Christmas Eve 2016

(singing) “Christus Natus Hodie; Ding dong ding; ding-a-dong-a-ding. ding dong, ding dong ding-a-dong ding”.

I’ve always wanted to be able to sing that in public, and it’s not a song that I’ve ever been able to. So there! I hadn’t decided to do that until before the 9:00 service tonight. But it is the opening line that I had, Christus Natus Hodie—Christ is born today; this very day. And it’s a wonderful thing. But I have to tell you, and I don’t know if you’re like me or not, but I am really tired of the Christmas myth. I’m so tired of the myth that Christmas has to be perfect, and that we have to have it all in place. I’ve done it over and over, and every year I say, “No, not this year”, but then it catches up with me and it just has to be right. We kill ourselves and we worry: is tomorrow’s dinner going to be right? Will the tree lights go out in the middle of everything? It is the perfect Christmas. I think that what’s so ironic about it is that we just heard a story about Christmas, and nothing in that story is perfect. In fact, if it had been, there wouldn’t have been a story. It’s filled with misunderstanding; it’s filled with disaster; it’s filled with errors and people being shut out in the night. And maybe that’s why it is so attractive to us, because we know that it’s a story of terror; we know that it’s a story of anxiety, and it draws us in because we can go to that place with those people and share in that. It’s a safety for us, and we need them, really, as our companions to get through Christmas. Especially the way the world throws us Christmas.

But look at that story: it’s really weird. I mean at the very beginning, the very fact that we look at a scene of people outside, in a manger, in a stable, in a cave and see warm light and think of comfort and warmth. Abandoned in a cold night. Stand on your front lawn tonight when all the Christmas lights are on, and see how warm and cozy you are in the morning; how many people have joined you to celebrate that. People locked out in the night? They didn’t even have a place to stay in a room in a house that was their rightful property as the kinfolk. So off they’re put to a place where the animals nest.

Shepherds—that wonderful Christmas image. But in the 1st century Judaism, shepherds were very odd people. They lived out in the countryside; they lived by themselves; a nomadic life; probably terrified of the city and very distrusting of other people. One commentator has suggested that they are the modern day equivalent of bikers. A Harley gang riding out on the streets, and that’s who God chooses to give the message to. Because God only knows, quite literally, that they are the only ones able to take it. Take a message that’s going to be one of Jesus reaching out to the dispossessed, and those on the fringes, and those who don’t have the perfect Christmas—never have and probably never will.

And then most of all, I think, the baby. Yes, it’s about a baby, but the problem with this baby and this child is that in that world it was not the reality we think of, certainly when we look at a creche set. A child was that to be reviled; a child was a nuisance, not considered a person; not worthy of any consideration. And certainly not this child who’s going to move around with the biker gang; who’s always going to reach out to those who are on the fringes. This child who lays in a manger in Luke’s story—what is that about? In a place where the animals eat? But this is the child that will be food, and maybe that’s why we’re here tonight. We know that in our anxiety and in our grief, we come into this place, we become their comrades, and we will eat that bread that will give us life. And a child, because in that world, something that would have come from that child, would have been odd. And for us, certainly, a child always signifies something new. Certainly a new way of looking at things that always confronts and confounds us, especially at Christmas. “Don’t screw it up, Johnny or Suzie. Mommy’s got to do this; we’ve got to make sure it’s right.”

Good friends of mine have a house that is a wonderful magic place for their nephews and nieces to come to. I call it The Great House. And Elaine has creche sets all over the place. She told me that last week her niece, Kennedy, came. Kennedy is maybe a 2nd grader. Kennedy has no exposure to Christianity; doesn’t know this story at all. She began to play with the creche set. She moved everyone around and she created a story. Elaine said when she finished, “Tell us, Kennedy, what this story is.” For Kennedy, the sheep were kittens; the cow and the donkey were dogs; the Three Kings were friends and were off in a circle facing one another, having a conversation with themselves. The angel was the mother of the baby, and the shepherd was the father. Mary and Joseph were the brother and sister of the child. That’s not bad theology for someone who doesn’t know the Christmas story; that’s not bad theology for someone who’s not a Christian. It’s pretty good theology if someone were a Christian and thought that way. Mary and Joseph as brother and sister of Jesus; an angel as the mother; and a shepherd, the Great Shepherd, the Good Shepherd, God the Shepherd, as the father. But I think the most intriguing to me, and I’d never thought about it, were the Three Kings, or the Wise Men, as friends. That’s a wonderful image for the Trinity, isn’t it? Three Kings, on this Feast, facing one another like a Trinity. Just today I happened to see in the New York Times an op ed piece by Peter Wehner. He’s writing about this very notion of friendship. He says, “The Incarnation also underscores the importance of relationships, and particularly friendships. The Rev. James Forsythe, a winsome and gifted pastor of McLean Presbyterian Church in Virginia, which my family attends, says friendship is not a luxury. It is at the very essence of who we are. The Three Persons of the Christian Godhead—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—speak to the centrality of community. ‘When we are in friendship’, according to Mr. Forsythe, we are participating in something divine. That is, fellowship and friendship were present in the Trinity and are therefore of immense worth to us. I’ve experienced that in my own life, he says, when friends served as God’s proxies, dispensing grace I could not receive in solitude’”.

The Three Kings as friends, the notion of friends, and the kings bring to the child the gifts. And it’s in that notion of gift-giving, especially between friends, not receiving, but giving. Four years ago I was involved in my parish at Trinity Cathedral in Portland; I was involved in the Wednesday community meal. It was a meal that anyone could come to, but it was largely 400 homeless people that came there for a hot meal. I met a young man named Scott. Scott was about 32. Scott had the mentality and social skills of maybe a 5th grader, maybe a 5 year old, sometimes. But Scott would always speak to me and welcome me when I came up to serve at the meal. Scott had had a rough year: his mother had died; he was homeless. I never knew from one week to the next if I would see Scott when I got to Trinity, or if he would be there. But this particular day, which happened to be a couple of weeks before Christmas—my perfect Christmas (I’ve told you about it before), the Christmas tree fell over in the middle of the night, Jesus went flying off onto the coffee table; the ornaments were smashed; it was a disaster. And it was the year of the Clackamas shooting when violence came very near to me. There was Scott, and he handed me this. It’s a pretty cool toy for a guy to give another guy. It’s a red RZN motor bike. He wanted me to have it. I can’t imagine him parting with it, but I took it, and it sits on my shelf of sacred items. I always know Scott by this; I don’t know where he is, but I know that he gave me this, and that gift is his presence. That gift is an incarnated presence, and God dwells in that reality.

Every year since I can’t tell you when, on Christmas Eve there comes an hour, usually 4 to 5, when I’m expecting Christmas to come. It gets very quiet, and if the light is out, it starts to sink, and it seems so sacred; it seems so near, and then it passes away. There’s a sense of loss, like it was there, and I couldn’t keep it and make it stay. And I have to go on, off to church, and do our things. It’s an experience that W.H. Auden knew. He writes about this in his Christmas oratorio, For The Time Being. “The happy morning is over”, he says.

“The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:

When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing

Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure

A silence that is neither for nor against her faith

That God's Will will be done; that, in spite of her prayers,

God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.”

So here we are again, and Christ is born today. And yet the world will move on; we’ll have to pack the decorations; and we’ll have to figure out what we’re going to do. And that safe space will be filled with anxiety once again. It wasn’t until today, when I listened to the Service of Lessons and Carols from King’s College, that I heard a verse from one of my favorite Christmas songs, O Little Town of Bethelehem. The 3rd verse:

How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given.

So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven.

No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin

Where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.

Is that that hour? Is that that silent coming, the gift that’s given to me? And for an hour I can hold it, but then I have to give it out and move back into the world. Christus Natus Hodie. But we’ll have to do the work with him. If Jesus is Incarnated, then he needs your friendship to make that reality, and to tell that Good News.

It is my prayer for you that you’ll have the perfect Christmas.

Amen

4th Sunday in Advent 2016 - The Rev. Bingham Powell

The Desert Road - 3 Advent 2016

Sermon for 11 December 2016

Isaiah 35:1-10; Psalm 146:4-9; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11

“As a deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for You, O God.” Amen.

That famous line from Psalm 42 was not one of our readings for this week, but it expresses perfectly the Advent sentiment. Think not so much in terms of Oregon deer, which get plenty of water, but think of deer in the Palestinian badlands, where rain is rare and the only water comes from springs that bring water down from the mountains. All the land around you is parched; such plants as there are, are hardy, thorny things. You can’t really just stay by the springs because that’s where the predators are. So you have your trails on the steep hillsides and you wander them endlessly looking for the next green plant to munch and trying to stay away from the lions and jackals. Most Israelites didn’t live in the desert, of course, but they saw it from where they lived, and it represented for them the realm of chaos, of demonic powers — the realm of death. In contrast to the land made fertile by God’s grace, the desert was ever visible as a part of the world that resisted the divine gift. Nowadays we see desert and wilderness as places, perhaps, where we find God, and Israel has stories about finding God in the desert, too, but mostly the desert is someplace where God is experienced as absent, a place in need of re-creation, that needs to be made fruitful. What the poet who speaks in Psalm 42 does is makes a connection between that physical condition of unfruitfulness to the spiritual condition of feeling God’s absence.

