Ordinary?

2 Christmas B 2008
(Jer 31: 7-14; Ps 84; Eph 1: 3-6, 15-19a; Matthew 2: 13-15, 19-23)


I just made the drive down I-5 to take eldest kid back to college. We’d had a cozy time all together this Christmas break, snowed in and all, and had avoided major fights. So he was not thrilled to return to the dorms and keeping order among the undergraduate Ducks.

We see the vision at Christmastide. We are dazzled by the light of God poured out into human flesh and bone. For a brief moment all things seem right, and even when we wrestle with pain and loss we feel we are given a great gift.

But we always must return—to what one poet called the Time That Is. The Roman Catholic calendar calls it Ordinary Time. Back to work, back to school, and if that were not enough Ordinary Time the tax forms are beginning to arrive. And darker ordinary time is waiting—rockets and tanks in the Gaza Strip, talk of recession almost everywhere. Where does Christmas go? And what did it mean?

Coming back north on I-5 the car radio lost its grip on my usual alternative music stations, so I let the radio search. It came up with a sentimental old radio drama. I listened and smiled while squinting through snow flurries in the dark. After the predictable happy ending the announcer said some pleasant things and concluded with, “Celebrating the 12 days of Christmas with you.” I appreciated that.

I appreciated it because we need 12 days to let the meaning of Christmas sink in. Today we have the gift of a Sunday often lost, the Second Sunday of Christmas. Who are we, the people of God who celebrate the Christ-Mass each year? And who is the God of this vision that blazes out, yet seems to fade?

We are people of hope. And this God is the God who transforms.

Jeremiah sings it. “With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back.” The prophet spoke to a broken and broken-hearted people who had lost land and hope. It is exactly when things seem darkest, when hope seems lost and God is silent, that God shall take us to God’s own heart. We are adopted members of the family of God. Mourning shall be joy, and there will be abundance to share. No exile is forever. Hold to God and God shall bring you home.

Paul sings the harmony. Spiritual blessing is given to us in the Beloved, wisdom, revelation, enlightenment, hope, and glory—all this the apostle has prayed for us. And we have it. A wise fellow recently told me, “The prayer of faith is thanking God for what God has given, even if we do not yet have it in hand.” The gift has been given to us.

And the Gospel tells how hope is born. The infant Hope was born amidst tension, violence, and fear. Powerful forces contended to possess the holy land. To protect his little family Joseph, the new dreamer of dreams, knew he had to live on the run. The beloved of God was born a refugee. Today Joseph would have to contend with Israeli tanks and Hamas rockets and surly frightened soldiers at checkpoints. He would feel right at home. But God came to birth in such a world. And God was born so that the world might be transformed.

An ancient monk said that God transforms us by taking flesh like fire changes iron. The heat spreads and shares its strength and light to the cold metal, until it glows with fire and may be shaped into something new and beautiful and even stronger than before.

Claim in hope the unspeakable blessings given, even if we do not yet have them in hand. Know that God’s fire spreads and transforms our flesh and souls. Trust God to make us a new creation, home of God’s fire, beautiful and strong.

What is real

Christmas 2008
Isaiah 9:2-7; Titus 2:11-14; Psalm 96; Luke 2:1-14(15-20)


What we’d planned and what was real crashed head-on, these past several days.

What we’d planned was a peaceful Christmas. What we’d planned was our travel. What we’d planned was our church schedule intact so we could celebrate those lovely liturgies, sing all the lovely music we planned to sing, celebrate the astounding news of God taking flesh when we planned to. And then we planned to get home, celebrate with loved ones, and have some time and resources left over to help the poor.

What was real was record snowfall: snowdrifts piled into side streets, planes grounded, trains stalled, even buses stuck. One of us slept on the airport carpet off and on for 24 hours before her plane left for Chicago. The deacon got stuck on a side street just this past Thursday. What was real were hard decisions to forego Mass at church on the fourth Sunday of Advent, the Brigid’s Table Christmas meal, and then Mass for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

I stood in my neighborhood with my aging boots sunk deep in a big slushy pile of what-is-real waiting for the Chihuahua to figure out how to manage his personal business in the snow. I thought about what is real.

