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The Mess We Cannot Will Ourselves Out Of
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 4, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Hosea 11:1-9 Matthew 2
Well, here we are on the first Sunday of the New Year: counted soldiers and countless Iraqis continue to be felled day after day; Israelis are bombing Palestinians and Palestinians Israelis just as they have done every year in recent memory; bodies too many to number have been buried in the rubble of a little Iranian village; New Year's Eve commentators on both sides of the spectrum note, along with an upturn in the economy, the unconscionable gap between the rich and the poor in our land; murder tops the city news every evening; those dear to our hearts also break them because we can neither help them to live nor help them to die...Happy New Year? What a curious thing we human beings do: surround with significance the pointless turn of a calendar. "Here's hoping 2004 is better than 2003," we toast and wonder if it could possibly, in some cases, be much worse. We make resolutions, assuring ourselves that at least one thing will change, only to return to our old selves within the month. Perhaps we celebrate the new year because at the stroke of midnight, before the morning dawns and darkness continues to win the day, something in us longs to believe, by sheer human will, that life on this planet is getting better and better every day in every way, that human history is progressive, that human nature can be improved upon by collective acts of individual kindness, that whatever might be new under the sun has more to do with our own resolve than with Christ’s redeeming love. Traditionally there are two different takes on the source and so the solution to human troubles in this world. On one hand, observes Leon Kass, human beings “are inclined to blame external causes—for example, poverty, prejudice, poor rearing, or just plan misfortune—against which they take up arms in order progressively to enable humanity’s natural goodness and felicity to emerge.” On the other hand, he says, human misery is blamed “on causes lurking naturally within the human soul—pride, vanity, jealousy, greed, and insatiable or unruly desires. Accordingly, [these] are skeptical about human perfectibility and suspicious of utopian projects, not least because they would have to be conducted by imperfect fellow human beings, always dangerously unfit to remake the world.” So on the Sunday when we have gathered to ascertain what time the star appeared that we might worship Him who was born to save us from our sin, we must begin by acknowledging our propensity for the former take on human troubles and their solution. There is, you could say, “a little Herod in us all”: an irrepressible something in us that believes we can and must will our selves and our world out of the mess we collectively find ourselves in. Herod, you will remember, was quite a social engineer. He not only pleased the Romans by being the first to collect tribute for the new emperor after Julius Caesar's assassination. He also catered to the Jews by beginning the reconstruction of the Temple, by tactfully omitting statues from the Temple mount and removing images from his coins, out of deference to Mosaic Law...or was it savvy politics? Though that was not all, for his construction program was astounding: stadia, theatres, and amphitheaters erected all over Palestine made Herod one of the most influential princes in the Middle East of his day. Indeed, before the appearance of that blessed star, Herod appeared to be making significant progress in the ancient world: "Barges are unloading soil fertilizer at the river wharves," notes W.H. Auden's Herod, heralding his own social accomplishments. "Soft drinks and sandwiches may be had in the inns at reasonable prices. Allotment gardening has become popular. The highway to the coast goes straight up over the mountains and the truck drivers no longer carry guns. Things are beginning to take shape. It is a long time since anyone stole the park benches or murdered the swans...Yes, in twenty years I have managed to do a little. Not enough, of course...Still, it is a beginning. In twenty years the darkness has been pushed back a few inches." The little Herod in us, this part of us that believes we can will ourselves into the good life and out of whatever mess we might find ourselves in, locates our hope for the world in human hands...believes the world will be saved when the right party gets in office...looks to a certain social order as the solution to the human condition...places all bets on the movement of human potential. In other words, whatever the mess is, we want it under our control--our enlightened control, of course--and so bet the future of the whole human race on the accomplishments of science, culture, education, economics, politics. In a very real sense, this is the religion we allow to be taught in our schools, the belief structure which coincides comfortably with power politics. No doubt such a take on human troubles offered light enough in the darkness until another light appeared over Bethlehem's stable and an utterly new, humanly unimaginable, totally inconceivable Word from outside our selves entered human history and became flesh. Words, of course, fail us before Word of a love without condition which will not let us go, before Word of a peace which passes understanding or human engineering, before Word of a justice so radical as to seem unfair to our small minds, before Word of a mercy which calls our merely charitable acts to account, before God's Word