Welcome to Our World, Jesus

WELCOME TO OUR WORLD, JESUS          

A sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Stephanie J. Nagley on December 16, 2012 at St. Luke’s, Bethesda Maryland

Readings: Luke 3:7-18 and The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens’, Stave III concerning the dangers of allowing Want and Ignorance to Flourish

This isn’t the sermon I planned for today.  I planned a light hearted look at Advent through the eyes of John the Baptist.  What I hadn’t planned; no one had planned, was the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

It is one more tragedy added to the pile of human sorrow.  One more “How could this be?” One more, “Please, God, not again”.   But this one, this tragedy, is harder because the victims were children, babies really, who had just begun to explore the world.   Harder, too, because there’s been too much senseless sadness to bear.  There is no making sense of this.   That is what John the Baptizer is trying to tell us.  Stop trying to make sense of tragedy in the world. Stop trying to rationalize the irrational and get on with making the world better.

John is not someone who soothes the soul with pastoral anodynes. He doesn’t sugar coat and he isn’t worried about getting reelected.  What he is interested in and worried about is how we’re doing as the people of God, how our children are doing and if we’re really serious about practicing what we say we believe.

The Advent question John’s asks is not, when is God going to make everything better?   The question John asks is this:  When are the people who say they believe in God going to pursue with all their hearts the love and peace of God?  When are the people of God going to get serious, really serious, about beating swords in plowshares, pulverizing handguns and automatic rifles and all sorts of weapons? When are we going to get serious about taking care of each other, especially those who are most in need of care?

This tragedy tugs at the hem of our garments like the boy and girl of Dickens’ Christmas Tale, and begs us to attend to Want and Ignorance before it’s too late.  This tragedy begs to us do it now while we’re still trying to sew the pieces of our hearts back together.

 Alexandra Petri said this in her Saturday Washington Post op-ed piece:

“There are no words for this.  But we know how it goes.  I hate that we can’t just say, ‘Oh, God, how horrible.’  …that we have to say ‘not again’… (that)…in a few days or weeks or months after we have exhausted our grief and indignation nothing will change”. “I hate that there is a familiar outline to this…that we will poor over his [the shooter] life and habits and quirks”. “I hate that we will use this tragedy to know how right we were…people will go on television insisting that they know what caused this…I hate that we have a template for tragedy that should have no template. …Columbine, Fort Hood, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora, Colorado, and Clackamas, Oregon…this time there were young children, terrified, being told by police to close their eyes.”  

“There’s a ritual to it now. The name of the places where the horrible has happened becomes more than a name, the date on the calendar more than a date.  ‘Our hearts are broken today’ said the President. …We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics’. Alexandra Petri responds:  “How?  No single law stops this.  No one policy fixes this.  Evil persists. Some crimes cannot be prevented. But that does not mean there is nothing we can do”. She concludes:  “The next time we say “Not again”, I want it to be a promise”.

That is what John, in his plain spoken, even harsh way is asking.  He is asking us to make of our lives a witness to the promise to live in the ways of God.

Jesus, who we are about to welcome into our world again is the way to that promise and to the day the words “not again” will never be heard again.

We welcome Jesus into the real world.  John puts the dirty, ugly, painful realities of this real world in front us and declares that is what Advent season is about.  It isn’t the gauzy fairy tale of Christmas preparations or a focus on holiday parties.  It isn’t the worry of what to get Uncle Charlie for Christmas or the irritation of fighting mall traffic.  John isn’t welcoming us or Jesus into that world or to the manger in Bethlehem so that we will admire a pretty baby.  He is inviting us to deal with a life as it is, smudged and broken, and in the name of the baby in Bethlehem demanding that we do our best to clean and mend and renew.

In these last several weeks, where the horrible, unthinkable has intruded, John, shouts at us and begs that we get serious about our jobs as Christians, as people of God.  Wild eyed John, standing up to his knees in water telling us it’s in our power to change the world.  There he is telling us to do at least something to make it better – give a coat, drop a coin, buy a chicken for someone in Africa, give to something, care, be Jesus. Stop the violence. Stop the violence like what happened in Clackamas, Oregon and Newtown, Connecticut. 