What is real is our life here on this living, unpredictable planet. What is real is how little control we really have over our lives. What is real is the work we do to live, the love we share to be human, our care for the poor who teach us how privileged we are. We slowed down and got in touch with ourselves, with one another, and with God. We got in touch with what’s real these past days.

That’s the Good News of Christmas. Christmas is real.

The Christmas Gospel says: No more promises and no more waiting. No more wishing and no more hoping. The gift is given. The Word of God, the vibrant living flaming Word, is among us. Fire and wind has taken flesh and blood. Mystery has become a tiny vulnerable child.

The night was silent, when Caesar’s legions covered the known earth and men now forgotten were in charge and a distant emperor taxed the world. In Rome they built him altars—the divine Caesar, the Savior of the world. This age is the age of peace, said Rome, the Roman peace, won by war and by blood and by treaties and by policies and by deals. The world was silent, watching, knowing there was no real peace that could come from a city of stone and a man on a throne.

Then what was Real became flesh.

The night was silent as all things were re-arranged for all time and a child was wrapped in cloths and laid in a feeding trough. Long ago the prophet said, “The donkey knows its manger, but Israel does not know their God.” That old wound was healed. Shepherds gathered and knew the one given to feed and free his people. We are still in shock.

Perhaps it is easier for our weary hearts and our disappointed souls and our perplexed minds to live in our plans and our wishes. But what is Real cries out in Bethlehem’s night. Often we do not recognize the sound. But today we do. The cry is God’s and the one who is Real is God, and at Christmas all is possible and all that was promised is here.

We see his glory. We hear his cry. We awake as if from a troubled dream to see and touch what is truly Real.

Christmas Masses postposed until Sunday December 28

Friends in God:

I never thought I would be involved in a decision to "cancel Christmas", as stop-action Santa did in that old Rankin-Bass cartoon that I was raised on. But Portland and the immediate area has been flattened by this round of snowstorms with more on the way, and we better observe "tradition" by obeying the Christian tradition of taking care of people's safety and well-being and not asking them to come out in this hazardous weather.

Sunday December 28 will be Saints Peter and Paul's parish observance of the feast of Christmas. The Mass schedule will remain the same as at any Sunday--8, 9:30, and 12 Noon Spanish. The 9:30 AM Mass will be "Carols and High Mass of Christmas" with all the lovely music and liturgy we planned for Christmas Eve.

Christmas is indeed "a season, and not a day", and this year we get to live into that. The culture will have moved into post-Christmas sales and forgetting, but we will gather to break the living Bread of the Word and the Bread of Life, knowing that the living Word has come and taken flesh among us. And we have seen his glory.

And hey...let's be careful out there.

Candles and snow: 4 Advent

Not for years have we “canceled church.” But snow and ice that reminds me of New York winters when I was a kid, which would result in one day off from school at most, paralyze our dear Northwest where we are used to gentle climates, reliable brown mud on Christmas, lots of water, roses blooming in December. Biblical tales of deserts and the dry imagery of Advent, as well as poetic snowy Christmas scenes, are usually a stretch of the imagination for us. But this year my dry soul is matched by a wholly respectable snowfall mixed with our regional nemesis, freezing rain. So game called on account of weather, and we get to “be the church” where we are, alone or with loved ones, pondering how little control if any we have over weather, or over much of anything when we really think of it.

These days many plans have changed, many things have shifted. A lot of rhetoric over the years in churches like ours says things likes “Slow down, be quiet, it’s Advent!” Since this season carries such a burden of activities, buying, and gaiety whether we feel it or not, often I think the churchly command to add reflection to the Christmas list is one more burden. But it has come to us whether we wish it or not! And I for one am ready to take that as blessing as much as anything else.

