Isaiah 9:2-7
Luke 2:1-20
For many of us, Christmas Eve just isn’t Christmas Eve until we sing Silent Night by candlelight. Although this hymn was written in 1816 by an Austrian minister, Joseph Mohr it wasn’t put to music until Christmas Eve 1818, when the organ at Mohr’s church broke at the worst possible time: Christmas Eve. Like most churches, the music had been carefully planned and rehearsed, and a broken organ was the last thing anyone had anticipated. In a panic, Mohr took the text he had written two years before and gave it to his organist, Franz Gruber. That day, Gruber composed a simple tune which he played that night on a guitar. (1)
Thanks to the fiasco of a broken organ on Christmas Eve, the world has this beloved Christmas hymn...a hymn that, let’s face it, perpetuates a lie.
Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright. What happened on that night is what has happened multiple times every day since: a woman had a baby. And unless there are some serious drugs involved -- and sometimes even when there are -- childbirth is far from silent. And newborn babies aren’t so quiet, either -- in fact, doctors and nurses start to get really worried when a baby emerges from the dark quiet comfort of the womb and doesn’t start making a ruckus.
But even beyond Mary and Jesus’ cries, Luke’s description of the first Christmas is, simply put, noisy. The shepherds are in the fields when a whole host of angels appear, singing. There couldn’t have been anything silent about that.
We may cherish this hymn’s images of silence and peace, but the reality is, Christ’s entrance into the world was anything but silent or peaceful. But one of the reasons we love this hymn so much, especially on Christmas Eve, is because we so desperately want to come to church on this night and escape the chaos of this season -- the lines, the traffic, the planning, the gathering, the cooking and cleaning and preparing and anticipating. We want to come and hear beautiful music and look at a lovely manger scene and forget, for just a moment, all that isn’t right in our lives and in the world. Regardless of whether that first Christmas night was silent, silence and peace are what we long for tonight.
The problem is, when we do that, we miss the whole point of what we’re celebrating. We risk forgetting that what we are here to celebrate is the incarnation, God taking on human flesh.
The incarnation has always been a controversial idea. In the days of the early church, there were many heated arguments about just exactly how Jesus was both human and divine. One of these arguments was between two theologians, Marcion and Tertullian. Marcion and his followers had a strong belief that God was perfect, immortal, and entirely good. Because of this, the Marcionites really struggled with the idea that God, good and perfect God, would actually become part of our sinful, fallen creation. That seemed to them to be beneath God. So they argued that Jesus wasn’t really human, more that he was a fully divine being who took on humanity kind of like a Halloween costume; it was never really what he was.
On the other side of this debate was Tertullian, who argued vehemently against the so-called Marcionites. Tertullian published a paper in which he urges Marcion to imagine Jesus growing in the womb. Tertullian uses vivid descriptions of body fluid and blood, of a fetus growing in an ever-expanding womb, of a baby born on straw and hay and followed by a messy afterbirth.
Not exactly the bleached-white, porcelain manger scene we usually imagine, is it?
Tertullian wants to make Marcion squirm, and after this gruesome description, he gets personal. “I know you reject this whole idea,” he says, “But how were you born?”
In other words, if we believe that the reality of conception, development, and childbirth are too messy, too pedestrian for God, then we risk believing that we ourselves are too messy for God. (2) And when we think this way, that we are not good enough for God to get involved with, then we come to church thinking that we can only meet God here, where everything is neat and clean, where we wear our best clothes and use our best manners, where the music and the lights and the decorations are meant to inspire us with God’s beauty and goodness. And from here, we’ll go home, back to the messiness of our lives, back to the brokenness of the world, and most of us will leave God here, a clean, silent, sweet, baby boy sleeping in heavenly peace.
For years, John and Joan Leising put a lighted manger scene in front of their home in Buffalo as part of their Christmas decorations. But on Dec. 23, 2005, they looked outside only to discover that the 18-inch tall plastic statue of the baby Jesus was missing from the manger. In its place was a note, that the statue was needed for something and would be returned in three days. But three days passed, then three weeks, months, and half a year. Finally, one morning in late August, John opened the front door to find the statue with another note and a photo album. The album was full of pictures of the Jesus statue taken at various locations all over New York state...in front of Thruway signs, on bridges, at rest stops, and even at a psychiatric center.
Although the whole incident was deeply disturbing to the Leisings, it is a wonderful reminder of what the incarnation is really about, of what this night is about. Yes, it is first and foremost a celebration of God’s incredible love for us, a love so deep and sacrificial that God chose to enter the world as one of us, not as a great king or ruler, but as the child of poor peasants who grew up to be a peasant himself and who reveals to us the true nature of God. But if we leave all that knowledge here at church, if we leave Jesus here in the manger, we have missed the point. We should all be stealing Jesus, taking the Christ child out of the relative peace and safety of the stable and with us into all the messiness of our lives -- the chaos of the holidays with too many presents and too much rich food, the challenges of our relationships with the arguments and uncertainties and old wounds, the fears that -- for all of us -- lurk just beneath the surface of the polished appearance we show the world. Because if Jesus isn’t there, in the messiness of human life -- my life and your life -- then it doesn’t matter at all if Jesus is in the manger, silent or not.
Without a broken organ, we wouldn’t have our beloved Silent Night. And without a broken, messy world, and a first Christmas night that surely was not silent, we would not have a God that stands with us, as one of us, and loves us not just at our Christmas Eve best but in all the messiness of life. So don’t leave Jesus here when you go tonight. Take him with you. After all, that’s why he came. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Robert Morgan, Then Sings My Soul, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2003, p. 93.
