Shepherd or King -- Does it Really Matter? A Sermon for the feast of Christ the King

One of my more entertaining church memories comes from a time many years ago when I was a member of a very small congregation.  Being few in number, we were engaged in an intergenerational education program during Advent, during which the vicar was leading us through a discussion of the catechism.  At one point in a discussion about Jesus something was said that caused a very precocious six year old in the group to exclaim, “Wait, Jesus was Jewish?”  “Well, yes,” answered the vicar.  “Huh,” gasped an astonished Christopher, “I always thought he was British.”  “Spoken like a true Anglican,” replied the vicar.

            I trust we are all clear that Bethlehem, the City of David, is not located in Great Britain.  Still, Christopher’s confusion is related I sense to a mindset that is fairly pervasive throughout Christendom.  We’ve all been taught since we were children that we are created in the image of God, and that Jesus of Nazareth was the human face of God.  Indeed, in today’s epistle Paul refers to Jesus as “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.”  So it’s not surprising that as one travels from place to place around the world, images of Jesus tend to resemble the people of a given area, regardless of whether they in turn look at all like someone born in what we know today as the Holy Land.  Hence, in the Coptic Churches of North Africa Jesus is often portrayed as black.  In Mexico I encountered images of a dark haired, very warm hearted looking man, quite different from those images of what I call the Scandinavian Jesus with which I grew up.  You know the image I mean, the fellow with the hazel eyes and the sandy colored hair in a flowing page boy.  The bottom line is it often helps people feel closer to Jesus if they imagine that Jesus looked like they do. 

            In a move that likewise was intended to make Christ more relevant by tying him to something familiar to many people, Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King in 1925, in response to the rise of secularism, atheism, and communism that followed World War I.  Reeling from the devastation and carnage of what has always been known in Europe as the Great War, many Christians were doubting not merely Christ’s authority but very existence, a perspective encouraged by the several non-Christian dictators who came to power around that time.  Pius instituted this new feast with several goals in mind.  First, he hoped nations would acknowledge anew that the Church actually has not merely the right to exist but also the right to immunity from the state.  Moreover, he dared to hope leaders and nations would regain a seemingly lost sense of respect for Christ.  Finally, he hoped individual Christians would gain personal strength and courage from the celebration of the feast, being reminded that Christ the King reigns in their hearts, minds, wills, and bodies.  Now, as citizens of a country that got its start by rebelling against a king, living at a time when individualism has been embraced to such an extreme that for many the only authority they’re wiling to acknowledge is the individual self, this image of Christ as King doesn’t necessarily work particularly well, for some of the same reasons, actually, that the Scandinavian Jesus doesn’t either.

            Becoming a bit too convinced that Jesus looked like us, means by extension that Jesus didn’t look like anyone who is different from us.  That makes it awfully easy to slip into the mindset that we’re somehow better than “they” are, whoever they happen to be, which in turn makes it dangerously easy to exclude or put down those who differ from us, because after all, we’re the ones who are really like Jesus.  Adding to this the notion of Jesus as king, with all the antiquated and often oppressive baggage that goes along with the concept of human monarchs definitely doesn’t help.  Jesus himself addressed this concern, as we read in Mark, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.  But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.  For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”  If we also remember that in John we are told that “when Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself,” we have further reason to ask just what we’re doing celebrating the Feast of Christ the King.  The beginning of our answer we find in the passages I just quoted to you.  Jesus clearly understood the oppressive nature of secular kings, and fled when he sensed the people wanted to make him one.   Unlike those worldly rulers, however, his version of being a king was to be a servant, to be not the one for or to whom sacrifices were made, but to be the one who was willing to be sacrificed.  It is no accident that the Gospel reading for the Feast of Christ the King is taken from Luke’s account of Jesus’ crucifixion.   

            The notion of a servant king is exceedingly counterintuitive.  The opening line of today’s recessional, “Crown him with may crowns, the lamb upon his throne” is a long way from Richard the Lion-hearted, with or without crowns.  Jesus didn’t want to be a king in the traditional sense, though if our Bible translations are accurate, he spoke on more than one occasion of his kingdom.  But his wasn’t the sort of kingdom his listeners were used to or over which some of them wanted him to rule.  His wasn’t a kingdom with territory and borders, focused on the autonomy of one people or nation at the expense of others, but rather a kingdom that by existing in the hearts of his followers, would transcend worldly distinctions of language, ethnicity, or nationality.   Like heaven itself, Jesus’ kingdom wasn’t so much a place as a state of being.  So why talk about Jesus as a king in the first place?

