Let the Earth Rejoice!

When I was teaching elementary school French, I had a brilliant idea one time for a Christmas lesson plan. In the south of France, people collect and display “santons” or “little saints”—small clay figures dressed in traditional folk costumes, representing each village inhabitant, from the town baker to the town pickpocket. The figures are all set up outside the stable, waiting to visit the Holy Family inside. For the lesson, my young students were supposed to choose a character from a typical French town in Provence and shape him or her out of homemade salt dough. We would then bake the figures in the oven, paint them, and display them in the school entryway as our own French “crèche,” or manger-scene.

We began our work, but it wasn’t long before I noticed that there was something wrong with the salt dough that I had mixed at home the night before. It somehow wasn’t firm enough to allow the kind of detail necessary for the task. I had assigned the most dependable children the job of crafting the Holy Family, the angels, the kings, and the shepherds. These kids were getting frustrated, though, as Mary’s head drooped softly down onto her belly; the angel listed to the right as if she had already sampled too much holiday eggnog; the shepherds’ staffs folded in two; Joseph’s legs crumpled beneath his heavy body; and the necks of the three kings slumped over into each other like some kind of royal three-headed hydra.

That’s when I noticed that the rest of the kids were not following directions.  They were not fashioning men and women from a French village. When I asked them what they were doing, almost every single child said that she was making an animal. Dogs, cats, birds, ponies, and giant insects were taking shape all over the classroom. Only one child was creating a human being. When I praised him and asked him which character he was making, he proudly proclaimed that he celebrates Hanukah, not Christmas, and was therefore making a Hebrew soldier from Masada, complete with a lovingly-crafted modern rifle in hand.

My blood-pressure started to rise as I watched my brilliant lesson plan go totally awry. Children, however, are creative, and they didn’t let my worry over accuracy ruin their project. They ignored my hand-wringing and single-mindedly continued their work. The next week, when the figures were all baked and painted, they proudly wrote “Joyeux Noel” above a manger scene … with a baby Jesus, a couple of bowing angels with droopy wings, a Hanukah soldier, and a whole zoo full of snakes, giant worms and escargots, legless dogs and cats, and quite a number of rocks.

All those years ago, I prayed that the parents who came to our school Christmas program would not look too closely at our lumpy animal Nativity. I cringed at the thought of this monstrosity sitting out in the hallway, where parents could shake their heads over the low artistic standards that I was setting for their children and the lack of French apparent in the lesson. Now that I think about it, however, the children in my French class were showing profound theological insight in their determination to bring animals to worship the baby Jesus. Think of all the carols that we sing about the ox and the ass standing around the manger. Legends, poems, and stories have sprung up all over the world about the role of animals in the stable in Bethlehem. Even though the Gospel stories about Jesus’ birth don’t mention the animals at all, our human imaginations have filled the stable with sheep and goats, oxen and donkeys, camels, and birds, and even spiders. I recently learned that it was St. Francis of Assisi, credited with putting together the very first crèche, who first put the donkey and the ox into the Nativity story.[1] Leave it to St. Francis to think to include the animals! I wish that I had known that fact twenty years ago, since I was teaching my infamous Christmas lesson at a school named after St. Francis!

Like the kids in my French class, we human beings seem to be drawn to the idea of bringing animals in to worship the baby Jesus. Our desire to include our animal friends in the wonder of Christmas is more than pet-loving sentimentality on our parts, however. When God came down to earth as a human baby, God did not come only to heal and save our human flesh. God came into the world to remake the whole of creation, animals included. When Jesus is born, the powerful Word through which God made the heavens and the earth enters history in the form of one human being. In Jesus, we see God’s loving face, but we also see the sons and daughters of God that we, too, are meant to be. Theologians have called Jesus the “second Adam,” born to bring to earth human nature as it was meant to be before the first Adam ate that piece of fruit in disobedience to God. Christmas is like a second creation, a creation necessarily touching the lives of all creatures, not just human ones. As Rowan Williams writes, Jesus’ birth “announces that creation as a whole has found its purpose and meaning, and that the flowing together of all things for the joyful transfiguration of our humanity is at last made visible on earth.”[2]

Psalm 96 sings a beautiful song in anticipation of the moment in which God will come to re-create the whole world. As Christians, we can hear in tonight’s psalm the joy of all creation as it views humanity transformed by God’s presence on earth:  “Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice: let the sea roar, and all that fill it; let the field exult, and everything in it. Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord; for he is coming, for he is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with his truth.”

