Okay… three homilies in 24 hours, each slightly different but on the same basic theme… hmmm….
Here they are:
Family Service: One Holy Night
On this night, and in fact during this entire season we view as unique and holy, much of the world puts its normal routines on hold. We gather with family, even that crazy uncle we’d like to pretend wasn’t related to us. Some will enter Christian houses of worship after many months, sometimes years, away. We celebrate our Savior’s birth, or at least go through the routine of celebrating that birth, even if we give salvation little or no thought for most of the year. We declare this to be one holy night.
In truth, as we will hear later in the beautiful words of Sophia Lyon Fahs, every night a child is born is a holy night, and a child is born every night, making every single night, every single day, every single moment when we are privileged to be alive, holy. And yet, there is something special in the birth of Jesus, something worth remembering all the other nights of the year, something special that is overlooked by those Christians who mistakenly view the Cross as the sole path to salvation. For those who believe that Jesus is the promised Emmanuel, that Jesus is God-with-us in some way beyond our understanding, a tremendous thing happens at Christmas.
Before that first Christmas, that Divine Mystery we name God seemed distant, immense, sometimes brutal. Then, in one act, God closed the immense gap between God’s being and our own. God came to feel as we feel, aching dirty feet, the cruelty we can inflict on one another, but also the soaring beauty of being in creation, the passionate love of parent and child, what it truly means to have friends, even, as Jesus learned with Lazarus, what it means to lose someone we love. God chose to be marked with humanness, to experience our being. And in so doing, the divine marked us with holiness.
Incarnation taught us how to live and changed our place in the order of being. Jesus reminded us that every day is a gift, the God wants us to live full lives now, to build a just and caring world now. Jesus in his teachings and in his life called us to courage, to radical transformation. He called us to throw off the shackles of false values. When God closed the metaphysical gap between the human and the divine, the door to contentment, to joy, to mind-blowing creativity, to life changing love, was opened.
What prepared Jesus the man from Nazareth to take on the navel-gazing leaders of his own religious community? What prepared him to take on the brutal Roman empire, to risk and lose his own life? We can assume from the scriptures that Jesus, the child and the man, was formed in the Hebrew religious tradition.
We know that the birth narratives as well as the one story about Jesus’s childhood are meant as teaching stories, as a way for the early Christians to understand what made Jesus so unique, but they also tell us that Joseph and Mary practiced their faith and raised the child Jesus within a religious community. He is presented at the Temple as a child, is part of a community, makes the arduous trip from Galilee to Jerusalem. As a man we see evidence of this religious upbringing. Jesus, who no doubt spoke Aramaic and Greek, is none-the-less able to read Hebrew, as when he reads the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue at Capernaum. He observes the religious law and exceeds it. His regular prayer life is a sign that he was taught by his parents how to pray. Jesus was so fully grounded in the Hebrew religious tradition that he was able to live it in a radically transgressive and transformative way, in such a way that he could enact a new covenant between humans and the divine.
What Jesus offered us, what Jesus offers us this night as we celebrate his birth, his role as God-with-us, is an alternative to all of the false systems we humans create for ourselves. Tribalism, nationalism, racism… Jesus rejected the false values of both Rome and of the Temple.
Today you are told that greed is good, that self-centeredness is okay. Our extended families have been reduced down to nuclear families, then even further down to sub-atomic families. Wall Street and Madison Avenue want you to believe that if you just buy the right stuff, you’ll be happy. How’s that been working out for you?
You can follow the Way of Jesus, or the way of aimlessness and sin. One leads to life in full, the other to suffering. This night, this one holy night, we remember that God closed the gap, that our Savior was born, and that, marking us with holiness, he offered us a new way. May we all embrace it, for unto us a savior was born, is born, will be born, again and again, out of time, out of place, miracle upon miracle. Amen.
Midnight: Christmas Every Day
I’m a sucker for Christmas movies, as those who are here every Sunday already know. But even I, with my Hallmark card idea of Christmas, occasionally encounter a movie so bad that I cannot sit through it more than once. On that list is a 1996 film called “Christmas Every Day.†Many of you will be familiar with the Bill Murray classic “Groundhog Day.†This was basically the same thing, but with Christmas and a teenager. The main character, Billy, is caught in a time loop, re-living Christmas again and again until he gets it right.
As terrible as the film was, there might be a lesson in it. First, how many of us would get trapped in that loop? Or, inversely, how many of us think we get Christmas “right� Anyone want to do a show of hands?
For many, the Christmas season becomes a frenzied half-delusional rush to check off an ever-growing list of to-do items, to meet every possible social obligation lest we should give offense, and to make enough purchases to keep the CEO’s of major retailers and the generals in charge of Chinese prison factories in Rolexes and Bentleys. A slightly exaggerated picture, no doubt, but pointing toward the truth.
Even a terrible movie can teach us a lesson. “Christmas Every Day†reminds us that Christmas is about relationships, and particularly about one special relationship, the relationship in which that Divine Mystery we name God closed the gap between that utterly transcendent eternal infinite and the human. That relationship, as imagined by the authors of the two birth narratives, begins with a visit from an angel.
The Bible, God’s Word for those who choose to follow Jesus, contains a mix of poetry, self-help, fiction and history. It is not only the story of who we have been, how the ancients made sense of our relationship with our Creator. It is also a story meant to give shape to our future. It is a story meant to give shape to our lives, if only we will let it.