            Our problem, I think, isn’t as much with kings as it is with words, with images.  We communicate primarily with words.  We think in words.  Words are what allow me to read a book and conjure up images as I go along of the scenes and events described on the page before me.  Yes, some of us can paint, or sculpt or take extraordinary photographs, but even then one person observes such a work of art and then describes it to someone else with words.   I was privileged many years ago, for example, to see the Mona Lisa.  Unable to paint a painting of the Mona Lisa, however, I have to fall back on words to tell someone else how magnificent it is.  Still, this all works quite well for us when we’re focused on earthly matters, but not so well when the subject of our conversation is God. 

            The very act of using words to describe God limits God.  It’s a bit like talking about the universe.  Now I spent most of my career teaching chemistry, that is, about the behavior of atoms and molecules.  I have no problem at all picturing those particles in my minds eye.  Invisibly tiny as they are, I can clearly picture their structure as well as their interactions.  Going the other direction though, as astronomers do, I have trouble.  I’m fine with the place of earth in our solar system, and that our solar system is part of the Milky Way galaxy, but then it begins to get away from me.  I understand the Milky Way is one of the 100 billion galaxies that have been discovered so far with the Hubble telescope, a number expected to double as telescopic technology improves.   Think about that - 200 billion galaxies!  Just how big is the universe?  Scientists believe it’s 13.8 billion years old, so that would mean the radius has to be at least 13.8 light years wide, except astronomers tell us the universe is expanding so the edges are supposed to be nearly 46 billion light-years away which makes the diameter 91 billion light-years across.  Most mind boggling of all, though, and the point of this exhausting scientific digression, is that I believe God created all of it!!!  How big, how powerful, how timeless does that make God?

            When you think of God in those terms it makes it seem rather petty to become overly concerned with the physical characteristics, the facial features of Jesus of Nazareth.  Yes, as the human manifestation of God Jesus was the aspect of God most like us.  But we believe that all three persons of the Trinity have existed from the beginning, so the thirty-three years Jesus spent on earth, while a key part, are only a small part of Jesus’ existence.  Moreover, focusing too closely on the various roles he played - teacher, healer, son, brother, friend, political activist, makes it harder I fear to focus on who Jesus really was and why he came among us in the first place.  We don’t encounter this problem in the Book of Exodus, which though it doesn’t appear first is the oldest book in the Bible.  When Moses, desperately trying to get out of leading the Israelites out of Egypt, a job he really did not want, asked Yahweh of the burning bush, so what am I supposed to say if the people ask who sent me, Yahweh replies, “I Am who I Am.  Tell them I Am sent you.”  That was it, just the simple statement that Moses was being sent by the God who IS.  That’s really all we need to know about God.  For that matter, it’s all we really need to know about each other.   Age, sex, skin color, nation of origin, economic status, profession, family structure, all may be very interesting, but the only thing that should really matter to you about me is that I am here, I am real, I am a beloved child of God, and that is all I really need to know about you as well. 

            Next Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent, our four week season of preparation for Christmas, when we celebrate the birth of a baby whose name was Jesus, but whose other appellations - among them Emmanuel, Redeemer, Messiah, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Prince of Peace, Son of God would fill a church directory.  And I haven’t even started on all the ways we have for referring to the other two persons of the trinity.  Names.  It never occurred to me to ask her, since she died when I was only ten years old, but I suspect my maternal grandmother never intended to be called Mema, but I’m told that’s what my eldest cousin called her, and it stuck.  Mema didn’t care.  We were her grandchildren and she loved us.   God loves the entire human family and I am sure, cares not at all by what name we address the source of our very being.  God knows that in order to matter to us God has to be real to us.  How each of us nurtures that relationship between ourselves and our triune God is very personal.  Perhaps you relate best to Christ the King, while the person sitting next to you may prefer Jesus the Good Shepherd.  Shepherd or lamb, servant or king - it really doesn’t matter to God.   What does matter is that you know beyond any doubt, that you are loved by the God to whom I prayed at the beginning of this sermon, the God who was, and is, and always shall be.  Amen. 

The Comfort of Mortality - A Sermon for All Saints Day

My Soul Magnifies the Lord - August 14, 2016 - Mary Sunday

May 22, 2016 - The Trinity: Theological Song and Dance - Brandon McGinnis

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Psalm 8

Romans 5:1-5

John 16:12-15

Two years ago I had the privilege of presenting a paper at the Stone-Campbell journal conference in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was nervous about attending the weekend-long conference, not only because I had to present a measly undergraduate paper to a panel of biblical scholars, but also because the whole event itself – a gathering of some of the top theological minds from across country – was, let’s say, mildly intimidating.