But for me this time has not been all soft warm spiritual “fuzzies”, a winter feel-good time with God. As the weather closed in and the cold deepened, something very primitive awoke in my soul, something akin to my ancestors’ souls in impoverished medieval Ireland or ice-bound Alaska or storm-tossed Denmark. I felt myself huddling, wanting to stay warm and safe, with the itch to light something on fire that my bonfire-burning forebears would have understood immediately. The days up until today have shortened and, as writer Susan Cooper eloquently said, “the Dark is rising”, the light of kindly sun fading. As the light became scarce and the snow arose, I found myself fighting “irrational” thoughts—what if the light does not return? What if the snow never stops? And have I prepared well enough for winter? No worries about supplies of peat for fuel or sufficient dried salmon and berries, but will the mini-mart be open to sell milk and will the debit card work? Will the 50 year old oil furnace, taxed to its elderly limit, make it one more year, clearing its venerable throat one more time at 2 AM? And then I feel ashamed, as these thoughts are already privileged. For in our midst are those whose needs are more basic, who are without a roof and walls heated or not, who face unemployment or under-employment or eviction. And the season is a difficult one for many among us whose care is not financial but emotional and spiritual—those who feel the loss of loved ones more keenly at this time, those who are alone.

I found myself without inner resources to draw upon, no “health in me” as the Prayer Book language might say. And so my prayer, when I would shake myself free of brooding and of worry as a dog shakes free a coating of snow, was very basic: “O Lord, come” “O Light, return”. As I write this, the aging baby boomer in me is comforted by the image of Linus saying sagely “That’s what Advent is all about, Charlie Brown.”

And so we sing, “O come o come Emmanuel…” And we are given the wintry grace to mean it.

We missed both the RCL readings today as well as the Lessons and Carols format we had prepared for 9:30. And so if there is a chance amidst what home life demands take a moment to check the Hebrew scriptures—Isaiah 11: 1-9 and Isaiah 7: 10-15. In Christian consciousness Isaiah IS Advent to a powerful degree—it is Isaiah’s majestic poetry and astounding images that are enshrined in Handel’s “Messiah”, and reading the Preface to the first Book of Common Prayer one gets the clear sense that not reading Isaiah through during Advent is what drove Thomas Cramner to the English Reformation! (cf Book of Common Prayer p. 866) The first portion of the book of Isaiah is sometimes called by those with graduate degrees and big student loan debts “First Isaiah”, and is directed at Israel before the great traumatic defeats and deportations (“pre-exilic”). Storm clouds politically and culturally were on the horizon and the prophet speaks both of idolatry as well as the abuse of the poor and vulnerable at the hands of the powerful and wealthy. There is a higher Law and One who sees, says Isaiah. But amidst predictions of military defeat and social chaos there are some of the most astounding images of hope articulated anywhere in the Scriptures. One will come, one will be born, a mysterious Servant both royal and humble. And his birth and reign will bring about a transformation of the earth and of our lives, transformation that we cannot begin to imagine. Lambs and wolves will lie down together, children will play on the nests of poisonous snakes. Isaiah’s hunger and hope is awakened in every generation when we are brought up short by the gaping needs of the poor and of our own hearts, and when we look to this policy and this leader, then that leader, for hope and for meaning and for deliverance from the dead end into which we have driven ourselves. Hope is not a What, it is a Who, and now we are given the gift of knowing that no broken promise, no disillusioned voice, no disappointed dream has the final word. The final Word is God’s and is God, and in the dead of our winter that Word is spoken and takes flesh in our very midst.

The other choice in the Hebrew Scriptures for today was 2 Samuel 7: 1-11; 16, where David, now king, wants to do the decent ancient Palestinian thing for God and build a temple. But it is a strange thing that his court prophet Nathan tells him. Nathan’s waking mind says “Sure!” probably already planning how to decorate the interior and where his own chair will go, “Simple, not too showy, but solid, classic!” But Nathan sleeps and in the dream-time the God of dreams comes and tells Nathan and therefore David a counter-cultural thing. No temple needed, no thank you—I’m not just another Fertile Crescent deity who happens to be on top right now. I’m a pilgrim God and journey with you and with my people. Want to find me? Find me in my promise. Find me in the footsteps of your own journey where I have been with you. Find me in the house that I myself will build, not a split-level Parthenon, but in the living stones of a people. I’m not wood and bricks. I’m flesh and bone and promise and breath.