What shape will your life have? Will you be a patient and faithful servant, like Simeon of Jerusalem, who waited patiently for the birth of the messiah, present in the Temple when the infant Jesus was presented, Simeon whose words, now called the Nunc Dimittis, are repeated in nightly prayer by Christians around the world? Will you patiently wait on the Lord, doing the work of the people of God, as did the elderly prophetess Anna, also present in the Temple when the infant Jesus arrived.
Maybe your story will be a story of faithful service, certainly the shape of the stories we imagine for Mary and Joseph, swept up in God’s plan of salvation, maybe not always understanding their role, but always taking the next step, doing what was expected. We certainly see in the stories of Jesus’ childhood and in his adult life that they raised him with strong religious training. They take him from the backwater of Galilee to the metropolis of Jerusalem as a child. They certainly teach him to pray, and he does so constantly. No doubt he spoke both Aramaic and Greek, but he has also been trained in Hebrew, as we see when he unrolls the Isaiah scroll in the synagogue. Joseph and Mary faithfully raising the miracle baby…
Then there is John the Baptizer, the cousin of Jesus, seemingly the first major prophet to emerge in the Hebrew tradition in several centuries. Like John, will you be a catalyst, opening the eyes of those around you, opening the hearts of those around you. Will you be the noble voice in the wilderness, modern day locusts and honey for your diet as you change lives through the love of God?
Then there is the shape of a life we see in Jesus, a difficult but not impossible shape, for Jesus life is marked by being in God. This state of being, described by Friedrich Schleiermacher as “perfect Christ-consciousness,†is not beyond the reach of we mere humans, for we are not mere humans. We are marked with divinity, infused with holiness. This world has seen many who were clearly vessels for the love of God for this miraculous creation. Will you let go of what is false, embrace every moment, and love as God loves, being in God?
Every path that acknowledges our utter dependence on that from whence we came, that attends to the Divine Mystery, is a path to holiness. You are but one piece in a glorious history, in a glorious creation. Like a puzzle piece in the big picture of creation, you will find your right place in the context of community. You path unfolds before you every day, the gentle and sometimes not so gentle movements of the Spirit call you to that path. God moves to as every day, God’s grace pours out upon us, shaped by that moment when God became one of us.
Every day, the call to covenant community. Every day the call to find the shape of your life. Every day the movement of God’s grace. Every day. Maybe that terrible movie was right after all. Maybe it is Christmas every day! And may it always be so. Amen.
Christmas Morning: One More Day
I have found myself in an uncomfortable position in recent weeks. You see, I take seriously the charge to thinking Protestants to take the Bible seriously, but not literally. To be sure, there is plenty of history in there, and truth of a sort that can’t always be verified. But during this Christmas season I have asked many of you to look afresh at the two birth narratives and ask yourself what it is we are supposed to learn from them. You see, Mark and john are silent on the subject of our Savior’s birth, and Matthew and Luke disagree on most of the details. Luke is trying to record a history, albeit through the lens of Paul’s theology, and he doesn’t know the geography of Judea and Galilee at all. Matthew is busy trying to prove that Jesus is the new Moses with authority to create a new covenant, and reshapes the entire story of Jesus’ earthly ministry to that end. But we are so used to the mash-up version of the story, the one that has both Luke’s journey and manger and Matthew’s wise visitors, that thinking about the text feels like a betrayal of sorts. It’s not, but it feels that way.
So this morning, I’m not going to ask you to choose. If you like Jesus born in the family home in Bethlehem then fleeing to Egypt, okay. If you want the census and the manger, that’s cool. And if you want to mash-up the two stories, go for it. Every version of the story is trying to get at the same thing anyways. Each in its own way is attempting to explain how Jesus the man from Nazareth was unique, how his arrival on the scene represented God-with-us, the Divine Mystery we call God present with us in the person of Jesus, not only the Divine partaking of humanness, but humanity being forever marked with holiness.
Whichever story you choose, for Mary and Joseph, for the shepherds, the next day, as the sun rose, it was one more day. One more day of grinding poverty at the dge of a sprawling empire that had no interest in God. Yet the stories we use to understand what happened in Jesus are marked not with desperation, but with fidelity.
Jesus, presented for circumcision at the appointed time. Jesus, taken on a pilgrimage to the Temple when he was twelve. Jesus taught to pray, and though he no doubt already spoke Aramaic and Greek, taught Hebrew as well, so that he could read the sacred scrolls in the synagogue. In a world, in a time, that had other values, other preoccupations, Mary and Joseph were faithful. They had other options. They chose God. And they shaped the infant that became the boy that became the man that taught us how to live, that offered us freedom from aimlessness and sin, that defeated death itself. Daily fidelity, small acts of faith, one day at a time.
The day after the baby is born. One more day of hard work, of breast-feeding, of sleepless nights. For Herod one more day of fear that his corrupt kingdom would be supplanted by God’s just and caring realm.
One more day. Today. One more day. Tomorrow. A day to study God’s word in scripture, as Jesus did. A day to pray, as Jesus did. A day to love your Creator and this amazing creation, as Jesus did. One more day.
The day after the baby is born. One more miraculous and holy day. Amen.