Angels we have heard: Christmas Eve

 Every year I wonder, what can I possibly say that would be new?  I know that there is really nothing new to say, but I still try to find new ways to share the message of the birth of Christ.  This year I decided to try to imagine what it would be like watching the events from heaven.  The following is a conversation between two angels.  One angel is in italics.  I also have a video and will post that soon.

----------------the story begins----------- 

“Oh my….have you heard? Tonight is the night.  The whole heavenly host is going down to visit our Lord’s people on earth.”

“Has that ever happened?”

“Not that I know of.  Sometimes, our Lord has sent down one, or two or three of his messengers to deliver his holy word, but never an entire army, a heavenly host.”

Will they bring their swords? Will there be a great battle?  I know that our Lord is most displeased.

You are right.  Our Lord is angry.  We have all heard him ranting and raving.  It’s just like when he watches sports: “Why are they doing that again?  How many times have I told them not to do that?”  When he is angry, it gets tense.  Once I went down myself to see what was going on.  It was bad.  I don’t know why people are acting like this.  It’s like they don’t even believe anymore.

I heard Gabriel went down several months ago and talked to someone. The heavenly choirs have been talking about it ever since.  You know how choirs are….Do you know why he went?”

 Well, I have heard something, but it doesn’t make any sense. They say he went to talk to a young woman named Mary.  He told her that she was going to bear the Son of God.  But that does not make any sense.  That seems like a drastic measure.  To send the Son of God down as a baby is risky.  Anything could happen.  It’s not safe.  Maybe that is why the heavenly host is going down.  They will be the body guards for the baby.

 Shhh….it’s happening now. 

 Wait…..who are they talking to?  Are they talking to shepherds?  Why are they talking to shepherds?  No one is going to get the message if they are talking to shepherds. No one listens to shepherds.

 Shhhh….we won’t be able to hear it if you keep jabbering.

Trumpet fanfare. An angel from the choir loft proclaims:

“Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people:  to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.  This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” 

Choir says together:
“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

What could they mean? Why are they bringing joy? I thought God was disappointed.  This does not make any sense.

It does seem a little odd. Why send an army of angels to deliver that kind of message?  And what kind of sign is that….a baby in a manger?  Surely an army of angels could have done anything.

 They should have done that moving fire that our Lord used to lead Moses and his people out of Egypt.  Fire always gets people’s attention.  What is a little baby going to do?

Our Lord likes to think outside of the box.  Maybe since nothing else has really worked, he decided to shake things up a bit.  I am sure this baby is more than just your average baby, not that all babies aren’t always cute, but this is the Son of God.

 What was it again that Gabriel told the girl...Mary?

 

He told her that she would conceive a son, and she will name him Jesus.  He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.  He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.

 Woh! That is huge news.  This Mary must be very powerful.  She must be a married to a king.

 That’s the thing, she is not married.  She is young and has very little.  She is a peasant.  But I have heard that she is very holy.  She is one of God’s favorites.  Our Lord told me that she has been especially chosen.

 That is a huge job.  Hey look, the shepherds are moving.  They looked pretty scared when all those angels were talking. Angels can be a little showy at times.  They really like to make an entrance.  No wonder the shepherds were terrified. 

 Just because you did not get chosen is no reason to be critical.  They needed to be sure to get their attention.  How else would you convince a bunch of shepherds that the savoir of humanity is about to be born to an unmarried peasant in a barn?  I mean really, you can’t make this stuff up.

 I hope they find him.

 I am sure our Lord will make sure they do.  Obviously he wanted those shepherds to be the first to greet the new baby.  Wait….it really is barn.  Do you see the baby?

 They put our Lord’s son, the hope of all humanity, in animal feeding trough?  What are they thinking?

I think it is all that they have.  Our Lord chose Mary because she is holy and good, not because she has money or power.

