Christmas Unwrapped

Christmas Unwrapped
Hebrews 2:10-18; Isaiah 63:7-9; Matthew 2:13-23

It’s the fifth day of Christmas. Have you got your five gold rings yet? Christmas isn’t over. The twelve days of Christmas continue right up to the Day of Epiphany, January 6.

We used to leave town on December 26th to go to grandparents. We always saw abandoned Christmas trees shivering at the curbside under powdered snow. All the build-up to Christmas and then it is over and gone, forgotten in a day. When I was growing up, I could usually get a few days play out of a toy after Christmas before it would break. And it was said that the changed Ebenezer Scrooge kept Christmas all year.

Still, I feel odd going into a Christmas shop in the middle of July. And the assault of Christmas music in October is like the early blizzard for which I am not ready. So even if you aren’t interested in a partridge in a pear tree and everything else that is supposed to come with it, I don’t want to pack up Christmas just yet. In fact, I am ready to unwrap it.

The reality of pre-Christmas is that the much too early music acts like a kind of lullaby. The bright lights mesmerize us. The images of the season – non-Christian and Christian alike – are like an opiate dulling the senses. We spend much of the month or two before Christmas in a drug-induced stupor that not even the Thanksgiving turkey tryptophan can rival. We are eager for the midnight sale-a-thons on “black” Friday. We relish the quaintness of small business Saturday. We glow like the computer monitors we stare at on “cyber” Monday. We are inoculated against the traffic on Chillicothe’s Bridge Street or at Easton Town Center. Like the hunters in our far-distant ancestry, we rise to the challenge of last minute shopping.

Then it is all over. It’s the morning after the night before. Reality sets in. Not just the credit card bills, but also the clean-up. Down comes the lights, the tinsel, the tree, the stockings, the wreathes. The Christmas bender is over. We clear it all away in hopes that we can sober up quickly. Like a spurned lover we get rid of all the things that remind us of the times that once were good.

Some of you are thinking that I must have gotten a truck load of coal to go on a Scrooge-like rant. No. I love Christmas. Forgive me for preferring to celebrate it after December 25th rather than before. A lot a good, kind, wonderful, generous things go on in the heady days that lead up to Christmas Day. I just think that lots of people – even faithful Christians – are so caught up in the mechanics of the celebration that they forget the bedrock foundation for Christmas. And whether we dismantle the holiday on December 26th or January 6th, reality, normalcy, true life returns.

The euphoria of Christmas hasn’t completely died away, the novocaine of “Noels” hasn’t completely worn off. Our scripture readings today remind us that the world we live in is not the peaceful kingdom that the Isaiah reading sang about on the First Sunday of Advent. And the reading from Matthew – out of step in our mental chronology of Jesus’ birth – grates like fingernails on a chalkboard.

But this is Christmas unwrapped. The world is like the debris strewn area around the Christmas tree after all the packages and gift bags have been torn into. The bows, discarded gift tags, shredded paper, and boxes litter a scene that once was idyllic and festive. We live in world in the long-lived aftermath of a super storm called Haiyan, or tsunami in Japan, or an earthquake in Haiti; of a Mexican Gulf oil spill, a volcanic eruption, or car bombings in Afghanistan or Iraq; of a factory fire in Bangladesh, a mall assault in Kenya, or a school shooting in Colorado.

Some will say, like Auntie Mame, that we need a little Christmas to get us through the terrors of life. We like the story of the British and German troops pausing to celebrate Christmas together on the battlefield in World War I before resuming the trench warfare the next day. We need joy in the midst of despair, we need levity to counteract the gravity of the 24-hour news feed on our I-Pads, smart phones and televisions.

And that is exactly why we need Christmas unwrapped. The reading from the Letter to the Hebrews gives us not only joy but also reality. It provides a solid reference point in a sea of uncertainty. It offers hope and assurance when the nagging doubts and questions return.

Christmas – the Incarnation, really – is a holy mystery. It can be said in simple words,:
• In Christ, God became one of us.
• In Christ, God is with us in our suffering.
• In Christ, we have been freed from the fear of death.
Simple words, yet complex ideas that need to be unwrapped carefully, slowly, deliberately, like an extravagantly wrapped, delicate Christmas gift. Which it is.

God became one of us. We take that for granted. The only thing we know is us. Which is why we so often picture Jesus by what we see in the mirror or by who we see around us most of the time. In reality, it is only one chromosome that determines our gender, and a very tiny percentage of the genes that determine our height, weight, eye color, skin tone, weakness to allergens of any kind, or precondition for chronic, debilitating, or life-shortening disease.

We should be humbled that God chose humanity as the life-form through which God would relate to us. God honored human beings by becoming one of them. We human beings have a poor history with God. We have second-guessed God’s intentions for us. We have ignored God’s commands to us. We have turned dominion into domination and scarred the earth. We have beaten, subjugated, imprisoned, tortured people like us as well as people different from us. We have fought and killed fellow people for very poor reasons and for no reason at all. We have fabricated stories and illusions and sold them to ourselves to keep us from believing the truth.

There are plenty of good reasons why Jesus would be ashamed to become one of us. Everything he is, we are not. But instead of dwelling on all the things that are different, Jesus chose to celebrate our common spiritual heritage. He will not deny that we are his sisters and brothers. He is one of the descendants of Abraham and Sarah who are as numerous as the stars. Introverts and extroverts, loners and party-ers, we are the “us” whom God is with in Jesus.

The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews declares quite plainly that God used “experiences of suffering to make perfect [Christ as] the pioneer of salvation.” Because Christ is one of us, the One who suffered on the cross is one with God and one with us in our sufferings. God is in the midst of sorrow, suffering, pain, agony, illness, grief: the sorrow of the man in Columbus who accidentally ran over his infant son; the suffering people in Syria and South Sudan caught between government and rebel forces; the agony of the people of Tacloban and other parts of Philippines after super typhoon Haiyan; the grief of the people of Newtown, Connecticut, and the families of victims of the Sandy Hook School shooting; the inconvenience of the people of Michigan. Maine, and other places in the lingering power outages.

God became incarnate – human flesh and blood – in Jesus not that suffering would be removed, but that suffering would be fully embraced in Christ. Jesus suffers completely. We do not suffer alone. He leads the way in bearing our suffering. Our suffering doesn’t go away. Nor should we look for ways to suffer. Rather in suffering we may find ourselves closer to Jesus and more appreciative of his saving grace.

Part of that saving grace is that we have been liberated from the fear of death. Jesus suffered right up to the cross and on the cross he suffered death. But death didn’t have the last word. Jesus was born that “we no more may die” as the Christmas hymn says. Resurrection and ascension confirm that death has no power. We can cringe at the suffering and agony that goes on in every part of the world. But our cringing is not from fear of death but from empathy with fellow sufferers. We shake off the cringing and stand firm knowing that no matter what pain and suffering may happen, no matter how horrific it might be, God triumphs for us through Christ.

Christmas is more than all the seasonal trappings that buoy us through the last months of the year. Christmas unwrapped is life eternal with the one who has suffered for us, who suffers with us in all the downs of life, and who will bring us with him into the radiant glory of God’s eternal rule. You won’t need a gift receipt for God’s love. One size fits all and it goes with every color imaginable. And the guarantee never runs out.

Thanks be to God.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com 

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Throwing Out the Etiquette Book

Throwing Out the Etiquette Book
Matthew 3:1-12; Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:4-13

I was ten when my father’s parents died. They had been married over 50 years and only moved twice, the last time just across the road to a house they built. Mom thought they had saved every greeting card that they had ever received. Grandpa had lots of old tools, nails, bolts, etc. We spent the summer packing and emptying the station wagon of the stuff we hauled home. Since their only child was Dad, there wasn’t anyone to divide it up with. It all came home.

Mom’s family wasn’t any better. Mom and Dad helped clean out several family homes. In one station wagon load they got a gate-leg dining table, six Windsor chairs (one with arms) and a wing-back chair, not to mention other odds and ends. When Mom’s mother moved out of a large house into a two-bedroom apartment, we got more furniture and a lot of china.

Granny had several sets of fine china. One set had cream soup bowls and saucers. Another had bone plates and finger bowls. Yet another set had the service plates that went under other plates. She had all the flatware to go with the china. She knew where to put the soup spoons, salad forks, dessert spoons, and seafood forks. She could set a table worthy of Amy Vanderbilt, Emily Post, or Downton Abbey.

Etiquette is more than silverware placement. The Wikipedia article on etiquette suggests that it is a topic which has floating cultural and social boundaries. The initial definition is “a code of behavior that delineates expectations for social behavior according to contemporary conventional norms within a society, social class, or group.” Some contributors to Wikipedia think that the topics “rudeness” and “respect” should be merged into the etiquette article.

After some history of social mores, the article focuses primarily on manners, a “term usually preceded by the word good or bad to indicate whether or not a behavior is socially acceptable.” It goes on to say that manners “are a subset of social norms which are informally enforced through self-regulation and social policing and publically performed. They enable human ‘ultrasociality’ by imposing self-restraint and compromise on regular, everyday actions.”(1)

It would be safe to say that the Bible has no interest in where the forks and spoons go or what order of plates get used. But the Bible, like books on etiquette, is interested in the social economy, the interaction and interrelation of individuals of the same or differing stations. Yet for all that, the Bible might just be anti-etiquette, at least as we usually think of it.

The Mosaic law was a form of etiquette. It laid out avenues of social contact that were acceptable or unacceptable. These had to do with health and hygiene, diet, property rights, and human rights. Yet anytime rules and regulations are laid out, it is so easy for them to become the focus rather than the original purpose for their enactment.

The Pharisees were the chief enforcers of the religious etiquette of the Jewish people in Judea in the decades before and after Jesus’ birth. The focus was on meeting the letter of the ritual code which made certain demands on those under its thrall. The measurement was to be precise, nothing less, nothing more. So when Jesus ate at the same table as people whom the code called sinners – outcasts, tax collectors, men and women of questioned moral status, foreigners, Samaritans – he was breaking the etiquette of the day.

Another etiquette breaker preceded Jesus. A man named John, who lived in the badlands along the Jordan River, dressed in the rough clothes of a wild man, ate a peculiar diet, and who preached the necessity of repentance of sin made visible through a water baptism. He was a curiosity. People flocked to see him and to hear his message. He was a celebrity, even if he didn’t seek the notoriety. He preached repentance and he didn’t soften his message for the people who were recognizably religious. On the contrary, he cranked it up several levels. His message was consistent: “Change your hearts and lives! Here comes the kingdom of heaven!”

The command that John thundered, “Repent – change your hearts and lives,” is in the present tense. That means continual or repeated actions: “Keep on repenting!” “Continually be repentant!” It isn’t like a door we pass through once that gets us into the kingdom. Repentance is the ongoing lifestyle of the people in the kingdom.

Notice how John connects repentance, life change, with the arrival of the kingdom of heaven. That sets up an interesting dynamic for us. How are we supposed to respond to the coming of heaven’s rule? Would you believe that it is not worship or praise, but repentance? That’s the hardest part of the coming of the Kingdom, or the biggest problem with remembering the coming of Jesus at Christmas or Palm Sunday. We want to celebrate and praise, rather than repent. We back off from letting the coming one change our lives. We don’t want to admit to ourselves and God, “I am wrong” or “I’ve done wrong.”

The arrival of heaven’s rule messes things up for the world, and for us. We find out later in Matthew’s gospel (10:7-8) that the coming of the kingdom means healing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing those with leprosy, driving out demons; and freely giving as we have received. That’s the message which Jesus gives to John’s messengers when the imprisoned John begins to wonder if Jesus really was the one he was to herald. Perhaps those radical activities are the good fruits worthy of repentance of which John speaks.

Changing our hearts and lives is no simple matter. Richard Jensen offers an understanding for repentance:

Repentance is often understood as an “I can” experience. “I am sorry for my sins. I can do better. I can please you, God.” So often we interpret repentance as our way of turning to God. That cannot be. Christianity is not about an individual turning to God. Christianity is about God turning to us.
In repenting, therefore, we ask the God who has turned towards us, buried us in baptism and raised us to new life, to continue his work of putting us to death. Repentance is an “I can’t” experience. To repent is to volunteer for death. Repentance asks that the “death of self” which God began to work in us in baptism continue to this day. The repentant person comes before God saying, “I can’t do it myself, God. Kill me and give me new life. You buried me in baptism. Bury me again today. Raise me to a new life.” That is the language of repentance. Repentance is a daily experience that renews our baptism.(2)

The Greek word baptizo literally means “to dip,” and secondly, “to wash, (often by dipping into the water)”. If we use the word “wash”  — “I wash you with water for repentance” and “He will wash you with Holy Spirit and fire,” we can sense the difference. Washing with water cleanses only the outside. Being immersed in the Holy Breath also cleanses the inside — or one’s entire life — like oxygen in the air we breathe which rejuvenates our blood and every part of our bodies. In other words, baptism is not a finger bowl experience.

