Angels in the Fields Where We Abide
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
December 22, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Zephaniah 3:14-20
Luke 2:8-20

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"And there were, in the same country, shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them…."

What can we say of the fields where we abide, of the various conditions holding sway in our lives on these winter days hastening to Christ's birth, of the human condition wherein we remain because we cannot help ourselves? For some who have come through these doors, the fields are well-decorated, the horizon brimming with possibility, the heart flush with a new-found love, the arms heavy (or soon to be) with precious children, life's purpose and meaning too serious a question for this holiday season. For others, the fields of our abiding have lost their luster and decorations only hide the dullness; possibilities have narrowed to one or two; the heart wanders into new valleys or has been left behind; young and old return to the hearth for succor; resources dwindle; life's purpose and meaning now question us down the long corridors of the night. For still others, the fields stand in all their winter starkness and decorations do not avail; our work being done, now the time may be passed variously with acts of charity or travel; the heart settles in to the familiar and the well-worn; the days gone by are scrutinized for their meaning, and the time remaining scanned for some purpose awaiting us in relative repose.

Having viewed the nativity through the eyes of artists last Sunday, I found my imagination running to the shepherds and wise men drawn to represent the three ages of human existence: kneeling in youth, in middle age and in later life before the manger. Would that I could have stopped the slide and scanned those eyes to see, according to the artist, what each age sought and saw in him who was born for us all.

Instead, given that the wide-eyes of our children have left the sanctuary to make-believe effortlessly before the manger, I have only your eyes staring back at me from the pew, revealing a mixture of weariness and wonder and wistfulness in this troubling Advent-world now poised on the brink of war. I see, as always, some bright eyes blinking like decorations in the sanctuary, having little need for a Word from on high to add to your happiness…other eyes stare with dullness into the hour ahead, daring the glad tidings to break into your bleak midwinter…still others see with wrinkles wrought deeply into a face whose wisdom is the wisdom of human finitude. We are shepherds, one and all, abiding in the common field of our human condition.

Of that condition it must be said that, no matter our age, we live as those who apparently think we abide in these fields alone, having been left to address the human condition among ourselves. In youth, of course, there is the illusion we will find another who will dispel our loneliness or work that will change conditions appreciably. In middle age, there is the myth that the one we thought we had found has failed us or that the world is too far-gone to save. In old age, there is a gratitude for the ones by our side still and a savoring of the gift of those given for a time and lost to death…or a bitter regret at the emptiness of a heart with no one left to blame.

Though our particular age and circumstance notwithstanding, we are really those who abide in these fields alone because-no matter who is by our side and what work we have been given to do--the fields, themselves, are silent. In other words, the self-contained world can lend our lives neither hope nor happiness nor help nor purpose nor peace. I know no more arresting articulation of such silence than Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach," written some think in his middle age, others think on his wedding night: a poem that was slipped into my mailbox this week as though by a messenger of God!

The poem begins on a calm night with full tide and a fair moon-not unlike the night we imagine in Luke's second chapter-- as the poet invites his companion to a window overlooking the sea at Dover Beach. Against the seeming tranquility of the night, the poet hears the "grating roar of pebbles which the waves suck back, and fling,/At their return, up the high strand,/Begin, and cease, and then again begin,/With tremendous cadence slow, and bring/The eternal note of sadness in."

Arnold likens the sound to that heard by Sophocles on the Aegean: "it brought/Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery; we/Find also in the sound a thought," Arnold continues, "Hearing it by this distant northern sea./The Sea of Faith/Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore/Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd./But now I only hear/Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,/Retreating, to the breath/Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear/And naked shingles of the world."

"Ah, love," the poet exclaims after inviting us to see the earth as without faith and revelatory only of the ebb and flow of human misery

    …let us be true To one another! For the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

But true to one another we can never be for long, and so the truer word Arnold speaks is word that we are in a world with neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain: we are here as on a darkling plain unless the news announced by the angels, of Him who has come to abide with us, is true; unless the Christmas claim, "To you is born this day, in the city of David, a Savior," is heard and we quit the fields in which we now abide alone, making haste for Bethlehem's stable.

Of all the places an angel of the Lord could have addressed the human condition with news of Christ's birth, Luke's angel addresses us where we can no longer deny the fact that we abide alone, in this world that hath neither joy nor love nor light nor certitude nor peace nor help for pain, without him. Into the fields where we believe ourselves to be without one to save, angels sing still, my friends, addressing us in this story we have taken to telling ourselves for granted over and over again. And if we would, by his grace, suspend disbelief for just one season, then the promise is that our eyes-no matter how young or old or dull--at last shall see him, through his own redeeming love: as light invading our darkness, as joy dispelling our sadness, as trust replacing our need for certitude, as peace passing all understanding, as help we cannot give ourselves, as a babe born in a manger.

But it is the artist who leads me further to ask, "What if we should hear the news as news addressed to us in our youth, our middle age, our old age?" What might it mean to you who are young if, at an early age, you knew you were not alone in the field where you abide, but loved by a God who abides with you? What would such news do to your anxious need for someone or something to fill the empty places of your very human heart, your need to find or succeed or arrive? Imagine the time, spent in pursuit or someone or something, redeemed for you who believe, really believe, the news of the angels proclaimed in the field where you thought yourself alone: to you is born this day a Savior, a love that transforms all of your love and work and play, from an anxious pursuit and holding on, into a freely chosen embrace!

And what if, in middle age, such an angel were to announce in the field where we abide that we are not alone, but accompanied by Him who has bid us, weary and heavy-laden, "Come unto him"; or who has sought us--lost and afraid on a cliff alone-only to carry us home rejoicing; or who has reasoned with us-angry at the injustices we have suffered thus far and outside in the cold-granting us grace enough to join the party; or who has commanded us-so worried over parents to bury, acquisitions to tend, appearance to maintain-that we lose ourselves only to be found anew in him? What if we, who are in the middle of a life we never intended to lead and are lost, heard the angel's address and were found running to the manger of him who would redeem our resignation and our regrets for faith's adventure?

Then what if in our later years, like old Simeon and Anna, our blurred and blind eyes were given sight, in the imaginations of our hearts, to see him whose reality has eluded our minds ever since we could reason? What if the wonder we had missed the first time round were given back to us, along with the wisdom to discern truth from fantasy? What if we were really freed from all that grieves us and thus received from his nearness all we need, until that moment when we arrive, by his grace, at our journey's end and see him face to face?

Though finally if we are those who hear the angel's song breaking into the darkling plain where we abide, then we are also those who have been summoned to Bethlehem's stable, shepherds young and old and lost in the middle of our years, making haste to see this thing that has been made known to us. Kneeling at our age before his manger, we behold him who beholds us never again alone in the fields where we abide, for he has joined our human condition and abides with us; we behold him who has pitched a tent on our various darkling plains and so visited them with joy and love and light and truth and peace and help; we behold him whose eyes behold, seeing us as the creatures we were born to be until we lie to die: as children of God, whose eyes have been opened wide with wonder, once again, at his birth.

"Our mood of longing," writes W.H.Auden at his manger, "turns to indication: Space is the Whom our loves are needed by,/Time is our choice of how to love and why."

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