made not into principles or ideologies or programs or politics, but come to us in the person of Jesus Christ. In Him we behold what? The best that human potential has to offer? Those who remain convinced redemption is ours to accomplish would incorporate his words and deeds into a yet more enlightened program. But for those who, in his light, see the depth of human darkness, see also in him the One whose love alone can save us from this mess, which is our sin. For in Him our eyes and hearts and minds are laid upon who God has purposed human beings to be since the beginning, even as we behold in His face the God whose grace will accomplish at the end, at the fulfillment of human history, what we have never dared to hope in the midst of it. Now you would think, given all our poor efforts to fix things, to order things, to manage things on our own...you would think given the poverty, the pain, the hopelessness, the helplessness which have resulted from our best efforts...you would expect we would be beside ourselves with joy and gratitude at the birth of a Savior. You would think the human race would be falling all over itself to get to the manger and bow down before love's incarnation. But here is where the Bible is so astounding when it comes to nailing our human condition in the flesh of these ancient characters. "When you have found Him," says Herod the Great, "bring me word of him that I may worship Him also." On the outside we are all reverence, but God is not fooled. Inside there still lurks the pride, vanity, jealousy, greed, wrath unresolved. In truth we are terrified at the prospect of a Savior who will unseat us, a Redeemer in no need of our input, a God whose promises put our politics, no matter how enlightened, to shame. "Naturally this cannot be allowed to happen," declares Auden's Herod. "Civilization must be saved, even if this means sending for the military, as I suppose it does.” In other words and in the second place, not only can we not will ourselves out of the mess our will has made, but now the little Herod in us all suspects, in the birth of this babe, that the way we have willed things to be is coming to an end. History itself has been interrupted by the proclamation of a new Kingdom where no longer will the first be first and the last, last...a new age where ninety-nine sheep are abandoned for the sake of one measly lamb...where laborers who come at 4:30 p.m. are paid the same wages as those who punch in at 7 a.m., and that is good...where paupers and prostitutes are pulled off the streets to sit at a banquet table because the rest of us are on diets and abstaining from sex for the New Year and that is as God intended! Herod was frightened and all Jerusalem with him because the little Herod in us all has such a stake in life as we will it to be despite the poverty and injustice and violence and viciousness which mark our rule. The little Herod in us all is so invested in an order which calls us King, sets us up in a condo overlooking the Dead Sea, maintains the distance between our lives and the squalor of a stable, that we cannot bear the proclamation of anything radically Other than ourselves and our will running the show. Hence, on this first Sunday of the so-called new year, two real options present themselves short of surrendering our wills: we must, as a people, either destroy Him or domesticate Him. By and large, the despots of the world, throughout the ages, have chosen the former, while we fair-minded believers in freedom and the democratic way have attempted the latter. We domesticate Him, and here is the confusing twist. For because we believe the new year is up to us, when it comes to God’s Word in the world, we decree that it must be kept out of politics and social issues for Christ's sake, be content with charitable giving and volunteer activities, sit quietly in pews as the innocents are slaughtered in our city streets. We domesticate this Christ whose birth, in fact, announces the end of our Heroding, hoarding days. There is, however, a third way for those who have seen His star and would come to worship Him. The way, to the human eye, may be indistinguishable from those who have placed their hope in the human prospect, working against all that destroys human life in the form of ignorance and poverty, hunger and homelessness, hatred and greed. The difference is in the location of the hope within us. Not I, said the once strong-willed Paul, but the grace of God in me. Surrendering our will to His (the very thing we cannot do and that only Christ’s redeeming love can work in us), claiming for ourselves and for our resolutions nothing, placing all our trust in the forgiveness of sins to save us from the mess we will continue to make of things without Him, we are born anew as those whose hope is in the Word made flesh. Our willing is redeemed in the will of him who alone willed God’s will all the way to Golgotha. “We will tell you two terrible things,” report T.S. Eliot’s Wise Men, “What we saw on the face of the new-born child was his death. And we say, as sure as the earth beneath our feet, that to stay with him would be to share that death, and that is why we left—giving only our gifts, withholding the rest. And now, brothers and sisters, we will ask you a terrible question and God knows we ask it also of ourselves: Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him is the only life?" May the God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for God’s good pleasure, turn you now toward His stable and soon toward His cross that his love made flesh may redeem the days of the year ahead from insignificance. Thanks be to God. |