What can we say December 20 - Advent 4

   Advent 4. "For lo, the days are hastening on..." {If you're prepping for Christmas Eve, check out my Preaching Christmas blog}. 2 Samuel 7 is a pivotal text in deciphering the origins and validation of the Davidic monarchy, but I’m not sure this is so preachable so close before Christmas - unless you're clever to see Mary's womb, or Jesus' body as the temple? You could play with the portability of God, the you-can’t-box-me-in character of this God, who is content enough to live in a tent even though David has built a sumptuous house for himself (revealing David’s typical character). Once grown, Jesus will say that Foxes have holes, birds have nests but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. This God in the flesh might show up just anywhere. Gosh, even in our people, in a divided world, perhaps in our churches!

   Lovely that the Psalter isn’t a Psalm but Mary’s song – the one she sang when she visited Elizabeth in Ein-Karem (Luke 1:46-55). I sure wouldn’t over-explain things. I’ll invite my people to imagine Mary singing. What was her voice like. I tend to imagine it as sweet, lacking that big soprano vibrato – but maybe I picture it as sweet because I’ve been lulled into classic portrayals of Mary as sweet, lily white, a bit fragile. Maybe her voice was on the raspy side. And why not? The content of her song is the antithesis of sweet. Here she is, quite pregnant with God, and she’s singing about political upheaval and the overthrow of all the world holds dear, and the elevation of all the world despises. Good thing Herod didn’t hear what she had in mind. He’d have had an armed regiment waiting for her to show up in Bethlehem.

   The Gospel, Luke 1:26-38, the Annunciation, which I like to treat earlier in Advent, as December 20 doesn’t leave her much time from conception to birth! This fact might itself be worth pondering. When you’re pregnant, the baby doesn’t show up 5 days later. Thankfully. You have to wait. It matters what you eat and drink. You become uncomfortable. Your old clothes don’t work any more. You’re awakened, your balance is askew. And it takes so much time. God coming to us, into us is like this.

   So much about Mary intrigues. I love the sermon that simply looks on Mary with awe. No big takeaways, no moral points, no missional directives – except that in the Annunciation, God asked to take on flesh, to become real in her, which is precisely what God asks of each of us. In my new book Birth: The Mystery of Being Born, I devised a little chapter about her, lingering on how she “pondered,” and items like Amy Grant’s “Breath of Heaven.” I’ll simply excerpt parts of that for you now:

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     If we want to make theological sense of our own birth, if we want to begin to understand God’s intimate connection with us as far back as conception, and then continuing through this moment, we can do no better than to ponder the marvelous, elusive and alluring story of Mary, the mother of our Lord.  “Ponder” is just what she, so understandably, did after those mystical and perilous nine months from the first stirrings in her inner being to the arrival of her son, God’s son. As she tried to rest, exhausted and yet jubilant after delivering this most wanted, unexpected and desperately needed child in all of history, “Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). 

     She “kept.” Luke’s Greek implies “treasuring.” And which “all these things” did Luke have in mind? I suspect that she treasured more than just the shepherd’s crazed report of an angelic choir, or the agony of birth, or the months of uncertainty during her pregnancy, the arduous journey to visit Elizabeth, Joseph’s tender mercy, and even Gabriel’s unasked for visit. Hadn’t she treasured the simplicity of her old life in Nazareth? Was it hard to treasure her interrupted dreams – not to mention what Rowan Williams called “the dangerous difference that God’s Word would make”?

     All these things she “pondered” – a word derived from pondus, meaning “weighty.”  We ponder what is substantial, maybe a burden; to ponder what is heavy, strength is required. The Greek suggests something even more picturesque behind “pondered”: sumballousa, meaning literally “tossing around together” or “debating.” Have you ever had so much substantive stuff in you at once that it seemed to churn incessantly? and then bat it around with yourself, you almost can’t help opening yourself to God? Richard Rohr sees Mary “in that liminal space between fascination and attraction on the one side, and fear and awe on the other.”

    Luke tells us that Mary “pondered” again when twelve year old Jesus got lost (but not really lost) in the temple (Luke 2:51). We can be sure she pondered much as Jesus grew up, left home, gathered a passionate following, and then conflicted with the authorities. We shudder over what she must have pondered on that dark night after his crucifixion. And in the long years to come after his resurrection and ascension: who pondered (and missed) him more than Mary?

     Luke’s telling observation of how Mary treasured and pondered all these things invites us to do the same, gifting us with considerable liberty to do so creatively. Mary: what woman’s name has been repeated more times in human history? Who has been the subject of more paintings, statues, jewelry and carvings? How many have fingered rosary beads, mindlessly or in desperation?

   Amy Grant intoned her catchy “Breath of heaven,” getting inside Mary’s mood: “I am frightened by the load I bear… Do you wonder as you watch my face if a wiser one should have had my place” – and then she pleads, “Hold me together… Help me be strong. Help me be. Help me.”

   Heaping attention on Mary would make her blush, and she would gently insist that we stop. Martin Luther was right: “Mary does not desire to be an idol; she does nothing, God does all.” Her loveliness, her holiness, and her appeal reside in her unawareness. A simple young woman saying Yes to the life of God already growing in her: without realizing it, she was now the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy of Holies, the open space where the infinite, uncontainable God became finite, contained in her womb.

An Illiterate Reader of the Word

     So much we’ve spoken of here is the result of imagination, and pondering – so skeptics will argue that we cannot know such things. Here’s what we do know. Mary lived in Nazareth, a small, backwater village of no account, population in the dozens, her family and neighbors eking out a hardscrabble existence. We would say that she married young – but so did most women back then. Even cynics will grant that she had a son, and probably other children, and a husband, Joseph, a carpenter or stone mason.

     We yearn to see her face. Much of Christian art depicting her is kitschy. I have always been fond of the serene, lovely paintings of her by Sassoferrato – although her skin is terribly white, while the real Mary would have been, like middle easterners of her race and place, more darkly complected. To visualize the feel of Mary’s face, we might veer toward something like Dorothea Lange’s iconic “Migrant Mother,” her 1936 photograph of a mother exhausted and yet courageous. Herbert O’Driscoll’s wise devotional book about Mary, Portrait of a Woman, features Garibaldi Melchers’ “Woman and Child” on the cover. Her more weathered complexion suggests strength and gentleness, maybe endangered, with a ferocious kind of love, shielding her child from danger.

     We are pretty sure Mary was illiterate. Certainly as a poor young woman from the middle of nowhere, she didn’t own a book; her family didn’t have their own Scripture scrolls. But she had seen the scrolls unfurled in the synagogue; she had listened attentively to the regular readings. Like most devout Jews, she had committed the Psalms and much more in the Bible to memory. She was, as her son was, an Israelite, the people of God’s promises. Thomas Torrance put it elegantly: “And then at last in the fullness of time, when God had prepared in the heart and soul of Israel a womb for the birth of Jesus, a cradle for the child of Bethlehem, the savior of the world was born, the very Son of God.”

     Through the centuries, artists have tried to figure out how to paint or sculpt that shimmering moment when the angel came to Mary and asked her to let Jesus take on flesh in her. Almost always, as the artists have reckoned it, she is holding an open book: God’s Word, the Bible. The angel didn’t flit into her life in a vacuum. Mary was a student of God’s Word; when asked to become the mother of God, she replied, “Let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

     Martin Luther called the Bible “the swaddling clothes in which Jesus is laid.” To ponder Mary’s pregnancy, we ponder the Scriptures that were very much alive in her mind and heart during those days of anticipation, anxiety, discomfort, probably nausea, something going on inside her she could not entirely fathom – in a unique way, and yet like all mothers in waiting. The Psalms resonated, with their dark cries for help and comfort. I wonder if she was deeply moved to reconsider the story of Hannah, barren and then surprised with a son? Once Samuel, her dream, her loveliest ever gift from God arrived, she didn’t cling to him but gave him back to the Lord, to serve with Eli in the temple at Shiloh. That boy in turn heard a voice in the night, and after some confusion responded, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening” (1 Sam. 3:9). Did that moment shape her reply to Gabriel? “Let it be to me according to your Word.”

     Which texts spoke most deeply to her? Did she have favorites? Surely the stories of Hannah’s pregnancy and the stirrings in Rebekah’s womb moved her. The blessing in Numbers 6 (“The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you”) must have resonated encouragingly. When the birth pangs were intense, did her mind drift to Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”), as her son’s did in his hour of agony? After he was gone, what pulsated in her heart when she heard 1 Corinthians 13 (“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things”), which would have been circulated and read where she lived out her years? What if pregnant women, or young mothers read the Scripture during their days of wonder and struggle, picturing Mary pondering the words in her heart?

The Echo of Her Calling

     Mary perceived the new life dawning in her belly as a call, as her divinely ordained vocation. Having a child wasn’t her pursuit of fulfillment or security in old age. She was responding to God’s calling. Or we could say the nascent life in her became her calling. How do mothers, when the news sinks in that, Yes, I am pregnant, begin with Mary to discern what God is asking of them, and how the nurturing of the child in the womb, and then after birth, can be the embodiment of a life of service to God, of a determination to follow the one Mary nurtured in her womb?

     Tradition suggests that Mary was about to draw water from a well when she was interrupted by the angel. A well in Nazareth supposedly marks the place, housed in a massive basilica that fields more visitors every day than the entire population of the Nazareth Mary knew. There is something mystical about water, our thirst for it, the beauty, the shimmering ripples eliciting a kind of simple awe. Water will matter for her, and for all mothers. They need to stay hydrated. Their fetuses live in a numinous, aquatic realm until the water breaks. And then the bath, a lifetime of drinking, and Baptism, and the delight in rivers, lakes, ocean waves and the gentle rain.

     The appearance of the angel must have been terrifying. Gabriel was, in Jewish lore, the mighty warrior among God’s heavenly host. And yet, if God’s plan was to make God’s mind and heart accessible, and for people not to be terrified, perhaps Gabriel toned it down, or came in a more humble guise. Luther suggests that “Gabriel did not resent being used as an errand boy to carry word to a lowly maiden. His glory was laid aside, and he appeared to her simply in the guise of a comely youth.” Even if he showed up in the most inviting form imaginable, Mary still had good cause to shiver. Elie Wiesel was right: “If an angel ever says, ‘Be not afraid,’ you’d better watch out: a big assignment is on the way.”

     Whose assignment was ever bigger than Mary’s? And yet, isn’t ours similar? Herbert O’Driscoll captured our inevitable kinship with Mary: “She had felt the divine visitation which in some way comes to us all. What had been asked of her was unique, and yet an echo of it reaches all of us if only we have ears to hear. She had been asked to offer herself to the divine will, to become a servant. She had made her choice, as we all must. Fully and freely she had said Yes. For those who say Yes nothing is ever the same again.” God’s calling is always like hers: God asks to become real in us, to take on flesh in our lives.

     In the Bible, those who are called have their reasons not to say Yes. Moses has his speech issues, Jeremiah’s too young, Isaiah is unholy – and now Mary, who knew their stories: she has not been with any man. God always counters, and uses the unusable. We might ask, Why Mary, of all people? We presume she was of immense holiness; Wordsworth called her “our tainted nature’s solitary boast.” She calls to us out of her holiness; Richard Rohr suggests that “somehow she is calling all of us to our absolute best.” She was a virgin. But in those days, as a matter of both holiness and family honor, most newly betrothed women were – hence, not the shock this sadly would be today. Luther pinpoints her humility – a humility that did not even know it was being humble: “She gloried neither in her virginity nor in her humility, but solely in God’s gracious regard… True humility does not know that it is humble.”

     Her ordinariness, and in such an ordinary place, makes her the sort of person God would choose for this extraordinary mission. Ultimately, what we realize about Mary is not that she had this or that ability; what she had was simply an availability. “Let it be to me.” As with all of us, God is looking for a readiness, an availability, or what Maggie Ross called “a willingness for whatever.” She heard the angel speak of what was impossible. With considerable courage, naivete, and trust, she went with it, she let it be in her. And I feel sure that over time she came to realize what was dawning in her was not for her or even her people but for the whole world.

     People who have gotten born, when they fix their attention on Mary, eventually begin to realize the wisdom of Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth century German mystic: “We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I also do not give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time. When the Son of God is begotten in us.”

     St. Augustine, overly enraptured by Mary, wrote “In conceiving you were all pure, in giving birth you were without pain.” He should have consulted Monica, his own mother, on this. Rachel Marie Stone fills in the blanks of the biblical story more fittingly: “A girl was in labor with God. She groaned and sweated and arched her back, crying out for her deliverance and finally delivering God, God’s head pressing on her cervix, emerging from her vagina, perhaps tearing her flesh a little; God the Son, her Son, covered in vernix and blood, the infant God’s first breath the close air of crowded quarters… God the Son, her Son, pressed to her bare breast… God the Son, her Son, drank deeply from his mother. Drink, my beloved. This is my body, broken for you.”

   I admire an Ethiopian prayer to Mary from the ninth century that doesn’t overstate things at all: “Your hands touched him who is untouchable and the divine fire within him. Your fingers are like the incandescent tongs with which the prophet received the coal of the heavenly offering. You are the basket bearing this burning bread and you are the cup of this wine. O Mary, we earnestly pray to you that, just as water is not divided from wine, so we may not separate ourselves from your son, the lamb of salvation.”

