The Birth of Hope

 

As the prophet Isaiah tells it, a tiny baby was born in a cold, stone palace in Jerusalem. He was a newborn prince, upon whose shoulders rested the hopes of his people. He was born to an oppressed people in a land controlled by foreign powers. His people were taxed until they starved; they were forced 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. 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.” They felt themselves “thrust into thick darkness.”[1]

The birth of this baby, this new king, became a sign of hope for his people. 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. Holding up this child, he committed God to shine light into the darkness of this 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 really 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. Instead, this was a name that made everyone dance and sing the delight and joy of victory. 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. Upon these newborn shoulders lay the salvation of the world. This baby 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. His parents 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.” They felt themselves “thrust into thick darkness.”[2]

The birth of this baby was a sign of hope for all God’s people. 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 land. They called on God 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 really is: “Planner of wonders, Mighty God, Father for all the future, ruler of peace and well-being.” It is a name born of hope, a name that demands wholeness, justice, righteousness, and peace without end.

You see, our Christmas hope is not a weak, fragile shrug. It’s not a syrupy pep talk proclaiming, “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.”  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]  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 [God] had said.”[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.”[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 on this day--if we decide to proclaim it.

Last month, a baby boy was pulled from an incision in the womb of his intubated mother. He was surrounded by exhausted medical personnel in plastic gowns, masks, and face shields. Bright lights and the hiss of machinery surrounded him on all sides. Small and premature, he was rushed to the isolation of the NICU. This baby was born in a land of isolation and contagion, a land of Pandemic and death. His people were tired, so tired of the struggle, and afraid, so afraid of death. 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]

Last week, however, this baby’s mother was able to hold her child for the first time.[9] She tested negative for the virus, and the tubes were pulled from her throat. Still in the ICU, this mother held her baby boy tight and praised God for the miracle of his birth. This mother proclaimed a loud “Yes!” of hope in God’s name, as she committed herself to the long struggle toward health and wholeness.

Tonight, will we pronounce a loud “Yes” to the birth of hope and salvation? Will we take God up on God’s Covenant promises of old and commit God to shine light into the darkness of this 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 really is: “Planner of wonders, mighty, victorious God, Father for all the future, ruler of peace and well-being?” It is a name that can make us dance and sing with the delight and joy of victory. 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

[9]  https://MyJoyOnline.com/mother-sees-baby-for-the-first-time-after-waking-from-Covid-19-coma/

Embracing What Mary Didn't Know

 

Alone in the empty church, I filmed our Christmas Eve services yesterday. As I looked around at the shadows, I was overwhelmed with all that I will miss this year: This Christmas Eve, there will be no nave full of flickering candles; no dinner at home with children gathered round; no “O Come All Ye Faithful” to lift me to the altar; no joy-filled hugs and in-person greetings; no special Eucharist cloaked in the mystery of the night. I’m sure that we each have our own similar lists of emptiness as Christmas approaches, some much more painful than mine.

As I thought about all of the loss this Christmas, I realized that this isn’t the first time that “memories of Christmas past” have haunted me. When I was a teenager, I longed for the Christmas magic of childhood. When I lived in Europe, I longed for familiar carols in my native tongue. When I moved from Germany to Kentucky, I longed for the cozy joy of candles, hot mulled wine, and charming outdoor markets. When my children grew up, I longed for Christmas traditions with little ones. When my parents died, I longed to see them gathered around the tree.

It seems that Christmas often brings out my longings for what has been familiar tradition. It’s odd, though, this longing for the familiar on the Feast of the Incarnation. Because nothing is stranger than the birth of God’s Son. The words of today’s Gospel are certainly familiar to us—but the story is definitely unlike anything we could have imagined for ourselves. If God had followed familiar customs, the angel Gabriel would have paid a visit to a nice, respectable Roman matron. He would have searched for a married mother of good-standing to bear God’s Son. He certainly wouldn’t have come to Mary, to a girl as powerless and as insignificant as any human being could be. Think about it: Mary is a woman in a highly patriarchal society; she is young in a world in which age brings social standing; she is unmarried and childless in a world where husband and children are a woman’s only source of worth; she is poor and belongs to a powerless, oppressed people in a world with a strict social hierarchy. In a familiar world, we would never call this young girl, “Favored Lady of God.”

