24 December 2023 Advent IV Sermon
Luke 1:26-38 “Meating God”
Someone listening to me preach for the first time, and maybe even the twenty-first time, lifting portions of sermons out of context, might think I do not believe in God. They would be wrong. I have no doubts about God or the goodness of God. I’m a lot less certain when it comes to the goodness of my fellow humans.
We construct religions, but God is always bigger than any one religion, despite the exclusive truth claims of almost every tradition, including our own, which suggests some spiritual humility might be in order.
That religion is a human construct does not mean that our efforts to understand holy mystery are wrong. Just because Moses did not write the Book of Exodus does not mean that particular great liberating event did not happen, led by Moses, nor does it in any way diminish the idea that the divine leans into liberation. The human soul is transcendent, and nature is non-stop “cup runneth over,” exuberant and resilient. If nature is a reflection of the glorious chaotic complexity of the divine, then liberation is holy.
The Christian Testament text called 2nd Peter might not have been written by Peter, but the person who actually wrote it was earnest and faithful, and also flawed, and besides, authorial integrity was a little more fluid back then.
Progressive and Reconstructive Christians take scripture seriously enough to look for the overstory, the story beyond the royalist propaganda that supported the idea of a Davidic monarchy or the transactional faith that funded the lifestyles of the rich and priestly.
Our 4th Sunday in Advent theme is love, and of course it is also Christmas Eve, so I want to spend some time this morning on incarnation as an act of love. And I’ll start by bracketing the two specific Nativity stories, for only two of the four gospels describe the birth of Jesus, and they differ on some important details.
I understand why the early Christians believed Mary had to be a virgin, and I am fine with whatever you decide to believe. I do not need Mary to be a virgin in my system of belief because I don’t believe Jesus saves by being an unblemished sacrifice to a blood thirsty deity.
I do not know or need to know exactly how Jesus may or may not have been divine, and let me assure you, there are many theological rabbit holes there, and that is even before you move from the specifics of Christology and on to Trinitarian theology, where you get to problems like patripassionism, the maybe/maybe not heresy that says that if Jesus is God and Jesus suffered on the cross, then God suffered, which some find completely unacceptable.
I am more interested, as I noted earlier, in the overstory. The details, the tools of historic context and the study of religion, those are just rungs on the ladder that get me to that overstory sort of like that planned Canopy Walk at Tanglewood Bill Bishop described during a recent adult forum. The overstory of the Christian testament is summarized in the concept of Emmanuel, God-with-us, which I read as a love story.
We can look at the formation of religion in the ancient Near East through the lens of archeology and anthropology. We know that the Greeks constructed a pantheon of gods who were all too human, murderous and petty. The Egyptians created a pantheon of gods who were as much animal as human, with the exception of a brief foray into monotheism under Akhenaten. The ancient Sumerian king Gilgamesh was sometimes worshipped as a god, and we would see this deification of rulers, sometimes dead and sometimes madmen like the Roman despot Caligula, throughout the ancient period.
The Israelite people, possibly drawing on their exposure to monotheism from Egypt, constructed a religious culture that was in many ways radical. Though they dabbled in polytheism far longer than the texts suggest, they slowly moved toward an ethical monotheism, to the idea that there was only one god, and that that god, Yahweh, was good, to their tribe in particular, and eventually through their tribe to the whole of humankind.
They forbid depictions of Yahweh, forever drawing a line between Creator and created.
The formative years of the Israelite culture were marked by confederation, and this would remain at the heart of their self-understanding. This was a political innovation, one that set them apart. Their only king was Yahweh, and when military pressure from the Philistines forced them into centralization, first under the warlord Saul, then under the usurper David, they always considered the human king suspect, and preserved stories of royal failure and evil kings. They revered the prophets, so often antagonists questioning royal authority.
The idea that Jesus was somehow God was offensive, for it undermined their core belief that God was inherently other, of a different category than humankind, and that Jesus may or may not have been somehow a claimant to a Davidic throne wasn’t as powerful as we think. We tend to read everything in Hebrew Scripture through the lens of later Christian theology, backwards not forwards.
For me, the act of love is in the overstory, in the idea that holy mystery manifested itself in flesh, for incarnation means to become flesh, sharing a root with words like carnivore and carnal.
Incarnation is “meating” God with an “ea.” And while some see this as a precursor to a bloody atonement, I see it as the dude who walks around Galilee, who experiences what we experience, who is moved to compassion, who gets it wrong sometimes, as he does when he compares the Syro-Phoenecian woman to a dog, who weeps when his friend dies, and who has his doubts in the hours before he is arrested.
It is the experience of God in this story, as just a vulnerable baby, displaced by government mandate, born in a stable because the guestrooms in his clan’s hometown were all full.
So many religions understand the divine as inserting itself into human history, into earthly history, through acts of power, and we have that too at times, in stories like the Exodus. But here, in this overstory of Jesus, we have vulnerability. This is not Gilgamesh on a mighty throne or Zeus disguised as a bull. Tonight we will celebrate a baby.
Love is being with. It really isn’t any more complicated than that. I had to learn that early on in ministry, especially in my required clinical training, for we are do-ers and fixers, but we cannot fix everything, and some things simply cannot be fixed. Sometimes all I could do as an intern chaplain assigned to a lock-down psychiatric unit was to be with, with the patients, with their families, with the staff, in all of the pain and chaos.
God is with, for God so loved the world, for God so loves the world, that God was with us, is with us, this day and always. Emmanuel. Amen.
Christmas Even Homily on the Lucan Nativity Story
The truth is, you’re not really here tonight to hear me. And there is that old joke about sermons turning into hostage situations. But that isn’t quite as funny this year, as there may or may not be hostages still alive in the tunnels under Gaza, as thousands of innocent civilians are slaughtered and countless families grieve.
But Jesus was not born into some Dickensian alternative reality, not even of the Cratchit family variety, an d certainly not of a reformed Ebenezer Scrooge. Things were pretty grim then too, somewhere around five years before we start counting the Common Era, a fact we’ll wrestle with in two weeks.
Tonight, it is just a baby, a young mother, a man who stepped up, some rough characters that smell like sheep, and maybe a drummer boy, God help us, or more accurately, God help that mother and the baby who might be sleeping in the middle of a donkey’s salad, and least until “Pa rum pum pum pum.” And no, I’m not going to do my best Bing and Bowie imitation. Though I totally can pull it off.
The three kings who are not kings and of unknown quantity are still on the road.
But maybe that space between birth and slaughter is exactly where we are supposed to be. We have this sanitized and simplified Nativity Story, a mash-up of two very different versions of events, with Luke leaning into humility, shepherds and dislocation, a baby born in a stable, and the unknown authors of Matthew leaning into royalty and a new Moses, the baby born at home, honored by Persian astrologers, then fleeing into Egypt like a wounded Palestinian at the Rafah crossing.
Because the truth is, life is not a Hallmark Christmas Movie, as much as we might like it to be. The developer is still going to bulldoze the beloved bookstore, the widowed single-dad is still going to struggle to pay the medical bills for his late wife, and there will be nothing charming about the Winter pageant, blown up when Moms for Liberty have a tantrum over diversity.
We snatch moments of quiet where we can, before the kid with the snare drum shows up. We love the ones we have. We immerse ourselves in angel song and starlight. We break bread and re-gift fruitcakes. We take time out to be fully present, even as we drag the world with us through the holidays. Because God is fully present with us.
This world glamorizes power and greatness, all things big and over the top, stadium tours that create seismic readings, jesters on golden toilets, and Josh Allen and the Bills handing Bill Belichick and the Patriots another loss on New Year’s Eve we can hope.
But Jesus was not born the son of a high priest. He did not lead an army. He loved. He ate with broken people. He touched those considered outcast and unclean. He offered a simple truth. God is here. This is the kingdom.
This is the kingdom. And if the holy can be found sleeping in a manger in Bethlehem, the holy can be found everywhere, and is. And sometimes, with a little luck and a lot of holy imagination, the beloved bookstore is saved. For unto us, a child is born, and she, and he, is a miracle. Amen.