2. Thanks to David Lose for making available online the chapter “God con Carne: Incarnation” from Making Sense of the Christian Faith that includes a helpful overview of the debate between Marcion and Tertullian.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
Parting the Curtain (sermon, fourth Sunday of Advent, Dec. 19, 2010)
Isaiah 35:1-10
Matthew 1:18-25
Two weeks ago, we heard Isaiah’s astonishing vision of hope: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks...” Last week we were treated to startling images of peace: “The wolf shall live with the lamb...and a little child shall lead them.” Those passages are probably more familiar to us than today’s, but, familiar or not, with this description of God’s appearance in the midst of wilderness, despair, and fear, Isaiah has outdone himself. It’s hard to imagine how we could improve on the majesty and poetry of this passage. Listen again:
A recent article in the Christian Century describes this time leading up to Christmas as “the numbing season.” As the author puts it: “There are the ceaseless rounds of Christmas parties, each requiring preparation of food and gift-buying, each surfeited with expectations of obligatory Christmas cheer. There is the flood of commerce, requiring a careful parsing of which are the newest and most "necessary" toys or clothes for children and grandchildren. There are the travel and the visits to family, spiked with all the stresses attendant upon such endeavors. Finally (and almost as an afterthought), there are added church responsibilities of nativity programs, Christmas Eve services and so forth.” [For us I would add the cookie sale, the Christmas tea, the Christmas Families projects...] The writer concludes, “No wonder many of us are likely to dread Christmas almost as much as we look forward to it.” (1)
If you think this sounds like an exaggeration, let me assure you, in my experience, it’s not. As hard as we may try to numb ourselves to the pain and dread and grief and, yes, fear, that surfaces for many of us this time of year, I often hear comments at church like, “I’m just not looking forward to the holidays this year.” “I wish we didn’t have to celebrate at all.” “This season is just too hard since...” since Dad died, since I lost my job, since the diagnosis, since my marriage is falling apart.
Lest we think that longing for God in the midst of our pain and despair is a new thing, remember that Isaiah too is speaking to a people in a numbing, wilderness season. And it is into this wilderness, this numbness that Isaiah speaks: “Be strong! Do not fear! Here is your God...God will come...God will come and save you!”
God will come. Hopefully, we believe at least that. In Jesus God came, in the Holy Spirit, God comes to us now; and someday, somehow, Christ will come again. Maybe what we fear the most, though, this time of year, in spite of our faith, is that for all the prophets’ glorious predictions, for all the lovely hymns about the child in the manger, God’s coming won’t change a thing. Our loved ones who died will still be gone, the job lost won’t magically be returned, the diagnosis won’t miraculously be reversed, the severed relationship won’t be restored. Christmas will come, God will come, and we will sing the songs and make the food and exchange the gifts, and our hearts will still be broken.
The preacher John Buchanan suggests that the whole Bible could be distilled into two words: “Fear not.” From the beginning until the end of the biblical story we constantly see human beings who are afraid and hear God, angels, and Jesus telling them they don’t need to be. Every time an angel appears, what’s the first thing they say: “Fear not!” “Do not be afraid!” And yet the shepherds in the fields were “sore afraid” the Bible tells us. Even Jesus’ disciples, who had the luxury of walking and talking and learning from Jesus, were constantly afraid -- that he could not save them from a storm at sea, that he was going to die and leave them alone...and when he did die, they were at first so afraid that they ran away from all the stories of the empty tomb and hid themselves in a locked room. (2)
So maybe instead of having Advent candles that stand for peace, hope, love, and joy, we should designate one for courage. After all, remember the cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz? He was sure that he was a coward because he so often felt afraid. What he didn’t realize was that he displayed courage over and over again by acting in the face of fear. This is the very thing we are called to do this season, to move through Advent, through the pain and fear and numbness, toward the promise of God who is coming to save us.
Years ago, in Alaska, there was a visitors’ center built with the sole purpose of showcasing one of Alaska’s largest and most beautiful glaciers. A whole wall of windows faced the glacier, and huge curtains covered the windows. The idea was that a tour of the visitors center would end in front of the windows. After learning all about the glacier, the curtains would dramatically part and the visitors would get to see the magnificent sheet of ice for themselves.
Sadly, though, the effects of climate changed intervened. The windows are still there and the curtain still parts, but instead of a glacier, visitors see only a three-mile lake of water, much of which came from the glacier melting. (3)
Reading today’s passages together has the same effect. First we hear Isaiah’s dramatic proclamation: “Look! Here is your God! God will come...God will come and save you!” And then the curtain parts and THERE...IS...Joseph, a young man full of fear and despair. The woman he is supposed to marry is pregnant. He knows he isn’t the father. He’s going to take the high road, but because in that culture engagement was a contractual agreement, he’s going to have to officially break the contract, in other words, divorce her. No matter how quietly he does that, it’s a small town. People are going to know, and people are going to talk.
Then, in the middle of one of many nights of fitful sleep, Joseph has an extraordinary dream in which the Lord speaks to him and essentially repeats the words of Isaiah: “Be strong. Do not fear. Look! Here is your God. God is coming to save you...to save everyone.” But in this version, gone is the drama, gone is the transformation of all creation, gone are the blind who see, the deaf who hear, the lame who leap, and the mute who sing. In this version, there is simply a young, pregnant woman, and a young man willing to stake his reputation on a dream. In this version, God is coming not in power and might and glory, but the same way all of do, growing in a woman’s womb. Yes, here is our God, who is coming to save us, but certainly not in the way we might have expected or even hoped.
Near the end of World War II, the Allies gathered together many of the English children who had been orphaned during the war. They provided the children with three meals a day and a bed to sleep in at night. The problem was, the children couldn’t sleep. After all the trauma they had been through -- the bombings, the loss of their parents, hunger and malnutrition, they simply were afraid to close their eyes and go to sleep; after all, who knew what the night might bring. Who knew if they would get to eat again tomorrow. After weeks of this, someone suggested that each child be given a piece of bread at night, a piece they could hold onto while they slept, a tangible reminder that they had eaten today and they would eat again tomorrow, that they could close their eyes, even in the face of all the fear and tragedy around them, they could hold their bread, and close their eyes, and sleep in peace.
A piece of bread. It may not sound like much, but it gave those children the courage they needed to sleep through the night in the face of the fear and uncertainty they faced. Joseph was a faithful Jew. He knew the prophets and the predictions. He trusted that someday God’s Messiah would come to save God’s people. What he got instead was little more than a piece of bread. As Joseph’s hopes for his future crumbled, he got a promise from God that, “it’s not the way you thought I would come, but this is how I am coming to be with you, to be one of you, to save you...to save the world.”
Advent and Christmas do not come each year to take away our fears, they come to offer us something to hold onto that we too might have courage. Look! you who are grieving! Look! you who are afraid of what the future holds. Look! you who struggle to find hope or peace or anything like joy. Look! Here is your God. God is coming...as one of us. To be with us. To stand with us in our pain and grief and fear, and, yes, in our courage. It may not be what we expected, even what we hoped for. But this year, may it be enough. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Rodney Clapp, The Christian Century, Dec. 8, 2010. Synopsis online here.
