottom part of the tree right before the guests arrive. On a deeper level, there is the annoying relative whom we can’t seem to forgive, despite our best efforts. There are the prayers that were left unsaid in our hurried preparations. There are the hearts where peace has not yet penetrated and the unhealthy family dynamics that we haven’t been able to fix just yet. We are never ready for the Christmas feast because we are torn between the ideal, Norman Rockwell vision in our heads and the real-life potential disasters in our kitchens or our living rooms.

But what about the birth in the stable? As we enter each year into the story of Jesus’ birth, our attitude seems to vacillate between the same extremes. On the one hand, we coo over the sweet little baby in the hay, idealizing the scene, turning the real-life baby Jesus into a docile image on a harmless Christmas card. Or on the other hand, we insist on the sufferings of the baby and his parents, emphasizing the prickly, insect-ridden hay, the bloody birth, the smelly animals, and the poor, dirty shepherds. “Look how he suffered for us, even as a baby,” we sigh, forgetting that love, not suffering, is God’s desire. The real question for us to ask one another this Christmas is not, “Are we ready for the feast?” but “Are we ready to see, really and clearly to see, what God’s love looks like in this world?”

God sent love to us as a baby, and are we ever truly ready for a baby? Clearly, Mary and Joseph were not ready. We know the story of Jesus’ birth so well that it takes some doing to imagine the surprise and disruption that it must have been for everyone involved. Jesus could not have come at a worse time for his parents. They weren’t married yet. They were traveling dusty roads at the whim of Roman bureaucracy. They weren’t living in the town that matched up with the messianic prophecies. They didn’t even have a decent place to stop for the birth. It’s been awhile since my children were babies, but I clearly remember feeling them kick inside me, sensing the inevitability of their birth, and knowing that, despite all of the books that I had read about babies, I was not at all prepared—would never be prepared—for the joys and responsibilities that this new love would entail.

One of my favorite icons of Mother and Child portrays the baby Jesus, no longer a newborn, snuggling up against his Mother, propelling himself rather uncomfortably against her face. The baby has thrown his arms around his mother’s neck and pushed himself as close as he can possibly get with his feet against her lap. Mary looks rather unprepared for the force of her baby’s enthusiastic love; it is almost as if he could knock her over with it. Rowan Williams writes that God, in coming to us as a baby, searches us out, “as unselfconscious and undignified as the clinging child.”[2] Are we ever prepared for such an outpouring of love from our Heavenly Father? We seek God, but we are often uncomfortable when God seeks us back. Are we ever ready for God to wrap a warm, tiny fist around our finger and hold on for dear life? To burrow into our being as if everything depended on it? To cry for us to take him in our arms? Such is the vulnerable, insistent Love that comes down from heaven this day. Whether we are ready or not.

As a baby, Jesus showed us his love for us by his appearance among us. As a grown man, Jesus also showed his love for us by his presence with us. He loved the outcast by eating with them. He loved the sick by touching them with his healing hands. He loved the world by refusing to escape from us when we handed him death on a Cross. In the same way, what Jesus expects from us now is that we respond to his love for us by our presence with the outcast. All Jesus asks, writes Gregory Boyle, is “’Where are you standing?’ And after chilling defeat and soul-numbing failure, He asks again, ‘Are you still standing there?’”[3] The God who comes to us as a baby, then, does not ask for us to be ready, competent, or prepared. The God who comes to us as a baby asks that we hold him and those whom he loves, that we stand with them for as long as it takes, come what may.

I was looking at our Nativity Scene the other day and thinking about all of the figures that stand there every Sunday during Advent, as the crowd in the stable slowly grows. Year after year, Advent after Advent, in the same places, stolid and dependable, they stand before the manger, while we rush around getting ready for Christmas. On Friday when I came into the church, there they were, still standing there quietly in their usual places, as our faithful St. Thomas decorators swirled busily around them, putting up the poinsettias, setting up the altar, getting out the candles … getting ready for Christmas. Tonight (today), as love comes down from heaven, maybe it is not a question of whether or not we are ready. Maybe it is a question of where we are standing.

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[1] Thank you, Katherine Doyle!

[2] Rowan Williams, Ponder These Things, 27.

[3] Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart, 173.

The underside of Christmas

          After watching “A Sanders’ Family Christmas” over at Derby Dinner Playhouse with the Under the Hill Gang this week, I believe that we American Christians are still just as perplexed about Christmas as Mary was about Gabriel’s astounding message to her.