As for Mary, in accepting God’s plans, she turns away from all that is respectably traditional. Her life as an unmarried, pregnant girl is one of scandal, risk, and reproach. Mary’s “yes” is an agreement to let go of the familiar: she lets go of her standing and her reputation. She gives up control over her life. She opens herself up to God’s strange vision for the world, where first is last and last is first. While I was studying today’s lessons at my desk, I glanced over at a photo of Michelangelo’s Pieta  that hangs nearby. As I read Mary’s trusting reply to the angel, I looked up at her grief-stricken face as she holds her dead son on her lap. The Pieta brought home to me the magnitude of the heart-breaking risk that Mary took as a mother. 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—They both proclaim the strange paradox of God’s love. God’s love abides quietly, patiently, enduring risk and obscurity. It waits to turn a poor, unmarried girl into the Mother of God, a mother whose own heartbreak gives life to the world.

 I’ve never quite understood the disdain that some people have for the song, “Mary Did You Know,” that Elsa sang so beautifully for us today. Many of my clergy colleagues, especially my fellow female clergy, resent the "mansplaining" of this song. They quip, "Of course Mary knew. The Angel Gabriel told her! She doesn't need some male songwriter to explain who her son would become." I don’t see this song as an insult to Mary’s agency or her faith, however. For me, it points to the strangeness of what God was asking of her. Mary didn’t ask the angel how her son was to save his people. The song lifts up the divinity of Jesus: his miracles and his Kingship. But Mary didn’t ask for details on what kind of king he would be. She couldn’t possibly have imagined that he would be a crucified King. How could she imagine a savior who would love and forgive a world that could only send him to a criminal’s death? Mary knew what Gabriel told her, without truly knowing how it would come to pass. Mary’s very faithfulness is reflected in her willingness to give up the familiar world of knowing for the strange world of God.

 The question for us in this oddly empty Christmas is not about what Mary knew when she said “yes” to God. The question for us is whether or not we are willing to follow her lead to embrace the strange.  Like Mary, do we believe, deep down, that Love is always worth the risk and the pain that comes wrapped up in it? Rowan Williams describes incarnation as “the utter strangeness of God that waits in the heart of what is familiar.”^[1] When the “familiar” of our memories is stripped away, can we, with Mary, find God in the strangeness? Can we seek Love in the losses? “In the absence of the trimmings,” will we, as Richard Lischer writes, realize that “Jesus is a real possibility this Christmas?”[2] God, in holy strangeness, comes to us in the familiar—in the familiar of human flesh, of human struggle, of human love. God is here in the emptiness, 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.”

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

[2] Richard Lischer, “A Season of Sighs,” The Christian Century, December 16, 2020.

Particular Joy

 

Today, on the third Sunday of Advent, the church calendar invites Joy. We light the pink candle and are given beautiful readings. Our readings hold out to us a joyful glimpse of the world made right: a world filled with justice, repair, blessing, laughter, prosperity, health …. All the things for which we long, for ourselves and for our broken world. And yet, true Joy seems so far away this holiday season. The days flow into one another uneventfully. We stay home. We wait. We stay home some more. I’ve tried to manufacture some Joy this week. I’ve decorated my Christmas tree; I’ve bought gifts for loved ones; I’ve decorated the house with at least one Nativity set in every room. But joy cannot be summoned. It can’t be created, poked or prodded. True Joy, as C.S. Lewis writes, covers us with “the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing” for a meaning beyond ourselves. True Joy is a tiny gift that grows and grows, slowly lifting us into that for which we long.

This is how the joy of the Incarnation begins. 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. They share 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 from longing into joy, beyond anything that they could imagine.

          The Magnificat, Mary’s jubilant song of praise, begins with Mary’s amazement that God has come to her, to a poor Jewish peasant girl from the Galilee. She knows that her life has been nothing special. She milks goats and hauls water. She bakes bread. She stays home. She waits. She stays home some more. She longs for something more. She longs for meaning, for justice, for goodness, for wholeness, just as we do. Mary’s song of joy begins with her own ordinary life, humble and lowly as it is. Slowly, her words grow into her longing. She tells of her own experience of transformation from emptiness to the fullness of life: the slow change from girl to mother, the astounding change from lowly peasant to Mother of God.

