Sermon Ponderings

Lessons for Sunday January 31, 2010

I’m astonished by the commentators I read on this passage who suggested that this story is an example of how the Jews rejected Jesus. In this day and age is that really something we have to keep addressing over and over again? I think that any interpretation of any biblical story that paints “us” automatically as the good guys – the ones who always get it right — needs to be viewed with a lot of suspicion. Not that we don’t get it right sometimes – but we need to acknowledge that the gospel is “news.” It’s not life as usual – for the first audience or for today’s. That means it’s going to rub some people, and some interest groups, the wrong way.

I wonder if the trouble with a lot of preaching these days – mine included – is that it doesn’t leave people mad. After all, Jesus says some remarkable things in Nazareth about preaching good news to the poor – the sorts of things that you would think would make people get excited – and instead they try to run him out of town.

It makes me think of Clarence Jordan and Martin Luther King Jr. It makes me think of the heros of the faith who have stood up to the powers that be and hammered away for justice and equity for the poor, and the captives and the blind. The speeches of MLK inspired both riots and hope. Clarence Jordan was reviled and venerated.

It also makes me think about the State of the Union address last night – and a President who says that we never thought change would be easy or quick or even popular. He urges his colleagues to show leadership rather than take pot-shots, and to work for real change for real people, rather than just votes for the next election. It’s fascinating to me how many commentators seem to think this is just blowing hot air – they don’t know whether spouting these kinds of things will actually help his poll-numbers. They clearly assume that a President simply can’t mean what this President says; he must simply be using self-serving rhetoric. And so his words – which could, I suppose, provoke a riot if taken seriously – are written off by the hometown crowd as empty.

Are we too close to the gospel to hear what Jesus really has to say? Have we tamed his message so much that we think “good news to the poor” simply means giving a few coins to a homeless person, instead of offering them dignity and real hope? That “recovery of sight to the blind” means nothing more than putting the CNIB out of business, instead of taking off our own blinders and seeing the world the way God sees it? That “the year of the Lord’s favour” means that we all get golden stars on our Sunday School attendance records, instead of having our financial debts forgiven?

Somewhere I read that part of the impact of our populace so mired in debt is that we are afraid to take political/social stands that might be unpopular with the people who sign our pay cheques. We can’t afford to risk … and we’re caught on a treadmill of having to earn more and more money just to stand still, so that we don’t have the time or the creativity to step back and ask the real deep questions of meaning and direction and purpose. Would the “year of the Lord’s favour” allow us to do that? What might we feel free doing or saying, if we didn’t have to worry about the next pay cheque, or the one after that? Might we try to offer some of the same kind of freedom to “the poor,” “the captives,” or “the blind?”

The people ran Jesus out of town; in the same way that “the people” are rejecting government health care in the US; in the same way that “the people” called for Jesus rather than Barabbus; in the same why that “the people” are afraid of anything new that might compromise an advantage that one of them might have over another. We want the poor around; they remind us how rich we are. We want the captives in prison; the remind us how we value our freedom. We want to be in debt; it feeds the ideology that says that we’ll feel better as soon as we buy the next thing (and even though we never really feel better we don’t give up on the ideology. That would be too radical. We just assume that we failed to buy the right thing, and so we go further into debt looking for the next one.

Readings for Epiphany

When we were pulling together this year’s Christmas pageant we discovered that the magi costumes were missing. Probably somebody inadvertently added them into last Spring’s rummage sale, quite forgetting that they had once bedecked the mysterious visitors from the east. Not that it’s in anyway surprising that someone should make this mistake; after all, the costumes themselves came from Value Village a few years ago, and presumably were once worn by someone who wasn’t pretending to be a biblical character at all. Perhaps they have a more dignified home now than they did among our tattered angel wings and tinsel halos.

No matter; this simply provided Ann and me with a wonderful opportunity to tramp around the second-hand clothing stores in Little India – we were looking for exotic looking fabrics – the more colours the better. I shudder to think what a true-to-life Indian woman would think of the things we bought, or the ways we combined them to create our make-believe wise ones, but we had fun, and there was no mistaking whom the costumes were intended to represent.