2. John Buchanan, Journal for Preachers, Vol. 24, No. 1, Advent 2010, p. 11.
3. Barbara R. Rossing, Journeys Through Revelation, 2010-2011 Horizons Bible Study, pp.31-32.
Matthew 1:18-25
Two weeks ago, we heard Isaiah’s astonishing vision of hope: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks...” Last week we were treated to startling images of peace: “The wolf shall live with the lamb...and a little child shall lead them.” Those passages are probably more familiar to us than today’s, but, familiar or not, with this description of God’s appearance in the midst of wilderness, despair, and fear, Isaiah has outdone himself. It’s hard to imagine how we could improve on the majesty and poetry of this passage. Listen again:
The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing...Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.”
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert...And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
A recent article in the Christian Century describes this time leading up to Christmas as “the numbing season.” As the author puts it: “There are the ceaseless rounds of Christmas parties, each requiring preparation of food and gift-buying, each surfeited with expectations of obligatory Christmas cheer. There is the flood of commerce, requiring a careful parsing of which are the newest and most "necessary" toys or clothes for children and grandchildren. There are the travel and the visits to family, spiked with all the stresses attendant upon such endeavors. Finally (and almost as an afterthought), there are added church responsibilities of nativity programs, Christmas Eve services and so forth.” [For us I would add the cookie sale, the Christmas tea, the Christmas Families projects...] The writer concludes, “No wonder many of us are likely to dread Christmas almost as much as we look forward to it.” (1)
If you think this sounds like an exaggeration, let me assure you, in my experience, it’s not. As hard as we may try to numb ourselves to the pain and dread and grief and, yes, fear, that surfaces for many of us this time of year, I often hear comments at church like, “I’m just not looking forward to the holidays this year.” “I wish we didn’t have to celebrate at all.” “This season is just too hard since...” since Dad died, since I lost my job, since the diagnosis, since my marriage is falling apart.
Lest we think that longing for God in the midst of our pain and despair is a new thing, remember that Isaiah too is speaking to a people in a numbing, wilderness season. And it is into this wilderness, this numbness that Isaiah speaks: “Be strong! Do not fear! Here is your God...God will come...God will come and save you!”
God will come. Hopefully, we believe at least that. In Jesus God came, in the Holy Spirit, God comes to us now; and someday, somehow, Christ will come again. Maybe what we fear the most, though, this time of year, in spite of our faith, is that for all the prophets’ glorious predictions, for all the lovely hymns about the child in the manger, God’s coming won’t change a thing. Our loved ones who died will still be gone, the job lost won’t magically be returned, the diagnosis won’t miraculously be reversed, the severed relationship won’t be restored. Christmas will come, God will come, and we will sing the songs and make the food and exchange the gifts, and our hearts will still be broken.
The preacher John Buchanan suggests that the whole Bible could be distilled into two words: “Fear not.” From the beginning until the end of the biblical story we constantly see human beings who are afraid and hear God, angels, and Jesus telling them they don’t need to be. Every time an angel appears, what’s the first thing they say: “Fear not!” “Do not be afraid!” And yet the shepherds in the fields were “sore afraid” the Bible tells us. Even Jesus’ disciples, who had the luxury of walking and talking and learning from Jesus, were constantly afraid -- that he could not save them from a storm at sea, that he was going to die and leave them alone...and when he did die, they were at first so afraid that they ran away from all the stories of the empty tomb and hid themselves in a locked room. (2)
So maybe instead of having Advent candles that stand for peace, hope, love, and joy, we should designate one for courage. After all, remember the cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz? He was sure that he was a coward because he so often felt afraid. What he didn’t realize was that he displayed courage over and over again by acting in the face of fear. This is the very thing we are called to do this season, to move through Advent, through the pain and fear and numbness, toward the promise of God who is coming to save us.
Years ago, in Alaska, there was a visitors’ center built with the sole purpose of showcasing one of Alaska’s largest and most beautiful glaciers. A whole wall of windows faced the glacier, and huge curtains covered the windows. The idea was that a tour of the visitors center would end in front of the windows. After learning all about the glacier, the curtains would dramatically part and the visitors would get to see the magnificent sheet of ice for themselves.
Sadly, though, the effects of climate changed intervened. The windows are still there and the curtain still parts, but instead of a glacier, visitors see only a three-mile lake of water, much of which came from the glacier melting. (3)
Reading today’s passages together has the same effect. First we hear Isaiah’s dramatic proclamation: “Look! Here is your God! God will come...God will come and save you!” And then the curtain parts and THERE...IS...Joseph, a young man full of fear and despair. The woman he is supposed to marry is pregnant. He knows he isn’t the father. He’s going to take the high road, but because in that culture engagement was a contractual agreement, he’s going to have to officially break the contract, in other words, divorce her. No matter how quietly he does that, it’s a small town. People are going to know, and people are going to talk.
Then, in the middle of one of many nights of fitful sleep, Joseph has an extraordinary dream in which the Lord speaks to him and essentially repeats the words of Isaiah: “Be strong. Do not fear. Look! Here is your God. God is coming to save you...to save everyone.” But in this version, gone is the drama, gone is the transformation of all creation, gone are the blind who see, the deaf who hear, the lame who leap, and the mute who sing. In this version, there is simply a young, pregnant woman, and a young man willing to stake his reputation on a dream. In this version, God is coming not in power and might and glory, but the same way all of do, growing in a woman’s womb. Yes, here is our God, who is coming to save us, but certainly not in the way we might have expected or even hoped.
Near the end of World War II, the Allies gathered together many of the English children who had been orphaned during the war. They provided the children with three meals a day and a bed to sleep in at night. The problem was, the children couldn’t sleep. After all the trauma they had been through -- the bombings, the loss of their parents, hunger and malnutrition, they simply were afraid to close their eyes and go to sleep; after all, who knew what the night might bring. Who knew if they would get to eat again tomorrow. After weeks of this, someone suggested that each child be given a piece of bread at night, a piece they could hold onto while they slept, a tangible reminder that they had eaten today and they would eat again tomorrow, that they could close their eyes, even in the face of all the fear and tragedy around them, they could hold their bread, and close their eyes, and sleep in peace.
A piece of bread. It may not sound like much, but it gave those children the courage they needed to sleep through the night in the face of the fear and uncertainty they faced. Joseph was a faithful Jew. He knew the prophets and the predictions. He trusted that someday God’s Messiah would come to save God’s people. What he got instead was little more than a piece of bread. As Joseph’s hopes for his future crumbled, he got a promise from God that, “it’s not the way you thought I would come, but this is how I am coming to be with you, to be one of you, to save you...to save the world.”
