A Time for Pondering (Christmas Eve 2013)

Homily Christmas Eve 2013 St. Albans

Luke 2.1-20

A Time for Pondering

One of my favourite verses in the Christmas story that we just heard from the gospel of Luke is the one that says “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.”

Christmas is a time for pondering.  Of course you might never realize that with all the rushing around that we do, the shopping, the meal preparation, the traveling and the rest of it, but Christmas is a time for pondering.  Because at the centre of Christmas is this strange proclamation we make that the God who created the heavens and the earth became flesh and lived among us, and appeared to us not in the form of a powerful king or a mighty warrior, but as a newborn baby, born in humble circumstance, vulnerable and totally dependent as all babies are on others to nourish and look after him.  It’s a surprising story that we tell, and so it’s only fitting that we do some pondering.

Mary gets that right.  Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. And maybe it helped that she had just given birth to a child.  I think that childbirth puts us in the mood for pondering.  Mary was exhausted of course, but there was no way she was going to sleep with all the excitement and commotion swirling around her.  The birth of a child has a way of opening us up, opening us up to new dimensions of life, opening us up to a heightened awareness of the world around us, opening us up to a renewed sense of what really matters.  For many of us, it’s the closest we’ll ever get to a miracle.  For many of us, the love we have for that newborn child is the closest we’ll ever get to pure, unconditional, sacrificial love.  And so Mary treasured all that was happening around her, and pondered these things in her heart.

And surely one of the things that she must have pondered was, “Where did all these shepherds come from?”

 She wouldn’t have been expecting shepherds.  Shepherding was an occupation that was filled by the bottom rung of the social ladder, by people who were unable to find what was considered to be decent work.  Shepherds in Mary’s society were stereotyped as liars, degenerates and thieves. Religious leaders took a dim view of them because their work prevented them from observing the religious laws and practices, and so they were regarded as sinners.  Their testimony was not admissible in courts and many towns, perhaps even Bethlehem, had bylaws which barred shepherds from entering within the city limits. 

So Mary would have been surprised when the shepherds showed up.   And she was amazed at what they had to say, the angels, the birth announcement, the multitude of the heavenly host.  And as she pondered these things, perhaps she marveled at the fact that the first people that God chose to send his messengers to were the ones that society considered to be last.  The outsiders, the poor, the marginalized.  And many years later, when Jesus launched his ministry to the poor and marginalized, I’m sure that Mary remembered the shepherds.

But when God sends angels to the shepherds it is even more than simply reaching out to the marginalized.  The shepherds were marginalized alright, but after years of living in the fields, years of being shunned by decent and religious folks, years of disappointment, the shepherds were also people who had given up on God.  Maybe even given up on life.  Life can be hard, life can be unfair.  Disappointments add up.  At a certain point we let go of the dreams we once had, we give up hope, give up on God.

But even when we give up on God, God does not give up on us.  God sends his angels to the shepherds, and they are terrified, after all, how would you react to God sending angels to you if you’d given up on God?  But the angel says,

“Do not be afraid, for see I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people:  to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.  This shall be a sign for you:  you shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.”

And so they ran.  It was all too good to be true, but they ran anyways.  They went with haste and they found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in a manger, just as the angels had told them.   

That night, the shepherds were touched by the divine.  They experienced God’s presence, and though they were terrified at first, when they saw the child their fear melted away, because who can be afraid of a God who chooses to enter our world with all the fragility and vulnerability of a newborn child.

And Mary treasured these things and pondered them in her heart.

My hope is that you too will be touched by the divine tonight.  That as we listen and ponder and pray and sing and gather round the table, we will experience God’s presence in our midst, and we will know, as surely as the shepherds did, that God is with us.

But that’s just the beginning.  Because there are many people in our world who, like the shepherds, have given up on God. They’ve had too much hardship, or too many losses, or endured too many insults.  They’re in the fields, they’re in shelters, they’re in hospitals;  they’re in our neighbourhoods, they are in our homes.  And so my further hope this evening is that those of us who have experienced God’s presence here tonight, those of us who have encountered Emmanuel, God with us, we will bring glad tidings of great joy to all who need to hear.  Go to them, tell the story, offer a hug or a smile or a meal, provide a listening ear or a shoulder to cry on, proclaim the good news that the God who made the heavens and the earth cares so much for us that he was born as a child in Bethlehem.

