A Troubled Birth

 Luke 2:1-20

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My first church here in Canada was a small church but we had enough youth to have the challenge of a youth group.  One year they decided they wanted to come up with a drama of what if Jesus were born today somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area.  It was an interesting presentation that culminated with them gathered around the piano singing The Beatles tune, Let It Be.  What they came up with was Jesus being born to a young, unwed teenage couple at the Finch subway station.  They were disappointed that there was not a station at Jane and Finch.  They thought they would have been able to highlight better the circumstances of prejudice that surrounded Jesus’ birth.  You see, Mary and Joseph were from Nazareth and Nazareth was considered to be an undesirable little town in Northern Israel. “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” they used to say.  The youth also had this child’s parents resting Jesus in a homeless man’s shopping cart.  Not the cleanest of places for a newborn, I’m sure.  Jesus himself was wrapped in rags and laid in a feeding trough…not quite the image we have of “swaddling clothes” and a “manger”.  

In the Bible, the baby Jesus had several visitors the night of his birth, shepherds and Magi.  Shepherds in his day were near the bottom of the food chain along with drunks and lepers.  The Magi were indeed kings and scientists.  Their science was astrology.  They were following a heavenly sign they had discerned to mean the birth of a great king in the land of Judea.  God’s announcing his coming to shepherds and astrologers was a bold slap in the face of the Judean king and the religious leaders who should have known this but didn’t for they were blinded by power and privilege.  The birth of the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ caught them by surprise and threatened their privileged positions.  When Herod found out, he wanted Jesus dead and actually killed all the male children in the area of Bethlehem under the age of two.  In the youth’s drama they have Jesus’ birth announced to some homeless people y who go to welcome him which should remind us that we church-going, upper-middle class white folk just might not have a monopoly on the things of God. 

Lastly, the paternity of Jesus truly did create a stir.  Mary was pregnant.  Joseph knew the baby wasn’t his.  His choices were to believe an angel or break the engagement as quietly as he could.  He wanted to not go through with the marriage for Nazareth was a small town and everyone was thinking that he had dishonoured himself by having relations with his fiancé before being married.  Truly, according to Old Testament law Mary’s life would have been ruined had Joseph not decided to continue with the engagement and adopt the child as his own.  This adoption is important.  It is what links Jesus to King David and Messianic bloodline.  Moreover, in the same way that Jesus was adopted as child of Joseph so are we, through him, adopted to be children of God.

            The story of the Jesus birth really is an eye-opener.  Our Lord was born out of wedlock, to say it politely, to a couple who were a young teen-age girl and a man likely in his thirties.  They came from Nazareth of all places to a stable in Bethlehem outside of an inn because, for whatever reason, no one in the inn had compassion enough to forfeit their room to a birthing mother.  In a stable was where Jesus was born.  How scandalous can that be?  God choose to unite himself to humanity in not only a humble birth but indeed under humiliating circumstances.  The scandal surrounding Jesus’ birth was not unlike the scandal surrounding his death.  It leads us to believe that if we want to know where to find God maybe we should start looking in the most troubling of circumstances.

While we’re on the that topic, maybe we should stop and ask where is it that we should look if we want to find God?  If the profoundest meaning of Christmas is that God is with us and deeply bonded to us, then where is he?  The answer would be not in the nostalgia of religion but in reality, in the brokenness, in the shamefulness of human existence.  Jesus was not born in the glamour of the temple in Jerusalem and praised by the good, upright, wholesome, and devout “hypocrites” of his day.  He was born to an unmarried couple; a teenage girl and a slightly older gent who both said “yes” to a call to endure shame and scorn for God’s sake and human healing.  

