Born in the Spaces Between
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
December 21, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Isaiah 40:6-12
Luke 2:1-20
“And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there
was no room for them in the inn.”
“Because we wanted much that year and had little,” writes poet Joseph Enzweiller of Christmas 1963:
Because the winter phone
for days stayed silent that would call
our father back to work, and he
kept silent too with our mother,
fearfully proud before us.
Because I was young that morning
in gray light untouched on the rug
and our gifts were so few, propped
along the furniture, for a second
my heart fell, then saw how large
they made the spaces between them
to take the place of less.
On Christmas Sunday 2008, when the many who want much now live in anxious anticipation of little; on this Sunday after a week when the winter phone that
would call you back to work has stayed silent and you have kept silent and fearfully proud for the children’s sake; on this Sunday before the Thursday,
before your heart falls when you see--as a child sees--how few and far between are the things we really give each other, when you see-- as an adult
sees--how fleeting and fragile are the times in which we may love one another: on Christmas Sunday 2008 we would do well to consider the space between that
takes the place of less wherein the savior of the world is born.
Each one of us here is well acquainted with the less, the loss, the lack: the voice silenced by death that we miss more than words can say; dreams faded
with the fallen market or a job lost or a marriage failed or a friendship ended; the future foreclosed, literally as regards a house or figuratively as
regards a home; hope on hold before the specter of illness with no help in sight. For some this represents a recent turn of events; for others life has ever
been thus. In previous years [‘63, say, or ‘74 or ‘89) the distance between what we had and had not was overcome by seasonal cheer shouted against the news
of dwindling investments, rising unemployment, global instability, political unrest and incomprehensibly compounded human need. This year, around the world,
cheer does not avail.
Instead the honest cry of the prophet comes as a strange sort of relief. Speaking to exiles that have lost everything, Isaiah identifies the edifice of
human civilization to be as transient as flesh and so marked by the less, the loss, the lack. All people are grass, he cries. Our constancy is like a
flower. The grass withers, the flower fades…the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales. In other words, the
substantial turns out to be ephemeral. The hold we have on anything, if ever we had any hold at all, is fleeting. “We dine with our friends and family as we
always have,” writes philosopher Steven William Laycock, “disquieted…by the quiet recognition that our mashed potatoes, our fork, our hand have been
discovered to be a little more porous than we had thought, that the peas, the dinner rolls, our own corporeality, and that of our dear ones, while altering
not the least in appearance or practical significance, have been seen to be a little more spectral.”
For the most part ignore this; come down on Christmas morning to rip open the presents that are there; stuff our selves with the mashed potatoes that
will add to our girth; talk politics with the relatives that still are willing to talk to us. We dwell in the tangible, the visible, the concrete, the real
as we construe the real to be, all the while missing the space between, the space on which we have no hold wherein the savior of our lives is born.
Luke admittedly begins the story of Christmas morning with our dwelling in the tangible, the politically consequential, the powerfully real, the decree of
Caesar Augustus that all the world, according to King James, should be taxed. Parenthetically says Luke, this taxing was first made when Quirinius was
governor of Syria. And all went to be taxed. Yet Luke immediately turns our attention to the space between (the space that holds a place for God’s purposes
in the world), the space that takes the place of the less and is occupied by Joseph of the house of David and his espoused wife Mary who was great with
child.
To the tangible and consequential, this space was inconsequential; Mary and Joseph were invisible; their kith and kin expendable heads to be counted.
Having left behind the little of everything they had, they arrived in Bethlehem and were accorded no space in the places that were tangibly full. Instead
they occupied the empty space of a stable. In Caesar’s world it was a place of less, of lack, of loss, of despair, of hollowness, of hopelessness. But it
came to pass precisely in the emptiness of the less, the lack, the loss that love—destined from the beginning to inhabit the space between us--came down
from heaven at Christmas to be born.
