Christmas Eve 2017

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all.

You may have noticed this evening that I have not worn my usual classy footwear.  I have chosen to wear my comfortable slippers. I have not hurt my feet; my feet are not cold; and I was not being lazy.  It actually took a lot of chutzpa to set aside the shiny leather high heeled shoes that I would usually wear to Christmas Eve Service– the shoes that make me feel good about myself, my persona; shoes that have a certain power that imbues the wearer.  Shoes that say, “this person is put together,” “this person is someone,” “this person is important.”  Tonight, I have set all that aside and worn warm, cozy slippers.

I am comfortable.

I am not comfortable.

Christmas Eve is a night we come to this space and expect comfort. There is the comfort of having family sitting beside us.  The comfort of familiar words, stories, promises. We are embraced by the comfort of twinkling lights, warm candle light; a break from the frets, the hustle and bustle of the world.  We are comforted by traditions and rituals; the sharing of the sacred meal. Comfort comes in the lilt of the scripture readings, For unto us is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour who is Christ the Lord; we share the same lilt in the array of Christmas carols sung together, oft from memory.  Tucked in our pews with the glow of Christmas on our faces, we are comfortable.

We are comfortable for the moment.

When we wake up tomorrow morning, or perhaps if we are fortunate a few days down the road; the comfortable feeling disappears.  In our own ways we return to discomfort, to mediocre, to just making it by.  Being in the world means confronting the world; living, means wrestling with everything that makes us human –  and this is uncomfortable. 

This isn’t a night of comfort. Jesus’s birth story is full of drama.  Joseph and Mary have broken the law, either having had relationships before they should have, or Joseph harboring a woman who should be cast aside to death (along with the child) for getting pregnant by someone else.  These criminals have nowhere to stay, and hunker in a barn to birth a baby.  The baby is wrapped in a swaddling cloth- the cloth meant for Mary’s burial, worn as a shawl during her lifetime. During the night the lowest of the low come to visit, unclean shepherds; surely quite a commotion. Later on, down the road, the couple sets off for Egypt as refugees, fleeing from a King who wishes to put an end to this child and does so by ridding the region of all infants by murdering all under two years of age. This is not a night of comfort!

Christmas carols reflect comfort and the not so comfy. Carols are filled with images of angels, and light; hope, joy, lilting tunes.  Taking a closer look at the language – so called happy songs, songs of comfort, nostalgia – speak of sin, death, sorrow.  Many carols have far more verses than printed in the hymnal, verses that talk about the specifics of God’s radical gift, radical grace, radical love, that of Jesus’s death. Death….and then the promise life – with the baby of tonight becoming Saviour and Redeemer. 

This is anything but comfortable.

We hear in the Gospel birth narratives of angels appearing to Mary, to Joseph; we hear of worshiping shepherds, costly gifts of frankincense, gold, and myrrh.  We hear comforting words, words that suggest Mary found comfort, and Mary treasured these things in her heart. Mary would draw on this reserve in coming years, as she watched her son grow, preach, teach, and gruesomely die at the hands of the Romans.

We treasure nights like this, the comfort of the Good News, for we know that times are coming when darkness threatens to overwhelm.  We come to find comfort to strengthen the heart: for when a father or spouse dies unexpectedly, when separated from loved ones by circumstance or situations outside of our control; when facing illness, needing to move into a care facility, experiencing job loss, waiting for children to find their way; when caught in the cross fire of war, fleeing for one’s life, doing whatever it takes to protect loved ones; living with consequences of poor choices; accidents and incidents of life that accumulate.

In a sense, tonight we are stockpiling a resource depot to provide strength and comfort for our time amidst the uncomfortableness of being human and the messiness of being in relationships.

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and in the present age to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly

I appreciate the reading from Titus.  Yes, I know it doesn’t sound like the comfortable Christmas we came to hear about. It is Titus’s words, however, that are the pinnacle of why tonight is important. One Bible translation of this passage has given it the title: Transformation of life. This is the comfort and the discomfort confronting us this evening.

The letter is written to a leader in the early Christian community who is forming a church on Crete. The letter sounds like a Greco-Roman household code of the time – an ethic to follow to bring order to individual houses and together stabilize the society. Basic directions are given to a culture who had found itself living with a lack of human decency. The scripture is more than a basic human ethic – there is more comfort and discomfort to be found.

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and in the present age to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly,

while we wait for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Comfort.

And discomfort, wearing your slippers in the world---- where people wonder how or why you have hope and wait for a promise, thousands of years old, yet to come to fruition.  We have neighbours, friends, and even family members who wonder why church, why tonight, why ever?  What is this faith?  People who tell us they, that we, can be good people without God, without God’s radical gift.

