Recognize

CHRISTMAS DAY, 2012 10:00 a.m. - Low Mass with Carols The Parish of Ss. Peter & Paul, Portland
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Biblical scholar and teacher of preaching Fred Craddock tells the story of a missionary sent to preach the Gospel in India toward the end of World War II. After many months, the time came for him to return home for a furlough.

His church wired him the money to book passage on a steamer; but when he got to the port city, he discovered that a boatload of Jews had just been allowed to land temporarily. These were the days when European Jews were sailing all over the world, literally looking for a place to live. These particular Jews were now staying in attics and warehouses and basements all over that port city.

It happened to be Christmas, and on Christmas morning, this missionary went to one of the attics where scores of Jews were staying. He walked in and said, "Merry Christmas."

The people looked at him as if he were crazy and responded, "We're Jews."
"I know that," said the missionary. "What would you like for Christmas?"

In utter amazement, the Jews responded, "Why, we'd like pastries, good pastries, like the ones we used to have in Germany."

So the missionary went out and used the money for his ticket home to buy pastries for all the Jews he could find staying in the port. Of course, then he had to wire home, asking for more money to book his passage back to the States.

As you might expect, his superiors wired back, asking what had happened to the money they had already sent. He wired that he had used it to buy Christmas pastries for some Jews.

His superiors wired back, "Why did you do that? They don't even believe in Jesus."
He wired in return: "Yes, but I do!"

Jesus will not always be found where we expect to find him. We tend to look for him in the easy, the nice, the clean, the pristine, the proper: we look for him in churches and in other Christians, in Scriptures, and in our Christmas carols, in church-sanctioned activities and clearly-defined tasks of ministry. But if these are the only places we are looking for him, then we're not looking in the stable, in the dirt and the straw and the deprivation where the real story, the actual birth took place.

We are not looking for him at a shopping mall a few blocks down 82nd Avenue from us. We are not looking for him in the faces of children and their mentors brutally murdered by a crazy man with a powerful weapon available to the public. Or at the little ones who will be forever traumatized by that horrible day a week ago last Friday.

Michel Quoist, the late French Roman Catholic priest who's quite famous for Prayers, his monumental small book of personal, and yet very profound, prayers for everything from "Prayer in Front of a Dollar Bill" to "Prayer of a Priest on Sunday Evening." He wrote about Christmas:

I am not made of plaster, nor of stone, nor of bronze. I am living flesh throbbing, suffering. I am among men and women and they have not recognized Me. I am poorly paid, I am unemployed, I live in a slum. I am sick, I sleep under bridges, I am in prison. I am oppressed, I am patronized. I sweat men's blood on all battlefields. I cry out in the night and die in the solitude of battle. And yet I said to them: "Whatever you do to My brothers or sisters, however humble, You do to Me."

Gathered at Bethlehem's manger, we are poised between love's completion or frustration, between love's triumph or tragedy. God's enfleshment in Jesus is love's risk. It is God's vulnerability. God's fullness made empty. God's richness made poor. God's "otherness" become flesh and blood--for us and for our salvation. The power of response is in our hands.

Let us pray, then, for the gift of recognition, which is indeed the message of Christmas. Today we can contemplate together what has unfolded at Bethlehem and acknowledge the meaning of Jesus as the holiest, riskiest sacrament of God's love that ever occurred.

"The things she knew let her forget again:
The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold,
The gaping shepherds, and the strange old men piling their clumsy gifts of foreign gold.
Let her have laughter with her little one.
Teach her the endless tuneless songs to sing.
Grant her the right to whisper to her son the foolish things one dare not call a king; keep from her dreams the rumble of a crowd,
The smell of roughcut wood, the trail of red,
The thick and chilly whiteness of the shroud
That wraps the strange new body of the dead.
Ah, let her go, kind Lord, where mothers go,
And boast his pretty words and ways,
And plan the proud and happy years that they shall know together, when her son is grown a man." (Dorothy Parker)

Delivered by the Rev. Phil Ayers