To some extent, I think the wise ones were as out-of-place in Bethlehem as those mis-used silks were in our pageant: symbols of a different culture, a different time, a different way of seeing the world. Figures who obviously don’t belong – indeed stick out like a sore thumb – in the routine of Herod’s palace or the dust of a peasant village in Palestine. Figures who are – and were — intentionally exotic.

We made that point with Indian silk; Matthew makes the same point with gifts so costly that they would be certain to outshine even the biggest hoard in Bethlehem. A pound of good frankincense cost two weeks wages; a pound of myrrh about the same. Both were in high demand as religious incense and as medicines; both were highly desirable and rare; both come from the sap of trees only grown beyond the borders of the Roman Empire in the south end of the Arabian peninsula. Romans liked to talk about how they governed “the world;” they called their Emperor “Saviour of the World;” they bragged about how they controlled all that was wise, and learned, and important. Beyond the boundaries of the empire were rumoured only to be worthless barbarians, so-called because they spoke unintelligible language that sounded like “bar, bar, bar.” Yet Matthew paints a picture of the ones from far away who see more clearly, know more deeply, come more reverently, and give more generously than any of the local leaders.

Readings for Christmas Eve

Note: reflections on the readings for Advent 4 are below in the next post

There is something mysterious about a candle-flame. The untouchable, unknowable, ever changing flicker of a candle in the window draws me to a power that is beyond human knowing in ways that almost nothing else can. The calm of a glowing campfire at the end of an evening, the promise of an advent candle, the fascination of a child who wants to play with a match, the glow in my hands on Christmas Eve – they all tug my heart in the direction of a power we cannot control, and a hope it’s hard even to articulate.

Yet it’s important to be cautious about the images we use, because when they become too rigid or stripped of nuance they can damage instead of enhance. I remember watching Filipino women who didn’t want to spend time in the sun, because dark skin was bad; I remember how often skin colour leads to moral judgments; I remember how easy it is to talk about “black and white situations;” “black and white magic;” black and white lies.” Can we talk this way without talking about black and white people, and making the same moral judgments?

One of the most powerful images of Christmas for me is to ponder the light that the darkness cannot even comprehend – a line from the prologue to John. I couple it with one of my favourite passages from the Hebrew Scriptures: “the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.” In the darkness, even a single candle-flame can be seen for miles – and a single act of kindness can transform despair into hope.

And yet I know darkness as a wonderful time, sometimes. Darkness is when my children would snuggle closest and remind me of the ties that bind us together. Darkness is when the cares of the day can be put aside in the comfort of a safe home. Darkness is when it feels easiest to pray, to me – when the distractions that light reveals no longer capture my attention. Darkness is when I can go outside and wonder at the expanse of the universe – who are we to consider that the Creator of all this should pay attention? And yet we are just a little less than angels …. Darkness is when many of us die – and I have sat at enough bedsides while people slowly slipped away to know that as a holy time, full of grace and truth.

Conversely, too much light can expose photographic film and make it useless. It can blind us, and leave us paralysed. And the same flame that I hold in my hands on Christmas Eve can destroy a city when it roars through as a forest fire. If God is light, then God is as powerful as a forest fire in addition to being as inspiring as a candle flame. And if God is light, God is also darkness – mysterious, restful, comfortable, safe, and full of wonder.

The wise ones followed a star, according to Matthew’s story – a churning furnace of fire which would both burn us in an instant, and also lead us to the Divine breaking in on the world. The shepherds saw angels wrapped in glory – whose first words were (and had to be) “fear not!” because angels are always fearsome. Angels – and stars – come with a message which, when we follow it, turns everything we know upside down. If we’re not afraid of what we hear, we’re not listening closely enough. And if we’re not changed by their message, we haven’t really seen what they’re singing about.

Glory to God who holds light and darkness together, and comes to bring healing to two thousand years of wrong. Glory to God who calls us to burn in harmony with the stars, and to walk in darkness and in light with the promise that wherever we may find ourselves we are welcomed, treasured, partnered. Glory to God who comes to us at Christmas, so that we, together with the Divine, can ensure that no one ever need fear the darkness or be blinded by the light.