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 an individual and irreplaceable human being; God is revealed to us in a 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.¹ It’s the same with joy: Have you ever been pierced by joy as you look over at a loved one, at a fellow human being who is as unique as their own fingerprint? Has joy ever washed over you as you contemplate a particular landscape, when the sun happens to come through the clouds in a certain way, in a way that might never happen again were you to visit that place hundreds and hundreds of times? Perhaps you’ve felt joy as you hear a certain translation of a certain verse of scripture, read at a certain time of day? Joy, like God, is revealed in particularities.

Slowly, as Mary sings her song, her words shift from her own particular situation to the experience of her people. Mary knows the songs of other mothers who have found themselves miraculously with child. The Hebrew scriptures are filled with these stories. She knows about 100-year-old mothers like Sara. She knows the stories of barren and desolate mothers like Hannah. She knows the ancient words of Hannah’s song of thanksgiving over a long-desired child. She even echoes Hannah’s words:  “My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God … There is no Rock like our God.”² 

Mary’s words carry her 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. They gain power and strength until the words themselves seem to cause the transformations of which she speaks. Her words seem to make present the future for which we all long: “God has cast down the mighty from their thrones,” she cries.  “God has lifted up the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich God has sent away empty… God has remembered God’s promise of mercy.”

          Don and I watched an old Christmas movie the other night called Last Holiday. The main character is a black woman whose life is filled with drudgery and a clear lack of joy. To top it all off, she learns that she has a rare disease and has only three weeks to live. In one scene, she is stands in her church choir, filled with anger and sadness at her plight. She suddenly bursts out in lament, quietly at first, “Lord, why in heavens me?!” As she sings, her words become louder and more fervent. Slowly, the congregation picks up her song. Her words run away from her, and her rant against God somehow becomes an expression of joyful praise throughout the entire congregation. People begin to dance and sway, stomp and shout. This movie scene reminds me how the unbearable conditions of slavery produced a unique kind of worship that mixes lament and praise, suffering and joy-filled longing. African-American spirituals express a painful longing for freedom and justice, always on the edge of joy. As our words escape us, somehow painful longing can become joyful thanksgiving.

When we hear Mary’s song, even we rich and mighty ones join in with joy. Have you ever wondered how we might fit into the scenes that Mary describes? Mary’s words should frighten us, for we are the powerful ones. We are the ones 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 upheaval seem to warm our hearts. The images of liberation and joy over the end of oppression grow from her story in such a way that we recognize their difficult truth. We join in the joy of liberation despite ourselves.

       In these dark days, when was the last time that you shared your longing 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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¹Paul Ricoeur, L’unique et le singulier, (Liege : Alice Editions, 1999), 46-47.

² I Samuel 2:1-2.

 

Mountains and Grass

 

When I drive down South Boulder Road toward St. Ambrose, the words of the prophet Isaiah ring out to me more clearly than ever before:

           "make straight in the desert a highway             for our God.

           Every valley shall be lifted up,
           and every mountain and hill be made               low; the uneven ground shall become               level, and the rough places a plain."

As I look at our glorious mountains, I can feel the mighty power that lifted them up from the bowels of the earth, so many millions of years ago. I can imagine the roar of rock against rock, the breaking, the pure force of geological change. And I can imagine what force it would take for the barrier before me to come crashing down. What a fearsome sight it would be, to see the majestic mountains sink back into the earth, like water draining from a tub.

I can picture the pioneers heading west, stopping near what is now Barcelona Street. They are full of dreams for the future, dragging all that they own in a heavy, lumbering wagon. I can imagine them looking up at our front range of mountains, wondering how they are going to get through, wondering what unseen obstacles await on the other side. How they would have rejoiced at Isaiah’s miraculous leveling, at seeing the valleys embrace the peaks, at finding a path open up, straight to their dreams. What relief they would have felt to watch their hardships and fears simply melt away.