Advent and Christmas do not come each year to take away our fears, they come to offer us something to hold onto that we too might have courage. Look! you who are grieving! Look! you who are afraid of what the future holds. Look! you who struggle to find hope or peace or anything like joy. Look! Here is your God. God is coming...as one of us. To be with us. To stand with us in our pain and grief and fear, and, yes, in our courage. It may not be what we expected, even what we hoped for. But this year, may it be enough. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Rodney Clapp, The Christian Century, Dec. 8, 2010. Synopsis online here.
2. John Buchanan, Journal for Preachers, Vol. 24, No. 1, Advent 2010, p. 11.
3. Barbara R. Rossing, Journeys Through Revelation, 2010-2011 Horizons Bible Study, pp.31-32.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
The Long Pause (sermon, 3rd Sunday of Advent, Dec. 12, 2010)
Isaiah 11:1-10
Romans 15:4-13
Imagine a Christmas pageant put on by kindergartners. There they are, a group of five and six year-olds, fidgeting on risers, pulling at their Christmas collars, but with beaming faces belting out the words to their song, words from Isaiah: “You be the lion strong and wild, I’ll be the lamb, meek and mild; we’ll live together happily, ‘cause that’s how it ought to be.”
Children aren’t the only ones whose eyes light up when they imagine a world at peace. Peace is something human beings have always longed for -- peace in our families, communities, nations, world. The Quaker preacher and artist Edward Hicks was so captivated by the vision of peace described by Isaiah that he painted more than one hundred versions of it. He put all the animals together: the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and kid, the calf and the lion, and a child among them. All of the animals have wide-open eyes that look almost human. They also look somewhat startled, as if this change in their reality from relationships of predator and prey to mutuality and respect has surprised them as much as anyone.
This vision of peace is certainly surprising, but no more so than the prediction that begins this passage -- that from a devastated wasteland of tree stumps, new life will grow: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of its roots.” Just before this passage, at the end of chapter 10, Isaiah describes a devastated battlefield, one that God has taken an ax to and cut down all the powers of the day which are depicted as towering trees. Nothing is left of Israel or its enemies except a mass of decaying stumps.
And yet, from one of those stumps, the stump that represents God’s people, Isaiah sees something: a tiny, fragile green shoot, a sign of new life. This is no ordinary crocus, improbably poking up through the late winter snow; this tiny sign of life is rooted in the lineage of Jesse, the father of David, Israel’s greatest king. Out of all the suffering and devastation God’s people have known, Isaiah declares there will be a new day, a new ruler, one greater than the people have yet seen.
“He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.” In other words, this new ruler will do what God’s people have failed to do: he will look out for the least and the lost, he will not judge as we human beings inevitably judge -- by the way people look or the way people talk -- instead he will see the suffering of the poor and he will be their protector, bringing them into the family of God.
This week I had a training session with the new elders and deacons and as we talked about our faith journeys some of us answered the question, “What do you love about Jesus?” Here are some of the answers: “I love how Jesus turned everything upside-down.” “I love how Jesus doesn’t judge people the way we do but loves even those we find hard to love.” “I love how Jesus challenges authority.” All of these answers speak to who we believe Jesus to be: God here on earth, reaching out to the least and the lost, protecting the poor and the downtrodden, reminding all people of their status as beloved children of the one true God.
It’s probably hard to say what’s harder for us to imagine: a truly righteous ruler who looks out for those who cannot fend for themselves, or peace in the animal kingdom. A woman watching that kindergarten Christmas pageant was moved to tears as those children sang with passion and idealism about the lion and the lamb peacefully coexisting. She cried, not because of the beauty of what they described, but because she could sense her own resistance to believing that such a thing could possibly happen: “As I watched that throng of kindergartners singing,” she wrote later, “something immensely powerful washed over me; it was like a monsoon of hope and sadness, all these children so certain the world ought to be this way, and me so certain of all the ways it isn’t. It moved me to tears, really; a jumbled mix of bittersweet tears — Advent tears — for that long pause between what is and what should be, what is and what we Jesus-followers believe will be.” (1)
In his book Peace, Walter Brueggemann expresses the same kind of skepticism about the picture Isaiah describes: “Unheard of and unimaginable!” he writes, “All these images of unity sound to me so abnormal they are not worth reflecting on. But then I look again and notice something else. [Isaiah] means to say that in the new age, these are the normal things. And the effect...is to expose the real abnormalities of life, which we have taken for granted. We have lived with things abnormal so long that we have gotten used to them and we think they are normal.” (2)
Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Our knowledge tells us that the peace Isaiah describes in this text is impossible. But in this season of Advent -- this long pause during which we wait on tiptoe for the promises of God to be revealed again -- God calls us to let go of what we think we know and use our imaginations to envision a whole new normal, to look around and see that the things we take for granted don’t have to be that way.
In our passages from Isaiah from Romans, we receive two images of what this new normal might look like. And, as theologian Stanley Hauerwas argues, if we really want to change ourselves or the world, acquiring the right image is far more important than diligently exercising our willpower. (3) In addition to Isaiah’s images of a righteous ruler and the peaceable kingdom, the apostle Paul offers us another image of a new normal in the passage we heard today from Romans. “May God...grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” How do we do that, you ask? Paul answers: “Welcome one another...just as Christ has welcomed you...”
It may sound like Paul is asking us to do the impossible -- live in harmony with one another, not just those who mildly irritate us, but those who deeply offend us by the ways their views and beliefs and lifestyles clash with ours. It may sound impossible, but the reason Paul calls us to extend that kind of radical hospitality and acceptance is because that is precisely what Jesus did...he was born into the devastated remnant of God’s chosen people and broke God’s promises wide open so that they included, not just the Jews, but everyone, all the children of the earth, the poor, the rich, the righteous, the sinner, you, me, everyone.
That God could extend God’s love and mercy and grace to all people was once as impossible for people to imagine as a wolf snuggling up to a lamb or a small child playing safely by the den of a poisonous snake. In this long pause of Advent while we wait, God calls us to use our imaginations to envision how what seems so impossible could become possible, that we could coexist with our worst enemies, in peace.
Peter Storey was the former Bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa and President of the South African Council of Churches. He tells of a land where the impossible eventually become possible, where sworn enemies imagined themselves to a place of peace.
Storey writes: “One of our important tasks in South Africa’s long struggle for liberation was to help people imagine what they found unimaginable: a South Africa where black and white lived together hand in hand and at peace. It was crucial for the church to incarnate that dream in the life of the Christian community so we could say to an unwilling nation, “There! That is what we mean when we talk about God’s future for South Africa! That is the new South Africa!”
