Christmas Eve Sermon at St. Mathew's Cathedral

Our sermon begins with a familiar figure, old Jacob Marley in his clanking chains taking us to Christmas past. And the time is roughly that which Charles Dickens knew, the mid- 19th century, give or take a decade. But the difference is this, Marley is headed not to his familiar London, but for two other destinations, where two famous men had something to say about the birth of our Lord.  Our first stop is Berlin and its great university, where we find the premier philosopher of his time, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, up in his study, finishing one of his overly long and obscure books.  He was a lapsed Lutheran, but he was interested in the incarnation, God becoming human in Jesus.  Hegel called it ‘picture thinking,’ which is to say, a fairy tale, but with a deep meaning. The divine is really what he called ‘spirit in the world’ moving through history- we might call it, evolution or enlightenment or consciousness or spirituality. What becomes incarnate is greater human potential, and this old story of a manger and a baby can finally be understood for what it tells us about ourselves in modern times.  Fast forward to many a guru or life-coach or political organizer. Hegel lived a century and a half ago, but you and I recognize this way of hearing the story- maybe we have thought of it this way at some point in our lives.

But Marley now takes us on a second, longer trip ( a decade or so later).  He brings us further this time, 6,000 miles, to the great east African kingdom of Buganda, there to meet the king, the Kabaka, in his palace on what would be called Lake Victoria.  The Gospel has just arrived via missionaries, including Anglicans.  He and his advisors are surprised by the news. The Bugandans knew of miraculous appearances and deeds of gods and spirits. And they knew of the creator God, the father high above the heavens. But after creating, he rested at a great distance from this world, which has turned out to be so sad and cruel.  Surely the Father is too smart to disturb his rest and get mixed up in all this!  For this reason the Christian message seemed strange and illogical.

Now you might think this sermon is itself strange- what have our lives to do with a turgid philosopher and a pagan king a century and a half ago?  Well, quite a lot actually. For many hear the story of the incarnation of God’s Son in Bethlehem, and so the Church’s claim about the incarnation, in just these ways. It is a beautiful old-fashioned story about human striving for which we have better words….Or maybe we assent to the existence of a God too distant and abstract to have anything to do with this mess.  These two ways of hearing tonight’s story are not outdated, in fact we all have probably had  in our lives moments or phases, where we think in these ways too- maybe we do so now. 

These two takes on the incarnation of God are different, but note that, practically, they amount to the same thing, namely that we are left with lots of room to run our own affairs.  In the first case, the story is really about us, and in the second the Creator has gone to the coast and left us to fend for ourselves.  In a way we are dismayed by this desertion, but in another we humans like it that way.

Just before COVID, a Methodist theologian and bishop named Will Willimon came to this cathedral and gave a talk titled ‘keeping Christianity weird,’ an allusion for our Texan benefit.  I mention this because there is a third way to hear tonight’s gospel reading. It is stranger than the others, but actually more compelling and logical in its own way.  For the real question is this: who is God? What sort of God is he?  And to answer this question, as with any question of identity, of who someone is, we need to hear his story, the trajectory of what he has said and done.  He is indeed the creator, and he is indeed high above all things.  But he loves his creation. The great Jewish philosopher/theologian Joshua Heschel liked to talk about the passion of God, his yearning for his wayward children, an offense to philosophers and yet a truth at the heart of the Jewish Scriptures, our Old Testament.  He means to dwell with us- that is what the psalm about the Lord as king tonight means. For his own mercy’s sake He means to come to his exiled children, though they in no way deserve it. That is that the prophet Isaiah is saying in our first lesson.  You see, the Gospel is not first all about us, as the philosopher and the pagan king thought, but first about him. We come to be who we were meant to be in his light, in the wake of his coming.

And that coming is not just an idea or a tale, but an event.  So in the Gospel we hear that the maker of all things is born as one of us, so as to live, and then die as one of us too.  If you object that this ties the usual idea of a god in a pretzel you are right, one threefold pretzel to be precise.  But our job is to hear the gospel on its own terms. If it seems offensive, that means you get it. If it seems strangely compelling, it means that he is in the process of getting you. The story is the same, an event, a claim, but a lifetime and more could be spent diving into it, which is what it means for it to be a ‘mystery.’