In the first place, love was born in the space between heaven and earth that ended the space between God and us. Put another way, the one who was born in
the stable is the one who left heaven, heaven being [in Karl Barth’s understanding] “the starting point in creation from which God moves through creation
toward us…heaven being wherever in creation God has taken [up] residence in order to come to us.” The apostle Paul put it another way: not counting equality
with God a thing to be grasped, the only begotten Son who was to be born in a manger emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. Later he would counsel
that we must lose our lives to find them, and I take this also to say something about the less, the lack, the loss, the self-emptying and emptiness that is
what happens when love happens in the space between us.
In the second place, given the crowds in Bethlehem and the few at the manger, love goes unnoticed in the space between, especially when we are occupied by
the tangible things that take all of our time and energy and imagination to have and to hold. Even now we steer clear of that space because entering in
entails letting go of the world as we exclusively see it or want it to be. We prefer the fields where we abide, being less afraid of the dark than of the
God who is coming to us. Nevertheless because God has taken up residence in creation for just this reason, because the emptiness of God in Christ has made
room in God for us, we are summoned with the shepherds to the city of David. In order to get there, we need only leave the selves we are without him behind.
Therefore, in the third place, “Love means that I emerge from the security of what I am in myself,” says theologian Robert Jenson, “and risk myself out
there in the world that is neither my inner world nor your inner world, but precisely the world between us in which we can be together.” Love intends
that our being at all is our being in relation to one another as we risk dwelling in the world between. In short, “if we are to love, it will be when we
are freed from having to hold on to ourselves in order to survive.”
That freedom is unimaginable except that, in the fourth place and for now, we know what love looks like because there is a lover dwelling in the space
between to take the place of our less, our lack, our loss upon himself, even unto death on the cross. Through his love we behold our true selves which are
our selves emptied and risked for others, risked--I say again--even unto death. Therefore the place we once believed to be filled with despair, with
hollowness, with hopelessness has been redeemed from insignificance by him whose self-emptying has made room for us in God.
Finally, those who have lost themselves only to be found by love in the world-between-us cannot help but testify, even and especially in the years when
there is little to be had, that the love born in the space between us is pregnant with possibility. “The deepest truth I have discovered is that if one
accepts the loss, if one gives up clinging to what is irretrievably gone,” writes Robert Bellah, “then the nothing which is left is not barren but is
enormously fruitful. Everything that one has lost comes flooding back out of the darkness, and one’s relation to it is new—free and unclinging. But the
richness of the nothing contains far more,” he says, “it is the all-possible…”: not, you understand, the all-possible we anticipate when the Dow rises or
the President-elect takes the oath of office or the war winds down or the winter phone rings with word of work. These possibilities have to do with the
future unfolding as we would have it unfold if we were in charge and in accordance with our presuppositions about what should happen next.
Rather the love that came down at Christmas is a love whose future, which is eternal life, will surprise us. “The surprise” says Jenson, “will be how he
will include all our follies and triumphs, each singular variety of publicanism and phariseeism, and the individual plot and style of every human life in
the mutual fulfillment wrought by his [love].” Love that is love, you see, affirms the freedom of the beloved in advance. “I affirm what the other will do
for and to me,” says Jenson, “without binding in advance what that may be. I do this because I no longer define by myself what is good for me, but allow
what the freedom of my beloved brings to define the good….To love [he says in sum] is to open my future to the surprises of another, to what I am not yet
and do not yet choose and do not yet hope.” This is not love in general but the love which came down at Christmas, the love born into precisely the space
between us, the love which is our life in him and his life in us.
Because
the curtained sun rose brightly
on our discarded paper and the things
themselves, these forty years,
have grown too small to see, the emptiness
measured out remains the gift,
fills the whole room now, that whole year
out across the snowy lawn. Because
a drop of shame burned quietly
in the province of love. Because
we had little that year
and were given much.
May this be such a year for you and yours, a year of having little when you are given much…when the emptiness measured out that is the babe born in a
manger, in the space between, remains the gift. Thanks be to God.
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