He then tells this story: Some of the most powerful moments in my life have been of Communion in places where people have been divided from one another. I once received a phone call in the early hours of the morning telling me that one of my black clergy in a very racist town . . . had been arrested by the secret police. I got up and drove out there, picked up another minister, and then went looking for him. When we found the prison where he was and demanded to see him, we were accompanied by a large white Afrikaner guard to a little room where we found Ike Moloabi sitting on a bench wearing a sweatsuit and looking quite terrified. He had been pulled out of bed in the early hours of a freezing winter morning and dragged off like that.
I said to the guard, “We are going to have Communion,” and I took out of my pocket a little chalice and a tiny little bottle of Communion wine and some bread in a plastic sachet. I spread my pocket handkerchief on the bench between us and made the table ready, and we began the Liturgy. When it was time to give the Invitation, I said to the guard, “This table is open to all, so if you would like to share with us, please feel free to do so.” This must have touched some place in his religious self, because he took the line of least resistance and nodded rather curtly. I consecrated the bread and the wine and noticed that Ike was beginning to come to life a little. He could see what was happening here. Then I handed the bread and the cup to Ike because one always gives the Sacrament first to the least of Christ’s brothers or sisters—the ones that are hurting the most—and Ike ate and drank.
Next must surely be the stranger in your midst, so I offered bread and the cup to the guard. You don’t need to know too much about South Africa to understand what white Afrikaner racists felt about letting their lips touch a cup from which a black person had just drunk. The guard was in crisis: he would either have to overcome his prejudice or refuse the means of grace. After a long pause, he took the cup and sipped from it, and for the first time I saw a glimmer of a smile on Ike’s face. Then I took something of a liberty with the truth and said, “In the Methodist liturgy, we always hold hands when we say the grace,” and very stiffly, the ward reached out his hand and took Ike’s, and there we were in a little circle, holding hands, while I said the ancient words of benediction, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all.” . . . From that moment the power equation between that guard and Ike was changed forever. God’s shalom had broken through at that makeshift Table. (4)
Advent is God’s gift to us, a long pause during which we wait and anticipate and imagine and participate in the impossible being made possible: righteousness and justice for all, harmony among enemies, peace on earth, good will toward all. May you know God’s peace as you wait and may you find ways, no matter how small they may seem, to extend that peace to one of God’s children you could not imagine living in harmony with. When you do, you will satisfy Paul’s command that we welcome one another as Christ has welcomed even us. You will glorify God and bring God’s presence here on earth again, as surely as it arrived in the manger that very first Christmas night, a night when all creation paused and knew peace. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Danielle Shroyer, online here.
2. Quoted by Kate Huey in her reflections on the lectionary passages online here.
3. Eugene Peterson summarizes Hauerwas’ argument in his book Under the Unpredictable Planet, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1994, p. 6.
4. Calum McLeod relates this story in his sermon “The Teachable Kingdom,” at the Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, IL, November 28, 2010. The story is quoted from Peter Storey’s article “Table Manners for Peacebuilders” in Conflict and Communion, pp. 61-62.
Romans 15:4-13
Imagine a Christmas pageant put on by kindergartners. There they are, a group of five and six year-olds, fidgeting on risers, pulling at their Christmas collars, but with beaming faces belting out the words to their song, words from Isaiah: “You be the lion strong and wild, I’ll be the lamb, meek and mild; we’ll live together happily, ‘cause that’s how it ought to be.”
Children aren’t the only ones whose eyes light up when they imagine a world at peace. Peace is something human beings have always longed for -- peace in our families, communities, nations, world. The Quaker preacher and artist Edward Hicks was so captivated by the vision of peace described by Isaiah that he painted more than one hundred versions of it. He put all the animals together: the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and kid, the calf and the lion, and a child among them. All of the animals have wide-open eyes that look almost human. They also look somewhat startled, as if this change in their reality from relationships of predator and prey to mutuality and respect has surprised them as much as anyone.
This vision of peace is certainly surprising, but no more so than the prediction that begins this passage -- that from a devastated wasteland of tree stumps, new life will grow: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of its roots.” Just before this passage, at the end of chapter 10, Isaiah describes a devastated battlefield, one that God has taken an ax to and cut down all the powers of the day which are depicted as towering trees. Nothing is left of Israel or its enemies except a mass of decaying stumps.
And yet, from one of those stumps, the stump that represents God’s people, Isaiah sees something: a tiny, fragile green shoot, a sign of new life. This is no ordinary crocus, improbably poking up through the late winter snow; this tiny sign of life is rooted in the lineage of Jesse, the father of David, Israel’s greatest king. Out of all the suffering and devastation God’s people have known, Isaiah declares there will be a new day, a new ruler, one greater than the people have yet seen.
“He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.” In other words, this new ruler will do what God’s people have failed to do: he will look out for the least and the lost, he will not judge as we human beings inevitably judge -- by the way people look or the way people talk -- instead he will see the suffering of the poor and he will be their protector, bringing them into the family of God.
This week I had a training session with the new elders and deacons and as we talked about our faith journeys some of us answered the question, “What do you love about Jesus?” Here are some of the answers: “I love how Jesus turned everything upside-down.” “I love how Jesus doesn’t judge people the way we do but loves even those we find hard to love.” “I love how Jesus challenges authority.” All of these answers speak to who we believe Jesus to be: God here on earth, reaching out to the least and the lost, protecting the poor and the downtrodden, reminding all people of their status as beloved children of the one true God.
It’s probably hard to say what’s harder for us to imagine: a truly righteous ruler who looks out for those who cannot fend for themselves, or peace in the animal kingdom. A woman watching that kindergarten Christmas pageant was moved to tears as those children sang with passion and idealism about the lion and the lamb peacefully coexisting. She cried, not because of the beauty of what they described, but because she could sense her own resistance to believing that such a thing could possibly happen: “As I watched that throng of kindergartners singing,” she wrote later, “something immensely powerful washed over me; it was like a monsoon of hope and sadness, all these children so certain the world ought to be this way, and me so certain of all the ways it isn’t. It moved me to tears, really; a jumbled mix of bittersweet tears — Advent tears — for that long pause between what is and what should be, what is and what we Jesus-followers believe will be.” (1)
In his book Peace, Walter Brueggemann expresses the same kind of skepticism about the picture Isaiah describes: “Unheard of and unimaginable!” he writes, “All these images of unity sound to me so abnormal they are not worth reflecting on. But then I look again and notice something else. [Isaiah] means to say that in the new age, these are the normal things. And the effect...is to expose the real abnormalities of life, which we have taken for granted. We have lived with things abnormal so long that we have gotten used to them and we think they are normal.” (2)
Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Our knowledge tells us that the peace Isaiah describes in this text is impossible. But in this season of Advent -- this long pause during which we wait on tiptoe for the promises of God to be revealed again -- God calls us to let go of what we think we know and use our imaginations to envision a whole new normal, to look around and see that the things we take for granted don’t have to be that way.