          This Advent, I wouldn’t mind seeing our hardships melt away, either. If only God would come to wipe away our troubles, to open for us a straight path to a whole and healthy world. It’s not just the image of mountains that resonates more with me this year. It’s also the anguished cry for comfort. There is so much death raging across the land, so much fear and privation all around us. I feel the need to join the people of ancient Israel in a heart-felt cry, imploring God like never before: “Haven’t we suffered enough now? When is our term over?”

Today’s texts promise us that comfort is coming. We have Isaiah’s beautiful picture of salvation for the exiled people of Israel, for a people longing to go home. Isaiah shows us a God who acts both in strength and in compassion, a God who levels mountains and who cradles baby lambs in his arms. Our psalmist paints us a picture of the healing of all creation: we see our longings take on flesh and dance. Truth and mercy turn and sway, together with peace and right relationship. They join in a holy embrace. And when the beautiful images no longer suffice, when we’ve had it up to here with sin and evil, Second Peter give us God’s fiery justice, burning away all that is broken.

These beautiful readings still leave us asking, “When, O Lord?”  It’s St. Mark who offers us something of an answer to our impatience. Scholars believe that the first line of Mark’s Gospel, “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, Son of God,” isn’t the first line at all. It’s really the title of the entire Gospel of Mark. (You see, ancient scribes didn’t have room for fancy spacing and punctuation in their manuscripts. Words and sentences all run together, and scholars have to figure out how to divide things up.) If this theory is correct, chapter one of the Good News of Jesus Christ is the story that we read in Mark’s Gospel. The whole book. Chapter one of Jesus’ story contains an account of his life and death on earth, followed by the resurrection announcement to the fearful women at the empty tomb.

Chapter Two of the Good News contains all of our reactions, our response to what we read in Mark’s Gospel. 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 and transformation. But all of this good work that we do in our lives is just the middle of the story. All stories have an end, as well. The end of the story of the Good News doesn’t depend on our best attempts or worst failures. The end of the story, Chapter Three, is the new heaven and the new earth: the salvation, healing, and forgiveness that are God’s doing.

 Today’s readings all remind us that the story of the Good News in Jesus Christ, is directed toward an end. We can dress that end in the language of the Day of the Lord. We can drape it in the images of Christ’s Second Coming. We can paint it in the pastel colors of a New Creation. But because Christ rose from the dead, the ending of his story remains one in which goodness triumphs. It is an ending in which Evil does not have the last word. It is an ending that gives hope to the middle.

Standing here in the middle of the story, looking up at the imposing mountains, we in Boulder are surrounded by grass. Isaiah talks about “the grass that withers.” I’ve always found this image of our sin and mortality to be devastatingly true, yet far from a comfort in despair.

"All people are grass, [writes Isaiah]
their constancy is like the flower of the field.

The grass withers, the flower fades,
when the breath of the Lord blows upon it;
surely the people are grass."

 

Grass. Fragile. Short-lived. Soon brown and broken, ready for the burning. It’s not a cheerful picture at all. Living here on the Front Range has helped me with this vision, as well, though. Every day, I take a walk through the Open Spaces around my home, and I am surrounded by brown grass. Tall brown grass blowing in the wind, short brown grass covered in dust. When I first drove out here last August, I was rather dismayed by all of this brown grass. I was used to dark, deep greens, velvet in the shadows. How was I ever going to get used to all this brownness, I wondered. What I soon realized, though, was the beauty of the brown grass. All it takes is a hint of sunlight, and the brown turns to silver and gold. On gray days, the landscape is pretty sad. But with a little light, the fields suddenly fill with golden splendor. They become a rich tapestry fit for kings. The dry, fragile grasses shine like treasure. Already, I have come to love the brown grass. It lifts my spirits higher than the deep greens ever did.

In this most challenging Advent, perhaps we are indeed the brown grasses. Fragile. Mortal. Here for only a short time. We are rooted in the plains, where we can only gape at the high mountains that surround us still. We long for Chapter Three of the Good News, still far away on the horizon. Yet God shines the Light of Christ upon us every day. As the Light touches each of us, God asks us to cry aloud in golden voices for all to hear. To shout in the wilderness that health and wholeness will prevail, that Evil will not have the last word. To cry aloud that God’s Good News will stand forever. We don’t have to bring down the mountains to reach our God. God comes down to us in resplendent light that cries in the wilderness:

“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!’"