Two Christmas Sermons

This is our house's Christmas cactus. It was struggling mightily on our kitchen counter, so I adopted it and have been showing it all the affection I can, which is sparse and sporadic, but apparently sufficient. It's been quite the year, and both the cactus and I are glad we've gotten through Christmas. Below are the links to two sermons I preached on Sunday, which I hope will be good reason this season. The first is about Mary and is good for those who want to be future revolutionaries, and the second is about the struggles some of us go through during the Christmas season and is good for those who need a break this holiday season.

For Mary, read Unexpected Hope. 

For a break and maybe some cathartic tears, read A Longest Night Reflection.

A Longest Night Reflection

This the manuscript text of a reflection shared at a longest night service on December 23, 2018. 

After I sprained my ankle, it turned several satisfying shades of blue and purple, some of which has yet to completely fade weeks later. My ankle swelled up like a parade balloon and wouldn’t allow me to put weight on it no matter how much I wanted it to, forcing me to take the past few weeks much more slowly than I wanted to. People noticed the boot and or the crutches and the brace and they leapt to help me, carrying things for me, opening doors, holding doors open for about forty-five seconds longer than they thought they were going to need to as I hobbled my way forward. Friends and acquaintances alike would exclaim, “What have you done to your foot!” upon seeing me arrive with my patented step-sliiiide, step-sliiiide, step-sliiiide. In short, everyone could see that I was hurt and everyone was understanding; helpful, even.

I needed that visibility in order to heal, because deep down, I think that if you can’t see a problem, it’s not a real problem. Unless you’re gushing blood or a bone is sticking through, you need to get back up and play through the pain. Mind over matter. We’ll look at bandaging up whatever’s wrong when we’ve got some time to rest, when there’s not so much to do, but right now, unless it’s an emergency, we’re going to keep on keeping on.

I come from a line of football coaches, in case that wasn’t apparent.

But the truth is, it would have taken longer to heal if I didn’t acknowledge the injury and rest my ankle when I needed to, and if I didn’t accept the help that other people offered me. My black-and-blue foot probably saved me a couple of weeks of lingering pain on the other side of the healing process. If my sprain that hadn’t shown up so vibrantly, I would have ignored the pain and limped on for months.

Grief is like that for many of us, I think. If it’s not visible, it’s hard to heal from, and it’s only visible for such a short period of time. The time between the diagnosis and the funeral, or the time between the phone call and the wake, or the time between the papers being filed and the divorce being finalized, as long as they may seem in those moments, are finite periods of time. It’s not often that you find people who understand that those moments are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to grief. And just when you think that iceberg has melted, it surfaces again, brought up by the warm currents of the holidays or anniversaries or triggered memories. This on-going, invisible grief can be more difficult to deal with than the fresh grief we felt at the moment of loss.

Of course, there are also those kinds of hurts and loss that people never see, or don’t take seriously when they do see them. Struggles with fertility. Miscarriages. Abuse of every kind. Loss of friendships. Loss of relationships. Loss of homes or places of safety and comfort. Loss of jobs or careers or roles or dreams. All of these things cause real pain and real grief that is exacerbated by this time of year.

And we wish someone, anyone, would just understand, without us having to explain. Telling someone else that you’re grieving takes vulnerability and energy and we might not have that in us right now, but it would be so good for someone else to understand that we do want to hear our loved one’s names. We do want to tell stories and think of all the things they loved, or would have grown up to love. We want someone to understand that we need space sometimes and not come chasing us down, or someone to ask if they can join us at the Christmas tree as we sit looking at the lights, and just listen to a little bit of what’s going on. We wish someone would just get it.

But the world is not a wish-granting factory and so we do our best to get by. We share articles on facebook that explain why the holidays aren’t happy for everyone, hoping that they’ll open just one person’s eyes, and go back to our celebrations in whatever mood we can muster up that day. We say the responses that talk about joy we don’t feel. We pray the prayers that talk about hope that we don’t have. We sing the hymns that talk about love when we’re not experiencing. We do our best to smile and laugh around family and friends, to meet the expectations of the season. That’s just the way life has to be lived.