In our passages from Isaiah from Romans, we receive two images of what this new normal might look like. And, as theologian Stanley Hauerwas argues, if we really want to change ourselves or the world, acquiring the right image is far more important than diligently exercising our willpower. (3) In addition to Isaiah’s images of a righteous ruler and the peaceable kingdom, the apostle Paul offers us another image of a new normal in the passage we heard today from Romans. “May God...grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” How do we do that, you ask? Paul answers: “Welcome one another...just as Christ has welcomed you...”
It may sound like Paul is asking us to do the impossible -- live in harmony with one another, not just those who mildly irritate us, but those who deeply offend us by the ways their views and beliefs and lifestyles clash with ours. It may sound impossible, but the reason Paul calls us to extend that kind of radical hospitality and acceptance is because that is precisely what Jesus did...he was born into the devastated remnant of God’s chosen people and broke God’s promises wide open so that they included, not just the Jews, but everyone, all the children of the earth, the poor, the rich, the righteous, the sinner, you, me, everyone.
That God could extend God’s love and mercy and grace to all people was once as impossible for people to imagine as a wolf snuggling up to a lamb or a small child playing safely by the den of a poisonous snake. In this long pause of Advent while we wait, God calls us to use our imaginations to envision how what seems so impossible could become possible, that we could coexist with our worst enemies, in peace.
Peter Storey was the former Bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa and President of the South African Council of Churches. He tells of a land where the impossible eventually become possible, where sworn enemies imagined themselves to a place of peace.
Storey writes: “One of our important tasks in South Africa’s long struggle for liberation was to help people imagine what they found unimaginable: a South Africa where black and white lived together hand in hand and at peace. It was crucial for the church to incarnate that dream in the life of the Christian community so we could say to an unwilling nation, “There! That is what we mean when we talk about God’s future for South Africa! That is the new South Africa!”
He then tells this story: Some of the most powerful moments in my life have been of Communion in places where people have been divided from one another. I once received a phone call in the early hours of the morning telling me that one of my black clergy in a very racist town . . . had been arrested by the secret police. I got up and drove out there, picked up another minister, and then went looking for him. When we found the prison where he was and demanded to see him, we were accompanied by a large white Afrikaner guard to a little room where we found Ike Moloabi sitting on a bench wearing a sweatsuit and looking quite terrified. He had been pulled out of bed in the early hours of a freezing winter morning and dragged off like that.
I said to the guard, “We are going to have Communion,” and I took out of my pocket a little chalice and a tiny little bottle of Communion wine and some bread in a plastic sachet. I spread my pocket handkerchief on the bench between us and made the table ready, and we began the Liturgy. When it was time to give the Invitation, I said to the guard, “This table is open to all, so if you would like to share with us, please feel free to do so.” This must have touched some place in his religious self, because he took the line of least resistance and nodded rather curtly. I consecrated the bread and the wine and noticed that Ike was beginning to come to life a little. He could see what was happening here. Then I handed the bread and the cup to Ike because one always gives the Sacrament first to the least of Christ’s brothers or sisters—the ones that are hurting the most—and Ike ate and drank.
Next must surely be the stranger in your midst, so I offered bread and the cup to the guard. You don’t need to know too much about South Africa to understand what white Afrikaner racists felt about letting their lips touch a cup from which a black person had just drunk. The guard was in crisis: he would either have to overcome his prejudice or refuse the means of grace. After a long pause, he took the cup and sipped from it, and for the first time I saw a glimmer of a smile on Ike’s face. Then I took something of a liberty with the truth and said, “In the Methodist liturgy, we always hold hands when we say the grace,” and very stiffly, the ward reached out his hand and took Ike’s, and there we were in a little circle, holding hands, while I said the ancient words of benediction, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all.” . . . From that moment the power equation between that guard and Ike was changed forever. God’s shalom had broken through at that makeshift Table. (4)
Advent is God’s gift to us, a long pause during which we wait and anticipate and imagine and participate in the impossible being made possible: righteousness and justice for all, harmony among enemies, peace on earth, good will toward all. May you know God’s peace as you wait and may you find ways, no matter how small they may seem, to extend that peace to one of God’s children you could not imagine living in harmony with. When you do, you will satisfy Paul’s command that we welcome one another as Christ has welcomed even us. You will glorify God and bring God’s presence here on earth again, as surely as it arrived in the manger that very first Christmas night, a night when all creation paused and knew peace. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Danielle Shroyer, online here.
2. Quoted by Kate Huey in her reflections on the lectionary passages online here.
3. Eugene Peterson summarizes Hauerwas’ argument in his book Under the Unpredictable Planet, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1994, p. 6.
4. Calum McLeod relates this story in his sermon “The Teachable Kingdom,” at the Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, IL, November 28, 2010. The story is quoted from Peter Storey’s article “Table Manners for Peacebuilders” in Conflict and Communion, pp. 61-62.
Monday, December 6, 2010
There Will Come a Day
Isaiah 2:1-5
It was the summer of 1969 and the creators of the children’s television show Sesame Street were just six weeks away from the air date of the first episode. To make sure they had a product that was going to be successful, the producers created five full-length episodes and showed them to groups of preschoolers around the city of Philadelphia. They wanted see how well the show held the attention of its intended audience.
But right away, there were problems. When the show was originally created, the writers and producers followed the advice of child psychologists who said they needed to separate the fantasy elements of the show from the real elements. When there were real human beings on the screen, the talking puppets should be nowhere in sight. In these test runs Muppets were filmed interacting only with other Muppets, and the street scenes showed only real adults and children. The psychologists were worried that mixing fantasy and reality would be misleading to the children watching the show.
The problem was, when the first episodes of Sesame Street were shown to groups of preschoolers in Philadelphia, the children lost interest in the show every time there was a street scene with only real people. Levels of attention would increase again when the Muppets came back on, but the producers knew the show would never be successful if the attention of its audience waxed and waned like that. So they defied the psychologists. They created puppets that could walk and talk and interact with human beings on the street and they re-shot all the street scenes. And that’s how Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, and Snuffalupagos were born. (1)
Spend any time around young children and it becomes obvious that they have an innate capacity to mix fantasy and reality. They accept without question books and movies whose main characters are talking animals or fantastical creatures that could never exist in the so-called “real world.” But there comes a time when they start to question -- what is real? what is pretend? And how can they figure out the difference?
The image Isaiah paints in our reading today sounds wonderful: the house of the Lord elevated on a mountain above all other mountains; people from all over the world and every nation peacefully traveling towards it; the ringing sound, not of jingle bells, but of metal weapons being pounded and reshaped into productive tools of agriculture. But most of us are way past the point at which we view such an image as anything less than a fantasy. Sure, it’s a nice idea, but how can we possibly take it seriously? How can this picture Isaiah paints ever be a reality?
One of the reasons we have such a hard time taking the prophet’s words seriously is that this Advent season feels no different than any other. Globally and nationally, things look disastrous. Wars and conflicts seem never-ending, politicians won’t work together to solve problems, citizens cast blame on everyone but themselves, the economic recovery has stalled, and environmental disasters threaten our present and future way of life. For many of us, things at home are no better. There is conflict in our families, fear about the future, and grief that always seems to creep into our hearts and take up residence this time of year, just when we are trying to make it seem like everything is merry and bright.
So it might help us to remember that when Isaiah first spoke these words to the Israelites, things were equally bleak. The world was filled with violence and war. Israel had been conquered and occupied by the frightful Assyrian empire and pretty much everyone from the king on down was shivering in dread and fear, feeling helpless and hopeless.
And yet it is in the face of that very fear and hopelessness that Isaiah speaks this prophecy:
God shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.
Into the darkness of war and uncertainty about the future, Isaiah, God’s prophet, offers God’s people -- then and now -- hope.
A Sunday School class of fifth graders was recently talking about the concept of hope. The kids in the class had a hard time coming up with a definition of hope, but finally they settled on two ideas: hope can either be wishful thinking, or hope is what helps you when you’re down and out. (2) In other words, paradoxical as it might sound, what these fifth graders realized is that hope is most real when we are in despair. We worship a God who, in the very birth of Jesus Christ in a tiny, conflicted, impoverished corner of the world, promised to be with us when we need it most, promised to be with us at those very times when things look the most bleak and hope-less. Viewed that way, the hope we cling to in the midst of the communal and individual struggles of our time is not the fantasy of children, but the reality we are called to proclaim.
Ruby Bridges may have been young, but at six years old she taught a lot of people about the reality of hope in the face of despair. Ruby was one of the first African-American children to integrate the New Orleans public schools. For months, federal marshals had to escort Ruby, every morning and afternoon, through crowds of angry parents hurling insults, racial slurs and violent words at this little girl. Finally, nearly every white family had withdrawn their children from the school. So Ruby went to school by herself for nearly the whole term.
A child psychologist named Robert Coles heard about Ruby and wanted to understand her better, so he spent some time with her and her parents. He also interviewed her teacher, trying to understand how Ruby could have withstood the adversity and abuse thrown at her. This is what her teacher said: “I was standing in the classroom looking out the window. I saw Ruby coming down the street with the federal marshals on both sides of her. The crowd was there shouting as usual. A woman spat at Ruby, but missed. Ruby smiled at her. A man shook his fist at her. Ruby smiled. And then she walked up the steps, and she stopped and turned around and smiled one more time. You know what she told one of those marshals? She told him she prays for those people, the ones in that mob. She prays for them every night before going to sleep.”
Coles asked Ruby directly about her prayers. “Yes,” Ruby said, “I do pray for them.” “Why?” Coles asked. “Why would you pray for people who are so mean to you and say such bad things about you?” “Because Mama said I should,” Ruby responded. “I go to church. I go to church every Sunday, and we’re told to pray for people, even bad people. Mama says it’s true. My minister says the same thing. ‘We don’t have to worry,’ he says. He came to our house and he says, ‘God is watching over us.’ He says if I forgive the people and smile at them and pray for them, God will keep a good eye on everything and he’ll protect us.”
Coles asked if Ruby thought the minister was right. “Oh, yes,” Ruby said. And then she explained, “I’m sure God knows what is happening. God’s got a lot to worry about, but there’s bad trouble here. God can’t help but notice. He may not do anything right now, but there will come a day, like they say in church, there will come a day. You can count on it. That’s what they say in church.” (3)
There will come a day. That’s what we say here in church. Perhaps even more importantly, that’s what the Bible promises, here in Isaiah and throughout Scripture. There will come a day.
As we journey deeper into Advent and closer to Christmas we have a choice. We can put up decorations, cook and bake, go to parties, and buy gifts as a means of constructing a fantasy -- if only for this season -- that everything in the world and in our lives is fine. Or we can do all those things in a way that proclaims our deep hope, our firm belief that there will come a day when all the pain and grief and violence in the world is transformed into peace and harmony and the house of God towers over everything else in the world. We proclaim this now, in this season of Advent, because we believe that in the birth of Jesus Christ God does something completely new, something that redefines reality for us, something that proves to us that no matter how bleak things seem, God is with us.
And so we can come together to this table, proclaiming our faith as we receive the feast God offers. Today we also have an opportunity to receive prayers for healing and wholeness, for ourselves or for someone we know. We do this to as a reminder that we can bring our deepest pain and sorrow to God, whatever is within us that God already sees, already forgives, already accepts, already loves. In the face of it all, we feast, we pray, not in denial, but with hope. As Ruby Bridges says, there’s bad trouble here, but God can’t help but notice...and act. So we act too, proclaiming our hope in Emmanuel, God with us, proclaiming in the midst of our despair the hope, even the sure and certain belief, that there will come a day. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. from an online excerpt of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, Back Bay Books, 2002. Read it here.
2. As recounted by David Lose in the Sermon Brainwave podcast for Dec. 5, online here.
3. Quoted in a sermon entitled “Peace Is More Than a Christmas Wish” by the Rev. Dr. P.C. Ennis, Trinity Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, GA, Dec. 9, 2007.
It was the summer of 1969 and the creators of the children’s television show Sesame Street were just six weeks away from the air date of the first episode. To make sure they had a product that was going to be successful, the producers created five full-length episodes and showed them to groups of preschoolers around the city of Philadelphia. They wanted see how well the show held the attention of its intended audience.
But right away, there were problems. When the show was originally created, the writers and producers followed the advice of child psychologists who said they needed to separate the fantasy elements of the show from the real elements. When there were real human beings on the screen, the talking puppets should be nowhere in sight. In these test runs Muppets were filmed interacting only with other Muppets, and the street scenes showed only real adults and children. The psychologists were worried that mixing fantasy and reality would be misleading to the children watching the show.