Because tonight, we are God’s angels.  May we who have been touched by God this evening go out and touch others with God’s grace and love, so that they too will know that God is with us.

Amen.

God's Promises (Advent 4, Dec 22 2013)

Homily:  Yr A Advent 4, Dec 22 2013, St. Albans

Readings:  Isaiah 7.10-16; Ps 80.1-7,16-18; Rom 1.1-7; Mt 1.18-25

God’s Promises

Today in our gospel reading we get Matthew’s version of the birth of Jesus, told from Joseph’s perspective.  It’s quite different from the story we’ll get from Luke’s gospel on Christmas Eve just two days from now.  No angels,  no shepherds, no Bethlehem, no manger, no swaddling clothes, no singing.  There is absolutely no sentimentality in Matthew’s account of Jesus birth, no sense of awe and wonder, nothing you could put on the cover of a Christmas card. Matthew’s version of the actual birth compared with Luke’s is stunningly brief and spare:

“Now the birth of Jesus took place in this way . . .  Joseph had no marital relations with Mary until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.”

One of the commentators that I was reading this week, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, said that this recounting of the birth of a child must have been written by a man, because the only thing that seems to be worth saying is that he didn’t get to have any sex until after the baby was born.

So why did Matthew write about the birth of Jesus this way?  If he isn’t trying to inspire us with a sense of awe and wonder about the birth itself, and clearly he isn’t, what is he trying to do?

For Matthew it’s all about promises.  God’s promises.  Matthew wants to tell us that the birth of Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promises which had been made to the people of Israel through the ages by the prophets.

We don’t usually read the beginning of Matthew’s gospel because it consists of a long genealogy, in which we read, in the old King James Version, that Abraham begat Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob and so on.  But Matthew puts that genealogy there for a purpose, or maybe several purposes.  One of the purposes of the genealogy is to establish that Jesus the Messiah is the Son of David.  And that is reinforced in the gospel text we heard today, where the angel addresses Joseph as “Son of David”.  And why does that matter?  It matters because in the book of Samuel we read that God through the prophet Nathan made a promise to David.  And that promise made to David was that God would raise up a son of David, through whom he would establish his kingdom forever, and to whom God says “I will never take my love away from you.  I will be a father to you and you shall be a son to me.”  This is the first promise that Matthew is pointing us towards.

The second promise that Matthew points to is the one made through the prophet Isaiah found in our first reading today.  In the book of Isaiah in the 8^th century BC, King Ahaz of Judah is worried because Assyria and Samaria are laying siege to Jerusalem.  But God sends the prophet Isaiah to King Ahaz and tells him not to worry, that Assyria and Samaria will not prevail, and that God will give Ahaz a sign:  “Look the young woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Immanuel, ‘God is with you.’

And so if we put these two Old Testament references together, here is the promise:

God will always love us, and God is with us.  The birth of Jesus is both the sign and the fulfilment of God’s promise to always love us and always be with us.

But who is this promise for?  When God says “I will always love you and I am with you” who is God talking to?

In the Old Testament, in the passages that Matthew is pointing to, the prophets Nathan and Isaiah were speaking to King David and King Ahaz when they proclaimed these promises.

Are God’s promises just for kings, for the rich and powerful?

No!  At Christmas, in Luke’s gospel we’ll read that the first ones called to the birth of Jesus are the poor, poor shepherds.

Are God’s promises just for one particular ethnic group, the people of Israel?

No!  At Epiphany we’ll read that wise men, foreigners from the east, travel from afar to worship Jesus.

God’s promise to always love and to always be with his people is for all:  All nations, all races, for rich and poor, for the powerful and the lowly.

I think we get that.

But I also think that many of us have another question about God’s promises.  The question is this:  Are God’s promises active, are they relevant today, or are we simply remembering things that happened 2000 years ago?

During this season of Advent, we have been preparing for the coming of Christ.  Are we simply remembering the coming of Christ as a babe some 2000 years ago?  Or, are we looking forward to Christ’s return at some point in the future?  Or, are we preparing for something that happens in our time and our place, the encounter with God that happens now, in our lives today?

Let me tell you a story about something that happened while I was in my previous parish of Huntley.  It was almost exactly three years ago.