Brian Stoffregen tells of leading a workshop on worship. He drew a crude stick figure of a person walking into a big box. Then he had the figure walking out of the box. He labeled the box, “Worship.” Then he asked, what do we expect to happen to people in this box? After some responses, he suggested, “Cleansed.” Worship is a time where we are cleansed. Cleansing requires going into one’s life to root out the dirt and filth and crud – and the deeper one goes, the more sin one will find – and the more sin that will be rooted out, washed away, and forgiven.(3)

John throws away the etiquette book. Jesus never picks it up. Nor should we. Repentance – changing hearts and lives – is not about nice social graces that ease social interaction. Repentance is not about what we can do. It is about what we can’t do and what God does do for us through Jesus Christ. The kingdom of heaven is arriving and continues to arrive. God is seeking us. God is excited about the changes that can happen to us. “Change your hearts and lives. Here comes the kingdom of heaven.”

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette. Downloaded December 7, 2013, 21:15 EST.
(2) Richard Jensen, Touched by the Spirit (Eugene, OR, Wipf and Stock, 2000), 49.
(3) Brian Stoffregen, “Gospel Notes for Next Sunday, Matthew 3:1-12.” Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 4:41 PM

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com 
Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Let the Noise Begin

I am reading Matthew today.

21:14-16: People who were blind and lame came to Jesus in the temple, and he healed them. But when the chief priests and legal experts saw the amazing things he was doing and the children shouting in the temple, "Hosanna to the Son of David!" they were angry. They said to Jesus, "Do you hear what these children are saying?" "Yes," he answered. "Haven't you ever read, From the mouths of babies and infants you've arranged praise for yourself?" (CEB, Common English Bible)

What occurred to me from today's reading was a thought about people who complain about the presence of children in worship. That is, they complain about the noise, the movement, the distraction. They would rather segregate the children in a safe, soundproof area where they can learn to play act church. (And then we wonder why they aren't interested in 'real' church later on.)

But more important than the sociological and development issues, is the bold assertion (in so many words) that children get God better than we adults do. "From the mouths of babies and infants you've arranged praise for yourself." Wow!

Jesus has already called out the disciples on this when they asked him who was the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. With a child in their midst he said, "I assure you that if you don't turn your lives around and become like this little child, you will definitely not enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 18:1-3, CEB)

Every time we have the audacity to think that we have God all figured out, that we know what God wants from us and through us for God's self and God's people, God pulls the rug out from under us. Perhaps we have got it wrong that God only wants soft organ interludes, Bach chorales, five-stanza, four-part hymns, and well-intoned sermons and intellectual prayers. Or that God only wants songs from the American gospel tradition and off-the-cuff prayers where every fifth word is 'Lord.' or that God only listens to praise choruses and watches YouTube clips.

Perhaps what God really wants is a rambunctious spirit, an ebullient praise-speaking mouth, a joy-filled heart. After all, if God wasn't interested in the child in all of us, God's son wouldn't have come to us as a child in a manger.

Cosmic Alertness or Perpetual Apathy?

Cosmic Alertness or Perpetual Apathy?
Matthew 24:33-43; Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14

We go through this every year. People ask, Why do we begin Advent with stories of judgment and of Jesus’ (Son of Man’s, Human One’s) return? Why can’t we just dive into the prophecy and the birth narratives? Why do we have to prepare for what we already know has happened?

Some answers might be:

• It’s been a whole year, and we need to rehearse the details. 
• Advent reminds us that the old order is ending and that the new order – the reign of Christ – is beginning.
• Jesus’ birth is itself a judgment on human beings and their social order.

Let’s face it, most of us are not comfortable with all the talk about judgment. Judgment means that there is something wrong with the present order of things. And for the most part, we are generally happy with the way things are. Judgment might mean change and we don’t think that much needs to be changed. And judgment might just get personal; it might not apply to some faceless “them” somewhere else, it might be directed at us. And that makes us sweat and squirm.

David Bartlett(1) says that Advent produces two very different reactions among Christians. Some Christians think that Christ’s second coming is the heart of the gospel. They read the scriptures for signs of the end times and then read the newspaper, watch the news, follow along on Twitter to see if those signs are happening now. Other Christians react as though the emphasis on Christ’s appearing is much ado about nothing that can be believed. They endure this first Advent Sunday so they can get to next week and John the Baptist, a quirky yet historical figure.

Bartlett concludes that those Christians who are focused on last things are tempted to fall into a perpetual state of anxiety, while those who are agnostic about last things likely fall into a state of perpetual apathy. How easy it is to diverge just a little bit from Christ and wind up missing him by a significant distance. Advent is about faith, not apathy, hope and not anxiety.