The play takes the form of a Christmas Eve service in a little Baptist Church in rural Kentucky, a service in which we, the audience, become the members in the pews. There are some fun songs and some good comedy, and I am not here today as theater critic. What boggled my mind, however, was the confusing and contradictory hodgepodge of Christmas that completely filled the script for this play. Secular songs and down-homey Hallmark sweetness were seamlessly interwoven with talk of the Baby Jesus and Salvation. And as a crowning jewel, there was a number about Santa’s elves--the bad, lazy little elves, and the good hard-working ones--with an injunction to the audience from Santa/Jesus for us to be like the good elves, doing our work and behaving, so that we would not burn in Hell. The trouble with this play was precisely that one could not tell if it was a parody of such hell-fire religion or whether it was preaching these beliefs. The trouble with this play was that it was perfectly OK for the authors to offer up all kinds of mix-and-match Christmas theology, all kinds of looks at Christmas, as if none of them mattered or made sense at all …. And all of the many church groups in attendance sat there and clapped for every one of them.

Truly, I understand the confusion. One minute we are watching the cute little messages in Rudolf and Frosty the Snowman, and the next minute we are falling on our knees for “O Holy Night” and breaking the chains of oppression. One minute we are drinking eggnog at the office party, and the next minute we are lighting candles in a darkened church. One minute we are wondering how to understand the idea of a Virgin Birth, and the next minute we are putting out milk and cookies for Santa Claus’ arrival down the chimney. The religious and the secular, the mundane and the mysterious--It does all just kind of blend together, doesn’t it, so that it is hard to know which is which? Pretty soon, it all starts sounding like one big trivial story.

In the play that we saw, the only overarching message that emerged from this confusing Christmas collage was that we had better behave ourselves. “Be Good!” “Work hard!” we heard, loud and clear. Well, I was waiting to start chapel in the preschool last week and was chatting with the children in the pews, when one four-year-old raised her hand. I called on her, and she blurted out for all to hear, “My mommy says that my daddy is on the naughty list!”

“What does that mean?” I stuttered, not sure where this conversation was going and buying time to think of a way to divert it.

“He’s going to get coal in his stocking!” she said with great disdain.

Trying to help me out, one of the teachers offered, “Well, he still has two weeks to improve his behavior …”

Indeed, the song that the children sang with the most gusto at the preschool Christmas program was “You better watch out … You better not pout… Santa Claus is coming to town.” It seems that, everywhere I look, all that we can salvage from our Christmas confusion is the solid little nugget of reputation and reward.

The message of our Gospel reading today seems to be just the opposite, however. If the message of Christmas were that the good, hard-working ones are to be rewarded, then wouldn’t the angel Gabriel have paid a visit to a nice, respectable Roman matron, searching out a married mother of good standing, to bear God’s Son? Would he really have come to Mary, who is as powerless and as insignificant as any human being can be? After all, she is a woman in a patriarchal society; she is young in a world in which age brings social standing; she is unmarried and has no children to give her worth; she is poor and belongs to a powerless, oppressed people. If God’s love is not poured out generously upon every single one of us, why call this young girl, “Favored Lady of God?”

And Mary, she doesn’t turn out to be much of a good rule-follower for her society, either, does she? In accepting God’s plans for her, she turns away from all that is respectable in her world. All of Gabriel’s promises for her son’s future must have seemed like distant dreams in the face of a present that would be filled with scandal, risk, and reproach, as an unmarried pregnant girl. Yet Mary lets go of her respectability and her reputation to accept what God has placed upon her. She gives up control over her life and opens herself up to God’s vision for the world. The annunciation hints at the same kind of scandalously self-giving, world-loving sacrifice that the Baby himself will show upon the Cross.

While I was studying today’s lessons at my desk at home, I happened to catch a glimpse of a photo of Michangelo’s Pieta that my daughter had brought me from Italy. Reading Mary’s trusting reply to the angel, while looking up at her grief-stricken face as she holds her dead son on her lap, brought home to me the magnitude of the heart-breaking risk that she took as a mother. Faithful, naïve Mary did not ask the angel how her son was to save his people. She didn’t ask for details on what kind of king he would be. Could she ever have imagined that he would be a crucified King, a savior who would love and forgive a world that could only send him to a shameful death? Would she have said “yes,” if she had known, I wondered. Of course she would have. For, deep down, we all know that Love is always worth the risk and the pain that comes wrapped up in it. The powerless young girl holding a divine baby to her breast, and the sorrowful young woman with her grown-up child sprawled lifeless in her lap, both proclaim the sobering paradox of God’s love in our lives. Rowan Williams describes incarnation as “the utter strangeness of God that waits in the heart of what is familiar.”[1] God’s love abides quietly, patiently, enduring risk and obscurity, waiting for the chance to transform the familiar into the strange and to make strange the familiar. It waits to turn a poor, unmarried girl into the Mother of God, a mother whose own heartbreak gives life to the world. It waits to pour out divine favor in all of the places that one least expects such favor, to spread incomprehensible love over all those whom we are certain do not deserve it, including ourselves. “A virgin giving birth?” we gasp with Mary, rolling our eyes. “Nothing is impossible with God,” responds our text. “The likes of me entering the kingdom of God is about like a camel going through the eye of a needle,” we mumble with the crowds around Jesus. “Nothing is impossible with God,” responds Jesus.