There was a woman in that parish named Ellen, whose mother Frances lived with her.  I used to visit them fairly regularly because Frances was in her 90s and couldn’t get out.  At a certain point, Frances' health began to fail, and her illness was assessed to be terminal, but it was a slow process and she had a nurse that came to visit and provide palliative care.  There was some thought that maybe she should be moved to the Maycourt Hospice, but for now she was being looked after at home.  All things considered, this was good for Frances, but it was all quite hard on Ellen who was very close to her mother.

So one day about two weeks before Christmas, I finished up some work at my office and was gathering up my things and looking forward to going home, when I had this thought come into my head.  “You should go and visit Ellen and Frances.”

So I picked up the phone, because I was always in the habit of calling before visiting, and I called, and there was no answer.  Maybe Ellen's gone out I thought, I’ll try again tomorrow.  But then I thought, maybe I’ll just drop by anyways on my way home.

So I drove over to Ellen's house and I saw that there was a car in the driveway.  A friend maybe, or perhaps the nurse that came by to look after Frances was there.  So once again, I figured that it was best not to disturb them, and that I’d try again tomorrow.  But just as I was about to back out of the driveway, another pesky thought, “maybe you should just go in and see what’s up”.

So I did.  And it was indeed the nurse who was there, and as it turns out, she was there by accident as well, she’d been scheduled to visit in the evening, but for some reason had decided to come in the afternoon instead.

While the nurse and I were there that afternoon, Frances died, peacefully, in her sleep.  And Ellen, who was profoundly affected by her mother’s death, was also immensely comforted to have with her at that moment her nurse and her priest.

That afternoon, I saw God having compassion on one of his people in need.  The God that promises to always love us, to always be with us was there with Ellen, acting to make good on those promises in a very concrete way.

God has promised to always love us and to always be with us.  That promise is as alive today as it ever has been.  And when God asks us to help, it is our privilege to be able to respond and share with God in the fulfilment of God’s promises in our time and place.

And this shall be the sign:  “the virgin shall conceive and bear a son.”  “And you shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.”

Amen.

An Exercise in Repentance (Advent 2, Dec 8 2013)

Homily:  Yr A Advent 2, Dec 8 2013, St. Albans

Readings:  Isaiah 11.1-10; Ps 72.1-7,18-19; Rom 15.4-13; Mt 3.1-12

An Exercise in Repentance

“In those days, John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’”

Each year during the season of Advent, we hear about John the Baptist.  Who is this John the Baptist?  Why do all four of the gospels, including Matthew in the reading we heard today, why do the gospels begin their account of Jesus’ ministry with something about John the Baptist before launching into the story of Jesus himself?  One reason is surely because the gospel writers believed that the coming of Jesus is so important, so earth shattering, that it requires preparation.  We need to get ready.  And so John is seen as the one who gets us ready, the one who prepares the way of the Lord, as was foretold long ago by the prophet Isaiah.

And what’s with the camel hair clothing and the leather belt and the diet of locusts and wild honey?  Is Matthew just trying to let us know that John’s a bit, let’s say, different?  Perhaps, but he’s also giving us this description and these details to let us know that he sees John as the return of the prophet Elijah, one of, if not the greatest of the Old Testament prophets.  Elijah is a hairy man with a leather belt, and at his earthly end the Hebrew scriptures tell us that he was taken up into heaven in a whirlwind of chariots and fire.  And why does that matter to Matthew and his first century Jewish contemporaries?  It matters because in the very last verse, the closing words of the Hebrew scriptures, our Old Testament, the prophet Malachi prophesies that before the coming of the Messiah, before the coming of the day of the LORD, God will send Elijah back to the people of Israel, to prepare the way for the Messiah and to get people ready for his coming by turning their hearts.

And so Matthew is claiming here that in John the Baptist, Elijah has indeed returned, and that the one for whom he is preparing the way, Jesus, will indeed be the Messiah long-promised by God, and that in order for us to get ready for his coming, we need to turn our hearts.

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

We read these scriptures in Advent because Advent is for us a time of repentance, a time to get ready for the coming of the Messiah.