What can we say come Christmas Eve?

   Christmas Eve!!  Preaching is a challenge, and a joy (I think). There's still usable Advent material in my previous blog, "Preaching Advent" - but beyond that, here are some key questions and thoughts I’ve assembled over the years of preaching Christmas Eve.

     (a) What do they come for? I try to remember what people came for – and precious few would say We come on Christmas Eve to hear Rev. Howell’s sermon.  They come for the music, and at our place for that magical moment when we sing Silent Night, lower the lights, and raise our candles.  It’s hokey – and I love it.  I’ve tried to name the wonder so it isn’t just “pretty.”  If it’s beautiful, it’s because it happens in the dark.  Lots of darkness in the world, and in our lives; so the little candle is a promise, a pledge, a defiance.  It’s a parable of a faithful life of resistance to evil. 

Gandalf (Lord of the Rings) said it well: “Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”  Or this, from the medieval Franciscan, Giovanni Giacondo: “The gloom of the world is but a shadow / Behind it, yet within reach, is joy / There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see / And to see, we have only to look / I beseech you to look.”

     It’s also helpful to help them hear their own music.  We have a soprano sing “O Holy Night,” and there’s much in there (“chains shall he break…”); last year I drew their attention to “Then he appeared, and the soul felt its worth” – suggesting that the order matters:  it is the appearing of Jesus that defines our worth.  We sing “Away in a Manger,” and I’ve invited them to pray the last stanza (“Be near me Lord Jesus, I ask thee to stay close by me forever, and love me I pray; bless all the dear children in thy tender care, and fit us for heaven to live with thee there”). When I wrote a book about Christmas music (Why This Jubilee?) a couple of years ago, I found myself surprised, delighted and moved over and over by the depth of theology and psychology and geography and history in our simple carols; I now try to help people really hear what they've sung by heart forever.

     (b) Who comes?  It’s a cheap shot to ding the C&Es.  We aren’t crowded on Dec. 24 because of them.  Rather, everybody comes – and they bring visiting parents, aunts, grandchildren, etc.  But you do have the very occasional attender – and how to speak to them invitingly?  I’m fond of what the novelist Julian Barnes said:  “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.”  I believe the most adamant atheist, and the most casual spiritual person have a deep-seated longing for home – for Christ.  Name the hollow place for what it is.

     (c) What do they need to hear?  I’ve chided the sporadic attenders and pleaded with them to continue coming.  Not helpful.  I do suspect Christmas Eve isn’t a bad time to quite gently take on popular atheism.  Among the many anti-Christian bestsellers was God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens (may God rest his soul…).  I’d play on that and say, Correct, God is not great.  God, rather, is quite small, vulnerable, a God who doesn’t conquer everything but gets defeated in the most profound embodiment of suffering love ever.  Jesus did not rise up miraculously in the manger and denounce his foes.  Jesus has a tender place in his heart for Christopher Hitchens.

     And Bart Ehrman.  Amazingly, and weirdly, a few years ago I received an email from him – on Christmas Eve.  I had been trying to connect with him on something – and he finally responded around suppertime on 12/24.  I had reviewed his book, God’s Problem, which is an embarrassingly vapid regurgitation of the most simplistic, easily answered critiques of Christianity – and his email to me said he didn’t like worshipping with his Episcopalian wife on Christmas Eve, because they raise all those candles.  “If good Christians would do something for the poor instead of raising those candles, I would think more highly of Christianity.”  I replied to him that, yes, a few thousand would raise candles at my place on this evening – but we also would raise over $100,000 for the poor.

     (d) What mood are they in?  Some are sentimental, some are giddy, some are edgy – facing family dysfunction.  Some have already been drinking.  I think almost all are in a bit of a “What really matters” mood.  If you’ve never read Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, you should.  He says this: “One Christmas was so much like another… I can never remember if it snowed for 6 days and 6 nights when I was 12 or 12 days and 12 nights when I was 6… All the Christmases roll down to the sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street.”  I’ve used this tactic: I’ll ask, What did you get for Christmas in 1998? Or in 2004?  No one can remember, of course.  Then I ask, Whom did you love in 1998?  Who was with you in 2004?  “Through the years we all will be together.”  It’s not the stuff.  I giggle when I recall my girls getting bikes on Christmas Eve.  But what year was it?  And where on earth are those bikes now?  It’s the people, the love, the relationship.  That’s all we have to give, all we really want to receive.  And that’s what God gives.  Not this thing or that answer to prayer.  God gives God’s own self at Christmas.

