Month: December 2017

Luke 2:1-20

Christmas Eve 2017

It is as if time is standing still here on this most holy of nights, the night of our dear Savior’s birth.  All that has been, all that there is, and all that will be converge on this night in this place.  We are transported to Bethlehem, with Mary and Joseph.  In the dark of the night sky, the stars sparkle brightly.  They look to be so close that you think you could reach out and grab them.   The baby Jesus is soon to be wrapped up tight, and sleeping in the manger. All is calm, all is bright.  Right now, right here, this night is perfect.  Maybe.

When we got into our car tonight to come to church, a lot came with us.  Our thanksgivings, our hopes and dreams jumped into the car when we opened the door.  Perhaps it is the excitement about gathering with family, or the dream of a hoped-for gift.  Some of us bring more than that.  We also bring our burdens that we carry with us almost everywhere we go.  Grief can be a constant companion, especially during the Christmas season.  I am certain that when we put our coat on to come to church, it went over top of concerns about medical insurance and money.  We stuffed into our pockets our worries about our loved ones.  When we parked the car, we had hoped to shut the door on broken relationships, if only for an hour. Tonight, memories of Christmases past showed up, for good or for bad.  And then there are our expectations and hopes for Christmas.  What did you bring with you tonight?

A friend of mine posted on FaceBook her hopes for Christmas.  She writes:

Every Christmas you always hear people saying what they want and bought. Well this is what I want: I want sick people to be cured. I want children with no families to be adopted and parents who want babies to be blessed with them. I want people to never have to worry about food, shelter, & heat. And cliché or not, I want world peace, too.[1]

Perhaps this is why we come tonight, if only for an hour, to a place where all is calm, and all is bright.  We come to live out, if only for an evening, peace on earth and mercy mild.  But the trouble is that all those things that we carry around with us didn’t stay outside in the parking lot when we came through the church door.

We came through those doors with both thanksgivings and sorrows.  We come on this holy night to hear the story of God among us.  But while Luke’s telling of Jesus’ birth looks like the front of a Hallmark Christmas card, Luke left out the messy details.  Truth be told, while we envision our Lord and Savior quietly fast asleep, at some point he woke up cold and hungry, and this holy baby’s cries were loud enough to for the shepherds to find him.  I picture Mary, who had just given birth, without any pain relief measures, and lying on cold, stiff hay which was poking her in her back, turning to Joseph and saying in that voice he dreaded, “This is YOUR hometown.  Where are all your friends?  Where is your family?  Why couldn’t they put us up for the night?”  And then she began to cry.  Poor Joseph—all he wanted to do was to comfort his baby and his wife, but he felt responsible for their circumstances and so he, too, began to sob.  The sounds of everyone crying were not in harmony with the donkeys’ braying and the sheep’s baa-ing.   It was anything but quiet that night.

This is the birth of the holy child, born in flesh and blood, both wholly human and wholly divine.  This is the babe in the manger, the King of Kings, who, with his borning cry, smelled the sheep and heard the cows moo.  In this low estate, with chickens clucking and goats chewing, came our savior, called Emmanuel, God is with us, in the middle of the noise and things that poke us in the back.

Theologian Edmund Steimle writes,  “For what other message on Christmas Eve is worth listening to?  What peace?  What hope?  If it is simply a forgetting—when we can’t forget, really—then we’re reducing the Christmas story to a bit of nostalgia and indulging ourselves in the sentimental orgy that Christmas has become for so many, or we are reduced to the deep depression that grips so many others on Christmas Eve.”[2]

How did we get here, writing on FaceBook about our desire for a perfect world and at the same time, celebrating God’s birth in Jesus’ human flesh?  When God hung the stars in night sky, and sent water crashing onto shores, when God orchestrated the dance of the peacock and the ballet of the platypuses, God declared it good.  When God created male and female in God’s image, God blessed them.  On that sixth day, God saw everything he had made, and indeed, it was very good.[3]

And then came Adam and Eve, formed in God’s own image, Cain and Abel, David and Bathsheba, and all our fears and jealousies, our prejudices, our egos. Our sin rose up.  But God responded with grace and mercy. When God’s people were enslaved in Egypt, God led them out of bondage into freedom, even providing bread for them on their journey.  Through Moses and the Ten Commandments, God again entered into a covenant to help us live as God’s people.  God spoke to us through the prophets, telling us what is, and what God wants things to be.  God’s grace is given to us over and over again.   And we broke our part of the covenant over and over again.

Then God sent his son. On this holy night, In the town of Bethlehem, the Son of God, was born of Mary to be among us.  The one whom through our sins are forgiven comes with flesh and blood, and tears and crying. God was willing to risk everything for us, that we might know how much God loves us.

This most amazing event, this first Christmas morning, in that little town, tells every one in every place, and in every time, that it is God’s will to come to us, to be with us.  To be with us in our living and our dying, in our hunger and in our feasts.   God is enfleshed in the middle of all that is sweet, and I all that is sorrowful, to be with us in birth and death, and love and heartbreak.  Jesus was born to be here with us tonight, in our praying and our singing.  To be present for us in a piece of bread and a sip of wine.