I know that’s the way I’ve lived my life. Most of the darkness in my life has been the invisible kind, the kind that I myself even have trouble taking seriously. Grief over the sudden and unexpected deaths of two of my friends, both of them educators who should have had long lives ahead of them, has hit me in waves over the past year, but it’s not my dinner table that will have an empty seat, it’s the one in their families’ homes. The same with Jean, Lib, and Jearline, matriarchs of my life back home. The empty spaces where they should be in church and around the neighborhood are real, but I was not the one who had to greet everyone who came to their funerals. I mourned right along with four of my friends as they lost their children before they were born, but it’s not my arms that ache to hold a baby lost to miscarriage. I have walked with my friend as she and her husband divorced and she begins to heal, but it’s not my heart that was broken over unmet promises of faithfulness and forgiveness. It’s been death by a thousand cuts this past year, but none of them was big enough to break the surface.

And then there’s the pain that’s only my own. Seminary is a time of tearing apart so that you can rebuild and if you’re doing the work right, you’re not only tearing down your false idols of what you understood God to be, you’re also tearing down some of the mistaken ideas you have about yourself. I had thought I was indominable, inimitable, and inexhaustible, but I’ve spent the past year being knocked down upheaval in my personal life, by past abuse becoming a present emotional reality, by changes in relationships, and by depression and anxiety that has been exacerbated by all these challenges, all of which have caused me to fail to uphold my responsibilities in school and in work. I’ve felt like a complete failure, completely alone, completely hopeless. There have been times that I haven’t wanted to go on, times that I’ve wanted to be done living my life, and yet, even with all that scary, serious loss staring me in the face, it’s hard for me to take it seriously. I found myself in my therapist’s office listening to her explain an activity that would, in the end, be the thing that would help me pull my mind back from the edge it was teetering on, saying, “Oh, but that’s for people with real problems.”

Sometimes our pain is invisible, even to ourselves.

But the wonderful, glorious thing about the Christian faith is that our pain is not invisible to God, even when it is to us or to those around us. We are seen and known and loved by the God who made everything, from gluons to galaxies, from quarks to quasars, from starlings to stars. When we hurt, we never hurt alone. God shouts this truth from every inch of creation, but sometimes our pain and grief, the world’s pain and grief, is louder than that, and so God chose to whisper it, to come to earth as a tiny baby in a far-off land a long time ago. Christmas is the time when we remind ourselves of the lengths God will go to in order to be with us, especially in our pain. We are not alone. Our pain is not invisible or unimportant to God. No matter what it is we’ve loss, it mattered. That’s why it hurts, and will continue to hurt.

And that is why God will continue to be with us, in this season and throughout our lives. Because God knows our hurt and God knows that there’s no simple solution to our pain, so God chose to join us in it. Now, I know that this is a high-flying theological claim and that for many of us, in our pain, we could not care less what God is “doing.” But whenever we’re ready to see it, I promise you that we’ll be able to see the presence of God around us, even in this season.

It’ll be there in the hug that brings unexpected comfort.

It’ll be there in the picture that brings a smile where before there had only been sadness.

It’ll be there in the loud, boisterous moment where for a second, just a second, everything seems whole again.

It’ll be there in the stories we tell about those that we’ve lost. God is always there in our remembering.

All those moments of kindness and goodness were planted into creation and they were given new life right alongside the baby who was laid in the manger. We only need to welcome them, the way we will welcome Jesus on Christmas.

Now, none of this is easy. I know that firsthand. But we’ve already made a first step. We’re here, in this place, with these people, who have all come because their pain, visible and invisible, was too much for this holiday season. We’re not alone. And best of all, God is with us. My prayer for you and for me, in the days ahead, is that we would see our pain and acknowledge it, no matter what it is. Pain is pain and grief is grief and it all deserves our attention and care. You can’t just treat the wounds that bruise. And once we’ve done that, I pray that we would be wrapped up in the kindness and goodness hidden in this world that has been so unkind and cruel to us, and held close in the presence of the God whose coming this season celebrates. Amen? Amen. 

