I don't do this very
often; in fact I'm not sure I've done it before in the years I've been
blogging. But I'm re-posting a post from four years ago - my last Christmas Eve
Sermon at St. Francis, Holden, preached on December 24, 2012. Preaching is always contextual. On the one hand
there is the Incarnation and the text from Luke's Gospel that we read to
remember the story. On the other hand is our context - the world in which we
hear this story. And I know that the world in December 2016 is different than December 2012.
And yet as I looked back on this sermon, I realized that we are always facing
challenges, and perhaps it has always been thus - from the very first Christmas in the context of the Roman Empire. And yet the light shines in the
darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Merry Christmas and wishing all
a new year of grace!
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Like most of you, I grew
up singing “Away in a Manger.” And I pretty much assumed that the angels must
have taught those very words and that very tune to the shepherds that night out
in the fields and that Christians around the world have been singing it ever
since, for two-thousand years. After all, if you look it up in The
Hymnal to see who wrote it, it simply says that this is a “traditional carol.”
Well, for reasons I will explain in a moment, this year I got to wondering:
“whose tradition?” So, of course, I Googled it…
The hymn was actually
written in the late nineteenth century—1885 to be precise—in Philadelphia,
where it was published by an Evangelical Lutheran Church Sunday School in a
collection called Little Children's Book for Schools and Families.
While that’s a while ago, it’s still only decades ago; in a tradition that has
been around for two millennia. In that collection it was set to a tune called
"St. Kilda,” a favorite tune of the Puritans but not the one we all know;
in The Hymnal it is set to a tune called Cradle Song.
Tradition. It’s a funny thing. We think we know the
tradition, but the truth is that most of us are not really all that interested
in the depth and breadth of the tradition so much as we are in “the way we did
things in my family, or my church, when I was a little kid.” If you don’t
believe me then imagine this: what if Charles and I had conspired to sing the
song as written tonight, to the tune no one here knew, and my defense was
“that’s the tradition?” This nostalgia for our own childhoods, that we
mistakenly confuse with the tradition, is a particular challenge at Christmas
time. Like Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights, we are sometimes tempted to just
keep loving tiny baby Jesus—and even more our image of tiny baby Jesus—rather
than allowing the image of the child in the manger to invite us more deeply
into the mystery of God’s love for the world.
So I have been singing
that carol for almost fifty years now: in church, in nursing homes, out in the
streets of Hawley, Pennsylvania as a child caroling. And because of
that I knew this: that when the cattle were lowing, the baby awakes, but little
Lord Jesus—come on everyone, you all know it—what does little Lord Jesus do, or
rather not do? No crying he makes! That must be
in the Bible, right? (It is not!)
The assumption, however,
that the carol must have it right has caused pageant mothers (and I presume
fathers as well) great consternation over many years in this parish. Every year
we ask some poor parents if they will have their child play “baby Jesus” in our
live nativity pageant. At first they think this is a great honor, but most
years “baby Jesus” doesn’t get the memo that says “no crying he makes.”
So last Sunday night,
I’m sitting at Memorial Church at Harvard when the choir sings a “traditional”
Flemish carol with the words that have been printed on the front of your
bulletins tonight. They go like this:
There is a young and gentle maiden,
With a charm so full of grace.
Look! See how she cradles the Christ Child,
As the tears flow down his face
There is Jesus Christ a -weeping,
While his vigil they are keeping.
Hush, hush, hush, dear child, do not weep,
Cease your crying, now go to sleep.
Cease your crying, now go to sleep.
Cease your crying, now go to sleep.
Wait, what? Baby Jesus cried?!
Says who? (Who are the Flemish anyway?) Surely if you have to pick a
“tradition” to believe, of course it should be that of good sturdy Americans (even
if they are Lutherans!) rather than somebody off in Flanders fields! Colicky baby Jesus? Really?
Yet this image of crying
baby Jesus has haunted me during these last days of Advent. There is
Jesus Christ a-weeping…hush, hush, hush dear child, do not weep. Cease your
crying, now go to sleep.
Well, of course I knew
that the Bible doesn’t address this question at all, but I started to
re-examine “the tradition”—even to the point of changing tonight’s gradual hymn
to “Once in Royal David’s City.” (You’ll just have to trust me that it would
not have worked for us to attempt to sing the Flemish carol!) Because in verse
four, we just sang these words:
For he is our life-long pattern; daily when on earth he grew…now listen up! …he was tempted,
scorned, rejected, tears and smiles like us he knew. Thus he
feels for all our sadness and he shares in all our gladness.
I have been thinking and praying with this image of the “crying baby Jesus” this past week. And it kept bringing me back to a verse of Holy Scripture that I memorized as a young child. My Baptist grandmother was old-school and she believed in teaching her grandchildren to memorize Bible verses, something I was not (and still am not) particularly good at. To my everlasting shame I am much better at memorizing whole paragraphs from the Book of Common Prayer! But here is one verse I know by heart: John 11:35— “Jesus wept.” The shortest verse in the Bible!
Now I know that verse is
set in a different context, when all-grown-up Jesus is standing at the grave of
his friend Lazarus. But here is the thing: Jesus did grow up. And Jesus
did weep. And if he was like us in every way, save sin, then he didn’t wait
until he was a grown man to shed his first tears. Like every child he surely
cried to let Mary know that he was hungry and when he needed Joseph to rock him
to sleep and tell him everything was going to be ok. He surely did cry when his
swaddling clothes were wet and he needed them changed. Hush, now, don’t
cry little one; go to sleep.
