St. Peter's By The Sea

December 24, 2008 - Christmas Eve

For the last few weeks, Melody and I have received several dozen Christmas cards. They have been sent by friends and family, parishioners, doctors, car dealerships, print companies and charities. We try to put them all up, as I’m sure many of you do, to demonstrate how nice it is to be remembered at this special time of the year. Even the impersonal ones from some business or doctor’s office find a home. Christmas cards sum up in lovely little snippets the themes of the Christmas season, brandishing “love” and “peace” and “joy” in ornate script, paired with images that try to represent those things.

My favorites, though (and for me there is always a “winning card” in every pile), are the ones that come from those friends who have celebrated the birth of a child or children in the past year or so. These are the ones with a picture of a pudgy, mohawked, rosy-cheeked baby, whom their parents want to show off to all their friends and family. I love to pick out which parent the child most closely resembles, and whether or not that’s a good thing (some of my best guy friends should not have been so selfish in passing along their genes to their daughters). You may fall for the tender sentiment of Hallmark cards featuring snowy country villages or angels, but as for me, just give me a chubby, awkward baby picture any day and you’ve got a winner.

When it comes to the birth of a child, we are all romantics. We all have a soft spot for babies and what they represent. A new life, a new hope, innocence coming into this old and tattered world; if there is beauty anywhere, surely it is here. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that we return year after year to church on these cold Christmas nights. It is the one time of the year when the church seems to focus on something that seemingly everyone has a fondness for. It is the time when we get to wrap ourselves up in all our warmest sentiment and leave behind the dark, confusing reality of the world we call home the other 364 days of the year. It is the time when we get to celebrate the nativity, a child being born, many years ago, and yet, like it was just yesterday.

Tonight we heard for the umpteenth time the story of a baby born in an out-of-the-way place to underprepared parents. As it is most often depicted, in our imaginations and in the great majority of art through the centuries, it is a story without shadows or any hint of reality to corrupt its purity. There is no attempt to represent the throes of Mary’s labor or the bloody and howling entrance of the child into the world. In one form or another, the manger always appears as a place of beauty and holiness—much like our own rendition—and never as a cold, cheerless symbol of the world’s indifference. “Away in a manger, no crib for his bed, the little lord Jesus lay down his sweet head; the cattle are lowing, the baby awakes, but little lord Jesus no crying he makes.” Down through the ages there have been countless variations, but the story retains its radiating gleam: not a hair of Mary’s head is out of place. The baby has been washed and dried, the stable swept. Nothing moves. The air is tinged with a golden glow and hums with the sound of angelic voices.

Maybe after 2000+ years this sweet little scene is all we feel we can hold on to anymore. The rest of the world is so hard, so fraught with injustice and grief and struggle, that we clamor for more moments like this one, when the mysterious plans and workings of God are transformed into a scene that we can make sense of. Maybe that is why so many people pack churches all over the world on Christmas Eve, to feel inspired, to feel connected to that great, mysterious God. The rest of the year they feel inexplicably disconnected from God, unable to figure out how to feel God’s presence, or whether it would even matter if they did. So much of who God is and what God does leaves us confused…but this, this night, this story, we get. For this one night, we are able to join with the shepherds as they make their way to the stable and see what all the fuss is about… On this one night, God makes sense, because God comes to us in the most universally lovable, picture perfect form: a newborn baby.

And that’s great—that the universal allure of a baby brings us all here tonight, that the beautiful, idealized image that we have of Christ in a manger makes us feel closer to God. And yet, when we make the story of Christ’s birth into a picture-perfect Christmas card, we miss something. When we focus only on the beautiful, chubby cheeked, cooing baby surrounded by a holy glow, and forget the pain of Mary’s labor, or the dirt of the stable, or the cold draft of the night, then we miss a big part of what God’s coming into this world is all about.

Because God didn’t come into a picture-perfect Christmas card kind of world. God came into the real world, into our world. With all of it’s brokenness and injustice and hurt and fear. The night of Christ’s birth wasn’t perfect, or at least perfect in the scripted, touched up manner of cinema and television. If you have ever witnessed a birth, in all its beauty and violence, then you know that there has never been such a thing as a perfect birth. And despite our best efforts to sentimentalize it, the least perfect place on earth for a birth would be in the confines Luke describes. If I am ever blessed to welcome my own child into the world, I guarantee that it will be among numerous medical personnel in a sanitized environment. Stables and mangers just don’t cut it. Shepherds just really don’t do too well as attending physicians in my estimation. Yes, this was something far below perfect.

And as strange as that seems, that is the hope and joy of Christmas. Not that God was born in a perfect way on a perfect night into a perfect family. But that God came into this world with all of its imperfection and broken ordinariness. And that means that God still comes into this world, and into our lives, no matter how imperfect and broken they are.

Even if you haven’t swept out the stable, God will still show up. Even if you don’t have every hair in place, God will still show up. Even if your life isn’t always filled with the peace and joy and love that we sing and celebrate and pray for tonight, even if the other 364 days of the year seem miles away from everything this night represents to you, God is still in your midst.

The angel’s declared to the shepherds that lying a manger not far from where they stood was a baby. Not just any baby, the angel says, not just another gorgeous baby that would be perfect for a Christmas card, but a Savior, in whom all our hopes and fears are met, a baby who is the very God we seek. In ancient times the prophet Isaiah referred to that same baby by a different name—Emmanuel, God With Us. Not the “God-Up-There somewhere who answers our prayers by lifting us out of our lives,” but the God who comes to us in the midst of them, however far that life is from what we dreamed it might be, however less than ideal our circumstances, however much or little our lives reflect the Christmas cards we send and receive. That is where God is born, in any cradle we will offer him, even if it’s the most humble of cradles that is really no more than a feeding trough.

If you have prayed tonight to be transported into God’s presence tonight, you will certainly get your wish, only not in the way you may have thought. As priest and famed preacher Barbara Brown Taylor once wrote, “None of heaven’s escalator’s are going up tonight. Everybody up there is coming down, right here, right into our own Bethlehem, bringing us the God who has decided to make his home in our arms.”

O come let us adore him.

Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2008 7:04 pm
Category: Sermons

December 21, 2008 - 4th Sunday of Advent

This weekend I came face-to-face with the pure, frustrating nature of interruption. You see, as much as we have all been programmed by stories and songs and movies to long for a snowy Christmas, the fact of the matter is that this magnificent winter storm which left great piles of the exact stuff that I desperately longed for as a child, is a tremendous interruption. Of all the rotten times to have bad driving conditions, disrupted schedules, and canceled appointments, this would have to be up near the top of the list. After all, the week before Christmas is not a time for interruptions. This is a time for the predictable and routine, because that seems to be the only way everything that needs to get done will get done.

You know something about interruption, of course, and it probably doesn’t even have to do with snow. Interruptions come in all shapes and sizes, from the mundane and irritating to the substantial and life altering. Parents, you are perhaps the ones best acquainted with this, as you are asked countless times a day to stop whatever it is you are doing and attend to the needs or wants of your children. Or for those who don’t have children, how many times have you just begun to write or read something and found just the right comfortable position, and then heard a knock on your door, or the phone rings, and everything must be put on hold to attend to that interruption. Or your week is scheduled to the max, perfectly laid out but needing absolute perfect timing to pull off, and then your car doesn’t start, or the “Check Engine” light comes on, or the State chooses that week to do repairs on the road you take to work.

Interruption in these situations looks like minor annoyance. But many of you know all about much bigger interruptions: a parent can no longer take care of him or herself, and you must decide to move them into assisted living or bring them to live with you. Or the results come back from what should have been a routine doctor’s visit and include words like “tumor,” or “mass,” or “blockage.” You weren’t expecting this interruption to your established routine, but there really isn’t much you can do to change the situation.

In the midst of these interruptions, it can feel like God is absent. We feel fear or frustration or anxiety or resignation, but we often don’t feel that God is anywhere in the mix with us. After all, God is a God of constancy, of permanency, of changelessness, so what would he know about interruption? Well, today’s gospel may speak into this situation.

Throughout the generations the story of the Annunciation has been told and studied by countless theologians, clergy and artists. It ranks right up there among subjects for famous Renaissance paintings—the moment when the angel Gabriel greets the startled Mary, or shares the surprising news, or when Mary stoically accepts this new fate presented to her by God’s holy messenger. Some portrayals depict a poised and graceful woman, serenely resigned to the role God has asked her to play. She is every bit the blessed virgin, a uniquely holy vessel called to do something no other person could ever have done, something that she alone could accomplish. Other interpretations focus on the fact that Mary would have been no more than an early teenager, perhaps as young as 13 or 14. No matter how righteous a person, a girl of that age would almost certainly have been scared and upset by the role she had been asked to play, especially given the response she knew she would get from her relatives and neighbors when she started showing signs of the pregnancy.

However you want to visualize this scene, ultimately this story is all about interruption. Whether Mary was statuesquely sitting in her home in a sublime halo of perfection, or planning her wedding, or doing whatever teenage girls did in that time, the annunciation came as an interruption to the life she had been leading up to then, the life that had been proceeding along, by and large, according to plan.