But repentance is a misunderstood word.  Too often it has the connotation of looking back at our lives and expressing remorse for the wrong things that we have done, and then perhaps doing some sort of penance to make up for these things.  But the actual word used for repentance, metanoia in the Greek, doesn’t really mean this at all.  Repentance is rather a turning around, a turning of the heart and of the mind, a re-orientation, a change in perspective.  For those of you who have studied philosophy, it is the word that Plato uses in his allegory of the Cave to describe the moment when the prisoners physically turn from looking at the shadows on the wall of the cave to looking at the actual objects creating the shadows, and the light shining through the cave entrance.  Repentance is a turning around, a reversal, a change in direction.

And to help us get the point, Matthew has filled this short text on John the Baptist with images of reversals.

At the time of John the Baptist, Jews from all over Israel and beyond would regularly journey from the countryside up to Jerusalem for the major religious festivals.   Four times a year, a great stream of people would flow into Jerusalem.  But in today’s reading we hear that all of Jerusalem streams out to the wilderness to be baptized by John.  The wilderness itself is transformed, from a place of loneliness and desolation to a place that is full of people. This is an image of repentance, a reversal, a complete turning about and change of direction that leads to transformation. 

Similarly, faithful Jews knew that if you wanted to confess your sins and receive forgiveness, the correct procedure was to go to the Temple in Jerusalem and to offer the proper sacrifice.  But here we have John in the wilderness, about as far as you could get from the Temple, proclaiming not a sacrifice but a baptism for the forgiveness of sin.

And John’s use of baptism itself was unique.  In those days, baptism was normally a ritual performed for non-Jews who wanted to convert to Judaism.  But in today’s gospel John is baptising Jewish people.  His action declares that it’s his own people who need to be baptised and converted.  Even those people who were comfortable, who thought they were the people of God by virtue of their ancestry, they are pushed out of their comfort zones and told to change the direction of their lives and experience the baptism of repentance.

Repentance is about reversals, changes in direction, re-orientation and transformation.  And it’s not just theoretical, it’s about the way we live.  As John says, we don’t just need to repent, but we also need to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.”

And because all of this is intended to be practical, not just theoretical, I thought we’d do a little exercise together here today, as part of our Advent preparation.

So here is the first step.  We now have 2 ½ weeks to go before Christmas, and I know that this makes it a busy time of year for many people.  So let’s get organized!  I want you to take one of these file cards and a pencil, and at the top write “To-Do” and then make a list of all of the things that you need to do to get ready for Christmas. 

(allow time for people to prepare a list)

Okay, are you ready for step 2 of our exercise?  This time I want you to take another card, and on this second card, I want you to write down your hopes and dreams for this Christmas and beyond.  You’ll need to give this a little thought.  And I want you to allow yourself to think big, to get in touch with your deepest hopes and dreams.  By all means you may want to write down things like Christmas dinner with family.  But don’t be afraid to go beyond this.  Allow yourself to be inspired by some of the visions of hope that we’ve heard already this Advent season.  By Isaiah’s vision of peace in which the wolf and the lamb can lie down together.  By Paul’s vision of all nations, Gentile and Jew, praising God together.  By Martin Luther King’s vision of a nation in which people would not be judged by the colour of their skin.  By Jody Williams vision of a world free from landmines, so that children can play safely in the fields.  By Nelson Mandela’s vision of “a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.”

So think for a moment and then write down on that card your hopes and dreams, the ones that are specific to you and your situation, for this Christmas and beyond.

(give people time to think and write)

And now for part 3 of our exercise.  You’ve written down your hopes and dreams.  Read them again.  Then go back to your to do list.  And put the two together.  Which of the things on that to do list will actually contribute to your hopes for Christmas and beyond?

Circle those that will.

You may want to cross out those that won’t.

And then you may want to add a few new things to your list.

(give people a little time to reflect on the list)

I know that when I do this exercise my list changes, and perhaps surprisingly, the one thing that I’ve forgotten that always seems to make it back to the top of my Advent to do list is prayer. 

Now, I don’t know how much your list changed, but if it did, and if those changes actually translate into a change in how you live out your life for the next 2 ½ weeks and beyond, that’s repentance.

Repentance is a re-orientation, a change in perspective, a commitment to turn and live differently, a turn towards God.

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.

Amen.

(With thanks to David Lose for his suggestion for the exercise found on www.workingpreacher.org)