The shepherds are talking to them.  They have seen the Christ child. One of them is leaning over the manger in wonder.  They are so excited! They are telling them everything they saw, everything the angels told them.  They are doing a good job telling the story.  I heard shepherds are good story tellers.  It looks like Mary and Joseph are listening. Look at Mary.  She seems so wise, so pure and good.  I think I understand why our Lord chose her over a queen.  Now the shepherds are leaving.  They are making quite a raucous with their loud shouts and praises for our Lord.  That is how it should always be.  Our Lord should always be praised with such wild abandon.  Hopefully they will share the good news with the people.

 Maybe that is why our Lord chose these regular people to bear witness to this miracle. This is why he chose a baby to be his representative on earth.  It is the only way people are going to hear.  If they listen, they will come to know God as we know God.

 Do you think the baby will be safe?

 I don’t know if he will be safe.  I am sure Mary and Joseph will keep him safe for as long as they can, but as soon as people realize who he is, as soon as he starts sharing God’s message, he is no longer safe.  

 Maybe God will send the heavenly host down when things get dangerous. Our Lord can protect anyone.

 I don’t think that’s his plan this time around.  I think Jesus will grow up with the people and he will love them just as our Lord loves them.  Maybe our Lord realized that the other ways of communicating with his people wasn’t really working.  They needed to experience our Lord’s love up close and personal.

 It cannot be safe.  I am worried for him. What if it doesn’t work?

 Even we do not know what will come of this, but our Lord has a plan.  It’s a different kind of plan than we are used to.  It’s so crazy, it might just work.

I hope the people listen this time.

I do too. 

Priest to the congregation:

The plan will only work if they people will listen. Will you, the people of St. John’s, listen on this Christmas Eve?

Soul Power: December 20, 2015

Year C, Advent 4                                          

Luke 1:39-55                                                              

It’s that time of year when we start talking about Mary.  It’s pretty much the only time we talk about Mary, which always bugs me a little.  There is a lot more to Mary than the nativity story.  There is more to her than a blue robe and a beatific smile. 

Throughout my life I have had an on again off again relationship with Mary.  Being that the Roman Catholic Church was a rather male dominated denomination, I often found myself talking to Mary-just so I could talk to a woman. I felt like she could understand me better.  As I started questioning my place in the Catholic Church, Mary was hurled at me as an example of the perfect female; submissive, obedient and sinless.  I began to resent her and saw her as another impossible ideal that I could never live up to. 

A couple of years ago, I had another change of heart about Mary.  For the first time I read the Magnificat as a powerful manifesto of sorts.  She talked about bringing down the powerful and sending the rich away empty.  It seemed like a rebel cry, a cry of a woman who had been one of the lowly, the poor, the ostracized.  For the first time, I saw the feistiness of Mary and I once again found myself identifying with her.  This time I tried to look at the whole picture of Mary. It turns out that the whole picture is not so very whole.  Very little is said about Mary in the Bible. The Gospel of Mark does not even mention her by name.  Paul (who wrote one third of the New Testament) only refers to her once and she was not named.

            What we know about Mary comes from the 3 Gospels that mention her as well as The Book of Acts.  This is what those sources tell us: She was engaged to a man named Joseph and lived in Nazareth where she was visited by an angel and agreed to bear the Son of God.  She visited her cousin Elizabeth who also had conceived miraculously.   She was a Virgin and gave birth to Jesus.  She was Jewish and followed the purity rites by having Jesus circumcised on the 8^th day.  She worried when she lost him for several days while in Jerusalem.  She asked him to perform his first miracle. She was at his crucifixion.  She was with the disciples after his crucifixion.   There are a lot of things we can infer from that information, but as far as facts, that is all we have. 

            Yet sometimes it is the small things that allow us to really know a person. We don’t need to know the life story of someone to feel that we know them.  In my quest to know Mary this time around, I became fixed on two verses.  The first comes from what we heard today. “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”  I kept wondering what it means to have your soul magnify the Lord.  Magnify essentially means to declare something great, to exalt.  It would seem that she did not need words to magnify the Lord, her soul, her very being magnified the Lord.  If that was all I knew about someone, that would probably be enough.   I started wondering what it would take to have your soul magnify the Lord.  Would it require constant prayer…a sinless life?  It seems like a long shot.   

            As I read on in the Gospel of Luke, I came across what is commonly referred to as the Song of Simeon.  When Mary took Jesus to be circumcised at the temple, she encountered two very devout individuals. The first was Simeon who immediately recognized this 8 day old infant as the Son of God.  He then proclaimed to Mary, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”  Simeon was essentially telling Mary that her child would be rejected and it would be so painful it would pierce her soul.  Her soul….her soul that magnifies the Lord was destined to be pierced.

            It was.  When they pierced her son’s side at his crucifixion, there is no doubt that her soul was pierced at the same time.  Yet her soul, her soul that exalted the Lord by its very existence was scarred but not broken.  I suspect that all along, her soul was preparing for that moment, that moment that caused stronger men to run and hide found Mary, and her radiant soul at the foot of the cross watching her son die.    

I wish my soul magnified the Lord.  There are moments when it does, and it is then when I feel most whole, like you could pierce so many holes, and I would still be standing.  The Lord wants to be worshipped.   God talks about it all the time in the Bible.  It almost seems a little needy.  If God is so great, why does he need little old humans to worship him? 

I believe that we worship God not only to please God, but to strengthen our own soul.  In worshipping God, we create and maintain a relationship with him.  God wants to be worshipped so that we can know him and he can know us.   When our soul magnifies the Lord, it means that we are in relationship with God and that relationship gives us strength.

That is what people like Mary teach us, how to be humans in relationship with God.  Sometimes things will fall into place.  We will know exactly what God wants and like Mary, we will have Elizabeths in our life who can affirm what we are feeling.  Sometimes, our relationship with God will look a bit like an impressionist painting, kind of blurry, but beautiful.  And sometimes, there will be pain and confusion. We will wonder why there is so much pain in a relationship with a being as perfect as God.  Mary experienced all of this.  She prayed and questioned.  She leaned on people when she needed to.  And sometimes she was alone in her faith and fear. Yet in the end, she was the mother of God, and nothing could change that.  You might think, yeah, but I am not the mother or father of God.  You are right.  We are children of God.  And no matter where we are or what we do, nothing can change that.  Our souls can be pierced, but they will not be broken. 

Nonetheless: December 13, 2015

Advent 3, Year C             
Zephaniah 3:14-20                                                                

 

On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.  Many were killed, but some survived. Sadako Sasaki was only two years old when the bomb was dropped a mile from her home.  She was unscathed as were many of her family.  They were the survivors, those who remained after so many had been killed.  However, 10 years after the bomb was dropped, her family discovered that Sadako had leukemia which at the time was referred to as “A-bomb disease.” [1]  She was told by the doctor that she had less than a year to live.  She was determined to live and tried hard to leave the hospital whenever she could.  On August 6^th, they had a ceremony near the site of the atomic bomb’s epicenter, which had been recently named Peace Park.  She was not able to stay but heard a song while she was there.  She sang it all the way home and as she lay in her hospital bed bleeding and in pain, she continued to sing. [2]  She even taught the song to her roommate. While she was in the hospital, a group donated origami paper for the patients.  A legend at the time was that if you fold 1000 paper cranes, your wish would be granted.  Sadako set out to accomplish this task in hopes that her wish for life would be granted.  She did not stop at 1000.  She continued to fold them until she died.  On one of the cranes, the discovered that she had written, “I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world.”

            I learned about Sadaka’s story after I read a commentary that referenced her briefly.  As I read more about her, I could not tear myself away from the story.  The part about her singing in her hospital bed reminded me of our reading from Zephaniah.   Our reading begins with, “Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion, shout, O Israel!”  This comes after two and a half chapters of the prophet Zephaniah railing against the people saying that God will destroy the people and the land because they have not obeyed God.   Zephaniah went on and on about the horrible things that would happen to the people of Judah as a result of their behavior.  Yet if you look at our reading for today the prophet seems downright cheery.  Not only does he encourage the people to shout for joy, he describes a God who will “rejoice over you with gladness…exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival.”  