Can you imagine the animals in a vast Christmas crèche, joining in the psalmist’s song of praise at humankind’s transformation? Can you see them gathering like we do tonight—and every Christmas Eve, year after year—looking toward the baby in the manger and longing with heart and soul for safety, for healing, for the redemption of Creation? I can see them, from the Arctic snows, to the African plains, to the deep oceans, to the American cities, all turning toward Bethlehem and raising their voices in song:

“Thanks be to God that I will no longer have to carry men into battle,” sings the horse.

“Thanks be to God that I will no longer swim in black, sludgy seas, despoiled by human greed for oil,” shout the seal and the fish.

“Thanks be to God that my home will stop melting and I can feed my babies again,” cries the polar bear.

 “Thanks be to God that I will no longer be beaten and mistreated by tortured souls,” shout the dog and the cat.

“I will be able to lead a plow once more on family farms,” rejoices the ox.

“I will no longer be slaughtered by greedy humans looking for ivory and skins,” chime in the elephant and the leopard.

 “I will cover the barren plains once more,” exults the grass.

“I will no longer be shattered in an insatiable search for treasure and fuel” rejoices the mountain.

They look at the new baby, and they know that the old ways will soon die. They know that God has come to remake the world, that God has come in truth and righteousness. As Auden writes, they know:

“How all things living,/ Domestic or wild,/ With whom you must share/ Light, water, and air,/ And suffer and shake/ In physical need,/ The sullen limpet,/ the exuberant weed,/ The mischievous cat/ And the timid bird,/ Are glad for your sake/ As the new-born Word/ Declares that the old/ Authoritarian/ Constraint is replaced/ By His Covenant,/ … Run to Bethlehem./ Let us run to learn/ How to love and run;/ Let us run to Love.”[3]

Let us all run, hop, crawl, fly and slither to the stable. Let us take our places around the baby who will set all creation right, standing hand in hand with all creatures, bearing witness to the power of God’s Love for all that God has made.

Amen.

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[1] Thank you to the Rev. Dr. Michael Jinkins, who brought this subject to my attention in his blog, found at http://www.lpts.edu/about/our-leadership/president/thinking-out-loud/thinking-out-loud/2014/12/16/-christmas-eve-and-twelve-of-the-clock-

[2] Rowan Williams, Choose Life (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 57.

[3] W. H . Auden, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio,” from “Vision of the Shepherds,” part II.

The Gift of Salvation

       ADVENT 3B        

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
Psalm 126
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
John 1:6-8, 19-28

Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.

          In this third week of Advent, the week of “joy” in which we light the rose candle, our lectionary has given us an early Christmas present. Whenever I hear the beautiful words of Isaiah 61, it’s as if I have just unwrapped a gift from God. With ancient Israel, my soul rejoices in the new clothes of salvation and righteousness that God has brought to me in these prophetic words. I can picture the glory of them and feel the comfort of them on my winter-dry skin.

          Have you ever received a Christmas gift, though, that is so wonderful that it makes you feel a bit guilty to have received it? “Oh, they spent too much on me,” you fret. “I’m not worth all this.” Underneath today’s joy, there's a hint of shame, too, in me, when I read our first lesson. After all, Isaiah is announcing liberation for the oppressed and judgment on the oppressors. Is this gift really meant for the likes of me? Me, with one hand deep in the stock market grab bag and with the other hand complicit in the torture of prisoners? Me, whose white skin puts me on the wrong side of the history of oppression? Me who sleeps every night in a comfy bed while children are homeless? 

          “Hold on. Should this text make me tremble rather than rejoice?” whispers a part of my soul. “From what am I being saved?”