Now I know as well as you do, or anyone does, that God is never actually absent. Yet there are times, aren’t there, when God’s absence seems almost palpable, when the “God-shaped hole in the human heart” feels like more than mere emptiness. At least that’s how it sometimes feels to me. And yet that emptiness is such an ache, such a longing, that it’s like God is present in that very absence and even by means of it. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” goes the saying, as a ravening thirst increases one’s love for cool water. “As the deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for you, O God.”

Advent is a time to feel that absence, to relish it as you relish the feeling of hunger when you smell the afternoon feast cooking on Christmas morning. It’s not just a desire to satisfy your hunger with food; there’s something delicious about the hunger itself, which serves as a sign of the feast to come.

This is the kind of feeling we ought to have as we hear Isaiah’s marvelous poem. Remember that to the ancients of the Middle East, desert symbolized the parts of the world that were in rebellion against God’s tireless efforts to make the world live. The desert was where demonic forces, predatory animals, and uncleanness of all kinds endured. If you got sick, and especially if you were infirm in a way that led to ritual uncleanness, such as being lame or blind or had leprosy, then you were of the desert, whether you lived there or not. But in Isaiah’s vision, God makes the desert fertile and lush, and all those symbols of barrenness are cured. The desert blossoms and becomes as fruitful as the greenest regions in Israel. The sight of the blind and the hearing of the deaf is be restored, those who had been unable to speak now can sing, the lame are able not just to walk but to leap for joy. The waterless wastes overflow with vigor. And no predators endanger anybody. And in the midst of this re-created land, this former desert, this place formerly inhabited by the unclean and demonic, there is now a sacred road that leads to Jerusalem and to the temple of God on Mount Zion there. This is imagery of pilgrimage to the temple. The power of God’s new creation, and of the holy road that leads to God’s presence, is so great that even fools can’t miss it, there is no uncleanness on this road because all uncleanness has been healed by God. The highway leads inexorably to the presence of God, and God’s redeemed people travel that way with joy that is so great as to drive away all sorrow and sighing. Doesn’t this vision of Isaiah just make you want to find that road and walk on it, like a thirsty deer who smells the water from afar? Walk with me through Advent; that’s our holy road and it leads to God’s own Self, who was made a human being like us for our salvation.

What I’d like to invite you to see with me is that the healing that’s needed by the desert, and which God promises, is also needed by us. Because there are things that dry us up, that make us forget who we are created to be, things that get control of us and make us who are called to be children of God into slaves. We are, as the Collect says, “sorely hindered by our sins.” I used to think of God as a stern old man who scowled when anyone smiled. That God wanted to prevent us from sinning mainly because he didn’t want us to have any fun. But the longer I live the clearer it becomes to me that that’s wrong-headed. Sins are the things we do that hinder us from living fully, that make us less than fully human, that deaden our physical and spiritual nerves so that we’re unaware of the world’s marvelousness. If you’re like me then you probably don’t have too much trouble thinking of the sins that dry up your soul, things you’ve neglected to do that you should have done; things you’ve done that you shouldn’t have done. Attitudes that cut you off from God and your neighbor. God promises to make the desert bloom again, to save us from our sins, but here we are still in the midst of them. In Advent, hoping and longing for the salvation of God to be born in us and in the world. In this Advent desert I long for God’s healing grace like a deer thirsting for flowing streams.

This the solution of the powerful riddle about how the loving God is also our judge: When God comes to be our judge, He comes to save us. God’s judgment is not a punishment for failure to be saved; it is the means of God’s salvation. That’s because what God is saving us from, is our sins, the attitudes and actions that shrivel up our hearts and make God’s world a desert. God will save us from those sins, because God is recreating everything into a new, green, fertile heaven and earth. I think myself, using Leonard Cohen’s words, that “every heart to love will come, but like a refugee.” But even if we utterly refused that salvation, God would save the rest of the world that we insisted on destroying. God’s salvation is inevitable, because life and bounty are God's way.

So what do we do while we live in Advent, in this time of expectation as we await the final victory of God? In modern Israel, the desert is increasingly being made fruitful by irrigation. That is, through a combination of human effort and God’s miraculous gift of life. Our individual lives are like that, too. The main way God frees us from our sins is by helping us to stop sinning. It doesn’t do any good to ask God to free us from our sins if we won’t walk in the freedom we’re given. The desert becomes fruitful when we irrigate it. The holy highway leads to the Jerusalem, but it is our legs that have to carry us on it. Our effort is part of the grace that God gives; it’s not good works versus grace, it’s the grace of good works. And so we remind ourselves annually, in this Advent season, to come back to the Source, to watch and pray for the Lord’s return, to do works of justice and mercy and peace. To eat and drink these signs of the banquet which we shall all eat, cured of our diseases, healed from our infirmities, and saved from our sins. This bread and this wine are the very presence of God breaking into our dried and twisted roots of our souls and beginning to irrigate the parched land. Strengthen the weak knees. Break up your fallow ground. Let streams begin to flow in the desert.