Henri Nouwen was a catholic priest who taught at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard but left the glorious life to live among the differently abled folks at L’Arche Daybreak Community in Toronto.  He says for us to really understand Jesus Christ we have to let go of power and follow Jesus.  He writes: “The world says, ‘When you were young you were dependent and could not go where you wanted, but when you grow old you will be able to make your own decisions, go your own way, and control your own destiny.’  But Jesus has a different vision of maturity: it is the ability and willingness to be led where you would rather not go…being led to unknown, undesirable, and painful places. The way of the Christian…is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross.”[1]

It never ceases to amaze me that we celebrate the humble, indeed humiliating birth of Jesus the Christ with the most vulgar display of consumerism and materialism ever known to human history.  When December rolls around it becomes painfully evident how conformed we Christians are to the world.  It is an amazing fact that if the Christians of the world would simplify their Christmas celebrations we could collapse the global economy.  That is how fickle we and this world are and to think that in the midst of this fickleness there are people, indeed children, going hungry because of it.  I have to wonder if we, the disciples of Christ, have more in common with King Herod than with King Jesus.

I’ll back off of that and once again raise the question of where should we look for this Jesus.  Well, getting together with family and friends is a good place to look, even better if you welcome into your celebrations those who have not the luxury of family and friends, and even better if you all gather to worship and to pray and even better if you try to heal the rifts that exist your families with confession and forgiveness.  But, I think there is an even better place to look for Jesus.  That is to look inside ourselves and go to that person called “me” that hides, hoping that nobody ever finds out who “me” really is…we all have a “me” that we try to compensate for… a “me” who’s been victim as well as victimizer, a “me” who is powerless as well as powerful in this world, a “me” who grieves because life is unfair…go there this Christmas…that’s your dirty, dark, dank stable in the basement of the inn.  It is there that Christ will be born in you and you shall be born from above.  In an inexplicable moment of grace your heavenly Father will pick you up and say “My Beloved.”  That, my Beloved, is the miracle of Christmas.  Amen.

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[1] Nouwen, Henri J.M., In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership, (New York, Crossroad, 1989), 62.

Ponder This Picture

 Luke 1:39-55

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There’s something about us humans that we like to make pictures of important events.  They help us to remember the details, or the story behind the event.  I have a picture here.  To someone who doesn’t know the story behind it, it looks like a couple of men, one older and one younger, pausing for a picture before entering a house.  Woohoo.  Who would want a picture of that?  A closer look and you will recognize the younger guy as me from about 20 years ago and by the resemblance between us, you will deduce the other man to be my father.  Most people who see this picture will remark on the resemblance and assume that’s what this picture is all about.  But there are plenty other pictures I could pull out to demonstrate the resemblance.  That’s not why I framed it and keep it around.  For me, there’s a story behind this picture that makes it very special.  This picture was taken by a hospice volunteer who was very good at capturing moments.  In this picture he captured the moment of the end of the last walk my father and I ever took together.  That’s special. I’m kind of looking up and away.  Dad is looking right at you with his hand on the door ready to open it and enter his home.  We are both smiling.  Though we both knew what was coming, there was joy that day.  A few weeks later, Dad opened a door and went home.  The smile on his face in this picture assures me everything’s ok.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  

In our reading from Luke, he gives us a word picture and throughout the history of the church many people have tried to paint pictures that tell this story.  In the first few centuries of the church they painted pictures called icons that were not all that detailed like Medieval and Renaissance paintings are, but were actually quite simplistic and the point of them was devotional.  You were supposed to just stare at them for hours prayerfully pondering who the people are or the moment depicted and come to the place where you see beyond the picture and catch a glimpse of the divine meaning of the moment.  Like when I see the smile on Dad’s face in this picture. It says something to me about life now and the life to come. 

There are many icons of this moment in Luke’s Gospel known as The Visitation of Mary.  They usually depict two women in an embrace with rather placid looks on their faces.  One woman will usually be depicted with graying hair, but you won’t be able to really guess the age of either of them.  In most of the icons you won’t be able to tell the women are pregnant.  Though there are a couple that draw little circles in their bellies that have baby boys in them and you can tell which woman is Mary because the John the Baptist baby is bowing to the Jesus baby.  Anyway, for the most part when we look at the icons of this moment and the embrace of love between the two women, one old and one young, is what we’re led to prayerfully ponder.  This bond of love is the story behind the story that has something to tell us about the nature or personality of God.  God is like the love, the intergenerational love of mothers and daughters particularly around this thing of being able to have a human life growing inside of you.  The personality of God as love and hope and joy pervades the icons the early church created to describe this moment of Mary visiting Elizabeth.