Thankfully, my mind was put at ease when I checked in, got my welcome packet, and read the conference title: Stone-Campbell 2014: God in Culture: Music, Movies, and Video Games.

As a theology major, movie buff, and avid gamer, the second and third items in that title – movies and videogames – made me feel right at home. But that first one – Music – not so much. While I certainly enjoy listening to music, making it, not to mention analyzing it, fall outside of my interests and abilities.

As far as I am concerned, sheet music is gibberish and musical composition is nothing less than sorcery. Don’t get me wrong, I have a deep appreciation for those moments when I’m awestruck by a piece of music, but my ignorance of the subject means that any technical discussion on the matter becomes a source of deep insecurity for me, which I then subconsciously disguise as boredom. 

My plan for that weekend was to skip all the sessions on music so that I could devote all my energy to validating my Netflix and Xbox binging as spiritual disciplines. That was my plan. So you can probably imagine my disdain when I learned that the conference’s keynote speaker would focus solely on theology in music. Of all the cool things we could talk about that weekend, we were going to talk about music. What could music, I scoffed, possibly teach me about God? It turns out, a lot, actually.

I didn’t know it yet, but the conference’s keynote speaker, Jeremy Begbie, a Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School, and a skilled musician, was about to teach me something that could only be taught though music. Begbie – a very articulate and very bald Englishman – began his address by recounting his early musical training and his subsequent conversion to Christianity. Admittedly I was zoned out for most of that part, but I was pulled back in when he sat down at the grand piano beside the podium and began to discuss the Trinity.

Now, as a side note, from here on out I’m basically going to paraphrase everything he said, so if anything I’m about to say really speaks to you, you have him to thank, not me.

He began his treatment of Trinitarian theology by reading John 14:8-17 – which was part our Gospel lesson from last week – where Jesus tells his disciples that “[he] is in the Father and the Father is in [him].” John’s Gospel makes it clear that Jesus – God the Son – is intimately close to God the Father. They are part of each other’s lives; mutually indwelling in one another. The Greek Orthodox Church has a fancy word for this: perichoresis – the interpenetration of God the Father and God the Son.

Well, how do we picture that? You’d be hard pressed to draw a coherent diagram representing the idea of perichoresis. As Begbie put it in his address: The mind boggles, or at least the visual mind boggles.

In John’s gospel both Father and Son are divine – both are God – but they are not identical. And if that wasn’t confusing enough, we also have to deal with the Holy Spirit, who is also divine – also God – but, again, not identical to the Father or the Son. How can they all be together as one – because, remember, as Christians we are supposed to be monotheists; there’s only one God – yet distinctively three?

If we rely solely on the mind’s eye, the Trinity is a very difficult thing to understand. Throughout the history of the Church, we have tried to rationalize the doctrine of the Trinity with visuospatial analogies, but in every case, those analogies eventually break down, inadvertently leading us into heresy. By which I mean those ideas that are inherently sub-Christian and which fall short of the glory of God revealed in Jesus Christ.

Perhaps the Trinity is like water. The chemical H2O can be found in three different states: solid, liquid, and vapor. At first glance, this seems to get the job done, but, unfortunately, this is the heresy of Modalism. Modalism denies the distinction of the three divine persons of the Trinity, insisting that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are merely three different “modes” of God’s self-revelation in subsequent eras of history, just like water can only assume one state at a given time.

Perhaps the Trinity is like a three-leaf clover. There are three distinct leafs that comprise the one clover. As much as St. Patrick might advocate for this one, it is in fact the heresy of Tritheism. Tritheism denies the unity of the three persons of the Trinity, insisting that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three separate gods affiliated by proximity, just like the three leaves of the clover are totally separate apart from their common location on the one stem.

Perhaps the Trinity is like the sun. The sun is a star that radiates both light and heat. Initially, this makes sense, but when we look closer, we can see it for what it is: the heresy of Arianism. Arianism denies the divinity and eternality of the Son and the Holy Spirit, insisting that they are both creations of the Father in the same way the light and heat are merely products of the activities within the star.

