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An Immensity of Waiting
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis December 19, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 9:1-7 Luke 2:1-20
“Home,” says Webster’s New World Dictionary very matter-of-factly, “is the place where one dwells.” Webster’s New World aside, the word calls forth a whole world of meaning within each one of us, especially in this season. It was not chance but wise calculation, I am sure, that led the Roman Catholic Church, many years ago, to invoke just that word in a compelling ad campaign during Advent designed to bring lapsed members back to the fold. “Come Home” the church implored those who were stopped in their tracks behind a bus. Come home! For some, home evokes a longing for what never has been, a longing actually intensified, an emptiness made bittersweet by this season; for others, home is a reality that can never be repeated, a memory called to mind by all that is most missed at this time of year; with a few it would seem to be a tangible gift, here and now, of a place where one belongs, of people who actually to take us in. “Home,” wrote Robert Frost in words most of us know by heart “is the place where, when you have to go there (say it with me), they have to take you in.” Of course, they don’t. Furthermore, there lives in a few of us a recluse who makes us run (for four months) away! Yet here I am! In the end it would seem, we were made to come home. The tangible if mundane evidence of this, given the latch that keeps us out, are the keys we carry keys in our pockets…keys that let us in to the places where we would seem to belong: into dorm rooms cluttered with reminders of the home we have left behind and with intimation of the home we shall one day make on our own; keys that let us into an apartment alone, at the beginning or the end or throughout our adult lives, space big enough for a table-sized tree and a wreath on the door; keys that open a house of two stories or three, perhaps with various stages of children or aging parents or grandchildren in residence as well as balsam wrapped around the banister, a CD full of carols continuously playing, a perfectly shaped tree reaching to the ceiling and a dog with jingle bells around her neck; or in our pocket there may still be a key for that house to which we return every year at this time, whose smells permeate our bones, whose faded ornaments keep us from forgetting and whose walls of photographs variously haunt and hold our hearts on high. In this culture, Christmas has become inextricably tied, for better or for worse, to the place our key unlocks, the place we have come to call home. It is, of course, not the place, we say, but the people in that place (if there are any) who hold the key to our having a home in Frost’s sense of the word on this Christmastide. After all, this is the season, says another poet, when we attempt “quite unsuccessfully--/to love all of our relatives, and in general/Grossly overestimate our powers.” Or, to turn it around, this is the season when we hope, albeit selfishly and unrealistically, that the ones we have been given to love will really take us in this time, which is to say, will accept us just as we are, make room for us in the heart as well as on the second floor or on the left side of the bed or around the kitchen table. We need so much from one another, especially in this month when we are told that we ought to love one another, and when we therefore expect to be loved. And the “so much” seems always to be given or withheld in the most ordinary moments by the ones closest to the heart: the gift carefully or carelessly chosen, the cookies baked or burned, the drink not taken or the binge on Christmas eve, the sharp word silenced or shot from the hip, the card signed “Love,” or just “Sincerely Yours,” the tender touch or the back of a hand, the judgment measured out or the joy let loose as the door opens announcing, “I’m home!” Why is it that we expect our kith and kin, our outlandish in-laws or our estranged children, our odd and out of sorts spouse, our closeted lover or our dearest friend to save us from the ancient loneliness this season of heightened expectations never fails to elicit? How is it that the redemption Christ alone came to accomplish is ignored in the hold of those who may or may not love us? Or when it comes to redeeming, when did we come to see our self always as the one who has traveled the distance, done all the work, taken the blame, gone the extra mile, and now think it not too much to ask that others do their part, overcome the remaining distance, bridge the significant separation, end the generations of estrangement which in some circles has been called sin? W.H. Auden speaks the truth in the end. We have become a people who only vaguely remember the stable where “for once in our lives/Everything became a You and nothing was an It,/craving the sensation but ignoring the cause….” Rather we have been coached by the culture to feel after Christmas, as though it were a mood we could create around the tree, as though it were a sentiment we could conjure up with candlelight and carols, as though it were something within our power (or is it another’s responsibility) to make happen. We cannot nor can they. So by the fourth week in Advent, when only six days remain before the shops close and the relatives arrive, we hie to the