In keeping with what we have said, two things should be said about our Gospel account of the incarnation from St. Luke tonight.  First, see how high and low converge in a way which is surprising and divine.  The child is born in a stable, vulnerable to attack from the powers of this world, as a result of which the angelic hymn sounds forth, the song of exaltation in heaven! God’s highness is his utter freedom, even to come low and join us, though in doing so he is no less God almighty.  Think of the words of Paul in Ephesians,’ what does ‘he ascended’ mean except that he descended into the lower, earthly regions; he who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens…’

Secondly, and finally, hearing the Christmas Gospel on its own terms, and putting who God is first, doesn’t mean that we find no place in this story.  Once we stop upending the story to be something about us, the story’s point, and so we, come round right. For the story includes us, we are a character in it.  We are the shepherds, at first bystanders, but, it turns out, more than that. We receive the sign of God’s action, and hear the hymn of praise to him.  And we are able, by God’s grace, to respond. The story envelopes us. As a result of hearing, we go to where the child is, we join the song of praise, and we tell others what happened. In those verses are found all we know, and all we need to know, of what the Church of God really is.

Of course there is much more to say, and the rest of the Christian year, complementing this great festival, says it. What it means for the God of love and covenant faithfulness to enter into his children’s plight leads on to weeks of hearing the strange parables of Jesus about the Kingdom. it leads on to his abandonment and death on our behalf, on to his being raised ahead of time, and finally to our being sent, like the shepherds, to be the emissaries of this news. Marley could take us to visitations of things past concerning these too, and we would see their meanings come to be obscured in ways all too familiar to us.  Already Mary is pondering what is to come in her heart.  Tonight is, like every service, an invitation to the whole counsel of God, laid out week by week in the bible and the church’s year.  But it is enough, and more than enough, this evening, to hear what the story for what it has to say, for what it is as a word from God, and so join with the shepherds in ‘glorifying and praising God for all that they had heard and seen.’      Amen.

Christians are Pirates

Last Saturday I was here at St. Matthew’s for an ordination service, a great day with five new deacons. I am grateful for that, and as always for the hospitality of this congregation. But I am in fact grateful for one other thing. When we were lining up to go into church, Father Joe Dewey’s four year old, saw me at the head of the line, and shouted out, ‘Mom, Dad, look, it’s a pirate!’ Not sure why, the hat maybe, or the cape, or the grey beard….or maybe the swashbuckling demeanor! A highlight of liturgical 2022 for me! I’m a pirate!  So in appreciation of this great honor, I have named this sermon, for our confirmands- three reasons you all too are pirates, as far as Jesus is concerned! 

My verse from the Gospel is this- there is no one born of woman who was greater than John, but the least in the Kingdom of heaven is greater than he.  John was obviously an intensely holy man, and the pinnacle of the prophets, but from the kingdom point of view nothing.  We’ll get to that…but first, three ways that you are pirates!

First, buccaneers are rascals.  They are scoff-laws, rule breakers.   That’s you.  I am not saying that you don’t have good qualities. I am not saying you are not of unimaginable worth to God. But I am saying that you are not worthy in yourself to stand before God. In the prayer book tradition, before receiving communion,  you would say that you are not worthy so much to gather up the crumbs under the table.  This is not adding an un-necessary load of guilt and shame…it is simply honesty.  Now you might respond that we were made by God and pronounced to be ‘good,’- so we were, but since then we have acquired a crack running through us.  We have not loved God and our neighbor as we should, and even when we seem to do so, it has an alloy.   When I was a youth minister, the priest I worked for was killed. I appreciated him, and it was a grievous loss, but upon hearing of his death, another question ran through my head- ‘what will this mean for me?” that self-referentiality runs deep. Living for God is something, as we were meant to, is something we approach at times, but cannot hold onto.  And there is a side of us that just resists at times, our of orneriness- for reasons we don’t understand. Why?  To that great question of the early church, are we a gathering of saints, or a school for sinners, the answer is, like it or not, the latter.  And as for the idea of sin adding to our shame, on the contrary, honesty about ourselves is the beginning of the road out of shame.    

