don't eat alone

This last Sunday of Advent leans into Christmas at our church since many folks will not be around Christmas Eve. This morning we looked at Matthew’s telling of Joseph’s side of the experience, brief as it is. I closed our service with my last Advent carol, “Knock Again.”

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When I read the brevity of Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth, it makes me think of an old Peanuts cartoon where Linus hands a book to Lucy and asks her to read him a story.

“A man was born, he lived, and he died,” she says before tossing the book aside. Linus then comments, “Kind of makes you wish you knew him better.”

I feel a bit like Linus when I read what Matthew says,

This is how the birth of Jesus Christ took place. When Mary his mother was engaged to Joseph, before they were married, she became pregnant by the Holy Spirit.

It, too, kind of makes me wish I knew them better. Then again, perhaps we know them better than we think we do, or at least we have more connections than we realize when we are looking at the traditional images of Mary and Joseph we see in manger scenes or hear in carols. Even to reread the two sentences I read a moment ago is to realize the birth of Christ begins with a good deal of heartache, which is to say Mary and Joseph were real people, not rosy-cheeked folks sitting for portraits to be hung in churches.

Mary and Joseph were engaged by not living together. When he found out she was pregnant, he had little choice to conclude that she had been unfaithful. He could have chosen to make a legal issue of out it, which meant Mary would have been stoned. Instead, Matthew says Joseph was going to dissolve the engagement quietly.

Though Matthew doesn’t mention her, we must remember that Joseph wasn’t the only one dealing with heartache or difficulty. Mary was a pregnant teenaged girl who could see the pain her fiancée was probably feeling and probably felt disheartened herself that he would question her love and loyalty even as she was growing more conspicuous and unexplainable to most everyone around them. We can fairly assume that she understood her future depended on Joseph’s choice.

Even if we skip ahead to the end of our passage to see that Joseph chose to go through with the wedding after the angel visited. I mean who wouldn’t? But that didn’t wipe away all of the difficulty. Their family was no more holy than any one of ours.

What Matthew describes tells us about the complexity, the confusion, and the frailty that attended this family, just like every other family. Indeed, there is nothing exceptional about Mary and Joseph, or even Jesus’ birth except that God comes through ordinary, mixed-up people in order to save ordinary, mixed-up people, and that God comes through a birth like all the billions of other births in the world to promise us peace and hope and joy and love as the children of God that we all are.

The birth of Jesus took place in the middle of a mess because that is how love works. Love, if it matters, has a face. It has a name. It has eyes and ears and fingers and toes. Love that is real has skin on it. And I mean actual skin. Love is not an idea or a concept. It is action. In the flesh word and deed.

In the middle of situations we don’t understand, griefs that feel too heavy to bear, problems that feel unsolvable, the message is in the name of the child: “God is with us.” Or, we might want to say, “God is really with us.” God is with us as we are, not as we know we should be, or we are trying to be, or we have promised to be, or we will be some day, but with us as we are now—today—in this moment.

In the gospels it took an angel—a messenger—to drive the point home. An angel told Mary what was happening to her and also woke Joseph up to help him see that God was in the middle of it all, which takes me back to Meister Eckhardt’s words about Christ needing to be born in our time and in our culture if the story is going to continue to matter.

Eckhardt finished his words by saying, “We are all mothers of God.” Matthew’s version prompts me to offer a paraphrase, or perhaps a companion thought: We are all messengers of God. We are all people capable of offering the word that God is really with us to one another in what we do and say. We are also capable of choosing not to do that. Whether Christ is born again in our time, in our moment, depends a good deal on how we choose to live. If we are willing to incarnate love, if we are willing to let God be near through, then love can be born again into our particular mess. Or not.

What a different story it would be if Joseph had awakened from his dream and decided it was not worth the risk or the trouble to go through with the engagement. What if Mary had told the messenger it was more than she could take? It’s safe to say we would not be sitting here because the story that connects us would have never been told.

The story of God—the story of love—continues because real people choose to let love be born in the middle of all of the mess, just like Mary and Joseph did. Those of you who are parents know that’s a choice they had to keep making, just as we have to keep making it in the middle of the mess we live in.

Our lives add up to more than being born, living, and dying when we choose to be messengers of God’s love in our words and actions. That is what it takes to make the Christmas story more than a memory. That is what it means for us to be mothers of God—and messengers of God.

May we live into our calling as we celebrate Jesus’ birth once again. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Our in-person worship got snowed out today, but I was able to record from home, so this sermon got to be more than just a manuscript. Joy is the theme of the third Sunday in Advent, and the scripture was Mary’s response to her surprising circumstance. Here’s where it took me.

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Of all the things that have been written about the Bible, we don’t find a lot that talks about humor in scripture. For one thing, the books of the Bible are not that humorous, though some of that is due to the fact that we are reading translations of ancient manuscripts that distance us from the original word choice and word play and timing that are essential to a good joke.