The theme of the Matthew passage, indeed of all of Advent, is the necessity of watchfulness. The reason for this is that Christ’s return appearance is not scheduled. You won’t find it on a calendar. You won’t get a 15 minute alert on your smart phone. And yet there have been countless interpreters of scripture who have either somehow missed the point of the opening verse of today’s reading or who think that they are better than our Lord by being gifted with special knowledge. Jesus is very clear: “Nobody knows when that day or hour will come, not the heavenly angels and not the Son. Only the Father knows.” As Paul reminds us in his Philippian hymn of Christ, “Jesus emptied himself by taking the form of a slave and by becoming like human beings” (Phil. 2:7), that is, lacking in divine knowledge, and often unaware of human knowledge.

So while some have tried to correct the apparent shortcoming in scripture and in Jesus himself, others slough off the lack of knowledge as a good reason not to pay much attention at all. What we have to remember is, even though we don’t know the day and hour of the coming of Christ, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. It will. The fact that the coming will be is vitally important for our lives right now.

A lot of people talk about Christ’s second coming, a kind Christian version of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Terminator” promise, “I’ll be back.” Like many other things that we take as scriptural, the Bible never makes reference to a “second” coming. The “Coming One” is one who has come and who continues to come to us in our gatherings around Word and Sacrament. For those whom Jesus is a part of their lives now, the “coming” will not be a surprise. He already comes into their lives now. That’s one way of thinking about the seam between church years that goes from the reign of Christ to his coming – in humanity as well as divinity.

The reference to Noah is all about Christ’s coming unexpectedly. Even though the people in Noah’s day didn’t know about the coming of the judgment, it still came. Even though people don’t know about Christ’s coming, he still comes. He comes as child to an unwed mother in a patriarchal society in a country occupied and oppressed by the until then most powerful human government. He comes as the co-equal with the Father and the Spirit to judge the world and redeem those whom God calls out from among the people, be they direct descendants of Abraham and Sarah or not.

The reference to Noah takes us beyond a boatload of eight human beings, and pairs of animals, reptiles, amphibians, and avians, not to mention seeds and plants (as the Jewish midrash tradition takes pains to point out). To focus only on them is to miss the point that the story is really about those who failed to prepare themselves, who failed to follow God at all. The point is that they took no notice of what God required or of what God warned. They were doing business as usual oblivious to the specter of judgment which hung over their heads. “In those days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark.” We aren’t talking drunkenness and gluttony, just everyday meals. And the marriage image has to do with their unawareness of their mortality. They assumed that the future would happen, generation after generation. But as the Genesis saga recounts, judgment came flooding into their lives and they were all swept away.

That is the same point that Jesus’ next images reinforce: two men are in a field; one is taken and one is not. Two women are in the shared courtyard grinding grain on the communal wheel; one is taken, one is not. These are readily recognized images from Jesus’ day. They represent ordinary activity, the stuff that people do and did day in and day out. The coming judgment is no respecter of gender or occupation. Ordinary daily activities will not insulate anyone from the coming judgment.

The language sets up an interesting question. Which is better? To be taken or to remain? How the kids in the AT&T cellular phone commercial would respond to that choice? For Matthew, given his overall use of the words “taken” and “left” in his gospel, being taken is better, although we more often than not may think just the opposite. In Matthew’s vocabulary, “taken” seems to refer to being redeemed from danger, while being left behind carries the sense of being forsaken or abandoned. Who of us doesn’t remember the ignominy of being the last one chosen for team play on the playground.

Life goes on. It must. Whether we grow and grind our own grain, or merely pull the ready-sliced bread out of the wrapper, doing it is necessary to our earthy well-being. Yet in the midst of the ordinary we must cultivate the capacity to perceive the coming of the extraordinary. And we are to do it without idle speculation.

If the images of Noah and of the farmers and farmer wives being taken or left behind weren’t difficult enough, then there is the image of the thief in the night. It always grates to apply an apparently negative image to the Son of Man, the Human One. But the image raises a troubling question. To whom might the reign of heaven and the coming of the Son of Man be seen as a threat? And what is the thief in the night coming to steal? Is it our human aloofness from and arrogance about our need for God, for salvation? Or will the coming one steal our guilt, our regret, our self-built defenses of ego and pride, and leave us with nothing to separate us from God, a return to the innocence humanity violated in the Garden following creation? That would indeed be a new advent, a starting over, a saving taking away.

Advent is a time to choose between cosmic alertness and perpetual apathy. And if we don’t choose, the One who is coming will choose for us.

O come, O come, Emmanuel.

(1) David L. Bartlett, “Matthew 24:36-44: Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year A, vol. 1, p. 20.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com 
Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.