     (e) What is my tone?  Of all preaching moments, my tone on 12/24 had best be gentle, slower than usual, resonant with wisdom, patience, kindness and wonder.  Sighing is in order.  If you have a smart-alecky voice like mine, you have to practice.

     (f) Where do I go first?  Since homilies on Christmas Eve should be short, you have to take people somewhere quickly.  Not a lot of reiterating the text, or ramping in with chit-chat.  And you have to take them to a very different place quickly.  Could be your grandparents’ Christmas tree.  I like a couple of historical moments.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s wife died in 1835, he remarried in 1843, then she died in a house fire in 1861; shortly thereafter his son was wounded in the Civil War.  With war raging, and bearing so much loss, he woke up on Christmas day and wrote, “I heard the bells on Christmas day Their old familiar carols play, and wild and sweet the words repeat of peace on earth, good will to men.  And thought how, as the day had come, The belfries of all Christendom Had rolled along the unbroken song of peace on earth, good will to men.  A voice, a chime, a chant sublime of peace on earth, good will to men. The cannon thundered in the South, And with the sound the carols drowned of peace on earth, good will to men. And in despair I bowed my head ‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said, ‘For hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to men.’

     This sequence moves me every time.  There is sorrow and good cause to feel forlorn at Christmas – but Longfellow continued: “Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: ‘God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; The wrong shall fail, the right prevail With peace on earth, good will to men.’”  That was my sermon one year.

     Or you have Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s amazing letter from a Nazi concentration camp:  “I think we’re going to have an exceptionally good Christmas.  Since outward circumstance precludes our making provision for it will show whether we can be content with what is truly essential.  I used to be very fond of thinking up and buying presents, but now that we have nothing to give, the gift God gave us in the birth of Christ will seem all the more glorious; the emptier our hands, the better we understand what Luther meant: We are beggars, it’s true.  The poorer our quarters, the more clearly we perceive that our hearts should be Christ’s home on earth.”  The image of no presents, empty hands, in poor quarters, even being apart.  Christ comes to humble hearts.

     (g) What about the text?  If you follow my blog, you know I’m big on attention to exegetical detail.  I think I am less so on Christmas Eve – although there are little details in the texts that intrigue and could be lingered on to make a whole homily.  The name Augustus – who promised everything Christ came to deliver: peace, salvation, good news, unity.  You could cite historians regarding the situation when Jesus was born – but it would be hard to top Madeleine L’Engle: “That was no time for a child to be born / With the earth betrayed by war and hate / In a land in the crushing grip of Rome; / Honor and truth were trampled by scorn / Yet here did the Saviour make his home. / When is the time for love to be born? / The inn is full on the planet earth, / Yet love still takes the risk of birth.” The phrase, “No room in the inn”: easy to spiritualize, and I’d commend Frederick Buechner’s eloquent lament over the fate of the innkeeper.  Mary “pondering” in her heart.  So much in Luke 2, much less John 1…

     (h) Anything you might report on?  I think of the prophets and their symbolic actions: is there something you can do and then just tell about it?  A couple of years ago, in the gap between Christmas Eve services, I drove to inner city Charlotte just to see what if anything might happen, if I might notice something.  I parked, and immediately (as if God set it up) a city bus stopped where I was standing.  An older woman, looking utterly exhausted, got off with a battered, rolling suitcase.  She sighed and looked at me.  I innocuously said “Merry Christmas!”  She moaned a little, and said, “Not for me.”  I said, “Tell me about it.”  She squinted, looked me over, dressed as I was in dress shirt, wool slacks, and with my very Caucasian complexion, and said, “You don’t look like the kind of fellow who would understand.”  I hung in there and said, “Try me anyway.”

     I reported this in my homily that evening – and tried gently and briefly to explore who’s hurting out there, would we understand, and how Jesus came not so much for us but for her and her kin, looking very much like someone who would understand.

     (i) The main thing, the only thing.  It’s the Incarnation.  God became flesh; God came down; God is as close as my own heartbeat and the breath I just took.  God understands us, and redeems us from the inside out.  This is why God’s revealing of God’s heart and mind came through an infant – something we all once were, something that elicits tenderness from even the hardest among us.  This is the only real unique thing about our faith.  Hans Urs von Balthasar: “Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things.”

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   ** Check out two of my books, Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week, and Weak Enough to Lead: What the Bible Tells Us About Powerful Leadership, are available.