Mary’s interruption was, of course, a child. And a child, of course, is synonymous with interruption. As I said earlier, from the moment they arrive, more often than not off-schedule, their needs interrupt the flow of ordinary adult life. This is not to say it is a bad thing, but merely that the good tidings that Gabriel brings are of a lifetime of interruption.

Mary responds to the interruption with that famous line that has become a prayer: “Let it be with me according to your will.” Many people have heard in this response the model of Christian living. Here was someone who heard God’s word and submitted to it. Her life was interrupted but she recognized that the interruption came from God, and so she embraced it.

But we know that embracing interruption is not as easy as it seems in this story. That is perhaps why Mary is Mary, because she was able to draw upon some deep reservoir of strength or fortitude or courage to hear what the angelic messenger had to say and accept this change in her life as though she had anticipated it all along. But for most of us, when we are honest, we might be willing to admit that our response to Gabriel would not necessarily have been so gracious. Changes in plans, interruptions, are not things that many of us embrace so readily, even when we think that the interruption may come from God.

More often than not, we struggle to hold on to the last vestiges of our normal life, and cling to patterns that are familiar and comfortable and usual. We may accept the interruption, but perhaps only grudgingly. We respond to the person who interrupts our routine with an extra dose of sarcasm or else palpably rush through the encounter so that we can get back to doing what it is we wanted to do with that time.

But if we are honestly searching for God, if we are not only open to the idea that there is a God, but are instead truly dedicated to the fact that God is alive and at work in this world, then we have to let down our defenses. We have to acknowledge the way that God is a God of interruption, who breaks into our routines, our normalcy, our little patterns of behavior that make us feel safe but are often just stifling the Spirit. If there is anything that Scripture shows us, it is that God has no respect for these little boxes of self-assurance that we build up around ourselves. Since the very moment that God interrupted Adam and Eve in the garden as they made those fig-leaf dresses for themselves, God has been interrupting us, calling us to task, making us wake up and take notice of a world that doesn’t revolve around us. We may not all be able to respond to interruption with Mary’s poise, but we can begin to open ourselves to the idea that interruption may bring us closer to the very God we so desperately long to feel and know.

At this time of year, what does it say that God’s arrival in the world was an interruption? God interrupted Mary’s life, and by extension, also that of her husband to-be, Joseph. But before that God was busy interrupting the lives of Zechariah and Elizabeth. And what about the shepherds in the field, or the wise men far away in distant lands… God shows up and interrupts them in their routine, ordinary lives, shows himself to them and directs them into new and life-giving paths.

When we talk about the source of our salvation, we usually talk about the cross or Jesus Christ. Perhaps, during this final week of Advent, as we make our slow way to the baby in a manger and the arrival of the newborn king, we may name the means of our salvation slightly differently: we are saved by Mary’s willingness to be interrupted. And so the next time someone wishes you a Merry Christmas, perhaps you can hear in it a holy question: are you, like Mary, willing to be interrupted by God?

Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2008 6:59 pm
Category: Sermons

December 14, 2008 - 3rd Sunday of Advent

The first chapter of John’s gospel is not the Christmas story you grew up with. It upsets the familiar, Christmas card friendly telling of the birth narrative that you hanker for each December. A Christmas pageant based on John’s gospel would be pretty boring; there would be one child, speaking one line (and I guess all the other children would be dressed in black to serve as the backdrop): “And the Word became flesh and lived among us and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” Now, while this might be every pageant director’s dream-come-true (imagine the savings on costumes alone!), this would not do much for the audience, who probably would walk away feeling shortchanged.

What we hear today is an Advent pageant, still starring one character saying much the same thing, still the shortage of props and costumes. Except, today the minimalist telling would be on purpose and would reveal something important. The one character is a man sent from God whose name is John.

Now try to stay with me while I digress for a moment: The Bible is more fun with nicknames. That is one of the lessons I learned from Seminary—not one that I learned from my professors, per se, but one that I learned from talking about the Bible for three years. You’ve got the BVM, or the Blessed Virgin Mary. Of course you’ve got JC, or Jesus Christ. There are some Old Testament prophets that get a lot of funny nicknames. But my favorite is definitely John, who Melody and I have taken to almost exclusively calling J.Bap. Because we know from the other gospels that John was out there in the wilderness, baptizing people, his unofficial title throughout the years has always been John the Baptist. So Melody and I just shortened it to make it a bit more catchy and funny.

And that nickname works for John in the stories about him in the synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark and Luke—where the story is heavy on bits about his ministry of baptism. But today we heard about John from the gospel of John, and it doesn’t seem to quite work. Because in this story about John, you don’t get any of the stuff that you get in those other accounts. We don’t hear about how he was the son of one of the temple priests, a man named Zechariah. We don’t hear how he fled to the wilderness as a young man and set up shop on the banks of the Jordan as a prophet. Nor do we really hear much about how he baptized people in the river.