Frosty and Rudolf and eggnog and Santa are for us the familiar. Abundant love poured out upon us is the strange. Our task this last week before Christmas is to listen for the divine strangeness within the familiarity of our culture—to welcome the divine strangeness that turns our focus on reward and reputation upside down and inside out. God is just waiting for us to utter the risky words: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word,” the burning, hidden word of Love that melts away all triviality like candle wax.

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[1] Rowan Williams, Ponder These Things, xvii.

Salvation: Dancing Home

          My young adult children have figured out a way to get my undivided attention at the dinner table, while at the same time avoiding all of my motherly probing into their private affairs: they ask impossible theological questions! Unfortunately, I fall for the bait every time and usually end up tripping over my attempts at smooth apologetics. This Thanksgiving, as I tried to win an argument by appealing to the promise of salvation, my son asked, “What exactly is salvation? What does it look like? Isn’t it that stuff about going to heaven while everyone else is going to hell?”

          “No, of course not,” my yoga-practicing daughter piped up. “Salvation is just inner peace. God saves us by giving us inner peace.”

          While I muttered that salvation is best seen neither as merely a reprieve from eternal hellfire nor simply as inner peace, I quietly began to wonder, “What exactly does salvation look like?” At Easter, we can play around in the realm of theological abstraction, as we try to explain the cosmic, saving death of Jesus on the Cross. But the incarnational nature of Christmas forces us back down to earth. During Advent, we wait for salvation, for deliverance, in the form of the baby in the manger—the baby whose name, Jesus, actually comes from the Hebrew word for “salvation.”

How do we explain the kind of salvation that the baby Jesus brings into the world? If I had to paint a picture of salvation, what would I paint?

          Imagine my delight to find that our psalm for today paints a beautiful picture for me. In Psalm 85, salvation resembles a joyful meeting, a divine dance, if you will, between God’s steadfast love and faithfulness and between God’s righteousness and peace: “Steadfast love and faithfulness have met together; righteousness and peace have embraced,” sings our psalmist. “Faithfulness will spring up from the earth, and righteousness will go before [God] and make a pathway for his steps.”

          Four divine characteristics meet on earth, become part of our world, and recognize and embrace each other as they begin to mold and transform creation from the inside out. I imagine flowing forms when I read these words—graceful, holy forms that pour into each other and into us and mix to create a smooth, wavy landscape, filled with the divine.

          First, God’s steadfast love steps out of the shadows. Grace and loving-kindness, the love that forgives again and again, the desire for covenant-building relationship, God’s love opens wide its arms here on earth. This love is our salvation.

          And then into God’s loving arms comes truth, or faithfulness. This is not a cold, abstract philosophical truth, but an active, all-encompassing faithfulness, full of good deeds and right response. It is the faithfulness that insists on feeding the hungry stranger and sheltering the pregnant, wayfaring mother when there is no room at the Inn. This response of faithfulness is our salvation.

          Then, as God’s love and God’s all-encompassing goodness come together in the dance, God’s righteousness rises up to join them. God’s righteousness isn’t some prissy obedience to a list of rules, but it is the eternal correctness that orders all of creation. It is what gives life stability, what keeps relationships in good balance. This right relationship is our salvation.

          Finally, last but not least, shalom—peace, well-being, happiness—springs up from the earth and greets righteousness with a kiss, joining right relationship to life-giving blessing. This shalom is our salvation.

          In all of this swirling, dancing divine outreach, it becomes clear that the salvation described here is a dynamic process, initiated by God. God pours out God’s love and right order upon us, to draw us into loving, right relationships ourselves. Salvation doesn’t happen up in heaven somewhere, though, independent of our actions on earth. Indeed, in our psalm, salvation doesn’t just involve humankind but includes all of creation, as the land flourishes and the earth itself yields faithfulness. Salvation is not our individual, once-for-all prize for believing the right set of words. Instead, it comes into our community, ordering and reordering, loving and shaping and transforming. It comes from the blessing of God’s presence, not merely as an absence of God’s judgment.