What can we say December 27? 1st Sunday of Christmas

    Nothing like "the Sunday after." Severe attendance drop-off… but then those quiet Sundays can be lovely. There is so much preaching fodder around the date, with the New Year beckoning – 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...

What can we say January 3? 2nd Xmas? Epiphany?

   A little quandary: January 3 is technically the 2^nd Sunday after Christmas. But with Epiphany falling mid-week, and the Baptism of our Lord looming on January 10, we will observe Epiphany this Sunday at my place. With, given the mindset of our people, the feel of New Year's, new beginnings, resolutions made, not yet broken.

   Mind you, the 2^nd after Christmas texts are lovely. Paul’s crazily long 202 word sentence that is Ephesians 1:3-14 Jan 3 – 2^nd after Christmas (a) declares we were chosen by God before the universe was even created, (b) we are “holy and blameless,” either aspirationally or in fact because of Christ, and (c) the “mystery of God’s will” is indeed a mystery but it has been “made known.” I made this into 3 sermons back in September when we departed the lectionary and ran a series on Ephesians. And here’s my blog from yesteryear on this text.

   John 1:(1-9) 10-18 includes the eloquent vs. 14, but we did this at Christmas.

   So our texts for Epiphany. Ephesians 3:1-12 could not be more timely: not losing heart? Breaking down the dividing wall of hostility? Reconciliation? I preached on this in our Fall series, and commend that sermon to you. So much in there about reconciliation of the unreconciled, so crucial for our folks during these days. I illustrated what can happen, with God, with two vignettes from the life of St. Francis of Assisi: the story of the wolf of Gubbio, and Francis showing up on the 5th Crusade against the Saracens, befriending the sultan, Malik-al-Kamil.

   Isaiah 60:1-6 soars far beyond “So rise and shine and give God the glory glory.” The dead stand, as people formerly downtrodden, about to receive extraordinary news. They shine, not because they have pretty faces or are in a chipper mood, but because the reflect God’s glory, like Moses did in Exodus 34. I love Oscar Romero’s benediction: “When we leave Mass, we ought to go out the way Moses descended Mt. Sinai: with his face shining, with his heart brave and strong to face the world’s difficulties.”

   Light in the darkness: I will prepare by going out at night, or down into my basement where it’s dark, and just being in the dark, or lighting a candle, feeling with it’s like. Isaiah’s vision involves a great gathering of nations, kings – and I dream of recreating the mood of the dramatic ending to “Field of Dreams.” Corny? It’s moving, touching something inside that is of God, not just Hollywood. John August Swanson’s marvelous “Festival of Lights” paints a hopeful picture of God’s future ingathering.

   Notice Isaiah includes camels toting gold and frankincense in his scenario – an exotic touch. Not a prophecy of the magi coming… but even so: Matthew 2:1-12. Christmas as sweetness and light? There’s no eluding Herod though. Nearing his own death, he inflicts death on so many innocents. The magi were lucky to survive after cheekily saying to his face “Where is the king of the Jews? We have come to worship him.”

   I get tickled over the magi, and I wonder if Matthew somewhere in the back of his mind saw a comic element here. You have the hilarious scene in “The Life of Brian,” when the magi show up at the wrong house; and Owen Meany’s moaning over “We Three Kings”: “Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying doesn’t sound very Christmasy to me.” Christmas pageants can be funny, the wise men wearing cardboard crowns, trying to muster a wise face.

   They were magi – astrologers! What bawdy humor: non-Jews who practice illegitimate arts find the Christchild, while the Bible people missed it. God is so very determined to be found. A Libra, a Pisces and a Taurus worshipping Jesus – a Capricorn? What are Capricorns like?

   Typically around Christmas I fume about the commercialization of the holiday. Can we blame the magi for kickstarting this with their gifts? Yet it is a season to “traverse afar” and give to those we love. If the Christ child is the one we love, notice they brought gifts of immense value, what was precious to them. Can we give Jesus, and those who are marginalized who bear his image, not our leftovers but what is especially valuable to us?

   And I can never neglect the tantalizing ending: “They left for their own country by another road.” Frightened by Herod? Of course they did. But isn’t there some mystery here – that once you’ve met the Christ child, you don’t keep plodding along the same old pathways. It’s a new day, a new road. T.S. Eliot ended his poem about the magi with “We returned to our places… but no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods.” Jesus doesn’t make my life easier or more comfortable. The closer we are to Jesus, the more we sense our dis-ease in this place.