Readings for December 19, 2008

James B. Janknegt: The Holy Family

I have been doing a lot of reflection this year about the differences between the secular Christmas around us and the churchy Christmas we talk about on Sunday mornings. It has become cliché to complain about the consumerism of Christmas – long before Dr. Seuss introduced us to the Grinch we have been struggling to find ways in secular society to articulate a deeper meaning for Christmas than the rush of opening parcels. But the longing for a “deeper meaning” for Christmas is present even among those who have no intention of ever looking for a “religious” meaning to the holiday.

Our secular Christmas songs certainly speak of presents, but they also speak of “being home at Christmas,” “chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” a time when “troubles will be far away,” and where “the prettiest sight to see is the holly that will be on your own front door.” It’s imagery about home, warmth, family, welcome, and belonging. It’s about all generations having a place and being valued. It’s about spending time with the people closest to us, when so much of our routine seems to mitigate against it. When we rail against the commercialism of Christmas, I think it’s because we fear that in the anxiety of giving or getting the right gifts we will lose the focus on the relationships that we want to be front and centre for this holiday.

This is only confirmed, I think, by the observation that the people who have the hardest time with Christmas are those for whom family is not a safe or happy place. For many families (a minority, I sincerely hope!), it’s simply not possible to enter into a mind-space where “all your troubles will be far away.” Distress lines are busiest at this time of year; divorce lawyers brace themselves for frantic phone calls from clients; women’s shelters prepare to be inundated with victims of assault, incest, and abuse; and all the less extreme but still very real symptoms of families that just don’t quite get along become more evident this time of year. Somebody wrote me a note the other day saying that their husband would not come to a family Boxing Day party because he was expecting to be hung over from too much drinking the day before. Family warmth, safety, and support is something we long for deeply; something we value highly when we have it; and something that leaves a gaping hole in our psyche when it’s missing.

I’m not exactly sure when Christmas was reduced to “Family Day” – and I’m certainly not prepared to say it’s a bad thing to celebrate the warmth and love that emerges out of families-at-their-best. I just want us to remember that for Christians, even this so-called “deeper meaning of Christmas” that our society strives for is but a pale shadow of the good news we’re invited to celebrate this season.

Christmas is certainly a time to reflect on the bond between a mother and baby. It’s a time to reflect on the hopes and dreams that infants evoke in us. It’s a time to wonder and celebrate that in spite of “two thousand years of wrong” (to quote another Christmas carol) God keeps entrusting us with new life – vulnerable, fragile, frighteningly dependent upon us. It’s a time to acknowledge that the warm and belonging that we long for so deeply at this holiday season is, in fact, God’s desire for all of us, all of the time. It’s a model for human living; a model for the world as it was meant to be. And a reminder of how we have strayed from that goal.

But it’s a model for more than just family dynamics. It’s a model for human living generally. I heard Crossan say recently that the people of the first century had no sophisticated way of talking about political systems – they spoke of the state as a household. Households could be judged good or bad depending on how well the members of the household were cared for. You might ask, “Are all the children fed and clothed?” “Are those with special needs cared for appropriately?” “Is every member of the household contributing to the whole in ways that take seriously both their gifts and the household’s needs?” We might well ask the same questions of our city, our province, our nation. Our longing for family-that-works at this holiday season is a longing to live in the sort of household that works as well as the fantasy one we plan to come home to every Christmas.

The original Holy Family did not have most of the necessities of life that we take for granted: they were refugees on the move, with few belongings and even less privacy, subject to the whims of a state that did not value them as people and only cared for what they might produce in the way of taxes. There were rumours of family conflict; pregnancy before marriage; scandal and hard decisions to be made. There was no surgical cleanliness in the labour and delivery room. They were, in short, like us – flawed, frail, fearsome, and wondrous. And to those frightened parents, struggling to hold life together, God entrusted himself – to affirm all the best that family has to offer, and to translate family values into Kingdom values; family ways of being into Kingdom ways of being.

None of us lives in a perfect family. I suspect (and maybe this is heresy!) that Jesus didn’t either. But Jesus came because the family warmth and belonging that our souls cry out for is not simply an unattainable dream; rather it is a glimpse of how God is aching for the world to be, and an appetizer for that banquet at the end of time when we gather at the feast table with our enemies and our friends and all the peoples of the earth. Who knows? Maybe at that table the Grinch himself will carve the roast beast.