The Trinity is like a woman who is a mother, wife, and daughter – Modalism. The Trinity is like the three parts of an egg – Tritheism. The Trinity is like three-in-one shampoo – and on and on and on! These visuospatial analogies cannot explain the in-one-another-ness of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit without compromising their distinction, their unity, or their equality. Because the elements of each picture are competing for the same visual space at the same time, our mind’s eye becomes frustrated and we begin to look at the Trinity as little more than a philosophical problem to be solved.

Happy Trinity Sunday…

Here is where the mind’s ear comes into play – and here is where Jeremy Begbie made music an important part of my theology.  (Here a triad was played)

What better way to think of the Trinity than as a musical triad? A three-tone resonance of life: the three individual tones mutually indwelling without mutual exclusion, yet without merger. Each note filling the same sonic space, yet recognizably and irreducibly distinct – enhancing and establishing each other; alive in and through each other.

The three-tone sound of a musical triad occupies no space, while each note simultaneously occupies every space. Nothing keeps the elements of that triad apart, yet they remain audible as different tones – those tones sounding through one another.

By articulating the intelligible simultaneity of music, the analogy of the triad does what no visual analogy could: describing the three-in-one-ness of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit without compromising their distinction, their unity, or their equality. This is, in musical terms, what is proclaimed by in the Creed of St. Athanasius: “That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.”

Where the mind’s eye sees the Trinity as a problem to be solved, the mind’s ear listens, and hears the Godhead as a reality to be enjoyed – to be awestruck by – like a beautiful piece of music.

But here’s the Good News: this isn’t just some fancy theological head-knowledge to impress our friends with. The reality of the Trinity matters to our daily walk with Christ, for participation in the life of the Trinity is the destiny of every believer.

As St. Paul explains in our epistle this morning: We are justified by faith and therefore have peace with God the Father, according to the grace obtained by God the Son and the sanctification accomplished by the Holy Spirit. St. Paul goes as far as to say that the Spirit pours into us the very love of the Trinity itself. By the co-operative work of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sanctifier, we have the hope of sharing in the glory of God – the very glory of the Trinity.

The Christian gospel is that God catches us up in the three-tone resonance of the musical triad – into God’s own resonance. The Holy Spirit tunes us in to the life of the Triune God: Carefully adjusting the strings that the Son has unstopped through the work on the cross, so that each one can resonate according to what the Father orchestrates. Together, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit transform the cacophony of our fractured world into a comic symphony in harmony with the Trinity.

The same St. Athanasius who composed the classic Trinitarian creed also said regarding the incarnation that, “God became Man that Man might become God.” This does not mean that humanity collectively becomes a fourth member of the Godhead or that we individually become demigods; it means that in sharing the divine glory, we have unity with God; participating and co-operating in the life of the Trinity itself.

That fancy word – perichoresis – that describes the interpenetration of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, has developed another, informal meaning over the centuries: dancing. The members of the Godhead rotate around one another in perfect, eternal choreography.

In the same way that we are caught up in God’s own resonance, so too will we be caught up in the movement of God’s dance. As the post-Pentecost Church whom the Holy Spirit indwells, we are being inducted into the divine perichoresis – the eternal dance of the Godhead. We don’t cut into the rotation of the three-in-one; indeed more beautifully, we orbit around the Trinity in perfect synchronicity.

The Trinity is more than theological song and dance. It is the heart of Christianity best understood through song and dance. There are plenty of wrong ways to think about the Trinity, and then there is the mysterious way to think about it. Don’t let your mind’s eye go cross thinking too much about it. Instead, listen with your mind’s ear. Let the Trinity get stuck in your head and let it move your feet. Let it move you into love, into community, into life. Let it move you into itself – into the Godhead, three-in-one. Amen.

May 15, 2016 - Pentecost Sunday - The Language of Love

Genesis 11:1-9

Acts 2:1-21

John 14:8-17, (25-27)

I have always been drawn to today’s Gospel reading and wondered why we didn’t hear more about it.  WE can do great works than Jesus?  What is this? I’ve always wanted to hear a sermon on these words.  And since I always say yes to the opportunity to give a sermon before I look at the readings, it feels as though I got a divine nudging saying, Figure it out for yourself! 

And so I did!

The twentieth century philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s most popular essay is entitled The Hedgehog and the Fox.   In it, he famously invokes the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, who said, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”  On this, I can say that I am most definitely the hedgehog.  I do know many things (we all do)—facts about the world and psychology and even the Bible, how to drive a car and play the flute, how to get a college degree and letters after my name—but there’s one big thing I know, and all these other things pale in significance to it. All my sermons are about it.  It’s all that sacred scriptures say if we dare to understand below their surface level.