The Psalm paints a beautiful picture of salvation, doesn’t it? It is indeed more than an “I’m going to heaven and you’re not” attitude, and it is more than an individual’s of inner peace. But what happens to this gift of salvation when God calls us to dance, and we turn away our faces? The dance of salvation cannot be done without lots of turning, says our psalm. God approaches, and we turn away; God turns away and we turn back; God turns again, and we turn to meet God in an embrace. The verb “to turn” in Hebrew is the same as the verb, “to repent.” Salvation is a dance of constant repentance and change. One of my favorite nativity scenes, from a medieval fresco in the crypt of a cathedral in Switzerland, shows Joseph off pouting in the stable. Mary and Jesus sit together between docile oxen and adoring sheep, glowing with divine love, but Joseph, obviously jealous of the new baby, slumps dejectedly with his head on his hand all by himself in a corner. If St. Joseph can sulk at the moment of incarnation, should we be surprised that we cannot hold more tightly to the salvation poured out upon us?

In our psalm, the people of Israel have returned home to Jerusalem. They have been brought out of exile in Babylon. God has heard their cries and has delivered them from their suffering. But home is still not the ideal place that they have imagined it to be. The returning exiles have been forgiven, yet they still sin. God has lifted their guilt, yet they still live in discord. Back home in Jerusalem, officials are still corrupt, people still forget to worship God, just like they did before they were forced into exile in the first place.

For us, too, our relationship with God, played out in the dance of salvation, is kind of like coming home for the holidays. You know, when you return to your family childhood home, finding it filled with both sad and tender memories. You can sense the promise of well-being and right relationship just oozing from every familiar corner. The love is there, palpable, but then not there at the same time. Siblings and parents can be annoying; old hurts and unhealthy patterns are never far beneath the surface. Sometimes, though, grace can fill the room like children’s laughter, as you gather together with family under the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree. Righteousness and peace embrace in the candlelight, and truth springs up from the crèche. But then someone slips up and feelings get hurt, or memories of an absent loved-one slice right through your heart. Home carries both so much promise and so much room for error.

Marilynne Robinson, in her novel Home, subtly plays on the relationship between salvation and home-coming. A father, full of forgiveness and mercy for his wayward son, throws open his home and his heart as the son, long-absent like the Prodigal in Jesus’ parable, returns home after twenty years of disgrace. The elderly father, a Presbyterian minister, practices goodness and forgiveness and gratitude for God’s blessings in a pure, humble way that truly seems to mirror the attitudes of our heavenly Father. Yet the two adult children, who have been forced to come home by difficult life circumstances, struggle daily with all of their relationships: to the past, to their father, to each other, and to their home town, in all of the little ups and downs with which we are all familiar. Like ours, this family’s ordinary, daily life is filled with constant turning, constant repentance, yet it is also filled with a constant sense of peace, love, righteousness, and faithfulness. “Weary or bitter or bewildered as we may be,” writes Robinson, “God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.”[1] The dance of salvation is like coming home, in all of its beauty and in all of its twisting, turning ambiguity.

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[1] Marilynne Robinson, Home, 102.

La Veillee

          Advent always begins with the command for us to “watch,” to remain alert to God’s action in our world. In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus rather mysteriously says, “So be on your guard; I have told you everything ahead of time.” When I first read that line, I thought, “What a frustrating comment! He sounds like a pompous puzzle-maker, handing us an incredibly complex puzzle and then refusing to give out any hints about its solution, tantalizingly telling us instead that everything we need to know is right in front of us.” How are we supposed to know what to do? What does it mean to “be on our guard?” Surely it does not mean to look for signs of the end in all of our newspaper headlines or to stir up fear in the guise of Bible study, like the preachers on those early-morning cable shows.