Which leads me to ‘why we are pirates’ part 2.  While we were yet sinners, at the right moment, Christ died for us.  That’s the Gospel. We are here as the gratefully undeserving.  But we have to see the right moment is here, and we have to be open to that moment.   In fact, according to the Gospel we have to be decisive, bold, full of chutzpah, nervy. Pirates aren’t big on extended deliberations.  Pirates seize the day.  This is an important theme in the parables of Jesus. For example, he praises the corrupt administrator, stealing money, who gets caught, and, before sentencing, goes and makes side deal with his clients so that they will help him down the road.  What? It is meant to be shocking, of course you aren’t to do any such thing. But this one thing you are to do, says Jesus, know how short the time is, and act decisively. Grab hold of grace like a buccaneer.

That is related to our Gospel verse. John has achievements of holiness and spirituality, but all that counts for nothing in the kingdom of grace, where pride of place goes to the dying thief who says ‘Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom”. A different calculus, his.  The kingdom is worth everything, the treasure buried in a field for which you would sell everything to have it- we are focusing on the decisiveness to see, sell, and claim. What in your life impedes your way to the one for whom you were made?

The sinner as pirate, the bold and forgiven as pirate- got it, but what is number three?  Well, this one has to do with being a disciple, a missionary, for Jesus. And it requires that some recall from your reading of the Book of Exodus. Remember how, leaving Egypt, the Israelites were allowed to take gold, silver, and jewels from their captors. It is called ‘despoiling the Egyptians,’ and it was an important idea for St. Augustine, four hundred years after Jesus. It described how Christians were to borrow, as to the metaphor, we would say plunder ideas from their neighbors, pagan, secular, whatever, so as to use those ideas on behalf of the sharing of the Gospel.  What would that look like? Maybe a scholar using the idea of black holes to describe what happened in the resurrection. Or maybe something as simple as borrowing tunes learned in the pub in order now to extoll the Gospel.  Or maybe using the discipline of family systems to understand how churches succeed and fail!  Another way to say the same thing has been the idea of taking captivity captive- found in the Psalms and Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. How can you take captive for Christ parts of the world around you, or parts of your own life, repurposing, since everything is ultimately meant to subserve him and his kingdom. 

Those outside might think that the Christian faith is a compromise, a retreat from life, as if the boldness were in self-adventure and rebellion.  But the opposite is true, since the world around us would have us settle for the its own predictable obsessions, and too often we indeed settle for the wider menu back in Egypt. But to live toward God, since it means first hard honesty about ourselves, and then taking the risk of faith, and then wading into the godless world for a different kind of plunder, well, those indeed are really piratical, the living so is truly to steer the vessel into the open sea.  Bon voyage.

Let the last word belong to one of the greatest of our tradition, the poet John Donne. He passed through romantic and artistic and political love, and the life of a buccaneer, literally!, on the way to that which he was seeking all along, the love of God.

    ‘hear us, o hear us Lord, to thee

A sinner is more music, when he prays,

Than spheres’ or angels’ praises be,

In panegyric alleluias,

Hear us for till thou hear us Lord

We know not what to say

Thine ear to our sighs tears thoughts, give voice and word

O thou who satan heard in Job’s sick day,

Hear thyself now for thou in us dost pray. Amen.

 Bon voyage. Amen.

   

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Complete the Race (II Timothy 4:17)

At the end of our vacation we find ourselves in Chicago for its Marathon weekend (the fastest, I have read this morning, perhaps because it is cool and relatively level). Marathons offer many good things. You can see world-class athletes from places like Ethiopia and Kenya. There is a feel of fiesta with signs by family members, getups by some for-fun runners, and food for sale.

But as I looked out my hotel window at 7:30 a.m., I watched the race of competitors who have lost legs or their use. Wheeling vehicles by arm for 26 miles means serious fitness and determination.

Those competitors were to me, this morning, a symbol of the Church too. For each is wounded. The larger family cheers them on. Each by grace has risen up to run the race. Ahead is the goal, the prize, the welcome home. We find the companionship of Jesus the Lord, there, and along the route too.

Amen.

GRS