The longer I live, as my experiences multiply, as my relationships deepen, as I have access to more news than is good for my psyche, the darkness creeps in ever more quickly.  The world is frightening and overwhelming.  My cache of comfort includes the stories of Jesus, beyond tonight, stories wherein the Gospel makes the comfortable uncomfortable, and the uncomfortable comfortable.  The Gospel doesn’t acquiesce to culture, rather, Jesus confronts societal structures and institutions turning them completely upside down, and shakes the conceptions of individuals turning many to a changed, transformed life. The Gospel proclaims that God’s economy is different; abundant and radical!

Comfort for some. Discomfort for others.

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and in the present age to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly, 

while we wait for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

He it is who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.

Tonight, changes everything.  Everything is transformed.  Because God’s gift of grace was born in a stable, because God became incarnate in Jesus… because radical grace has already occurred, we live in hope of the fulness of grace yet to come. God – Immanuel- empowers us to live in ways that we can not of our own accord. Divine grace gives us the experience, the feelings we have tonight of comfort, to carry into a dark and weary world the light and love and peace we share here. Because of the experience of God’s radical love -- the feelings we leave here with --- we are called tonight to be expressions of the gracious self-sacrificing God whom we profess; to live zealously from the divine grace in which we take comfort.

Tonight, I pray that you leave here, comfortable to wear your heart on your sleeves and in your actions. Wear faith like a pair of comfortable slippers, so comfortable in relationship with God, that you go to the ends of the earth to have relationship with others; knowing and accepting it will mean being in the uncomfortable places – like wearing slippers to a fancy dinner, a wedding; to work, to a funeral. Be radical in love.  Radical in grace that dispels darkness.

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all

Chastened, Reckoned ... a Pregnant Pause Advent 2B

It took only 12 mins.  12 mins for the blasts of fire – pronouncing a quickly arriving day of judgement; a judgement of the way humanity is living. Friday night’s National news sent my head spinning, my heart wretched apart. Judged. Culpable, all of us. Guilty.

10mins into the news cast, the clip was shown.  A scene of a starving polar bear caught on film; at an abandoned fish camp, scavenging for food.  A furry skeleton, weak and shaking with each step; its legs buckle and the once majestic animal collapses, and with his last breath disappearing, closes sad, pleading eyes, and is no more.

This is it --- the hell, fire, and brimstone—of the scriptures.  The scary scripture prophesies we have been reading and hearing these past six weeks.  Dread, doom, destruction, the Day of the Lord. A day when stars will fall from the sky, elements will be destroyed by fire, elements will melt away in a blaze, and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

Yes, the words are true. 

The images of the passages, the tenor of the words, has many quaking in their boots – and many others who want to believe it is not true, and only metaphor. Have you heard people jokingly say that they are “afraid to be struck by lightening” if they were to walk into a church; or words that refer to being smote by God for some infraction or other.  Is it simple jest, or a deeply routed idea with truth behind them?  Images and words play on the imagination and form theology that speaks of punishment at the hand of a judge, who determines the merits of one’s life on a spectrum of good/bad, and right/wrong.  Humans at the end face punishment where God inflicts vengeance, punishment for wrongs committed throughout our lives. Someday we will pay the price for our actions or non-actions.

And as if the dying polar bear was not enough, I am in a terrible wilderness, as it was my non-reaction to the rest of the news that is extremely disturbing.  Crowds of Palestinian protestors and rising tensions in the Middle East, the disappearances and murders in an LGBTQ+ neighbourhood in Toronto, the rise of nuclear threat, were all trumped – by spooked thoroughbred horses being let loose to try to find safety amidst fanning flames of fire in the California desert. No passion or anger or fear was kindled by the stories of people, thousands of people in desperate wilderness conditions.  I felt nothing.  Not like the emotion I felt for the horses, and the sadness and grieve over the polar bear. Later on, after reflection, I feel guilty and ashamed that I have judged animals to be less understanding, than humans, and judged humans as responsible for their own circumstances, and the cause of the crisis in the animal kingdom, no fault on the part of the animals. I judged people as if every person, in wicked situations, deserved the plight and wilderness in which they find themselves. What sort of retribution can be expected for a person, or a people, with hardened hearts? My heart is hardened.

Polar bear scientists tell us what many of us already know, that shrinking ice, the loss of habitat, the inability to get to and find seals and other food sources, are causing the extinction of polar bears.  We have heard this news before and we have been told that global warming is the biggest contributor to the current crisis.  There are no humans in North America that are excluded from the indictment of contributing to the death of the polar bear.  Society – made up of all of us- lives large, even when some of us try to live a small footprint, our feet still sink, as creation fights the fires we stoke. The video of the polar bear dying changes everything – not the plight of the polar bear, or the situation—for it has the potential to change human response, in so far as it is a call in the wilderness pleading with human beings to repent, turn around, make straight the way of the Lord. The scene is forever emblazed on my heart, burned in my mind.  And because my heart was burned, --- not completely destroyed, not thrown into the fiery furnace for eternity; my heart remains smouldering in the wilderness because I have been chastened, and face a reckoning.

Chastened, having been inflicted with suffering for a greater purpose, compelling a moral improvement

Reckoned with -- called to account for my actions; a call followed with a pregnant pause…

This point must not be overlooked, dear friends.  In the Lord’s eyes, one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years are as a day.  The Lord does not delay in keeping God’s promise—though some consider it “delay.” Rather, he shows you generous patience. God wants none to perish but all to come to repentance. 

Rather than judgement as vindictive vengeance, punishment, and penal purgatory, sentenced by God to death row, we find ourselves in a time of delay.   In the wilderness, God’s courtroom opens up and we are sitting in an oasis of God’s judgement. Much to our surprise judgement appears in an unexpected way. It is not death.   There is compassion, pardon, and forgiveness. After being chastised and reckoned with, having come face to face with God – through fire--- we arrive in a pregnant pause…

The season of Advent is the gustation of Jesus. Prior to Jesus’s birth the prophet is calling for us to get ready to welcome Immanuel, God-with-us.  We are called to make straight the pathways of our God, to prepare the way of the Lord, to repent.  This is a time of God waiting, for us to say “yes.” And when hearts are ready, therein God will reside, become immediately incarnate and then, thanks be to God, we can fulfill our promises, our obligations, to turn back to relationship and covenant with God and creation. God’s justice is the gift of generous patience.

When reading Helmut Theilicke’s book of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer, one comes across a break, with a note, that indicates that the sermon was interrupted by bombing. During World War II, Pastor Helmut preached a series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer, for what else was there to speak into the chaos experienced by his congregation at the time. The book also has a note when the preaching resumed. 

Stars, fire fell from the sky, there was weeping and gnashing of teeth knocking at the church door, yet, those present while waiting for a new heaven and a new earth, were making every effort to be found without stain or defilement, and at peace in God’s sight.

Those who gathered waited with hearts open to the quenching words of God through the preacher, being held in the sacred through an investigation of the words of the Lord’s Prayer.   As bombs fell, the people took what cover there was. In the wilderness, God’s courtroom opened up, and much to their surprise, judgement appeared in an unexpected way.  It was not death. It was a pregnant pause.

In the pregnant pause…

water abounded in the wilderness; people were at peace in God’s sight as the Word smothered flames of fear, Our Father who art heaven, flares of anger and distress dissolved - hallowed be thy name, the fire of uncertainty extinguished - thy kingdom come, sparks of indecision and apathy doused, thy will be done on earth as in heaven.

Fire is fought with water.

John the Baptizer comes to us in the wilderness of our lives and calls from the past, to move us into a future of promise; proclaiming a baptism of repentance which leads to the forgiveness of sin, the residing of God’s justice in our hearts, in our midst – incarnate. Immanuel.

John stands in the middle of the Jordan river.

The Jordan river: referred to as the source that made large plains fertile like the garden of the Lord; the place of miracles, where the leprous were healed; a significant crossing of “leaving behind” for a people to enter the Promised Land; an oasis in the desert where the thirsty came to hear Jesus preach, to be healed of infirmity; a place where Jesus sought refuge in the wilderness from enemies who sought to entrap him.  This river in the wilderness is the second largest source satisfying the water needs of Syria, Lebanon, Israel. This lifegiving river is the place from where John proclaims repentance, reminding us and calling us back to the promises made in baptism – ours and God’s. Come repent.  Come see the abundance of the justice of God that resides among us.

Fire is quenched with water.  We find John the Baptizer in the wilderness standing in the Jordan river, surrounded by water; offering to quench the fire. Washed with the water of life that runs through the desert of our lives, we will face our earthly end- the day of the Lord will happen and God’s justice will be revealed. We will be tried by fire, chastened, undergo a reckoning – meaning a response is expected.  And there will be a surprise; not death, but, a pregnant pause…

Where a hardened heart towards other human beings might just melt by the very compassion of the One who became incarnate, to live as Immanuel, God-with-us. In the end fire can be quenched by Immanuel’s lifegiving water.

Today I pray for a heart refined by fire, elements melted to soften it, beyond a care for polar bears and horses – a compassion to include human beings- a passion to live in the fires of the wilderness always returning to the rivers of life.

With the psalmist I give thanks:

You [God} were favourable to your land; you restored the fortunes of Jacob.  You forgave the iniquity of your people; you pardoned all their sin.

Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other.  Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will [rain] down from the sky.

May this be so a thousand times over. Amen.