Barbara Brown Taylor defines salvation as “a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there …. It opens a door in what look[s] for all the world like a wall.”[1]

The wall that holds us captive can indeed be a plain wall of stone or brick. The tight places that encircle us can indeed be crafted by real-world oppressors. After all, the prophet Isaiah is speaking to a people who have spent generations in exile, to a people who were torn from their homes by war, to a people who are finally being allowed to return to their plundered land. He is offering encouragement to a discouraged and truly downtrodden people. In Isaiah’s vision, salvation is truly freedom from an oppressing enemy. Salvation is a people returning home and rebuilding what was laid waste by human oppressors. God is surely still calling for this kind of liberation today, as well, in situations all over the world, including in our own backyard.

          But there are other, more metaphorical walls that put our lives at risk. There are even metaphorical walls behind the walls of stone and steel. Chris Hoke is a prison chaplain in Washington State. [2] Like Isaiah says, his work is to bind up the brokenhearted and to bring good news to the prisoner. He doesn’t see his call as “saving sinners from hell” though. He actually finds more truth and holiness in his encounters in the prisons than he does in most church communities. His job isn’t to break the inmates out of the prison, either, or to fight the authorities for their freedom. His job is to be an agent of that “divine spaciousness” that Taylor describes.

When Hoke first started visiting prisoners, he would sit with them across the steel table that lawyers use to talk with their clients, and the prisoners would lay their heads on the table and weep. All of their pain, all of the anguish of their lives, would pour out of them, and he would listen to them and love them in spite of it all. They would hug at the end of their sessions, and groups would hold hands in prayer circles and lay hands on one another in prayer. Through touch, the walls came down, and God’s love could begin a healing process as powerful as the touch of Jesus in the gospels.

After awhile, though, the prison authorities decided to start a “no touch policy” in the prison.  There were no more hugs, no more prayer circles, no more laying on of hands. And the prisoners suffered. Hoke says that incidents of violence actually imcreased, and then more clamp-down measures were enforced. Metaphorical walls were strengthened, and the men found themselves in a double-prison.

Hoke now had to speak to prisoners through a phone, separated by a thick glass wall. If the prisoners wanted to tell their stories, they knew that all of their words were being taped and were available to prosecutors. There were no more liberating confessions. The prisoners didn’t cry anymore. Their tears and their hearts dried up. As Hoke says, “when hearts don’t have a place to break, they become harder.” The glass became a wall that had to come down before healing could occur.

One prisoner whom Hoke visited was in solitary confinement, spending his days alone in a 9 by 12 foot room. He was losing hope. So Hoke decided to find the man’s youngest daughter—a daughter whom the man had never met—and convince the mother to let the child visit her father in prison. On the day that he brought the four-year-old girl to see her long-lost dad, Hoke spent the drive to the prison teaching her to sing “You are my sunshine.” Sitting behind the glass with Hoke, the beautiful little girl beamed at her imprisoned father on the other side. She told him that she loved him, and she sang “You are my sunshine” to him. The father was able to weep again, tears falling from his face as he told his little girl that he loved her. And according to Hoke, the glass then “melted away.” The man was still incarcerated, but he was saved. Saved not from hellfire or from serving his time—but set free as only love can set us free. Through Hoke and the love of a child, God had cut a door in the wall.

Jesus, of course, adopts Isaiah’s words as the statement of his own mission. In Luke's Gospel, right after Jesus' baptism and his temptation in the wilderness, he goes into the synagogue in Nazareth and unrolls the Isaiah scroll. He reads aloud the prophet’s words of release and good news for the poor, the sick, and the oppressed. “Today the Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus announces. All are amazed, and Jesus' ministry begins.

I recently attended a service in which the preacher talked about Jesus’ saving grace for us sinners. But there was something about one of the illustrations that he used that bothered me. For a long time, I couldn’t quite figure out what wasn’t right. It was a compelling story. The preacher talked about a little toddler who was locked in a hot car while her mother was in the store. The preacher was actually there and saw the child. At first, bystanders thought that they could get the child to pull open the tab that was locking the car door, and they yelled out instructions to her. The child, of course, couldn’t comply, because she was strapped in her car seat, bound by straps of cloth. This child is like us, said the preacher, bound by lives of sin, captive and unable to free ourselves.

Finally, in the story, a big, burly onlooker grabbed a metal hammer off of a nearby truck and smashed in the glass of the car window, pulling the child to safety. That hero is like Jesus, said the preacher. Smashing sin and death and saving us in our helplessness.

