What can we say December 31? 1st Sunday of Christmas

    December 31 is a quirky time to preach. I’ll expect a severe attendance drop-off… but then those quiet Sundays can be lovely. There is so much preaching fodder around the date – although I’d sure avoid urging people to make new year’s resolutions that would make your church, or even their lives run more smoothly. I think of course of Wesley’s Covenant Prayer, a great New Year’s compact to make with God (although I always suspect that it means more to me having studied it on a page than it can to people out there trying to listen to me read it).

   There is a fascinating week of Kwanzaa, whose traditions of long leisurely meals where you talk about tradition, ancestors, culture, and dreams, seems about as Christian a way to end one year and bring in the next as anything I could concoct.  And then I ponder the way New Year’s is a huge deal in largely African-American churches – all because of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Freedom – not American-style freedom so much as that Gospel freedom Paul envisions in Galatians: that’ll preach.

   Isaiah 61:10-62:3. Did Mary know and think of such a text, especially shortly after Jesus’ birth? “My whole being shall exult… He has clothed me with garments of salvation.” It’s vindication the prophet seeks – but it’s not revenge!! Isaiah 62:2: “Kings will see your glory” – Herod? Or the Magi? And “a new name the mouth of the Lord will give.” Indeed: yeshua, meaning “Lord, help!” or “the Lord helps,” fantastic, fitting, matched by his nickname, emmanuel, “God with us.”

   Psalm 148. What an elegant appeal to even the animals and all of nature to praise God – which, we realize, creatures are already doing simply by being. Weren’t there beasts at the manger? Thomas Merton: “A tree gives glory to God by being a tree.” All of nature, if we see it from this perspective, is constantly in praise of its Maker. What a way to end and begin the year – the way we being every worship service: praise.

   We think, of course, of St. Francis of Assisi and his “Canticle of the Creatures,” inviting sun, moon, stars, all living things, to join in a mighty chorus of praise of God. I wonder how many sermons actually invite people into praise, or settle for being words of praise – instead of lurching toward some takeaway, some moral?

   Psalm 148: did Mary and Joseph sing this one during Jesus’ early days? “Praise him in the heights, all his host” (a la the angels on Christmas night?). Echoes of Job in this stirring tour of creation, including not just the pretty and photogenic, but also monsters, frost, stormy wind, wild, dangerous animals. All praise the Lord, even unwittingly, simply by being. Annie Dillard (in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) muses over the mind-boggling diversity and experimental dazzle that is creation, saying “There’s nothing God won’t try.”

   Years ago I co-authored a book with Clint McCann, Preaching the Psalms – but don’t get around to doing so often enough. David Ford once wrote (in Living in Praise) that the antidote to despair is praise. I need to ponder that – and try some praising too. Praising is counter-cultural for us consumers. Praise wastes time. Praise isn’t about me, or even what God’s done for me.  Can I get out of myself long enough to praise? Could my sermon not be utilitarian, but simply an expression of how amazing God is?

   I may explore St. Augustine's great distinction between love of use (uti) and love of enjoyment (frui). I love money because I use it for something else. I enjoy chocolate because... well, I just love it. God is looking for frui, but we typically go at God with uti… Praise takes some practice, some learning, getting outside, shutting off the gadgets. Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the best tutor I know. She takes us on a tour of little creatures that amaze - and argues that "the least we can do is notice."

    Rabbi David Wolpe also reminds us that the ability to express praise can be lost by disuse. "There is no trick to being grateful for that which is rare and special. To be grateful for that which is always there is difficult."

    For Psalm 148, people are insufficient to the praise required – not merely because their words and songs are too feeble. We need every creature, the animals, and even the celestial, heavenly beings to join in our chorus to stand a chance of honoring God well. Jason Byassee, in his terrific Brazos commentary on Psalms 101-150, ingenuously suggests that creation is “the lock for which God’s redeeming work is the key.” Creation isn’t neutral, just a place we happen to be. It’s the setting for God’s great redemption. It’s the target of God’s great redemption, as God is saving not only us but everything ever made.

    Galatians 4:4-7. How rare, and cool, to hear Paul on the simple incarnation instead of Jesus’ death and resurrection? I’ve written elsewhere on adoption and what a great image it is for our induction into Christ’s family. And Karl Barth’s wisdom – that the child calling their father Abba would be an apprentice in the father’s business. And don’t forget: to be an heir is to receive blessings you did not earn.

   Luke 2:22-40. What was Jesus’ very early life like, his first few days and weeks? We love the carol which suggests “little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.” Surely he cried. We should hope he cried. He became one with all of us who cry. Babies cry, and we may be grateful, as that sound is the sign of life, vitality, a protest against being so rudely removed from the warm safety of the womb, a declaration to the world that “I have arrived” – and “something’s wrong.”