This matters to us,
especially after a polarizing election year and Hurricane Sandy and all of that
loss in Newtown, Connecticut—and that’s just the past two months! It’s been a
hard year and let’s face it, a hard decade or so. And grief is always
cumulative. Crying baby Jesus takes us to the heart of the mystery of the Incarnation
and to the good news of this holy night: that God really is with us.
God who, in Jesus, knew both tears and smiles and who, even now, feels all our
sadness and shares in all our gladness. Immanuel.
I think most of us have
felt, at some point or another in our lives, that what we really want is an
interventionist God: a God who will intervene in human history and fix things
that get broken, or better still prevent bad things from happening in the first
place. A superhero-God who can at the very least spin the planet back in time
when necessary to stop evil from happening. Such a world would be Eden, of
course, and we would have no free will—but still it sounds nice when things are
really hard.
In the world we do live
in, there are some out there speaking in the name of Jesus Christ who find an
interventionist God to be the cause of every bad thing that
happens and usually they have a group that they are happy to scapegoat as the
source of God’s wrath. Now I’m not really for going back to the days when we
had heresy trials but if we did, Huckabee and Dobson and their ilk are the kind
of clowns that ought to be the first brought up on charges. What they have to
say is mostly about their own bigotry and fear and hatred and has very little
to do with the holy catholic and apostolic faith we are here to proclaim
tonight.
The two great moments in
the life of Jesus that take us to the heart of what his life was about are
celebrated in the two great festivals of the liturgical year: Christmas and
Easter. The two great icons of the birth and death are of a baby in a manger
and of a man dying on a cross. If these two images reveal anything at all to us
about the nature of the incarnate God, the suffering God, it is that God so
loved the world. That is how John’s Gospel puts it. Not that God so loved the
right-wing Christian zealots. And certainly not that God so hated the Jews, or
the Muslims, or the gays, or the atheists, or anybody else. God so loved the
world, the whole world. No exceptions.
But God so especially
loved the little children of this world, that God gave up power and control to
live and die among us to be with us and for us. There is nothing in Bethlehem
or on a hill outside of Jerusalem to suggest that God is looking for ways to
inflict hurt on people. Jesus comes to bring joy to the world, and peace on
earth and good will to all people. That’s what the angels sing about, even if
some are deaf to their songs. In his living and in his dying, Jesus shows us
how to live more generous and compassionate lives. He shows us how to respond,
when we pray for peace on earth: let it begin with me. He feels all our sadness
and all of our gladness. Look! See how Mary cradles the Christ Child, as the
tears flow down his face. There is Jesus Christ a -weeping, while his vigil
they are keeping.
Jesus most assuredly
wept and weeps on this holy night with all who are grieving. Not just
those new losses that are still fresh on all of our minds, but old ones too.
When I look back and consider all the funerals I’ve presided at in this parish
over fifteen years, I wonder why it is that so many of them come in December:
so much loss in our lives and so much sadness. So if you ask the question
“where is God?” in relationship to the grief and pain that we feel tonight, then
there is only one answer to that question: look to crying baby Jesus. It is the
God we see in the face of this child that calls us to live life more
abundantly. The God who is revealed to the shepherds and to us on this holy
night is not some distant masochist who watches this all happen with glee, but
a God who weeps when we weep.
And that is the good
news of this night: that we are not left comfortless. We are called as
Christians, as Franciscan Christians, to sow joy where there
is sadness, to sow love where there is hatred, to sow faith where there is
doubt; to sow hope where there is despair. That is what these weeks of Advent
have been about: recalling us to the work God has given us to do in Christ’s
name. In four words that is about hope and peace and love and joy.
The late Fred Rogers
(who was, if you don’t know, also a Presbyterian minister) once wrote that when
he was a boy his mother told him after scary news in the world to “look for the
helpers.” To look to those places where, after a disaster or tragedy, people
are helping and caring. You see that both globally and locally. It’s as real
here in Holden when people show up at their neighbor’s door with a casserole as
it is in Newtown or on the Jersey Shore. Look to the helpers. There you see
Jesus making all things new. Or as St. Paul reminded the first-century Church
in Philippi:
5Let the same ind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 6who,
though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something
to be exploited,7but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, 8he
humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a
cross.
We gather here on this holy night and throughout the year to be re-membered and to listen for God’s calling to us to share the work that God has given us each in our own way. Like Zechariah and Elizabeth and John the Baptist and Mary: to say “yes” to God by letting this same mind of God’s self-emptying kenotic love be in us until every tear is wiped away. Even the tears of baby Jesus.
If you want to see the hand of God,
then look to those places where there is love, for where there is love, there
God is. Ubi caritas et amour, Deus ibi est. There are babies
crying, even now—in our world and in our neighborhood. May we see in them the
face of Jesus, the newborn king—the crying baby Jesus who yearns for us to
double down as instruments of God’s peace, and as willing participants in the work
that God has entrusted to us, that God shares with us for the sake of this
broken world: to be doers of justice and lovers of mercy and a people who
(always with God’s help) continue to walk humbly with God.
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