When I taught high school English, I loved reading Shakespeare with students, but the part that was the most difficult for them to understand was the humor. Jokes don’t travel well over centuries. It’s hard to keep up with the way language changes from generation to generation, much less from century to century.

Tragedy travels better because it is grounded in events, in circumstance. The death of a parent, for example, is something we can understand across great spans of time because experience doesn’t need a translator. Tragic things just happen. Humor is an art, something that has to be crafted in the moment—and when I say humor, I mean more than a setup and a punchline. I’m talking about a way of looking at the world that helps us not take ourselves so seriously, that creates room for laughter and connection, that makes the tragedy bearable. That kind of humor is a learnable and practicable skill.

Translator Sarah Ruden says Biblical humor is a manifestation of the Bible’s joy. What I read in her words is that joy is also a skill, an art, that we can learn and practice, and the words Mary spoke after she found out she was pregnant give us a good picture of what the skill of joy looks like in practice.

The hard part for us is we have to break some stained glass to really hear what Mary is saying. Over centuries, her words have been as “The Magnificat” and then turned into any number of classical music pieces. Two of our hymns this morning are adaptations of what we often call her song, even though there’s not really indication in the text that she was singing.

Though much of the music is beautiful, it binds Mary up rather than setting her free or setting us free to see her joy at work. Sometimes that happens in the way we sing it. Our first hymn, “The Canticle of Turning,” sets the text to an old Irish folk tune, “The Star of County Down.” It was written to be accompanied energetically by guitars and fiddles and even a bodhran (an Irish hand drum) rather than by an organ and sung in a tavern as much as a sanctuary.

Under all of those layers, Mary was probably about fourteen when God’s messenger told her she was pregnant, and not much older when she went to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who was a good deal older. Mary was in the middle of a tragedy, as far as circumstances were concerned. The life she thought was about to unfold had exploded with the news of her pregnancy. Instead of getting married, Mary was going to be ostracized. Nevertheless, she told the messenger, “Let it happen just like you said,” which was her first step toward joy.

The other steps followed in the words we read this morning, which move from gratitude for God choosing her to talking about how the child she was carrying would upend the world and offer hope to those who lived outside of the realms of power and wealth—those deeply acquainted with tragedy. Those who were rich and powerful were not always going to be so. That’s the way the humor of God worked, and she was grateful to be a part of it.

Mary wasn’t acting like the tragedy wasn’t real, she was choosing to craft space for joy to live. She was choosing to see more than the tragedy, to see the uncertainty that was in front of her as room for hope to grow.

That is difficult and important work, and it is the work to which we are called as well. It’s important because tragedy, in whatever form it takes, is about separation and loss. The craft of joy is reconciling work, connecting work. It’s the idea in the carol, “Do you hear what I hear?” That’s an invitation to share in the joy that is going on around us no matter what the tragedy.

The stars keep coming out. The birds keep singing—even in the winter. The sun comes up every morning. Little babies stare at us and smile in supermarket lines. We sit in coffee hour and tell stories and laugh together. Whether big or small, the song of joy plays all around us. The question is are we willing to practice the skill to hear it?

We started by saying that scripture is hard for us to get sometimes because of the layers of translation and history that lie between us and the original versions. Still, we trust there is a reason to keep telling the stories and to keep trying to come to a deeper understanding of them, even as we continue to work to not get so attached to our version of the stories that we can’t be caught by surprise by new way of looking at them.

That same approach is what leads us to a life of faith. It is hard to make meaning out of all that happens to us. We face tragedy and difficulty, and we don’t always have a good reason for why things happen. Yet, we don’t give up. We choose not to take a fatalistic view of things, but we keep telling the stories of joy and hope, the stories of the ways God’s love and mercy finds us and saves us, and we keep working to not get so attached to our way of looking at the world that we can’t be caught by surprise.

And at the heart of the story of Jesus’ birth that we tell every year is the reminder the messenger gave to Joseph, who was reeling in the face of tragedy he didn’t understand: “Name the child Emmanuel, which means “God is with us.” Down all of the years, all of the tragedies, that is still the heart of our story: God is with us, no matter what other circumstances are our reality. God is with us, calling us to practice the art of joy. May we answer with Mary’s enthusiasm. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

This week’s sermon is built around Matthew’s description of John the Baptist, but I wandered a bit through the Christmas story to get to him and ended up thinking about what it takes to exact significant change in our lives.

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When we read Matthew’s description of John the Baptist and the things he said to the people who came to be baptized in the Jordan River, where they were all gathered out in the middle of the wilderness, it’s a fair to ask, why are we focusing on him as we mark this Advent Sunday dedicated to hope?

For that matter, Advent is a season of anticipation for the birth of Jesus and our reading is the account of the one announcing the beginning of Jesus’ ministry as a thirty-year-old man. Why are we telling this story now?

For one thing, Matthew doesn’t spend that much time telling us about Jesus’ birth or infancy or childhood. He commits all of seven verses to what we know as the Christmas story, and most of those are about how Joseph reacted to the news that Mary was pregnant. Then Matthew spends a whole chapter talking about the Magi and the things their visit set in motion. (We will look at those stories at Epiphany.) Then he moves directly to John and the things Jesus said and did as an adult.