In thinking about Hoke’s story, and about salvation, I finally figured out this week what was bothering me about that story. You see, Jesus isn’t some muscled superhero with a sledge hammer. God comes to save us in the tender flesh of a baby, a baby just as helpless as the one in that car seat, a baby just as helpless as you, and me, and the man in solitary confinement. Jesus doesn’t smash the glass that walls us in, sending shards a-flying. Like the prisoner’s little daughter, Jesus penetrates the glass with powerful Love. Writes Rowan Williams: Christmas shows us “that miraculous love is possible … The vilest offender … is now deserving of attention and compassion; no life can be allowed to fall out of the circle of love. Because God has overthrown the empire of numbers and calculations, mass movements and majority interests: ‘The story of a human life became the life story of God and filled the universe.’ …. This was when the new creation began.”[3]

          Even the most privileged of us here today are each held captive: Captive by the inevitablities of age or by the chains of illness. Captive by guilt or by shame. Captive by our own insidious doubts. Held behind walls that we erect and behind walls that others use to enslave us. Hear the good news of Christmas: God has come behind our walls to dwell with us, making room in the tight places and beaming love through the walls of glass, binding up the brokenhearted, proclaiming liberty to the captives, comforting all who mourn. Open the gift of  a love that will allow you to weep, so that you can rejoice. Don the garments that will break you open so that the Baby’s love can seep in through the cracks.  "Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed, will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves." Rejoice!

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[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, from Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith.

[2] Chris Hoke, “The Day the Jail took Touch Away,” recorded on NPR’s “Snap Judgment” and found at http://chris-hoke.com/media/.

[3] Rowan Williams, Choose Life (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 38.

Here is Your God: Living in the Middle of the Story

Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8

Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

        In Advent, we are supposed to be waiting. But for what?  For the sweet baby Jesus in the manger? For the fiery Last Judgment? For Santa Claus and the presents under the tree? For the Christmases enshrined in childhood memory to come to life again? For some combination of all of these?

          I went to Michael’s hobby store right after church last Sunday to grab a new wreath for my front door. Amidst pawed-through piles of plastic greens and overflowing tangles of glittering ribbon, I heard a voice crying in the wilderness. The voice did not say, “Prepare the way of the Lord,” however. On this last day of November, it said, “I am SO SICK of Christmas.” A mom, weary to the bone, was wandering the aisles with two children who looked to be about four and seven. The seven-year-old must have been asking to buy things, because when she heard her mom’s words, she put down the trinket that she was holding, and you could see the joy flee her face. Her tiny shoulders drooped; she looked at the floor; and she grew silent with shame. “Just so sick of it ALL,” muttered the mom, utterly defeated. Trying to save the situation, the four-year-old piped up with forced cheer, “I’m so sick of Christmas, too, Mommy. Come on, let’s go home.” And the family trudged out of the store.

“Comfort, O comfort my people.”

It is surely not the secular, commercial Christmas that we are eagerly awaiting.

Later this week, I turned on the TV. Injustice poured off of the screen and into my living room, casting shadows over my little creche. I saw a young boy getting shot; a father being strangled. I saw guns and violence; fear, crime, and racism covering us in darkness on all sides. I also saw crowds marching, and I heard strong prophetic voices crying in the wilderness of injustice. However, they were not saying, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” They were saying, “We can’t breathe! We can’t breathe!”

“Comfort, O comfort my people.”

Something is being born this Advent, but I’m not sure that it is the sweet infant in the hay or the cozy Christmas family dinner that they are awaiting on the streets.

Is it, then, the Day of Judgment that we are waiting for? The day of God’s justice? The triumphant return of Christ, when all will be set aright? A new heaven and a new earth, where right relationship is finally at home? Isn’t that what we are all longing for?  Like Robin pointed out last week, though, we modern “progressive” Christians tend to assume that all of the excitement about Jesus’ Second Coming was over a long time ago. Indeed, already by the second century after Jesus’ birth, when 2 Peter was written, Christians were starting to wonder what was taking so long. Now it has been over 20 centuries. We wonder if we misunderstood the Lord’s promise. Today, we certainly don’t know what to do with all of this language about a fiery end to our world. We don’t like to hear the threats. We roll our eyes over the grand metaphors. We are tired of waiting. Our faith tells us that transformation has to happen, so we tell ourselves that it is up to us to bring about justice. It is up to us to be “Christ’s hands and feet in the world,” after all, and to live lives, as Peter says, “of holiness and godliness.” Aren’t we now the ones who are supposed to start digging out those highways in the desert, moving mountains to get our world right with God? And yet … How can we, lost and adrift in the commercialism of Christmas, find our way out of the desert? How can we, so oppressed by sin that we are unable even to breathe, bring about God’s Kingdom on earth?