God promises there will be a time when there will be no famine, no war and no tears.  My friend’s prayers for Christmas, for healing, for the blessing of children and families, for the homeless and the needy will come to pass, for God has given us that promise. But until then, it is here, now, in the midst of our fleshy mess, that God choses to meet us in Christ Jesus. Through this baby, God blesses broken hearts, and newly found love, the birth of newborns and the loss of partners.  Through this child, laying in swaddling cloths in the manger, God is present in our goodbyes, and our hellos, in our marriage and separation, and in our healing and reconciliations.  God is with us in the middle of our wars and our peace.  Through this holy child, we are given hope, and the resilience of our human spirit.

God did this extraordinary thing in a most ordinary manner and in a most ordinary place. And perhaps that’s central to the message of why we gather and celebrate tonight – that this God, who is beyond anything we could imagine, is bound up with our everyday ordinary lives. There is no place too nasty, too painful or too sinful for the grace of our Lord to enter.  There is no darkness that exists which can overcome the light of Christ.  Christ is in the midst of it all, making all things holy in his name, and giving us peace that the world cannot give.

And so, we come here on this holy night, waiting to hear the sound of the newborn baby’s cry among the bray of the goats, and the beating of our hearts.  We come in darkness, to bathe in the light of Christ, and to sing with the angels. Thanks be to God.

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

[1] Used by permission.

[2] Edmund Steimle, “The Eye of the Storm.”  Chorus of Witnesses. Grand Rapids:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994.  241.

[3] Genesis 1:31

 

John 1:6-8, 19-2 8     Advent 3

She was in fifth grade at Sunrise Elementary school in Colorado.  Ashwanty Davis had big brown eyes, and a subtle smile.  She hoped to grow up to become a Women’s National Basketball star. Some didn’t see her as the person she was, and Ashwanty would have to endure their bullying.  When she had enough, she confronted one of the girls who were taunting her.  Someone took a video of the encounter, and it ended up on social media.  As views of the video increased, so did the bullying.  ‘“My daughter came home two weeks later and hanged herself in the closet,”’ her mother said.[1]  This little girl, who has been described as a child of joy, spent two weeks on life support before she died.  Ashwanty Davis was victim of “bullycide.”  Suicide after being bullied is so common now that we have a word for it.

There were witnesses to the fight.  The person who videotaped it and uploaded it onto the internet was a witness.  All those who watched it were witnesses, too.  Some of those people testified to what they saw by taunting Ashwanty even more.  They testified to darkness, tormenting her until she could no longer see the light.

We are witnesses every day.  We see and hear and experience things that impact others on a daily basis.  On these cold winter days, we see people walking on the street carrying everything they own because they have no permanent home in which to keep them.  We hear people telling jokes that demean a particular race or religion. This week, I read about someone who needs to choose between paying rent and paying health insurance.  How does our faith impact our witness?

Flip Wilson, when asked about his religious affiliation, said, “I am a Jehovah’s Bystander.  They wanted me to become a Jehovah’s Witness, but I don’t want to get involved.”  How does our faith impact our witness?  Our witness put into words and deeds is our testimony.  As one professor reminds us, witness and testimony are terms that come from the legal sphere, and are used when something or someone comes to trial.[2]  Witnesses are put on the stand to testify to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  Perjury, bearing false witness, is not only against the law, it is against God’s commands.  Bearing false witness is a sin.  Luther explains in the Large Catechism the fullness of the eighth commandment:

No one shall use the tongue to harm a neighbor, whether a friend or foe.  No one shall say anything evil of a neighbor, whether true or false, unless it is done with proper authority or for that person’s improvement.  RATHER, we should use our tongue to speak only the best about all people, to cover the sins and infirmities of our neighbors, to justify their actions, and to cloak and veil them with our honor.  Our chief reason for doing this is the one that Christ has given in the gospel, and in which he means to encompass all the commandments concerning our neighbor, “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you.” [285-286].

To what does your witness testify?  Or are you a bystander, afraid to get involved?  What would have happened if those who witnessed Ashwanty being bullied testified to the light of Christ’s love?

Jan Richardson writes:

…the light comes as a vivid reminder that we have, at the least, the power to help illuminate the path for each other.  It matters that we hold the light for one another.  It matters that we bear witness to the Light that hold us all, that we testify to this Light that shines its infinite love and mercy on us across oceans, across border, across time….  Blessed are you who bear the light in unbearable times, who testify to its endurance amid the unendurable, who bear witness to its persistence when everything seems in shadow and grief.[3]

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.  He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.  He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.  As the Gospel of John explains, Jesus is the true light, the one who creates and maintains life.  This light of Christ comes as God’s presence sitting at the bedside of someone we love.  The light of Christ comes as a friend who will see us through dark times.  The light of Christ stirs our hearts to speak out for those who have no voice.  The light of Christ illumines a path we did not even know existed.  The light of Christ brings hope.

Our witness and testimony are based on what ultimately matters–Jesus’ witness and testimony to us, for us, about us.  In the legal court language of witness and testimony, Jesus’ birth, his life, death, and resurrection will find us guilty, and declare that we are forgiven.  In this season of Advent, as we wait for Jesus to be born and for Christ to come again, live in this sure and certain hope.  Live in this light.  Witness it.  Testify to it.