The problem was, when the first episodes of Sesame Street were shown to groups of preschoolers in Philadelphia, the children lost interest in the show every time there was a street scene with only real people. Levels of attention would increase again when the Muppets came back on, but the producers knew the show would never be successful if the attention of its audience waxed and waned like that. So they defied the psychologists. They created puppets that could walk and talk and interact with human beings on the street and they re-shot all the street scenes. And that’s how Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, and Snuffalupagos were born. (1)
Spend any time around young children and it becomes obvious that they have an innate capacity to mix fantasy and reality. They accept without question books and movies whose main characters are talking animals or fantastical creatures that could never exist in the so-called “real world.” But there comes a time when they start to question -- what is real? what is pretend? And how can they figure out the difference?
The image Isaiah paints in our reading today sounds wonderful: the house of the Lord elevated on a mountain above all other mountains; people from all over the world and every nation peacefully traveling towards it; the ringing sound, not of jingle bells, but of metal weapons being pounded and reshaped into productive tools of agriculture. But most of us are way past the point at which we view such an image as anything less than a fantasy. Sure, it’s a nice idea, but how can we possibly take it seriously? How can this picture Isaiah paints ever be a reality?
One of the reasons we have such a hard time taking the prophet’s words seriously is that this Advent season feels no different than any other. Globally and nationally, things look disastrous. Wars and conflicts seem never-ending, politicians won’t work together to solve problems, citizens cast blame on everyone but themselves, the economic recovery has stalled, and environmental disasters threaten our present and future way of life. For many of us, things at home are no better. There is conflict in our families, fear about the future, and grief that always seems to creep into our hearts and take up residence this time of year, just when we are trying to make it seem like everything is merry and bright.
So it might help us to remember that when Isaiah first spoke these words to the Israelites, things were equally bleak. The world was filled with violence and war. Israel had been conquered and occupied by the frightful Assyrian empire and pretty much everyone from the king on down was shivering in dread and fear, feeling helpless and hopeless.
And yet it is in the face of that very fear and hopelessness that Isaiah speaks this prophecy:
God shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.
Into the darkness of war and uncertainty about the future, Isaiah, God’s prophet, offers God’s people -- then and now -- hope.
A Sunday School class of fifth graders was recently talking about the concept of hope. The kids in the class had a hard time coming up with a definition of hope, but finally they settled on two ideas: hope can either be wishful thinking, or hope is what helps you when you’re down and out. (2) In other words, paradoxical as it might sound, what these fifth graders realized is that hope is most real when we are in despair. We worship a God who, in the very birth of Jesus Christ in a tiny, conflicted, impoverished corner of the world, promised to be with us when we need it most, promised to be with us at those very times when things look the most bleak and hope-less. Viewed that way, the hope we cling to in the midst of the communal and individual struggles of our time is not the fantasy of children, but the reality we are called to proclaim.
Ruby Bridges may have been young, but at six years old she taught a lot of people about the reality of hope in the face of despair. Ruby was one of the first African-American children to integrate the New Orleans public schools. For months, federal marshals had to escort Ruby, every morning and afternoon, through crowds of angry parents hurling insults, racial slurs and violent words at this little girl. Finally, nearly every white family had withdrawn their children from the school. So Ruby went to school by herself for nearly the whole term.
A child psychologist named Robert Coles heard about Ruby and wanted to understand her better, so he spent some time with her and her parents. He also interviewed her teacher, trying to understand how Ruby could have withstood the adversity and abuse thrown at her. This is what her teacher said: “I was standing in the classroom looking out the window. I saw Ruby coming down the street with the federal marshals on both sides of her. The crowd was there shouting as usual. A woman spat at Ruby, but missed. Ruby smiled at her. A man shook his fist at her. Ruby smiled. And then she walked up the steps, and she stopped and turned around and smiled one more time. You know what she told one of those marshals? She told him she prays for those people, the ones in that mob. She prays for them every night before going to sleep.”
Coles asked Ruby directly about her prayers. “Yes,” Ruby said, “I do pray for them.” “Why?” Coles asked. “Why would you pray for people who are so mean to you and say such bad things about you?” “Because Mama said I should,” Ruby responded. “I go to church. I go to church every Sunday, and we’re told to pray for people, even bad people. Mama says it’s true. My minister says the same thing. ‘We don’t have to worry,’ he says. He came to our house and he says, ‘God is watching over us.’ He says if I forgive the people and smile at them and pray for them, God will keep a good eye on everything and he’ll protect us.”
Coles asked if Ruby thought the minister was right. “Oh, yes,” Ruby said. And then she explained, “I’m sure God knows what is happening. God’s got a lot to worry about, but there’s bad trouble here. God can’t help but notice. He may not do anything right now, but there will come a day, like they say in church, there will come a day. You can count on it. That’s what they say in church.” (3)
There will come a day. That’s what we say here in church. Perhaps even more importantly, that’s what the Bible promises, here in Isaiah and throughout Scripture. There will come a day.
As we journey deeper into Advent and closer to Christmas we have a choice. We can put up decorations, cook and bake, go to parties, and buy gifts as a means of constructing a fantasy -- if only for this season -- that everything in the world and in our lives is fine. Or we can do all those things in a way that proclaims our deep hope, our firm belief that there will come a day when all the pain and grief and violence in the world is transformed into peace and harmony and the house of God towers over everything else in the world. We proclaim this now, in this season of Advent, because we believe that in the birth of Jesus Christ God does something completely new, something that redefines reality for us, something that proves to us that no matter how bleak things seem, God is with us.
And so we can come together to this table, proclaiming our faith as we receive the feast God offers. Today we also have an opportunity to receive prayers for healing and wholeness, for ourselves or for someone we know. We do this to as a reminder that we can bring our deepest pain and sorrow to God, whatever is within us that God already sees, already forgives, already accepts, already loves. In the face of it all, we feast, we pray, not in denial, but with hope. As Ruby Bridges says, there’s bad trouble here, but God can’t help but notice...and act. So we act too, proclaiming our hope in Emmanuel, God with us, proclaiming in the midst of our despair the hope, even the sure and certain belief, that there will come a day. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. from an online excerpt of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, Back Bay Books, 2002. Read it here.
2. As recounted by David Lose in the Sermon Brainwave podcast for Dec. 5, online here.
3. Quoted in a sermon entitled “Peace Is More Than a Christmas Wish” by the Rev. Dr. P.C. Ennis, Trinity Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, GA, Dec. 9, 2007.
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