Unexpected Hope

This is the manuscript text for a sermon preached on Sunday, December 23, 2018. The sermon texts were Micah 5:2-5a, Luke 1:39-55, and Hebrews 10:5-10. The primary text is the Magnificat, which is the end of the Luke text. 

Since Pastor Sue talked about A Charlie Brown Christmas last week, I figure I can talk a little bit about my favorite Christmas movie this week: A Muppet Christmas Carol. I’m a child of the 90s and when this movie came out in 1992, I was the perfect age for the muppets and the singing and the movie effects that did not age well. I love it for its charm, but as I watched it again this week, I loved it anew for its story. A Muppet Christmas Carol catches the heart of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Michael Caine is my favorite Scrooge. There is nothing like watching him go from a curmudgeon who can’t find a word for even Kermit the Frog to learning to dance with the Ghost of Christmas Present and, finally, watching him walk out into the world after realizing, as Gonzo the narrator tells us, that, “His life had been laid out before him, and it could be changed.” I needed some of that kind of Christmas cheer after the week we’ve had.

Because it has been quite the week, friends, hasn’t it? For those of you who follow the news, there have been some high-profile announcements and resignations and changes in plans and policy and I think that many of us wish there was some way that we could influence what’s happening in Washington, to change it for the better, to get rid of the chaos and to clear the pathway for good governance. And we want some way to do that that’s not the hard work of thinking through policy, talking to our members of congress, voting, and getting other people to care enough to vote too. We want a miracle. We could use one. It feels like we won’t get peace any other way.

If you were going to do that, though, what would you do? If you wanted to change the way the world worked, who would you talk to? Surely it would be someone in power, someone with authority. You would want to get the ear of someone who can make change happen, and convince them to be more loving, to be kinder, to advocate for policies that will help all of us. You’re probably going to want to send an angel or something to someone in a suit and tie with an office downtown.

And of course, that’s what we would expect someone who wanted to influence Rome to do as well. Get someone in the emperor’s court on your side. We all know how fickle world leaders are, how they’re held under the sway of their advisors. If you want to change the Roman Empire, you’re going to want to get in with Caesar. That’s how this world works, whether it’s ancient Rome or modern-day Washington. You have to play the game. We know that’s what’s got to be done.

How silly it is, then, for God to have chosen a teenage girl to change the world. A teenage girl with no connections, no leader’s ear bent to her will. A poor girl from the middle of nowhere, whose best-case-scenario is getting married, having a son, and keeping the household for her husband until he dies and her son is able to take care of her. If Jesus were to come to Earth today in the United States, Mary would be from West Virginia, or a reservation in South Dakota, or a border town in Texas, or Flint, Michigan. We would not notice her, just like no one noticed her then.

Well, no one except for the angel Gabriel, who visits her in the passage just before the one we read for today. Gabriel appears to Mary and says, “Rejoice, highly favored lady! The Lord is with you!”

Highly favored? Lady? Mary? Daily life in Nazareth is a struggle against hunger and unfair taxes. In what way has she been favored? Mary is confused by these words, wonders what sort of greeting this is.

Gabriel responds to this by telling her to not be afraid, which helps, I’m sure. He then tells her that’s she’s going to have a son, and that son is going to be a king of a kingdom without end.

Mary keeps her cool and thinks through her situation. She asks, “How is this going to happen? How am I supposed to have a baby without having sex? I haven’t, you know, known a man, not like that.”

Gabriel is ready with an explanation. “The Holy Spirit will come over you, because the one who is to be born will be holy. Look, even Elizabeth, your cousin, the one who spent her long life thinking that she would never have a child, is six months pregnant. Nothing is impossible for God.”

Nothing is impossible for God. Mary chews this over. She thinks about where she’s from, all the poverty and sickness and death, and thinks about what kind of kingdom her son will bring about. If he’s going to be a holy one, then maybe he’ll actually make a better world. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. I am the Lord’s servant. Let it be with me as you said.” And it is. And Gabriel goes.

Now, we have no confirmation that this visit from an angel is real, no proof that it wasn’t just the delusion of a teenage girl, until Mary goes to visit Elizabeth. It’s still just the word of a woman, but Elizabeth feels the baby inside her jump when Mary shows up. It is such an insignificant event, two mothers-to-be meeting. My cousins did the same a few years ago when they were both pregnant, one with her third, the other with her first. The most that came out of it was a facebook post.