There are people, sent from God, whose names are Sue and Bob, Sandy, Linda, Jane, Paul, Alan, your name and mine.

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

[1] https://www.theroot.com/10-year-old-girl-killed-herself-after-video-of-fight-wi-1820887617  web accessed December 13, 2017.

[2] Long, Thomas.  Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian.  San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass, 2004.  28.

[3] http://adventdoor.com/2014/12/12/advent-3-testify-to-the-light/ accessed December 13, 2017.

Isaiah 40:1-11   Mark 1:1-8    

Advent 2

 Location, location, location.  We hear that expression when we are searching for a place to settle into so that we can renew our souls, a place to honker down when the snow comes, a place to build a life, a home.  Location is important because the context informs and contributes to our understanding.  You know more about a person when you find out if they grew up in Boston or in Gloucester, and if that was during the Great Depression or the Vietnam war.  Both geographical and historical location are worth paying attention to in scripture.

Our reading from Isaiah this morning comes after a long time of turmoil.  Israel and Judah were constantly at odds over theological and social issues.  Conflicts arose among Israel, Judah, Syria and Assyria. Assyria took control of Judah, the southern kingdom, and destroyed the capital of Israel, bringing the northern kingdom to an end.   In 597 and 587 BCE, the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and took its people captive.  The destruction of Jerusalem was seen as God’s judgment on Israel’s sins.  People’s homes, their neighbors, their church and their favorite restaurants were gone. Now they were living in a foreign land with a different language and strange food.  It felt like being in the wilderness.  The prophets had warned them of the consequences of their behavior, but their ears were shut.  The results of their sin were catastrophic, and they had no one to blame but themselves.

Into their state of hopelessness, God speaks, Comfort, O comfort my people.  God will bring them home.  Their exile will be over. This time, instead of warning,  the prophet’s voice cries out:  “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”   The uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plane.  Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all the people shall see it together. 

About 500 years later, Jews would revolt against their Roman oppressors, and the temple of Solomon would be destroyed. Into this place and time, the prophet John stood in the wilderness and cried out,  ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight…’  The words of comfort spoken into the wilderness exile through Isaiah are echoed.

Wilderness is a place and time of destruction.  It is a place where we are left feeling that life is out of our control, and a place blind to all hope.  Do you know that feeling?  Have you listened to the news this year?  The highlights of 2017 are chilling.  Fear of “the other” pervades the reported stories.  Racism and prejudice continue to be acted out in Charlottesville, and in places across the country.  This is the year of the deadliest mass shootings in the United States, and yet there is no ban on equipment that turns a gun into an assault weapon.  Fear of a nuclear weapon attack from North Korea looms in the background.  Media coverage of sexual misconduct now dominates the news.

On December 12, there will be an election in Alabama for a U. S. Senator.  One of the candidates has had nine women claim sexual assault.  One of those women says she was 14 years old at the time.  Roy Moore denies all allegations.  He remains a strong candidate for senator.  Time Magazine’s person of the year this year are all the women who have spoken up about sexual misconduct.  Exposing these violations of the powerless is a good thing! But swept up into the chaos of allegations, we find guilty people who are exempt from condemnation, and innocent people who are condemned.

We have witnessed power that takes, dominates and inflicts abuse that denies dignity to God’s creation.  It is even scarier when those who act on their dominance of the powerless and their hatred of “the other”  profess faith in God.  We are in a place of despair, and a place of fear.  In the discomfort of our wilderness, God speaks to us through an unconventional man dressed in camel’s hair and eating locusts.  A prophet who proclaims a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

The first words in Mark’s gospel are this:  The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  The good news of Jesus Christ begins with God’s messenger crying out in the wilderness.  This prophet was John the baptizer who came preaching repentance.  John makes it clear that the good news of Jesus is connected to repentance.

As bad as the events have been this year in our country, it is time to stop pointing fingers everywhere but in the mirror.  It is time to stop calling bad behavior mistakes, and recognize for what it is–sin.  The road that prepares us for Christ is confession.  While we desire redemption without judgment, it is when we confess our sin that we can accept God’s forgiveness.  It is when we admit we are broken that we begin to be healed.  It is when we realize that we cannot save ourselves that we look for our savior, who comes to us as a baby.

If the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God starts with our repentance, then the good news is God’s presence with us in our sin.  Not just our sin, but the sins of the world.  God’s power lies not in God’s controlling, but in God’s ability to stay with us despite our attempts to ignore and even push God away.  The good news is that our God comes to us as a baby in human flesh.  God enters into our sinful world of mass shootings, and sexual assaults, and hatred of blacks and Muslims.

Jesus Christ, the son of God, not only comes to us in our wilderness, our exile, but stays with us in our pain, and our anger, and our tears, and our sin.  The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ will unfold into a God who knows vulnerability, suffering, and death on a cross. The good news of Jesus Christ will unfold into life that comes from death.  For we who are in the wilderness, and for we who are in exile, this is the beginning of the good news.  In 2017, what better news is there than this?

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin