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Three Meditations for Daniel Pinkham’s Christmas Cantata Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 10, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Speak to Us! Micah 5:2-5a “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son….” Hebrews 1:1-2 The hopes and fears of all the years are still met in the little town of Bethlehem. Seven centuries before the birth of Jesus, in the shadow of Assyrian incursion and internal corruption, Micah wrote of the human longing for a shepherd in whose strength God’s people would live secure. Today security in Bethlehem masquerades as a 25 foot high concrete wall, punctuated by armed Israeli watch towers. “PEACE BE WITH YOU reads a huge legend on the wall,” according to journalist Ellen Cantarow, “without (apparently) the slightest trace of irony.” What does it matter that he was born in the fullness of time between our occupied lives if, in the year of our Lord 2009, peace is not with us, nor do we live secure? That the terrorist chose Christmas day to fly was not by chance! This is why we are still shouting, above the deep and dreamless sleep, “Speak to us!” But if God, in fact, has come to us, why are we still shouting? Speak to us of peace, we cry against our warfare! Speak to us of healing and forgiveness and mercy real enough to bind up our wounds. Speak to us of a love that blows our small-minds and a hope large enough to imagine angels invading the fields where we abide. We are shouting still, I think, because the silent nights of our sadness, our loneliness, our poverty, our unbelief and our fears are unbearable without this holy conversation for which we were made. But as it was on that night long ago, so it is again this year: the Word God has spoken through the shepherds—“To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior”--will fall on deaf ears. We will not go even unto Bethlehem to see this thing that has come to pass and the babe lying in a manger. We would rather stick to the facts than bow to this fantasy. Nevertheless I declare to you that God has spoken and is still speaking to you through the Word made flesh in Bethlehem. That Word addresses you just as you are and just where you are in all of your disbelief because “The Word of God is where we ourselves are, not where we should like to be,” says Karl Barth, “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.’” In the dark streets where you abide alone, the hopes and fears of all the years that have become your hopes and fears will be met in him who was born in the night for you.
O Wondrous Mystery Luke 2:1-7 “While they were there, the time came for her to be delivered, and she brought forth her first born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was not room for them in the inn.” Luke 2:6-7 “Mystery” writes theologian John Leith “may be construed as a presence that encounters us in the depths and at the boundaries of our existence. The mystery defies…every effort to grasp it or get a hold on it. For we are within the mystery, and we cannot view it as a spectator.” To dwell for one silent night in the story of Christmas--the tale of angel visitations, of virgin births, of God incarnate—is to do business with the mystery that encounters us in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. Unlike a problem that requires study and hard work, the application of principles or the manipulation of techniques, our proper response to mystery is awe and wonder. Unlike scientific inquiry that would have us repeat at will the solution to a problem, mystery surprises us with the unrepeatable, the unimaginable, the unexpected and inexplicable presence of the gift we call grace: the love we cannot fathom. Problems can be dispelled; mystery only deepens. “The more mystery is recognized,” says Leith, “the more mysterious and wondrous it becomes.” Mystery’s counterpart is revelation and in the Christmas story, we have to do with both in the same holy breath. In revelation, mystery is disclosed for a moment in time as though a light had pierced the darkness. In that light, faith would be the leap that in Jesus Christ we have been given “the clue that enables [us] to put together the disparate experiences of life into a meaningful whole, to see a pattern and purpose in human history, to overcome the incongruities of what life is and what [life] ought to be.” [Leith] For in the manger and on the cross, the mystery we are to ourselves and the mystery God is to us have been revealed in the humanly inconceivable birth of a son who is Christ the Lord. “O wondrous mystery…who though the Son of God, a Son of man on earth was born.”
Love Abiding I John 4:10-12 “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son….” John 3:16 How shall we receive the gift of being so loved, of being loved in this way? How in the world can we begin to believe that the God who has given us life and breath and set our feet on ground as hard as stone has refused also to let us be, to let us go, to let us die forever without him? How shall we receive the love of Him who loves us not according to our wants but according to our true need? Try, in the first place, coming to him just as you are, for his is a love which abides with us just as we are. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a letter to his best friend Eberhard Bethge on Christmas day reminds us that the angels summoned the crude shepherds to the manger “just as they were” in all their need and not knowing. The angels summon us in the same way too. On bended knee in your mind, and in the second place, beseech this child not for the tangible things, but speak to him of the hope that is in you because he was born; whisper to the heavens now close at hand of the faith you cannot seem to muster in your reasonable mind; with sighs too deep for words ask him, simply ask him for the love our every conditioned gift to one another has failed to secure: the love which never quits, the love that knows no end. This is the love, you see, that came down at Christmas and is, even now, seeking room in the inn of your heart to be born. Then give him your heart in all of the heart’s not-knowing, not trusting, not believing, for it is the gift he most desires. This is not sweet sentiment, but rather your life given away for love’s sake, not counting the cost on behalf of the forgotten, the outcast, the prisoner, the poor, the hungry. Follow this child into a world whose need requires of you the humanity He came to redeem. Finally, for his sake, try to love one another, said John, knowing that all of our trying is in vein without Him. Try the sister-in-law who is trying herself; try the uncle who, through his stupor, means well; try the father whose toughness is a cover for his longing to be tender; try the mother in whose hold you first learned to trust; try the child whose tantrum testifies to the restlessness within us all; try the neighbor who, like the poor, is always with you. “O find in this” Arnold Kenseth prays, “O find in this, dear Lord, our human hearts, our hope for [the world], our praise for thee! For we stumble in these busy ways and have a lonely carol to sing before the holy places.” Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace and love abiding. |