Since I used to be a French teacher, I sometimes amuse myself by reading the Scriptures in French. This time it paid off! The French command to “watch!” in Mark 13 is “veillez!” That verb “veillez” jumped out at me, because it is related to the noun for a special kind of vigil. Down in the South of France, near where I used to live, there is an old tradition in which villagers meet at night in each others’ homes for what is called a “veillee.” Men and women, old and young, grandparents, sleeping babies and little children, gather in an old farmhouse kitchen, in front of a cozy fire, and they roast chestnuts and tell stories into the night. They live in a poor, desolate area of France, high on a windswept plateau, far removed from the weathy, tourist cities of the Mediterranean coast. Their land is poor and arid, and the cliffs and caves of the ominous-looking countryside resemble the rugged landscapes of the American West. It is a land full of fears, hardships, and wearying isolation. So the people gather at night for a vigil. They gather together to “watch” over the night. They tell ancient stories of ghosts, werewolves, and tales of encounters with supernatural beings that fill the dark hollows and shadows of their landscape. Their stories allow them to talk about their fears and to try to explain the difficulties of their lives, and their gatherings give them a sense of family and community and history in the midst of a poverty and an isolation that would otherwise crush their spirits completely. These people know what it means to have to stay alert, to watch, to be on their guard.

A little to the northeast of these villages, there is another village called “le Chambon sur Lignon” that has been the object of books, studies, and even films. Isolated on one of those cold, windswept plateaus, a community of poor, subsistence farmers, Le Chambon became famous for its “watching.” In addition to stories of ghosts and werewolves, villagers in the mostly protestant town of Le Chambon would gather in the evenings to tell stories of their Huguenot past: Stories of faith and of resistance in the midst of violent persecution, and steadfastness in the face of intolerance, stories linking them to their heroes of the Protestant Reformation. During the troubled times of the Second World War, a young, idealistic pastor, in disfavor with the church authorities because of his shocking pacifist beliefs, was shuttled off to be the pastor of poor, isolated Le Chambon. This pastor joined in the nightly vigils, adding Bible study to the local stories, spending days and hours examining with his little community the words of Jesus, those words that will never pass away.

Slowly, imperceptibly even, Jesus’ words became part of the hearts and minds of these ordinary villagers. And then, one day, strangers started to straggle into the village, knocking on farmhouse doors and asking for food, shelter, and refuge from persecution. They were Jews, hounded by their own governments, fleeing transport and death in concentration camps to the east. And the villagers of Le Chambon took them in. Working together, as a close community, they hid them, hundreds of them, in their homes. They shared their meager food with them. They provided them with false identity papers. They secretly filled their local school with their children …. For years, they did all of this without hesitation, disobeying the laws of their own Vichy government, helping perfect strangers very different from themselves, facing possible imprisonment and even death for them. When interviewed after the war by journalists eager to praise their actions and to make heroes out of them, the villagers of Le Chambon could not explain their actions. In a documentary, some of them say things like, “We did it ‘just because.’” “It was the normal thing to do.” “We didn’t have any theory. We just did what had to be done.” “People came to our doors and asked for help. How could we not open them?”

The people of Le Chambon, during the long winter nights of vigil, had huddled together sharing the transforming words of Jesus. Without realizing it, they had learned how to be on their guard. They were alert, when history knocked on their doors and called on them to act. They knew from the stories of their own history and from the stories of the Scriptures, what was expected of them as Christians. Together, they were ready to face trials and tribulations. They did not spend their time searching the heavens for signs or clamoring for control over the future—or even for control over their own lives. As their pastor himself wrote, “in times of crisis … Predictions are a refuge for cowards … There are dangers involved in trying to predict the effects of your actions on your own life, your family’s lives, the lives of your parish, and the lives of your countrymen.”[1] Instead of making predictions, this pastor and his flock chose to follow the words of Jesus, to love their neighbors as themselves, and to help the unjustly persecuted innocents around them.

In the words of our Scriptures, Jesus has truly “told us everything ahead of time.” It’s all there, as it has been for 2000 years: the good Samaritan, the woman caught in adultery, the prodigal son, the woman at the well, the healings, the resurrection encounters, the passion and Cross …
“Heaven and earth may pass away, but my words will never pass away.” May we remember to watch with those words. To gather together in a dark, stormy world, to share the burdens of our worries and fears, and to listen to the stories. To teach them to our children. To pass them lovingly from hand to hand, like we pass the chalice and paten. To “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them,” as it says in one of my favorite Collects. I don’t think that we can be the courageous people that Jesus calls on us to be without making our Christian story a deep part of who we are. I hope that we will be able to find time at St. Thomas for more Bible Study, for more classes for adults and for our young people to study the words that will never pass away. For with the words of Jesus embedded in our minds and hearts, united as a Christian community with a story, we are awake to truth. We will not be sleeping when it is our turn to act responsibly in the insecurities of the present. Let us keep the “veillee,” the vigil. Let us watch together! Amen.

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[1] Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood be Shed.