But also stop the violence that we do every day to each other and to ourselves.  The unkind word.  The failure to see one another, to acknowledge the presence of the other.  Would it kill us to say ‘hello’ to a stranger, to offer kindness to someone we don’t even know?  The truth is that the failure to connect with each other, especially those we don’t know, is killing us. 

It’s time to stop the violence in our homes when we fail to honor those dearest to us.  Take time with each other. Don’t wait for another day when you’re less busy or less stressed.  This moment is the only moment we have.  It’s time to stop the violence of not taking care of ourselves, our bodies and our souls.   And when we stumble, fail, when we get too busy, or a little cross with one another, or don’t take care of ourselves, and we will, don’t give up. Renew the promise and begin again.

John shouts at us, a ropey blue vein bulging on his forehead, eyes burning, imploring us to stop waiting.   Stop waiting for God to wave a magic wand.  Stop waiting for God to do what human beings have the power and ability to do. Stop waiting and start being who you are and who you are and who we are is the holy hope of new life.   Move, choose, protest, write letters, pray, get a therapist, demand more, expect more, expect better, invite and anticipate the presence of God in everything and in every way.   

The modern prophet, Jewish scholar and mystic Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said that we mustn’t accommodate to evil. We mustn’t adjust.  Evil should surprise us; astonish us on arrival because, as Heschel said, “an individual dies when he ceases to be surprised”. Evil should shake us to our core, rattle us in ways we can’t tolerate and move us to change.

We are the holy hope of new life.  When God came in flesh and bone God was offering to be with us in our flesh and bone, to work with us, to go hell and back with us in order to birth into life the kingdom of God.

I wish God would wave a wand and change it all.  If God is all powerful or so we are told that seems to me the easiest possible remedy for what troubles us.  Why it doesn’t work that way is a truth with which I continue to wrestle.   So far the wrestling has led me to this: We have to be fully invested, fully involved in the coming of a new day.  Without us God won’t.   Heschel wrote, “…We tend to read the bible looking for mighty acts that God does and not seeing that all the way through the Bible God is waiting for human beings to act”.

We welcome Jesus to our world in the manger.  But Bethlehem isn’t in the beginning of the story. Actually it’s more in the middle. What leads us to Bethlehem is a long journey with God and it’s been a journey of choices. Would we choose war or peace? Would we take care of those in most need of care? Would we choose to be faithful or go our own way?  At times we were magnificent in our faithfulness to God and at times miserable. But even in our failures God remained with us.  When we had fallen, our faces planted in the dust, God scooped up us and that dust as in the beginning and breathed a second chance into us saying, “Let’s try again”.

We are approaching Bethlehem but we can’t stay there just as we couldn’t stay in the garden.    Why?  The same reason we help our children grow and mature. We don’t, shouldn’t, mustn’t, shield them from the bumps, bruises and deep sorrows that comes from being human.  We have to give them the ability to chart their own life course. It’s the only way they grow up.  It’s the only way they have a chance to survive.  It’s the only way they can join the rest of the human race and be a responsible participant.  So it is with you and me and God.

God doesn't wave magic wands. It wouldn't help us grow and mature and become responsible participants in kingdom work.  In our journey from Bethlehem and beyond there is simply the always patient God waiting for us to grow into best selves.  There is simply the faith-filled God becoming part of us, a union that realigns our particles, rearranges our atoms, and reconciles our molecules into the beings God made us to be in the beginning of time.   And when God made us God said: “This is very good.”

 So when we cry out, “Not again!”, and God responds,“Promise?”, it's time, this time, to keep the promise.  It’s time to stop waiting and be the change we’ve been waiting for.

 

The sermon was followed by the choir singing “Welcome to Our World” by Chris Rice, the lighting of 28 candles and the reading the names of those who lost their lives on Friday, December 14, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut.

The Hunger Games



Katniss Everdeen lives in a world of poverty, starvation, oppression and the aftermath of war.  She lives in a world where hope exists only in the stolen and forbidden moments when she slips into the woods hunting live game with bow and arrow.  If she’s lucky she will get a squirrel to feed her family. 

It’s illegal to leave her district and go into the wood to poach, but she’s not afraid of being caught.  She is afraid of the annual Hunger Games.