Instead, the gospel of John just sort of introduces him all alone, by himself, without any of that other stuff to give some context. And the word that describes John in this gospel story, instead of “Baptist,” is the Greek word martyria, the root of our word “martyr,” which actually means “witness.” It says in verse 7, “He came as a martyria (witness) to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.” John has been sent to be a witness, to testify to the “Word made flesh,” “the Light” that no darkness has or ever will extinguish.

“Can I get a witness?” is something you’ll hear cried out from pulpits in many African American churches, especially in the south. If John were present in that church, he would be among the first to stand up and shout back, “I’ll be a witness!” He seems to have been more than ready to testify on behalf of Jesus. As this gospel tells it, that seems to be the very reason he was born: to testify.

A few years ago Curtis Almquist, the Superior of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, which is an Episcopal monastic community located nearby in Cambridge, came to a clergy conference in the Diocese of Texas to give an address. And what he said has stuck with me ever since I heard it: “I would say it is a wonderful discipline to always have a testimony of praise of our lips. For those of us who call ourselves ‘followers of Jesus Christ,’ I would say we need to be in touch with the ‘why’ on a daily basis. Why—not why did you become a Christian, but rather, ‘Why have you remained a Christian.’”

Curtis was talking about the lost art of testimony giving. We seem to have lost touch with the ability to articulate for ourselves, let alone for someone else that we might know or meet, the point of all this faith stuff. As Episcopalians, we have become too squeamish about bearing witness—sharing our faith, sharing our hope, sharing good news—to other people. But as Brother Curtis reminds us, this is foundational stuff. After all, isn’t a witness just someone who has seen or heard something that they can attest to, that they are willing to affirm, that they are willing to share with someone?

What if we tried to reclaim the practice of testimony sharing? I mean, what if we were consciously prepared to share some good news—the Good News—amidst so much bad news that people face in the course of a day? That seems to have been how John saw himself: not as John the Baptist, not as John the son of Zechariah, but as John the Witness. John the Testifier.

Now, the important thing to remember about a witness is that a witness is not the main focus of the story. A witness in a trial is only a sideliner. My brief stint in law school at least gave me that much knowledge. The witness only exists to prove or disprove the case of the person the trial is really about. Being a witness means speaking, not on behalf of yourself, but on behalf of someone else. It means using your words and your actions and your life to proclaim something that is beyond and above yourself.

The funny thing is that it appears as though many people wanted John to be the One (capital “O”). Here he was, preaching about someone else, someone who was to come, and still people got confused. “Who are you?” the messengers from Jerusalem wanted to know. They meant it not in the “What is your name and Social Security number” sort of way, but more in the “Are you somebody we should be paying more attention to because you’re the messiah” sort of way. “Who are you?”

And what does John say? “I am not the Messiah.”

Maybe that’s the first step in being a witness. Maybe the first step in gaining the courage and fortitude to be a witness is to repeat those words. “I am not the Messiah.” Say it out loud: “I am not the Messiah.”

I know it seems obvious. You already knew that you weren’t the Messiah. Only the mentally imbalanced, the ones they put on heavy doses of drugs or in clinics think they are the Messiah. But messianic ambitions for ourselves and messianic expectations of others are not just the quaint delusions of the mentally ill. More often than not, we think we are the center of our lives. We think it is our job to make sure good things happen to us and to our families. It is our job, and within our power, we think, to make things right.

But to think those things is to make ourselves the Messiah, to assume that we are the ones who have the power. But John’s life stands as an example that our lives are not meant to be about ourselves. They are meant to proclaim, to witness, to testify to something greater. We are not the Light. We are here only to share the good news about the true light.

To listen to John is to see that God’s desires are more important than our desires, God’s life in us is more important than the life we think we want to live. John was not the Light, but he came to testify to the Light. He came to remind us and to bear witness to all who will listen that the darkest forces of the world are not as powerful as they claim or appear to be—but we are not the ones who stop them. It is Christ and Christ alone whose light conquers our darkness. If fixing this crazy, broken world were up to us, we’d be in big trouble. But that’s not our job. Our job is to witness to the one who already came and who will come again.

In the midst of our frenzied preparations for Christmas, in the midst of sale-shopping, and house-decorating and cookie-baking, we are brought face-to-face with a true witness to the Light. And he’s asking us who we are testifying to this Advent. Who are we bearing witness to? Who is this season all about? Who is our life all about?

Can I get a witness?

Come, Lord Jesus.

Posted on: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 8:59 am
Category: Sermons

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