     Mary nursed him, rocked him, whispered and sang to him. Exhausted like all mothers, she fought through the weariness. Did she suffer any postpartum depression? There were visits. The shepherds flocked toward his manger, perplexed and overstimulated by what they swore they’d seen and heard out in the fields, angels trumpeting and singing. The magi appeared in course, right away or months later, we have no way of knowing – just as we don’t know how many of them made the trek from Persia or Arabia or wherever. We guess three, since they three gifts; but artists have depicted four, or seven, or a dozen.

     Mary and Joseph, of course, were Bible people, thoroughly Jewish, and their Jewishness shaped the small, beautiful and thus expansive world Jesus first glimpsed in his first days. And so Mary, on cue, did as all Jewish mothers did: she and her family made the arduous journey to Jerusalem for her “purification.” Catholic tradition and even Protestants’ best hunches make us shrug, wondering why she of all mothers would need to be purified. But having just borne God’s own son, she stuck to the law, seeking to be as pure and holy as possible in God’s eyes – perhaps akin to the way Jesus, God in the flesh, holiest of the holy, submitted to Baptism. And as pious, observant Jews, hardly done with the Torah now that Jesus has arrived, they offered up a couple of sacrificial birds on the altar.

    And then, being diligent in faith, Mary and Joseph delivered their son to the priest for circumcision, which for them was a non-negotiable act of obedience and devotion to God. I wonder if Mary felt her first pangs of separation when she handed her infant son over to a priest she’d never met, and if she shivered a bit when she heard his outcry when the knife cut into his flawless flesh. Another unexpected pain was about to hit her.

     Seemingly by chance, Mary and Joseph bump into an old man named Simeon. And then a woman named Anna who had been a widow for 84 years.  The aged inevitably turn and gaze at an infant, as if the chances to glimpse such precious beauty are numbered. Or was he somehow, even if unwittingly, dispatched there by God? “It happened that there was a man.” Chance, maybe. But then verse 27 exposes what even he may not have known – that he was “led by the Spirit.” This “upright and devout” one was not alone in “waiting for the consolation of Israel” (Lk 2:25). But some mystical disclosure had come to this man – that he would not die before seeing the Messiah. Do mothers today encounter various older people who figure in profound and surprising ways into the unfolding drama of their children’s lives? Does God send such people into our orbit to shape the puzzled parents’ new world?

     Simeon took the child. Mary would forever be handing her child over to the hopes of others. His prayer over the child must have struck Mary and Joseph dumb. “Now let your servant depart in peace,” for this Messiah (even in infancy) had come, “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for Israel.” We deploy extravagant hyperbole when speaking of a newborn, but this is over the top, outrageous, either divinely inspired or sheer craziness. 

     Would that he had stopped with his blessing. In somber tones, Simeon spoke directly to Mary: “Behold, he is set for the fall and rise of many in Israel… A sword will pass through your own soul.” These densely framed words require considerable exegesis, and much pondering from Mary. His destiny involves the “fall and rise” of God’s people. The order should puzzle us. We speak of the “rise and fall” of, let’s say, the Roman Empire, a British dynasty, or a famous politician. With Jesus, as Scripture has tutored us to expect, turns everything upside down. Those drawn into the wake of this child will learn that you fall before you rise, you get emptied of your own goodness before you are filled with the mercy – and the same happens with God’s church, rising like a phoenix only after suffering the worst persecution.

     The pattern will be Jesus’ own. He will fall, flagellated by the soldiers, then beneath his own cross, and finally crushed by death itself, only then to rise, and to reign. This fall will indeed pierce Mary’s heart. Simeon was right: she would barely be able to stand at the foot of the cross, trying to avert her gaze but not being able to do so from the sight of the lifeblood she had given him draining out of his precious, pure body. Whose heart was more crushed than hers? Who felt the piercing of the nails and the spear more than his mother? Who, even after his resurrection and ascension, felt the pangs of missing him more than his holy mother?

     We may pause and consider prophecies, most of them surely unintended, that are uttered over our children. Sizing up mom and dad, the doctor says He’ll be a tall one! Or as a premie beats the odds and exhibits surprising growth, the nurse says She’s a fighter! Or the too-young mother in labor and delivery, with no family hovering nearby, the obstetrician shrugs and hangs her head: That one is already behind the eight ball. I have vague recollections of overhearing awful words in my own house growing up – that when my older sister was born, they had really wanted a boy. So I was their boy! and she was not – a terrible prophecy. Were there prophecies you’ve overheard about yourself?

    After that quick visit to Jerusalem for purification and circumcision, the Bible tells us nothing at all about Jesus’ childhood until he is twelve years old – beyond the scope of what we’re attempting in this book. But that moment is instructive. The holy family made their way to Jerusalem as part of a caravan of travelers from Nazareth to the high festival days in Jerusalem. Headed for home, somehow Jesus got misplaced, and his parents couldn’t locate him for three days. Once they did, Mary upbraided him: “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously” (Luke 2:48). Indeed. Even they are learning what all religiously seriously parents learn: you do not know what God is calling your child to become.  We imagine Jesus as some prodigy, outsmarting the smart, teaching the brilliant. But if you read the text closely, it's a dialogue, and Jesus is asking questions more than spouting theology. A commendable way to begin a year...