“As the deer longs for streams of water, so longs my soul for You, O God.”

A Light in the Darkness -- Candles of Hope -- 2 Advent 2016

Throughout this season of Advent, each week we hear a selection from the book of Isaiah. And I know you already know this—you’re top-notch Biblical scholars—and at the very least you’ve probably heard me preach on Isaiah before. But I think it never hurts to do a little review.

Isaiah lived in time of great difficulty for the people of Israel. The once great nation had declined; the nation of the great King David and the wise King Solomon, unified under their rule, was no more. The people had forgotten God; they had strayed from God’s ways, and they were living a life of division, corruption, greed, faithlessness, and injustice. They had forgotten to love their neighbor; they had forgotten to take care of the widows and orphans; they had forgotten to treat the foreigners in their midst as if they were citizens; they had forgotten to treat each person with dignity and respect as the image of God in which they were made. They had forgotten the ways of justice and peace and mercy and grace and love that God teaches in the commandments. And so God let them decline; God let them face the consequences of their action, even to the point of allowing the Babylonians to come in and to scatter them into exile. It was a very dark time for the people of Israel: a time of sorrow and lament and grief. “They sat down by the waters of Babylon and wept”, wrote the psalmist during these years.

And into this darkness, God sent Isaiah to do two things: first God sent Isaiah to diagnose the problem; to tell the people that the reason this had happened was because they had permitted and they had committed injustice; that they had strayed from God; that this feeling of abandonment was because of that. And second, God sent Isaiah to offer them hope, to let them know that God had not actually abandoned them; that God was still with them through it all.

“Hope—that thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without any words and never stops at all”, as Emily Dickinson wrote in that famous poem. During the season of Advent we hear selections from Isaiah that are all about this hope. Hope that the world will be transformed; that this darkness was not permanent. Transformation such as the mountain of God rising up above all the mountains; the mountain the people could not see anymore in their exile; the mountain of God in which they were no longer at would rise up and the nations would stream to it. Transformation as the desert bloomed abundantly, and the sand turned to pools of water to quench their thirst in the parchness of the wilderness in which they lived. Hope that the lame would leap like deer, and that the speechless would sing songs of joy; hope that the predator and the prey would rest and play and eat together in peace, and that a little child would lead them, as we heard in today’s installment.

Each of these messages of hope that Isaiah was sent by God to deliver was a candle lit in the darkness of their exile, of their despair. And these words of hope that Isaiah preached are a light in the midst of the darkness of this season and of our own lives. We cannot control the darkness; life is full of darkness. Individually in death and pain and illness and challenge and difficulty, and collectively as a community, we do and will experience darkness. We cannot control that darkness, but we can control the light. We can light candles of hope to brighten this world. That is Advent: While the world literally gets darker and darker as we move towards the solstice, every week we light more and more candles as we approach that time. We resist the darkness with light, with hope, with love.

Several years ago my family started a tradition of eating dinner during Advent primarily by the light of our Advent wreath. That first week is dark—one candle. But by Second Advent, by tonight, we’re going to double the light at our meal, double the light in our life as we light that second candle. And by the time you reach Fourth Advent, you are basking in the abundance of light—the light of four whole candles to lighten your meal.

We are sent by God, like Isaiah, to light candles in this world, to brighten it. Each of us individually is sent out into this world wherever we go—in our work, in our home, in our lives, in whatever communities we may belong to – to bring hope to people, to bring love and grace and mercy to enlighten the darkness, to shine hope.

And that’s what we’re trying to do here as a community, also. Every meal that we serve at the Saturday Breakfast is a candle lit in the life of the darkness of someone. Every warm greeting, every smile given to our guests when we treat them with dignity and respect at that meal is a candle lit in the darkness. Every Ho! Ho! Ho! Stocking that you fill is going to be a candle brought to a little child who’d otherwise have a dark Christmas. Every time we gather together as a community, we are shining more light. Every prayer we offer is light that we are sending out into the darkness.

We are sent to enlighten the world, and as we light our Advent candles this season, and as we light our candles of hope in the world, we prepare ourselves and this world for the brightest of all the lights: the light that came into the world, the light that darkness cannot overcome, the light embodied in a person, in a child born in a manger, Jesus Christ, our Lord, a little Child who will lead us in all hope. Hold on to this hope, and continue to enlighten the world everywhere you go.

My sisters and brothers in Christ, I leave you this week to ponder a question: what candle are you going to light?

Amen.

1 Advent - November 27, 2016

Children's Sermon explaining Advent

December 20, 2015 - The Musical Sermon

Readings about Jesus, accompanied by exquisite music:  voice, flute, organ