role call
were I to place
myself in the story
I think I would choose
to be a shepherd
who did not have
to prepare a thing
they simply abided
watching sheep sleep
until the angel choir
burst into star song
and sent them sprinting
towards Bethlehem
and then they went
back to abiding
that sounds like
a good Christmas
Peace,
Milton
The last Sunday in Advent is always a hard one for me because it’s hard to find something fresh to say, which is why I bounced off of a passage from Philippians today. Here’s where it took me.
____________________
I’m going to take a risk with you this morning: I’m going to start two sermons in a row talking about Christmas movies.
Okay, so it’s not that big a risk.
One of the consistent things at our house during the holidays is we watch Hallmark movies. For the most part, the plot is the same and the actors change. Someone has to go back home because of a crisis of some sort, or because the big corporation they work for wants to buy the town, and they meet up again with an old love. Then they have to choose between corporate and community, between power and love.
And—SPOILER ALERT—love wins.
One of the reasons the movies continue to be popular is that’s a good story line. It feels good when love wins, particularly when it doesn’t always feel that way in real life.
Another tale that we tell every Christmas is the story of our faith, which is also a story about love and the promise that love is stronger than life or death or power or whatever else love encounters, but it is not a plot line that fits neatly into a formula or ties up all the loose ends. Life and love both have lots of loose ends. One of the difficult things about telling the story again is it can feel predictable—like a Hallmark movie.
What I mean is we can, perhaps too easily, allow ourselves to think, “I know this story,” without letting it settle into our hearts and the tangle of loose ends our lives hold on this particular Christmas, both personally and collectively.
Perhaps the many layers of loose ends we see in our systems and institutions emphasize the reality that we live in a nation—and perhaps a world—obsessed with power and money. The people who consistently get attention are those with both, and many of them spend a lot of energy clamoring for more. The people who are consistently not only left out but are often demonized are those who have very little.
Leading up to our most recent presidential election, the two candidates raised and spent almost four billion dollars. I don’t even know how to imagine how much money that is. I can put it in this context: The average SNAP benefit—what people get a month to help them buy food—is $187. A month. That four billion dollars would pay that bill for over twenty-one million people.
Instead, we got to see attack ads.
Paul wrote his letter to the Philippians understanding full well what brazen power can do. He had been in Roman prisons. He had seen how the empire destroyed families and even nations. He wasn’t writing a Christmas letter to the young church, but he was telling the same story of how love speaks truth to power—and he used it to call people to live out that love in the way they treated one another.
He said, “Adopt the attitude that was in Christ Jesus: Though he was in the form of God, he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit.”
Jesus wasn’t born to take control. We have heard and said it so many times that we can miss the shock of it—God entered the world as a baby, as a helpless human being born into a family without influence or privilege.
The incarnation of God is an act of love, not power. Jesus didn’t come to conquer or take over. He came to join with us as a human being, to show us how to live into our humanity, into our lives as those wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved.
Paul said that is the foundation for how we treat each other:
“Therefore, if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort in love, any sharing in the Spirit, any sympathy, complete my joy by thinking the same way, having the same love, being united, and agreeing with each other. Don’t do anything for selfish purposes, but with humility think of others as better than yourselves. Instead of each person watching out for their own good, watch out for what is better for others.”
As we hear those words, let’s go back to Bethlehem.
When you imagine what Jesus’ birth was like, what do you picture? Is it a staid, even stark, scene like our little nativity here? At Ginger’s church, the littlest ones are the animals for their Christmas pageant and they are encouraged to dress as their favorite creature, so there are bears and lions and dinosaurs and Poohs and Eeyores all gathered to welcome the baby. I don’t know how the tradition started, but its good theology.
The word in Luke 2 that the King James Version translated as “inn” really means guest room. Some families had an extra room they rented out; that is to say they had two rooms. The manger was in the room—not in a barn—because the animals were brought inside for safekeeping at night, into the room that was also the kitchen and the bedroom and whatever else it needed to be. Jesus was born in the middle of it all, into the middle of a big welcoming mess.
With that image in mind, here these words again: “If there is any encouragement in Christ . . . .”
The root of the word courage means heart, so to encourage is “to put the heart in” whatever it is we do and say, to not just go through the motions out of habit or duty; to not let ourselves go along with things because that’s just the way things are; to choose not to take the easy road of cynicism but to choose the challenge of hope; to imitate Christ by not exploiting our advantages but seeing them as ways to, as Paul said, watch out for what is better for others.
I know. It’s the same old story. But it’s a great story. And this time around, we are the ones in the movie, if you will, we are the ones that have the chance to tell the story of how God’s love alive in us can change things when we encourage one another, when we put our hearts in it. Amen.
Peace,
Milton
solstice sandwich
today was the thinnest
of daylight sandwiches
the shortest distance
between two darknesses
last night it began to snow
but it was another thinness
icing across the landscape
an inconsequential covering
tonight is the thickest
of nighttime sandwiches
the widest distance
between two daylights
tomorrow the sun will rise
and it will be another thinness
lighting up the landscape
an inconsequential covering
in this time of not enough
we do well to remember
that days never stand alone
and neither do the nights
snow falls in seasons and
days are numbered by years
it takes more than one
sandwich to make a lifetime
Peace,
Milton
chowder head
I think coincidence
and soup are synonyms
both words mean
to fall together
it started with bacon
that’s when I knew
we were having
chowder for supper
I found potatoes
and chopped clams
even as I grabbed
items as though
I was gathering
props for improv
giving myself options
I couldn’t see yet
the clam to spud
ratio was unbalanced
so I reached for
the sweet potatoes
and let the creamy
coincidence simmer
as the soup turned
the color of sunset
we emptied our bowls
and filled them again
grateful for the way
things fall together
Peace,
Milton
live and learn
“the only way to learn is to live”
the words came from
a fictional librarian
who lives in a story
about consequences
an old word that means
what comes next after
whatever we said
or did or didn’t do
which we can’t see
until we live through it
and that makes me
want to flip the thing
the only way to live is to learn
to learn means to be
cultivated and to live
is to continue or remain
the way to continue
is to be cultivated
to fill the furrows of
our brows with what
has come next as we
plow our way through
one thing after another
so our days add up to a
story worth telling
living and learning
are chicken and egg
whether we’re talking
sequence or consequence
we must continue
to be cultivated and
remain attentive to
whatever is coming
remember the end of
the world is long overdue
Peace,
Milton
One of our favorite Christmas traditions is watching—no, rewatching—movies. We have several that we need to see at some point during the holidays to make the season feel complete: “It’s a Wonderful Life,” of course; “Christmas in Connecticut” with Barbara Stanwyck; “The Preacher’s Wife” with Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston; Bill Murray’s take on “A Christmas Carol,” which is called “Scrooged;” Will Ferrell in “Elf;” and “The Family Stone,” which has a cast full of great actors in a story that is both heartfelt and hilarious about what it means to be family.
After a chaotic scene where a number of the story lines come tumbling in on each other in the big kitchen of the family home, one of the sons—Ben (played by Luke Wilson)—leans back on his pillow with his arms behind his head and in a voice that carries a tone of wonder and amazement says, “Repeat the sounding joy.”
He says it with such beautiful force that always gives me pause—and he says it before the big mess that has the family pulling in different directions has been sorted out.
I, like pretty much all of us, have sung that line every Christmas of my life in “Joy to the World,” but I had never really thought about what it meant until I saw “The Family Stone” and heard Ben speak the words: repeat the sounding joy.
Part of what Isaac Watts was communicating in his hymn was that to be joyful was to join the chorus of creation that is already making a joyful noise.
joy to the earth, the savior reigns
let all their songs employ,
while fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains,
repeat the sounding joy
We are not singing a new song; we are repeating the rhythm of all that is swirling around us. We are repeating what we hear—if we are listening, which is what it takes to make good music: first we listen, then we sing.
Joy may be made by a practiced, hard-won achievement as much as by an unlooked for, passing act of grace arriving out of nowhere; joy is a measure of our relationship not only to life but to death and our living with the constant companionship of our immanent disappearance, joy is the act of giving ourselves away before we need to or are asked to, joy is practiced generosity.
And then he says,
To feel a full and untrammelled joy is to have become fully generous; to have allowed ourselves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear: a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness itself and the vulnerability of joy’s imminent loss, felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of the ocean, the sky, of two people dancing at sunset—and from nowhere, a sudden surge from the unknown tide now filling our lives—I was here and you were here—and together we made a world.
I was here and you were here—and so were the rocks and trees and mountains and flowers and animals—and together we made a world.
When Paul wrote to the Philippians, he made it clear that joy was a choice:
Rejoice in God always! Again I say, rejoice! Let your joy show in your treatment of all people. God is near. God is here.
Let your joy show in the way you treat people. Another translation reads, “Make it as clear as you can to all you meet that you’re on their side, working with them and not against them.”
Repeat the sounding joy.
Now I am going to repeat some things you already know, but they are worth saying again.
Joy is not a feeling; it’s a choice. It is a choice to engage, to listen, to pay attention. David Whyte is right when he says that sometimes it catches us by surprise, but we still choose to be open and receptive, and we have to choose to repeat what is sounding around us. And that is true of all the things represented by our Advent candles: hope, peace, joy, and love.
All of them are choices. Acts of will. Things we have to decide to do. So are cynicism, conflict, self-centeredness, and apathy. Joy is not the only song being sung around us. If we choose, we can see the world as one where survival is what matters most, which means I have to get what’s mine because it’s everyone for themselves. Though we hear that song blasted at high volume all around us, it is not the song of creation. It is not the song we were made to sing. It is not the song carried by the magnificent moon that hung in the sky last night, or by the smiles we share with one another when we sit together in coffee hour.
To choose to repeat the sounding joy—or the sounding hope and peace and love—is not being naïve about the reality that life is painful. Being joyful does not mean to ignore our grief. To choose joy is to go beyond our fear, to dig deeper than our sorrows, and to trust that at the bottom of life the joy and hope and peace and love are still sounding.
It is also to choose to help others hear the song. As I said at the start, we are repeating what we hear all around us. When we see others—perhaps even those sitting on the pew with us—who can’t hear the song because it is being drowned out by other noise, we can choose to sit with them and sing until they can sing it too.
God is near. God is here. So are we. God is with us.
As Ginger likes to say, life is holy and life is quick. The days we have as part of the choir of creation don’t last long, but they are rich and crammed full of the presence of God—so say the rocks and the trees, the squirrels and the sunshine, the full moon and our broken hearts.
God is near. God is here. God is with us. Repeat the sounding joy. Amen.
Peace,
Milton
coffee shop duet
what I saw first was
her solitude as she sat
on the bar stool matching
the expression of the
coffee shop’s blank wall
but when he entered
she turned and so did
the light around her
they greeted like good
friends talking as they
shuffled coats to make
room for themselves
he took the stool next
to her which left him
much taller than she
but she widened
the frame by moving
to a taller stool as
he settled in without
catching the detail
then he turned to her
and they were eye to eye
she smiled he smiled
and then she kissed him
with a spark and a giggle
what I saw then was a
dance meant not to
be a performance
but a witness of one
another in the middle
of a coffee shop on
a winter afternoon
when they thought
no one was watching
Peace,
Milton
I could hear rain
in mid-December
days die incrementally
losing light almost
from the crack of dawn
suffocate them with
a blanket of clouds
and the only light
that lives is artificial
still light is not life
or so I was reminded
when I realized
I could hear the rain
not just the storm
but the tap dance
of drops on the patio
that had been silent
for so many showers
however dark the day
I could hear the rain
Peace,
Milton
interstices
the space between trees
the crack in the mortar
the time between floors
if we took away the spaces
between us among us
the universe would
collapse into a fist
the rest between notes
the breath before words
the pause to ponder
intervening emptinesses
waiting to be noticed
to be seen as something
other than nothing
the gap in the fence
the break in the clouds
the width of a room
what we see as vacant
is what connects us all
the substance of things
thrives in our in-betweens
Peace,
Milton
ritual in search of significance
the last thing I do before
I go to bed is to disconnect
my implant and hearing aid
and enter into quietness
it is necessary action
because both my batteries
and my body need to recharge
so I settle into silence
each device has a cradle
where it rests for the night
the batteries nestled as well
none of us hearing a thing
as my motions become more
deliberate and intentional
I find myself looking for
words to mark the moment
as I break open the casing
press the battery into place
and close the containers that
will hold things for the night
most of them can go unspoken
since I am not able to hear
better to trust than to speak
and let the silence do its work
Peace,
Milton