Scholars believe that the first line of Mark’s Gospel, “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, Son of God,” is really the title of the entire Gospel of Mark.[1] (Ancient scribes didn’t have room for fancy spacing and punctuation in their manuscripts.) According to Mark, the beginning of Jesus’ story is his life and death on earth, followed by the announcement of resurrection to the fearful women at the empty tomb. Everything we read about in Mark’s Gospel is just the beginning! The middle of Jesus’ story of Good News is all of our reactions to his life, after we hear the beginning. The middle of the story is how Christian lives are lived in the light of resurrection. The middle involves our attempts at righteousness, our attempts at repentance, our attempts at courage, our attempts at justice. But that’s just the middle. All stories have an end, too. The end of the story of the Good News doesn’t depend on our best attempts or worst failures. The end of the story is the new heaven and the new earth: the salvation, healing, and forgiveness that are God’s doing.

We are gathering on the Wednesday nights of Advent at St. Thomas to tell our own faith stories. We tell about our childhood and our beginnings in our families of origin. Like Mark starting with John the Baptist, we might even tell how our families’ stories before our births influenced our childhood. Then we tell the middle of our stories: we talk about the lives that we try to live and the highs and lows that unfold in our relationships with God. But we are not yet at the end of our individual stories. Our lives are not over. Even as we age and grow close to death, we know that our lives with God after death have yet to unfold. The stories that we tell on Wednesday night are of necessity unfinished stories. The story of the Good News in Jesus Christ, though, has an end. You can dress that end in the language of the Day of the Lord. You can drape it in the images of Christ’s Second Coming. You can paint it in the colors of a New Creation. But because Christ rose from the dead, it remains an ending in which goodness triumphs, an ending in which Evil does not have the last word. It is an ending that gives hope to the middle.

Hold that hope tenderly! Hear the words of comfort that God offers us as we plug away at transformation. Remember that it is God who comes down to us at Christmas. It is God who clears off the path and levels the hills, over and over and over again. This Advent, when the days of waiting seem dark and long, I long for us at St. Thomas to acknowledge, with our lives and with our voices, the comfort and hope of the story’s End.

“Comfort, O comfort my people … Lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear. Say to the cities … ‘Here is your God!’

Here is your God, flattening those shopping malls to the ground and planting a garden in the wilderness. A garden where plastic garlands become grapevines and tinsel turns into life-giving rain. A garden where everyone has enough to eat and children and adults alike mirror the joy of God in creation.

Here is your God, wiping out injustice. Burning with fire the drugs and the poverty and the hatred. Bringing down the powers the corrupt our souls and our world.  Bringing young black boys and law enforcement officers together in an embrace of trust and friendship.  Binding us together as we are in God’s sight.

Here is your God. It’s not just a dream. It is the end of the story—an end at which we can even take a peek. I’ve seen glimpses at the Eucharistic Table. I’ve seen glimpses in the garden at Eastern Area Community Ministries. I’ve even seen glimpses on the news media. Police and protesters embracing—seriously, Rev. Anne? Yes, take a look at twelve-year-old Devonte Hart, a young black man facing a line of armed officers in Oregon. He is shaking with fear and holding a sign that says, “Free Hugs,” as tears drip down his face. Officer Darren Wilson, who is white, comes over and talks with him, wrapping him in a bear hug. Somebody takes a photo.[2]

“Lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear. Say to the cities … ‘Here is your God!’”

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[1] David Lose, “Active Waiting: Advent 2B” found at http://www.davidlose.net/2014/advent-2-b/

[2] http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/29/living/ferguson-protest-hug/