            This is quite a change from the God who wanted to destroy them. The Book of Zephaniah is only three chapters long and in the first two and a half chapters,  Zephaniah was not a happy prophet.  It is unclear what exactly was going on but some people have surmised that the beginning part was before the Babylonian exile where there was all kinds of bad behavior. Then the Babylonians came and carted off most of the Hebrew people, leaving a small group to remain.  Because of the hopeful and joyful tone of the last chapter, scholars and readers have hypothesized that these words of hope were for those who remained in Jerusalem, the survivors.  These people, often referred to as the remnant, had seen their holy city destroyed.  They saw their loved ones carted away to a foreign land to serve their enemy as slaves.  They undoubtedly saw many of their friends and family killed.  They were left behind to pick up the pieces and pray that they would not be left alone forever.

            This is a hard place to be, left behind and still living in terror.  They still lived in this familiar place, but it could not have been more different.  Where there was once a beautiful temple, there was now rubble.  Where there was once a vibrant community, there were now only small pockets of traumatized people.  Now Zephaniah is telling them to rejoice and exult with all your heart.  It’s like when you are having the worst day of your life and someone comes along and says, “Cheer up.”  That is never helpful! Zephaniah was not telling the people to cheer up or be happy.  He was telling them that God was there with them in the rubble.  God was with their families who had been taken to Babylon. 

Zephaniah wrote, “Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands grow weak.”  That line about your hands growing weak caught my attention. I wonder if the people were weary of putting their homes and their lives back together and God was telling them, “Don’t give up!  Keep rebuilding.  Keep starting over.  I will be your strength when you are weary.”   We need that strength when we are starting over.  God was providing not only the strength but the inspiration and joy as well.  When they could not sing, he sang for them. God sang and sang until the song became their reason for dusting themselves off and starting again. 

            A theologian named Karl Barth described Biblical joy as a defiant “nonetheless.”  For instance, the Hebrew people might have said: “The world is against us.  We live in constant fear for our lives.  Our holy city stands in rubble.  Nonetheless…God is with us today and God is singing.”   Sadaka might have said, “I am dying.  My country lost 150,000 lives in 3 days.  It seems as though all hope is lost.  Nonetheless, I will continue to sing for peace and I will make these cranes until I die.” 

That is the power of God.  God does not ensure that bad won’t things happen.  When we feel abandoned- living in the rubble of our lives, God gives our weak hands strength to keep building, keep starting over.  God gives us people like Sadaka to inspire us.  Her death could have led to hatred and bitterness. Instead, her 7^th grade classmates decided that they would raise the money to build a monument in her honor at Peace Park.  The Children’s Peace Monument depicts a girl with her hands outstretched and paper crane in her hand.  This story has spread far and wide.   Every year, about 10 million cranes are offered before the monument.  At the base of the monument, there is a plaque that reads, "This is our cry. This is our prayer. For building peace in this world."

            Sadaka and her community built peace, one paper crane at a time.  It seems like strange building blocks, does it not?  Origami paper cranes are delicate and easy to crush.  But when they start to fill a hospital room, they provide hope.  When they fill a park that was once the scene of disaster and agony, they fill the hearts of the world.  I imagine Sadaka lying in her hospital bed singing her song for peace with God standing beside her singing that same song.  Sometimes the song that God sings for us is one of sorrow for our pain.  Yet I find comfort in a God who will sing for us when we are too weak, who will find joy for us when our eyes are too clouded to see the joy. 

            We are at a place in our country where we are living in fear.  We are afraid for our country.  We are afraid for those outside our borders.  Every time we turn on the news, we find something new to fear, something new to grieve. The best way to combat fear is with joy.  Our songs cannot keep us safe in a literal sense but they will give us strength to start again, and again, and again. And when we remember that God is singing with us, then our song has the power to cover the whole world with joy.  As we prepare for Christmas, for the birth of the Prince of Peace, let us remember that peace and joy are not for Christmas alone. 

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[1] http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/virtual/VirtualMuseum_e/exhibit_e/exh0107_e/exh01071_e.html

[2] http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/virtual/VirtualMuseum_e/exhibit_e/exh0107_e/exh01072_e.html