So looking at Luke’s word picture here, we should begin our understanding of God’s saving act of his creation having caught a glimpse of this intergenerational love, hope, and joy and the intuitive understanding that woman share around child-bearing.  Luke’s backstory to his picture is of God acting in miraculous but very human ways.  Elizabeth, who due to the stigmas of her day suffered scorn among women for being unable to bear children, is now pregnant in her elder years.  Impossible and dangerous.  People could have quite easily accused her saying that Zechariah must have been the problem all along and now your pregnant so it must be by someone else.  Mary, a young girl twelve to fifteen years old, still a virgin yet pregnant.  Umm.  That’s not going to go over well in her small town hometown.  She will be scorned for being pregnant out of wedlock.  

But, Elizabeth and Mary, both knowing that God is at work in them, look beyond what other people will see and think and say.  Elizabeth does not pass judgement upon Mary for what seems like it could be a very scandalous situation in the life of small town, traditional, faithful Jews.  Instead of judging Mary she looks beyond and perceives the hand of God at work and then, honoured to be in Mary’s presence, she blesses Mary.  And Mary, she forgoes the inclination to make a judgement of Elizabeth and how she might have gotten pregnant after all those years and looks beyond all that and believes what the angel Gabriel said and accepts Elizabeth’s pregnancy as the sign that what the angel said about the baby growing in her was true.  

And so, blessed by Elizabeth Mary sings a song of praise from deep within her being.  Her whole being is deeply, moved with love, hope, faith, and joy.  God is at work through them.  The words of the song are in what I would call the prophetic past.  The prophets often said what God was going to do by saying God has already done it in order to add certainty to the fact that God will do it.  Her song is about how God will remember his people and his promises to his people to show them healing love and basically turn the world order upside-down to fix and heal everything.  He will scatter the proud and bring down the powerful from their thrones and lift up the lowly.  God will equalize things.  The hungry will receive good things, but the rich will receive no more.  Everyone will have enough.  

We can ask how will this happen.  Well, the great books of history depict pictures of men doing heroic things. Typically, the male way is to say, “Bring me my coonskin hat and rifle.  Let’s forge and empire.”  But in Luke’s picture, we find God acting through the impossible, seemingly scandalous pregnancies of two women and the bond of intergenerational, maternal love and understanding they share.  Somehow that’s the way God will bring about his future.  We will find God turning this world order upside down and healing his creation by causing humanity to understand the weakness, the vulnerability, of this intuitive understanding and bond of love that women share with respect to child-bearing.  Jesus said that the suffering and troubles of this world are the birth pangs of creation giving birth to the new world coming.  We must learn to love and support one another and the Creation in the midst of these birth pangs instead of continuing on in this exploitative “Serve me” attitude that we have.  We must learn to maternally love the future that’s coming for the sake of the children who will live in it.

As Elizabeth was honoured to be in Mary’s presence and blessed her so must we regard everyone.  We must honour and love and bless everyone. Even if the biggest jerk on the face of the planet is standing before us, we must humbly accept the honour of being in their presence and find a way to bless them.  Quite often this looks like finding the courage to speak the truth in love.

We must continue on in faith, hope, and joy.  God will bring this future healed reality about.  In hope, we must act accordingly in love.  Our only reward in this life will be the tasting the Joy of the Lord as he moves us to praise.  The joy of the Lord is our strength.  Ponder this picture of the love that Mary and Elizabeth share and understand it as the healing way of God and strive to live according to the hope there in.  Amen.

The Joy of Enough

 Luke 3:7-18

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At our house we have two cats; an orange tabby named Tiggs and a grey and white something or other blob we call Peewee.  They were just months old when we rescued them from the local shelter.  At first Peewee was quite outgoing and affectionate and Tiggs was a bit shy.  But after a month or so that all changed and we don’t know why.  Tiggs became the outgoing, curious cat who likes your company.  Peewee, well quite honestly, he’s become a disappointment.  He’s skittish and rarely lets you touch him.  He likes to demand his food with a very annoying bit of relentless meowing that starts 30-45 minutes before they get their food.  We have to feed them at specific times because if we left food out for them, Peewee would just eat and eat and eat.  He has his dish and Tiggs has his.  Peewee is the faster eater so he finishes his food and moves on to Tiggs’ dish.  So, Tiggs is always hungry and Peewee is fat.  Peewee doesn’t seem to know how to stop when he’s had enough. He is just a fat, annoying, hairball barfing, litter box filling mistake that we obviously can’t euthanize and I know quite well he wouldn’t make it as a barn cat.  So, we’re stuck with him, which means…we just have to love him, find out what makes him tick, and try to draw him out.

Well, that’s cats, what about people.  It’s almost Christmas and of course I’m waxing nostalgic about the Christmas Eve dinners we used to have at Grandma and Grandaddy’s and what a joyous occasion it was.  The food, the conversation, the gift giving, being a kid, and then growing up and watching the kids.  Everybody was welcome and loved.  Mawmaw always put out an abundant feast.  There was more than enough for everybody.  We ate and everybody was “fat, dumb, and happy.”  There was joy.  I can’t imagine what would have happened if there was one or more of us who acted like Peewee in the family.  I’ll pretend it was me. What if I started an hour or so before dinner yelling “When’s dinner going to be ready?” and kept it up while everyone else was doing their part to get it ready.  And then once dinner was on the table I claimed all the food for myself, even pushed everybody else away from their plates so as to eat their food too…and we won’t get into the dietary disturbances that come along with eating all that food to which I would so rudely subject everybody else.  Then while I’m gorging myself I start to go on about “When can we open presents?  I want to open my presents.”  The time comes and I tear into mine and it’s, “Look what I got. Look what I got.”  But apparently, it’s not enough so I start taking everybody else’s presents.

I can’t imagine if that happened at Christmas Eve at Grandma and Grandaddy’s.  There would have been absolutely no joy at all.  What do you do with someone like that?  You can’t just euthanize them or banish them to the barn.  You don’t do that to human beings (but we do).  But you know, welcome to Banquet Planet Earth…and you know what else?  We are part of that small percentage of people who are ruining the banquet for most everybody else.  I wish I could say this is the way humanity has been just since the Industrial Age and the advent of Capitalism, but no.  If you look back, it’s the way humanity has been throughout recorded history.  There have always been the human versions of Peewee and Tiggs but, oddly, the Tiggs’s have idolized the lifestyle of the Peewee’s and when given the chance have acted likewise.  We want to have it all and turn a blind eye to those who have it all and how they got it and won’t admit the cost that comes from attaining it…the poverty, disease, hunger, pollution, violence.  We simply refuse to make the bold claim that having too much is immoral, but rather it’s our common goal.  There’s no wonder there’s a widespread lack of joy here at Banquet Planet Earth.

Unfortunately, we psychologize Joy, tying it to mental health and removing it from the context of economic lifestyle.  We think material comforts contribute to joy and the more material comforts you have the happier you’re supposed be.  Then, when somebody who has it all is so miserable they stay doped up all the time, we explain it away as mental illness, give them anti-depressants, and tell them to spend some time reading Joel Osteen or Deepak Chopra.  “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die” is not the way to Joy.  There are mental health consequences to living “the lifestyle of the rich and famous” and those consequences are worsened when we realize that that way of life is not the path to joy but rather leads to a profound lack of it.

Well, you might question why I would bring out an angry sermon by John the Baptist on a Sunday when we are supposed to be talking about Joy, but bear with me.  People were flocking to the prophet of God in the wilderness because their lives were so bad that they had no hope in anything other than a mighty act of God to fix it.  They were not happy people. The bulk of them were everyday people who were over-taxed and over-worked, scared not only about the future, but about what loss tomorrow may bring.  Even tax collectors and soldiers (law-enforcement), the upper-middle class were coming to John for answers, for hope and what did he do?  He called them a brood of vipers who thought they could flee from the cataclysmic change that’s going to affect everybody when God acts, the people of God too.  Apparently, he didn’t go to the same preaching class I went to, but then again, how would my sermons be different if you weren’t paying me?

John actually gave this hope deprived, joy deprived people the way to joy.  The brood of viper comment aside, John gave them a glimpse of the joy-filled life that will be at the heart of the coming Kingdom of God.  It’s quite simple actually, something we learned in kindergarten probably.  If we have more than enough, then we share what we have with those who don’t have.  Don’t use our position of influence and privilege as a means to take more for ourselves which sounds a whole lot like don’t use your wealth to gain more wealth.  Be satisfied with what we get for what we do rather than using extortion to get more.  It’s quite simple…be satisfied with enough.  Be generous with what we’ve earned so that everybody has enough.  Don’t take more than we need.  

It’s interesting that they are in the wilderness and if you remember Israel’s wilderness wandering after God delivered them from slavery in Egypt, then you recall that God fed them on manna.  Every morning God provided them with this bread-like stuff that tasted like coriander.  They were supposed to collect only enough for that day and no more.  Any extra they collected would go rancid.  So it is with life at Banquet Planet Earth.  There is abundantly enough for everybody if everybody takes only enough for themselves to live on.  If we take more, rancidness occurs and it is occurring – Climate change, pandemics, poverty, wars, etc.  All this bad stuff is the consequence of our lifestyle of wanting to have more than enough.

To close, if we want to know more than fleeting glimpses of Joy like at Grandma and Grandaddy’s on Christmas Eve, then we have to accept the fact that true joy is tied to ‘economic justice, fairness, generosity and learning to live on enough.  The downside of this is that if everybody lived this way, the economy would crash and those who have everything will lose everything…but, the feast of abundance and resulting Joy will be permanent rather than fleeting.  That’s God’s promise for what’s coming and he will bring it about, so it’s best we start living for it now.  Amen.

The Solution to Politics

 Luke 3:1-6

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If we were hearing this passage from Luke’s Gospel with the fresh ears of someone who lived at the time Luke wrote his “narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us” (as he states at the beginning) to a fictitious addressee whom he names Theophilus which means “God-lover”, we would be struck with how political it is.  He starts here by naming the political leaders who are responsible for the well-being of the people not only God’s people there in Judea, but of everybody in the world as they knew hit.  Luke names the politicians and then makes the bold statement that the Word of God didn’t come to them but to a hermit prophet out in the wilderness to whom multitudes of people were flocking in desperation because their life was so bad (mostly because of these politicians) that God was their only hope.  He names the leaders and indicates that God will work against them to bring salvation to all people.  This was not a non-political matter of private religion.

Be mindful that to a First Century hearer of Luke’s Gospel, salvation did not mean getting your sins forgiven so that you can go to heaven when you die.  Deliverance would be the better word to use here and deliverance was always a “this world” matter, an “on earth as it is in Heaven” matter.  The baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins that John was proclaiming was not the message of get baptized so you can go to heaven when you die.  John’s baptism was a symbolic gesture of wanting to be clean before God in order to be ready for when God comes to put things right.  

There was strong sentiment among the people that due to the corruption of the priests and the money-making religion that they had made of Temple worship in Jerusalem, the sacrifices made there were unacceptable to God.  So, the everyday people of the land were going to the prophet of God out in the wilderness to get washed clean in the Jordan to be ready for God’s coming.  You know significance of the Jordan River, the river God’s people crossed into the Promised Land from their wandering in the wilderness after God delivered them from slavery in Egypt and also when God brought them back from Exile in Babylon.  The faithful, everyday people of the land were looking for a new start in a new age in God’s land with God obviously reigning. 