The Hunger Games has taken place for 74 years is this post apocalyptic world of Panem, ever since District 13 dared to revolt.   Each year a girl and boy ages 12 to 18 years will be chosen by lot and fight to the death until only one remains.  All of that will be required television viewing. 

Suzanne Collins the author of the Hunger Game trilogy said she got the idea for the story channel surfing on television.  On one channel she saw people competing in a reality show and on another channel coverage of the Iraq war.  This mix of realities, war and competition, created a surreal state that led to the books that are said to be similar in plot to such classics as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Collins said that she relied on the bones of a Greek myth to craft her tale of good and evil and moral ambiguity.

This is Hunger Games, a story that has been told over and over again throughout the ages.

Jeremiah tells a similar story. It’s the story of the Israelites.  People, who had lost their hope, who were oppressed by a ruling nation and who suffered in the aftermath of war.  The Babylonians destroyed the temple of Jerusalem and dragged King Zedekiah off in chains.  The people of Judah had lost everything power, prestige, freedom and security but most importantly they had lost their God, the god they thought they could rely on did nothing to save them.  An impotent god was no better than no god at all. 

Have you ever felt that way?  You pray and pray for something to happen and nothing happens, nothing changes.  What, then, is this relationship with God?  Why should we bother with a God that is impotent or just not terribly interested in our lives?

Who needs a God that can’t make the cancer go away or turn a daughter back home after she’s wandered on the streets?  Who needs a God that let’s bad things happen to good people and the bad people get away without a care?  Who needs a God that let’s children starve?  [1]

These are age old questions.  The people of Judah contained their laments until they could hold them no longer.  They raised their voices and complained about God.  Jeremiah tries to reassure them that God will indeed keep the promises God made. God will bring newness out of destruction.  God will set them free from their bondage and exile.  God will find a way where there appear to be no way.   In fact God will do more than they imagined, the law that was on carved on stone will now be carved in their hearts.  

The prophet is announcing a new covenant.  That’s fine but there’s one problem.  A new covenant implies that the old one was broken.   Was it broken because, as the prophet suggests, the people couldn’t keep their part of the bargain by keeping their sticky fingers off of sin?

Or is there another more difficult to bear possibility?  Is the failure not of the people but God’s? Could God not fulfill his side of the bargain?  Had something shifted in the calculus of covenant people God and the people? 

There are too many stories where bad things happen but not because of human unfaithfulness.  The Psalms and the book of Job are testaments to that.  Not all of the people of Israel were at fault and yet all of them suffered in the Babylonian exile.  Jesus certainly didn’t deserve his fate.  He was simply preached about mercy and compassion.  He healed the sick and gave hope to the hopeless.  What’s wrong with that? 

Katniss isn’t thrown into the Hunger Games because she has done something wrong.  Her father didn’t die because he was unfaithful. Her mother wasn’t caught in the desperate hole of depression because she sinned. 

A bargain with God is often thought of as a quid-pro-quo.  We do what we’re supposed to do and God does what God is supposed to do.  But what are we to think when the covenantal calculus doesn’t hold?

What are we to think when our prayers aren’t answered or even seem to be heard?   The choice may be to blame God, get angry or abandon God altogether.  Those are the most common responses but after that there is another possibility. There is a response that takes our spirituality to another level.  That brings our practice into a greater depth of who we are and who Got is to us.

That journey of depth is here as we enter the last days of Lent.  The stories grow darker and hope dims.  

Jesus is talking more openly about his death and the darkness that is to come.  ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies there is no life’, he says.   And ‘those who love this life will lose it and those who hate their life in this world will keep life forever’.

In these last days of Lent the “shadow of the cross begins to fall over everything” – including the hope we have that God will somehow make everything better before it all falls apart.[2] What are we to make in the changed calculus of the covenant, the deal made with God to behave ourselves and God will provide?  Where are we going as we toward the cross?  What is to become of us, the beloved of God?

The answer may be in the obscure passage of Hebrews that reads like some secret code. The Book of Hebrews was written to Christians who had suffered persecution.  Out of fear they  had stopped gathering together, praying and attempting to bring into fullness the kingdom of God. They had given up.

Jesus is likened to a priest in the order of Melchizedek.  He is the son of Noah, carried the robes of Adam and gave Abraham bread and wine.  In other words, he carries the story of our beginning and the story of our journey through this world and all the troubles we encounter because we are human. 