church. Still craving the sensation but now vaguely seeking the cause, we turn to Scripture in search of a word that will remind us of the reason for the season. But the word we find—or that finds us--always does so much more than we can ask or imagine. Opening to the ninth of Isaiah, the prophet minces no words: no matter what we do, who we know, where we call home, we are a people who dwell in darkness, a people whose waiting—whether we know it or not-- is immense, a tribe whose exile appears to be endless. Short of God’s coming to us, we will be a people who have no place to lay our heads nor companion by our side with room enough to house our need nor love wide enough to redeem us from the distance that separates or the darkness that divides. According to Scripture, we dwell in this darkness together. According to Webster’s definition then, the darkness has become our home. The Bible admits no real difference between the ones warmed by the fire, surrounded by kin, and those left out in the cold. It makes no distinctions between those who appear to have made it and those who are holding on by a gossamer thread. Whether king in a palace or leper begging by the gate, whether shepherd on a hillside or astrologer of some means, the Bible tells us that who we are is a people who dwell in a land of deep darkness; who we are is a people living at a great distance from our true home; who we are is a people waiting to be rescued from the cliff of fall where long ago we unknowingly got lost. In fact, almost as if in answer to our obsession with hearth and home, we are given a story which majors—from beginning to end—in Bedouins, nomads, people who at most pitch a tent for the night and move on. Beginning with Adam and Eve thrown out of the garden…to Abraham and Sarah setting out not knowing where they were going…to Moses and the Hebrew people wandering in the wilderness…to a people with scant history in the land being sent into exile…to shepherds abiding in the fields, taking shelter in caves, tending sheep amid the rocks…to wise men following the lead of a star across the desert…to disciples called away from their towns and families…to Paul traveling blind on the road to Damascus turned clean around…and ending with the Elder John banished from all those he loved on the island of Patmos, Scripture tells us about people who knew themselves to be strangers and exiles on this earth. You could say it was the culture, the times, the geography of that particular place. It still is. “I will not sleep under a roof in Palestine,” wrote Henry Van Dyke, “but nightly pitch my wandering tent beside some fountain, on some grove or garden, on some vacant threshing-floor, beneath the Syrian stars…looking upon the faces and the ways of the common folk, the labours of the husbandman in the field, the vigils of the shepherd on the hillside.” You could say it was and is the culture, the times, the geography of the Holy Land. But given the place and time chosen for the incarnation, and given Jesus Christ, we must conclude it is more. For if, in the face of this child born in a manger, because there was no room in the inn, we somehow behold God’s face toward us, we also behold our human face as if for the first time. Vulnerable, helpless, homeless from the beginning, God in Christ reveals to us what it is to be human: vulnerable to every rejection, helpless to make us love him, with no place, apart from God, where he truly belongs. In him we behold all that we thought this season was supposed to dispel; in him we face the ancient loneliness from which we have run; in him, because he reveals the truth about our humanity, we may, in the silent night, quit the lie, the pretense, the make-believe. For at his birth we remember the stable where for once in our lives, our vulnerable, helpless, homeless lives, we are known not as an It but a You, and there even we are given a place to be born anew. “The light that shines in the darkness,” said Karl Barth in 1926 over German radio, “is an ordinary man and gives light to ordinary people. This is incomprehensible, and yet because of it revelation is real and the Christmas gospel is quite different from both the sweet madness and the false optimism of mere reverie. The Word of God is where we ourselves are, not where we should perhaps like to be, on one of those heights to which by some luck and strong effort we might attain; he is where we really are, whether we are king or beggar, in our torn condition in which we who face death appear—in the ‘flesh.’ …he encounters us in the riddle of our ‘darkness’ on its own ground.” So finally he comes to us in the homes we could not make without him: into every marriage held together by what cannot be said; into each weary and heavy-laden heart unable to see a way through; into the lonely fears which keep us tossing and turning into the night; into the secret grief of a distant love; into all the places where we really live and really die. Into our darkness he comes to take our broken homes upon himself. Still the darkness lingers; still the divorce is pending and custody unsettled; still the cancer rages, the tears fall, the children leave angry, the dinner rolls burn. It will not be as we had hoped this Christmas. It never is. Without him, we could not bear it sometimes. With him, nevertheless, we are home. For in him, the immensity of our waiting is over: home has come to us. Thanks be to God! |