Repentance wasn’t so much this remorseful “I’m a sinner” thing that medieval Christianity passed on to us.  Repentance was getting on board with what God was doing to deliver his people from oppression and establish them anew in the Land with leadership that would lead like King David did, leaders after God’s own heart rather than popularity and power.  These people were, with desperation, anticipating as their only hope that at any moment the Messiah of God would come and bring the Kingdom of God.  So, they went to John the Baptist for they knew that he, according to prophecy, was the one crying out in the wilderness preparing the way of the Lord. 

This movement that was centered around John the Baptist was not a non-political matter of private religion.  It was all about matters of everyday life – work, taxation, the cost of living – and the effect the political leadership in the land had on those everyday matters.  The faithful in the land, those looking to God for the solution, were flocking to John because they had no confidence at all that their political and religious leadership were capable of solving the difficulties of everyday life, but were rather the root of the problem.  Those in power were ruling for the benefit of themselves rather looking after the needs of the people.

I think we can relate to their lack of confidence in their political leadership.  On November 21, 2021 the survey organization Ipsos conducted a poll here in Canada identifying what Canadians considered to be the top issues our newly elected federal government needed to deal with and also our confidence in Parliament to make significant progress on these issues.  The biggest issue was affordability and the cost of living, the affordability of basic necessities.  Only 21% of us were confident our leadership can make significant progress on keeping the cost of living in check.  The second big issue was the Pandemic and we gave the government a 61% vote of confidence on that.  Then came healthcare, housing, the economy, and climate change only one third of the people surveyed had any confidence at all that our elected officials can make any sort of significant progress on these issues.  We're better than the Americans though.  The results of a similar survey released this passed week showed that only 21% of the people surveyed had confidence that Congress can get anything done at all.  

I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but it truly sounds to me that in North America we are losing confidence in our elected leadership and it appears we are heading towards hopelessness.  That’s not good.  I’m no political analyst, but from my armchair I really don’t see where the needs of everyday people like me and my family are being put first.  I am deeply troubled that it is likely that nearly all of our members of federal Parliament made more on stock investments last year, during a Pandemic, than the combined income of my household.  That leads me to surmise that our members of Parliament do not wrestle with the same economic insecurities as you and I; yet, they make decisions that affect our economic security.  And then we have to listen to them bicker over their ideological differences and as they personally attack each other as if they were professional wrestlers dressed like televangelists.  I would much prefer they put their politics and the twisted desire to win at all cost aside and work together to do the work we elected them to do.  Sorry. I’m getting off track here.  There has to be a solution to politics.  

  Well, in John the Baptist’s day the people were returning to the Jordan, to get on board with what God was doing and get a new start.  For us today, I suggest we return to the Table of our Lord.  This meal which introduces us to the One who did not spare his one life, but gave it for us all; the One who did not seek his own gain, but gave up everything that we might have the abundant life; the One who took five loaves and two fish and fed a crowd of likely 15,000 hopeless people; the One who healed people, cleansed and restored lepers, cast out demons, and held political and religious leadership accountable for their hypocrisy; the One who understood that the unity of the bond of love needs to be tended to before all else.  

In this me-centred world where everybody’s their own expert and the capacity to trust is out the window and at our cores we’re just plain scared to death, I don’t think that it’s a ridiculous suggestion to say, “We need Jesus!”; to say, “Come to the table and meet and ponder the One whose way is unconditional love and sacrificial generosity and hospitality. There is a place where you are welcome; where you can rest and lay your burdens down, where the Spirit of God just might wash over you letting you know just how loved by God you are and that you are his beloved child and your life is in his hands."  The place to find the solution to politics is the Table of our Lord.  Come and meet the One who gave himself for you.  Jesus and his way is the solution to politics.  He is peace and at his table is the way to the peace of his kingdom.  Amen.