It is said that Jesus takes away the sins of the world, but that not what the writer of Hebrews is saying.  Hebrews is telling us that Jesus is the chalice of all humanity holding our darkest secrets, carrying our deepest wounds, pouring out our most wrenching sadness and grief. The sacrifice Jesus offers to God is not doves or even his life but the grief and supplications of all people.

People who suffer.   People who feel real pain.  People who wonder whether hope has passed them by yet again. 

What leads Jesus to arrest, trial and death is his willingness to make known the grief of the world, to make real in flesh and blood human anguish, loneliness, fear, guilt, things done and left undone.  He cries out for his own sake but he also cries for us. If that wasn’t true, if he hadn’t cried out for us, he would have lived and died at an old age from natural causes.

We may think the covenantal calculus doesn’t hold, that God isn’t listening or doesn’t care that the cross seems all too real in our lives.  When our circumstances or the circumstances of the world drive the nails into our hands and we feel silvers of wood stab us in the back the truth may be that the calculus is different than we imagined. The calculus reveals how we called to enter a deeper level of what it means to be the beloved of God.  We’re asked to find our way through the pain and darkness in order to have new life. 

Deep in Lent the cross looms large and it is a reminder that there is no path around the darkness.   Unless a grain of wheat falls and dies, unless we dare to enter a thousand deaths that life will bring there is no transformation.   

That was true before there was a cross or even its shadow.  It was true for the people of Israel when Jeremiah was trying to give them a reason to keep going.  It certainly is true in the futuristic post apocalyptic world of the Hunger Games. It true today.   

A few years ago a young woman read her poem “Lost Generation” on YouTube.  She said:

I am part of a lost generation and I refuse to believe I can change the world

I realize this may be a shock but “Happiness comes from within” is a lie, and

“Money will make me happy”

So in 30 years I will tell my children

They are not the most important thing in my life.

My employer will know that

I have my priorities straight because work is more important than family

I tell you this

Once upon a time

Families stayed together but this will not be true in my era this is a quick fix society

Experts tell me 30 years from now I will be celebrating the 10^th anniversary of my divorce.

I do not concede that I will live in a country of my own making

In the future

Environmental destruction will be the norm

No longer can it be said that my peers and I care about this earth.

It will be evident that

My generation is apathetic and lethargic.

It is foolish to presume that

There is hope

And all of this will come true unless we choose to reverse it.

And then she began to read the poem backwards.  “There is hope.  It is foolish to presume that my generation is apathetic and lethargic.  It is evident that my peers and I care about this earth. No longer can it be said that environmental destruction will be the norm. In the future I will live in a country of my own making. I do not concede that I will be celebrating the 10^th anniversary of my divorce …” The reversal of the poem ended with her saying, “I can change the world, and I refuse to believe that I am part of a lost generation”.[3]

Across every generation the tears and cries have come.  Jesus took all of that to the cross, hung there with it.  To go there again is to remind ourselves of the challenges of being human and that God through Jesus is telling us God knows what it is to be me and you, to be hurting and broken, to suffer and to die. And we can make it.

There is suffering in being human.  There is injustice and cruelty, oppression, poverty and unfairness.  Good people die and bad people will too often win.  All that reality pulled on Jesus. He died holding the weight of our sorrows, the heaviness of our grief.  He suffocated from the injustice and the oppression of the world.

Because he took that on and because he died and because he lived we find a different calculus for our lives with God.  It isn’t about God taking all the hard times away; it is about going through the hard times with God and discovering that there is still life or even a new life to be lived.

The story of what happens to Katniss doesn’t end with the Hunger Games. There are two more books before we know her fate and how she is transformed and creates transformation in those around her. It’s not a pretty story. It is a story of darkness and moral ambiguity. It is our story. It is the story of our ancestors.

We come to the darkest day of Lent.  The cross looms over us.  On that cross Jesus will die and then he will rise and find his frightened and disheartened friends.  Those friends will find the strength to move on.  They too will suffer but they are able to interpret the meaning of their suffering through the experience of knowing Jesus, watching him die and seeing him in a new way.  