We are so like that ancient people of Babel.  We think we can use language to build a tower and “make a name for ourselves”.  That irascible Yahweh of the early Hebrew Scriptures was right in trying to show the people that what they were doing was dangerous—that acting out of fear will only scatter them and create confusion as to their true identity. And yet we still do it—we try to create names for ourselves. We try to become nice or successful or a professor or an electrician, and then we define ourselves by those labels, becoming hypnotized by the language used to describe us and creating a false self based on it.  We forget about our deep inner life and the realms beneath the surface.   We become more and more scattered and we misunderstand even those who seemingly speak the same language that we do. The world is fractured and divided and feels hopeless.

Centuries after the Tower of Babel, with the coming of the Holy Spirit, we began to understand that there is another language, not of words alone but of breath and fire and love.  A new rush of understanding entered the world that transcended thought and language and set our hearts on fire. We began to see a new creation, a new way of being in the world—the way of love.  Pentecost clearly demonstrates that when we enter into the divine life of love that we can begin to really understand each other—whether or not we speak the same language.  We discover that there is another language below the surface of our lives that we are all fluent in.  We can begin to understand the language of longing, of connection, of oneness.

The Gospel of John gives us a way to enter into this place of oneness, to understand this new language. Brad was very right last week when he cautioned us about the Gospel of John and how taking it out of the historical context of the small early Christian community it was written for has resulted in thousands of years of anti-Semitism and justified violence beyond imagination.  The language of John, like all languages can be dangerous when taken on its surface level only.  It can be a language of Babel. And I would like to add a further caveat to the reading and hearing of this Gospel.  When read in its entirety is it clearly not just a collection of stories of what Jesus did and said.  It is instead a road map into the mystical heart of God and Love, into mystical union with Jesus. 

The gospel of John presents a paradigm for understanding our oneness with the Father—that utterly transcendent aspect of God who is beyond our language and our understanding and can only know through the person of Jesus. When we seek to embody and express our oneness with the creator, we are better able to let the trappings of false self fall away and come from a place of divine love. When we operate with divine love as our center, we become aware that we all speak the same language and are able to perform even greater acts of love than Jesus himself! What greater act of love is there than to be totally present with someone, laying aside our expectations, preconceptions and certainties to enter into the dangerous realms of love, perhaps being changed forever? The language of love leads us to a spaciousness of being that includes all things with compassion and understanding.  It is a place of paradox where nothing can disturb your peace and happiness and perfect joy and yet you are able to enter into the pain of the world without being consumed by it.

The ability to express divine love pulls us out of our individual agendas and calls us to share the oneness of our being with each other. My years as a therapist and now spiritual director have shown me so clearly the importance and impact of listening to each other with divine love. To listen not only with my ears, but with my spirit, to hear not only the language of words, but the language of the souls longing to live in a connected state of oneness with each other. When we listen on the level of love we find that we can become new people.  James Carse says, “A creative listener is not someone who simply allows me to say what I already want to say, but someone whose listening actually makes it possible for me to say what I never could have said, and thus to be a new kind of person, one I have never been before and could not have been before this deep listening.” 

This last week, we put my 102 year old mother-in-law into hospice and brought her to our house to die.  I’m sure many, if not most of you, have been in a similar situation. Standing on the brink of eternity—standing still in the face of death, letting its inevitability sink in, accepting each moment as possibly the last one, in awe of the mystery of life and death.  Jesus calls us to live this way always. He calls us to live and pray in His name—from a place beyond the false self, from the heart of love to the heart of the beloved.

So what is the one big thing that I know?  That we are surrounded in each moment by infinities of love, by eternities of peace and yet we most often choose to enclose ourselves in the languages of Babel with their expectations, preconceptions, criticisms and separation. It is a tremendous and awesome thing to choose the language of fire and breath and love, which is a language beyond words and which reaches into the realms of boundless freedom.

This Grace That Scorches Us

A Blessing for Pentecost Day[1]

Here’s one thing

you must understand

about this blessing:

it is not

for you alone.

It is stubborn

about this;

do not even try

to lay hold of it

if you are by yourself,

thinking you can carry it

on your own.

To bear this blessing,

you must first take yourself

to a place where everyone

does not look like you

or think like you,

a place where they do not

believe precisely as you believe,

where their thoughts

and ideas and gestures

are not exact echoes

of your own.

Bring your sorrow. Bring your grief.

Bring your fear. Bring your weariness,

your pain, your disgust at how broken

the world is, how fractured,

how fragmented

by its fighting, its wars,

its hungers, its penchant for power,

its ceaseless repetition

of the history it refuses

to rise above.