But Elizabeth knows that there’s something more significant here. Something special, something miraculous has happened to Mary. The baby in her knows it too, and Elizabeth knows the miracle that her own baby is. “Why do I have this honor?” she asks Mary, “that the mother of my Lord should visit me? Happy, blessed is she who believed that the Lord would fulfil all promises!”

Let’s pause here, with these two happy and blessed women speaking to each other, to think again about who Mary is. We have already seen her stand up to an angel, boldly asking this fear-inducing heavenly being questions about how, exactly, God is going to use her in this plan. We can guess that Mary, even though she’s a teenager who’s probably only rarely if ever left her village, has already been through a lifetime of stress and strain, living where she does. These two things tell us that she must have some chutzpah. And Elizabeth has called her “happy” or “blessed.” The Greek work is μακάρια, and that root, μακ, means “to make long or large.” Someone becomes μακάριος when God stretches out and reaches to them God’s grace or favor. Elizabeth is using a word that, in other days, would have meant, “Mary, God has made you great!”

And so what does this bold teenager, full of chutzpah, do with being told that God has blessed her, has made her great? The CEB fails us here, because what Mary says is, “My soul magnifies the Lord!” Magnifies, the Greek word being Μεγαλύνει, literally meaning, “makes great.” My soul makes the Lord great, Mary says, and I rejoice with all that I am.

She goes on to explain what she’s feeling to Elizabeth, and as she does, she sounds a lot like Hannah, who we heard about a month ago. God has seen me, Mary says. God knew where I was, what my life was like, and God favored me! The mighty one has done great things for me and everyone will call me blessed. Me. Not Caesar, or Herod, or even David, the great king of the past. Me. Mary.

God has done mighty things for me and not only for me, but for everyone, from generation to generation, all who know God to be God, God shows mercy to them. And we know God can do it. We have seen how strong God is. We know that the proud, the arrogant, those Romans who are in charge, God can pull them down from their high places and lift up people like you and me, Elizabeth. God has kept all the promises made to our ancestors and he’s done it again. God has done this wonderful thing for me and God will do more. God will fill up the hungry with good things, but the rich, who already have more than they should, God will send them away empty. We know that God’s remembering the mercy God promised to us, the mercy that was promised to us forever.

This is Mary’s prayer. It’s not just the humble prayer of the obedient. It has some bite to it. If God is going to change this world, Mary has a prayer for how it’s going to happen.

If Mary were living in the United States today, out in the country or on a reservation or in a border town or in the inner city, what would her prayer look like? Who would she be thinking of when she says that God has pulled the powerful down from their thrones? Who is she thinking of when she says that God has lifted up the lowly? Take a minute, and write things down if that helps you think, and try to imagine the world that Mary is praying for. 

You see, Mary is laying out our world in front of us, an unexpected world, a world where there are rich and poor, great and lowly, and a world where God chooses the lowly. When God wanted to change the world, God didn’t reach out to Caesar or anyone in his court. God reached out to a teenage girl, from the middle of nowhere, and showered favor on her. The hope of all the nations entrusted to the most unexpected of vessels. And Mary herself tells us what this hope is. It’s the same as Scrooge’s, after his life was laid out in front of him. It is hope that things can change.

On Tuesday, we’ll celebrate the birth of that hope. We’ll celebrate God come to earth, God who put on flesh, God who stepped into the body prepared for him and who lives in the world today, through you and through me. Jesus, born in Bethlehem of Judea, coming from the least, will be the one who changes everything, the one who casts down the proud and lifts up the lowly.

Is that the Christmas that you’ve been preparing your hearts for? In this journey through advent, is this the Christmas you’ve been waiting for? Or is it a little unexpected?

If it is, you’re not alone. But my prayer for us, for all of us, is that we are able to welcome the Christ child into this world on Tuesday, ready and eager for the change he longs to bring, a change that bends the world toward justice and kindness and love and life abundant. Amen.