With that in mind, before we talk about John let’s back up to Matthew’s account of the birth because we can make an important connection there. (Matthew’s primary focus is Joseph; we will hear from Mary next week.)

This is Matthew 1:18-23.

This is how the birth of Jesus Christ took place. When Mary his mother had been betrothed to Joseph, but before they were married, she was found to have a child in her womb through the Holy Spirit. Joseph, her husband-to-be, being a decent man and not wanting to publicly humiliate her, planned to call off their betrothal quietly. But when he thought carefully about these things, an messenger from God appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because the child she carries is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you will call him Jesus, because he will rescue the people from their offences.” Now all of this took place to fulfill what God had spoken through the prophet: Look! A young girl will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will call him by the name Emmanuel, the translation of which means, “God is with us.”

God is with us. As we engage this story in our time and in our culture, it helps to remember that the basic understanding of history in the Hebrew Bible is that the people strayed from God and then God rescued or redeemed them. The name Jesus, in fact, is from the root of the word for rescue or salvation. Whatever happened, they trusted that God was with them.

Joseph (and perhaps Mary) needed to be reminded of that by the messenger because all he could see was dead-end circumstance. The woman he wanted to marry was pregnant. The life they had anticipated—whatever that was—was not going to happen. The angel didn’t tell him any differently, other than to say for him to not break the betrothal. Stay for the birth and name the boy “God is with us,” then stay for the marriage and trust that the name will hold up.

That sense of God’s presence matters when we take a larger view of Hebrew history. It helps to keep in mind is that the Hebrew people lived through a number of exiles and oppressions over many centuries, facing circumstances where the life they had anticipated didn’t happen. A good deal of their story as it is told in the Hebrew Bible centers around those experiences. Often, the way the people understood their difficulties was that they had done something wrong to cause their exile. That’s not necessarily what God said to them, but it was often what they heard. In most every case, the main message that God continued to send was one of redemption, offering the people a chance to repent and start over.

Which brings us to John the Baptist.

The historical moment into which he stepped when he started calling people to repentance and baptism was another moment of oppression and struggle. The Romans were brutal rulers, as we will see when come back to the story of the Magi. John’s invitation for them to make changes sounded like the prophets they had heard about in Bible stories who gave people hope beyond feeling like life was difficult because they had sinned. They could make changes that mattered if they were willing to trust God was with them and see what would happen next.

He was calling them to hope, to trust that the choices they made mattered, even if they couldn’t see how that would all work out. He called them to change their purpose, to change their hearts and lives, to start anew with what they thought God could do through them.

In the centuries since John walked in the wilderness, that sense of that kind of hope hasn’t changed. None of us knows for sure what is going to happen, or how things will work out. What we can do to affect whatever is coming is to make thoughtful, dare I say prayerful choices about what we say, do, and feel; about how we treat other people; about how we spend our time and our money; about how we live out our trust that God is with us.

How, then, can we change our purpose, change our hearts, so that Christ can be born anew in our time?

That’s a big question that doesn’t necessarily require a global answer. I’m not asking how we change the world as much as how we change ourselves because that is how the world actually gets changed. Hope requires specificity, so here are three specific things to consider.

First, I invite you to daydream about who God wants you to be and what God wants you to do within your spheres of influences. Are you doing the work you feel that is most true to yourself? How can you affect the primary relationships in your life? Who do you feel call to become?

As you hold that question, I ask you to think of one specific element of your life that you would like to change, that you would like to repent. Let me offer an example. Most every fall is difficult for me because the shrinking daylight is like rocket fuel for my depression. I spend most of November and December feeling crushed by the weight of it all and doing what I can to hold on till the Solstice and the promise of longer days.

Thanks to some suggestion I read or heard somewhere, I decided to commit to getting up morning at around five so that I was awake for the sunrise. I make the coffee and I sit at my desk, which is in front of a window, and I watch the dawn break as I do the crossword and then read. Somehow that change has given me new life. I have had a burst of creative energy rather than feeling like I was falling into a hole.

Let me be clear: depression is not a sin. It has been something in my life that has kept me from being my full self, from being able to see that I am wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. The change I have made—my repentance, if you will—has not been because I did something wrong as much as I changed a behavior to make me more available to the world and to God.

Repentance can have a number of faces, so let me ask the question again. What one specific element of your life would you like to change?

The last question requires us to think about our lives together. What change do you think needs to happen in one element of your communal life—here in this church, in your neighborhood, in Hamden, at work—that you can contribute to with a change in what you say and do, or how you spend your time and resources?

We will go from this service to share a meal and talk about our budget for the coming year, which is actually a discussion about who we are as a congregation and who we think God is calling us to be. Do we have ways in which we need to change our purpose or change our hearts?

The hope that underlies repentance is that when we change ourselves we change the world. May we live boldly into that kind of hope. Amen.

Peace,
Milton