I will not tell you

this blessing will fix all that.

But in the place

where you have gathered,

wait.

Watch.

Listen.

Lay aside your inability

to be surprised,

your resistance to what you

do not understand.

See then whether this blessing

turns to flame on your tongue,

sets you to speaking

what you cannot fathom

or opens your ear

to a language

beyond your imagining

that comes as a knowing

in your bones

a clarity

in your heart

that tells you

this is the reason

we were made,

for this ache

that finally opens us,

for this struggle, this grace

that scorches us

toward one another

and into

the blazing day.

[1] Jan Richardson, Circle of Grace, Wanton Gospeller Press, 2015.

December 24, 2015 - Christmas Eve - Ready or Not, Jesus is Coming

Christmas Eve 2015

"Ready or not, here I come!"

The Rev. R. Bingham Powell

Do you remember playing the game hide-and-go-seek as a child?

            You would go try and find the perfect hiding place

                        while one kid would cover her eyes and count 1,2,3...

                        All the way until whatever number you would all agreed upon.

            Finally, that kid would would shout "Ready or not, here I come!"

That is how I feel about Christmas right now.

We've been counting throughout Advent

            - lighting our candles on the wreath and opening our calendars -

                        and Christmas just called out "Ready or not, here I come!"

You've decorated the house... or not.

You've put up the tree and the lights... or not.

You've sent the Christmas cards,

            you've made or purchased the gifts,

                        you've wrapped the presents... or not.

You've finished your Christmas sermon... or not.

Just like when that the kid has called "Ready or not, here I come,"

            and maybe you had just enough time to jump into your hiding space,

                        maybe you, now at Christmas, have enough time to wrap one more present,

                        but pretty much, it's over.

The preparations are done, whether we are ready or not.

The same was true of Jesus' birth over 2000 years ago.

He did not wait until all was perfectly ready before he came.

He simply came.

In the middle of the census,

            in the middle of a journey,

                        in the middle of a housing crisis,

                                    he came.

Ready or not, he came.

Like most of us, his parents had to figure it out on the fly.

He came when he came.

And they had to place him in a manger,

            because there was no other place for him.

Ready or not, he came.

In the middle of the night,

            when the shepherds were safely settled in for the night

                        with their sheep well-protected,

            the Angels announced that Jesus came,

            sending the shepherds out from the safety of their night watch to go verify the news and praise him.

Ready or not, he came.

There is a poem by the acclaimed author Madeleine L'Engle that sums up this reality so well. She says of Jesus:

He did not wait till the world was ready,

till men and nations were at peace

He came when the Heavens were unsteady

and prisoners cried out for release.

He did not wait for the perfect time.

He came when the need was deep and great.

He dined with sinners in all their grime,

turned water into wine. He did not wait

till hearts were pure. In joy he came

to a tarnished world of sin and doubt.

To a world like ours, of anguished shame

He came, and his Light would not go out.

He came to a world which did not mesh,

to heal its tangles, shield its scorn.

In the mystery of the Word made Flesh

the Maker of the stars was born.

We cannot wait till the world is sane

to raise our songs with joyful voice,

for to share our grief, to touch our pain,

He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!

Ready or not, Jesus came.

To Mary, to Joseph, to the shepherds, to us.

Jesus came.

If God had waited until all was ready,

            we would still be waiting for that first coming,

                        for that first Christmas morning,

                                    for we are never ready.

And it is precisely because we were not ready

            and still are not ready, 

                        that he came.

For a perfect, ready world has no need for a savior

            to heal its wounds and repair its brokenness.

A perfect, ready world has no need for the incarnation of God

            to stand in solidarity with us in our pain and sorrow.

A perfect, ready world has no need for the light of Christ

            which illuminates all the dark places of our life.

Ready or not, he came.

And ready or not, he comes.

We are still a people who walk in darkness as Isaiah so poetically puts it.

It is in our continued unreadiness that Jesus still comes

            born anew and placed in the manger of our hearts.

When we least expect it, where we least expect it, Jesus comes.

            In the most unlikely manner and time and place, Jesus comes.

            In a little child, in a dirty manger, in a cold night, Jesus comes.

            In a stranger, in someone hungry, in a prisoner, Jesus comes.

            In our brokenness, in our sorrow, in our grief, Jesus comes.

            In our pain, in our fear, in our darkness, Jesus comes.

Ready or not, Jesus comes. Amen.