Every generation is caught in the shadow of a cross.  Every generation has struggled or suffered from the weight of poverty, disease, loss and sorrow.  Every generation has had to fight the good fight for the oppressed and the downtrodden.  Every generation has walked through the bloody streets of a Syria and heard the cries of children in a Sudan.  But the disclosure of God in Jesus proves that none of this is the last word and none of it needs come true again and again.  As long as we choose to reverse it and be the presence of a living God there is hope.

There is hope and it is foolish to presume that we are apathetic and lethargic

We can change the world and We refuse to believe that we are part of a lost generation.

---

[1] Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 2 Lent through Eastertide, Richard Floyd

[2] Feasting on the Word, Richard Floyd, page 126

[3] Diana Butler Bass Christianity after Religion,

I AM A CHRISTIAN, ALMOST

A Work in Progress 

I am not a Christian so that I can make pronouncements of certainty about when life begins, or who is saved and who needs to be. 

I am a Christian because life is messy and love is the only thing that has ever made sense.

I am not a Christian to pass judgment.

I am a Christian so that I can live with people most especially people whose decisions cause me pain or anger without needing to kill them or hurt them or stop listening to what they have to say. 

I am not a Christian because it makes everything clear.

I am a Christian because life is full of murky middles and moral ambiguity and following the Way of Jesus helps me sort through the confusion, sit with the uncertainty until there is clarity, and think more deeply, question more sincerely and live more compassionately with others and myself. 

I am not a Christian in isolation.

I am a Christian in community with others who are struggling, just like me, to understand how to live with authenticity and integrity in a world where problems and perplexities don’t often yield to easy answers.

I am not a Christian because it’s easy. 

I am a Christian because following Jesus means that nearly every day I have to choose whether to be a person of compassion and love or go my own way.

I am not a Christian because it is popular or politically expedient.

I am a Christian because it continues to challenge me and pushes me to reevaluate my life and my responses to circumstances.

I am not a Christian because I want to go to heaven. I am a Christian because I don’t know exactly what happens after death but I do know that right now I want to make the most of the life that I have and trust that whatever comes will be astonishing.

I am not a Christian so that I’ll be “saved” not in the way that word gets thrown around.

I am a Christian because I want the original meaning of salvation.  I want to feel whole and holy.  I want to be free of those things that enslave me like money, insecurity, approval, conformity or that keep me in exile such as not being able to love someone else out of some crazy fear. 

I am a Christian because it is a path toward finding my most authentic self which is the self God has called the beloved.

Our Precious Time Being

By Stephanie Nagley

(Excerpts of ‘Christmas Oratorio,’ For the Time Being by W H Auden, written 1941-42)
http://hopeeternal.wordpress.com/2008/01/08/christmas-oratorio-w-h-auden/


Well, so that is that.  Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes --
…There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week --
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted -- quite unsuccessfully --
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers…
…for the time being, here we all are,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
…There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance.  The happy morning is over,…God's Will will be done, …God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.

The Time Being is the most trying time of all and where we spend most of our days.  The decorations are already or about to be put away.  The Christmas music is gone or nearly gone even though it’s still Christmas.  We return to the everyday trying to hold on to where we’ve been.

We must live in this world, as difficult as it is. We must live in this world and do our feeble best to hold on to the truth that is within us hanging on to the belief that God will cheat no one.

God will cheat no one of the breadth and depth of human existence with all its joy and sorrow.  Because we are human, the triumphs and toils of our days find us and in that crucible of life, in that manger, we are given the opportunity to birth the very existence of Christ for the Word became flesh and lives in us.

God will cheat no one and in the fullness of time the world will know what we touched - the very presence of love born in Bethlehem and born again in us. We move on from that night when you and I became the very manger of God to feed those around us.

We move on now and into this new year. We aren’t who we were last year at this time or even a week ago.  The star that pointed the way for the shepherds continues show the way - our guiding light in this time being.  It is our compass and shield.  Even though the bills must be paid, and the laundry loaded in the Maytag, we aren’t the same. 

This New Year is ours to make of more than the last.  We have a year to practice the experience of new birth.  We have a year to practice love.  We have a year of time being to be present to God in a way we couldn’t a year ago.

What will you make of this your new year?  What will you do with your precious time being?