And just as strange is the dangerously familiar story of a message and a pre-marital pregnancy. I say “dangerous”, because familiarity has surrounded this tale with soft sentimental tones, risking that we know what it’s about before we hear it. But in Luke 1: 26-38 the angel, and not just any angel but one with serious biblical “cred”, Gabriel the messenger, is sent slumming. Gabriel is the messenger of God, and by all rights he should be hanging out in Jerusalem, in the temple, with the high priest and the rest of the professionals who are supposed to be looking and listening to angels as part of their position descriptions. But the stupendous being goes to backwater, “sketchy” Galilee, to some flyspeck called Nazareth, which is Nowhere even if the name suggests it’s a place that holy folk may be from (ex. “Nazarites” like Samson). And in Nowhere Gabe finds Nobody, an unmarried young woman. But this is a story about being surprised—the place that you think is really Somewhere may well be nowhere in particular, and Nowhere may be, in the blink of a divine eye, Everywhere and the only Place which is really happening. And Nobody? This young woman, marginal because of her gender in 1st century Israel and in a marginal heterodox town in a marginal province of the Roman Empire, is the tough-minded Everyone in the time it takes for a divine Being, to whom time means nothing, to stand before her and to speak. Mary, Miriam of the prophet’s name, is addressed with respect by great Gabriel with a prophet’s greeting—“Favored one! God is with you! Do not be afraid!” Not an average day in Nazareth—in a divine blink Mary is not just a prophet but is humanity, the earth as well, who is the first to hear Good News in all its joy and its outrageous promise and yes, its great risk to respectability and to convenience and to keeping things Just As They Are. As my monk-friend in Lafayette is fond of saying, “Mary is not rent-a-womb; she had a choice and she chose!” A poet said that the earth and the cosmos held its breath and waited for the answer. A young girl’s “Yes” made possible the silent explosion of the Event of events, the God who takes flesh and “pitches a tent among us.” And so never again be surprised or outraged by what this God can and will do, because nowhere is just nowhere and no one is nobody and God continues the divine Pilgrimage with God’s all-so-human people, walks with them, suffers with them, will even die with them and by them and will rise and so bring them to resurrection, will complete the journey begun with Mary’s “Yes” and Gabriel’s departure, the angelic mission done.

When the darkness seemed deepest and the snowflakes, tiny and savage-sharp as grains of sand, pelted the windows on Saturday night, primitive instincts and Advent hope met when we lit all four candles on the table Advent wreath. Sometimes a candle makes more sense than the most elegant thought. May Light come as promised but may we never think the Light is anything but an astounding, surprising Gift. May the Light shine forth from our lives into a world locked in a cold winter of many kinds.

This is already a long post, but here’s a pair of quotes that normally I would forego in order to keep my Sunday homilies to their trademark brevity.

One short one from Irenaus, 2nd Century theologian: “God is the glory of humanity. Humankind is the vessel which receives God’s action and all (God’s) wisdom and power.”*

A much longer one, that spoke loudly to me this past week, from a reflection by a UCC minister:
“…During this Christmas season, out of a stable, out of the dry, provincial hills of Bethlehem, comes a cry. It is the cry of a baby and it is the cry of God. It is the cry of every mother who has buried a child; the cry of the worker whose hands lie idle because of another layoff; the cry of the husband whose arms are empty this Christmas after 60 years of companionship; the cry of a body in the death throes of AIDS or cancer or heart disease; the cry of every human heart that has suffered.
“But it is also the cry of God, who says, ‘Enough! Enough of blind eyes and hard hearts, enough of compensation instead of justice, enough of slander instead of truth, brute strength instead of gentle power, hunger instead of fullness!
‘The day is coming,’ says the Lord, ‘when I will restore the years lost to you, I will give back the withered legs carried in a wheelchair, I will fill those deaf ears with music beyond all imagining, I will satisfy those longings for which you have wept and pummeled your pillow on 10,000 nights.
‘On the longest night of the year, the word will become flesh and dwell among you. You will behold the glory and the truth of that word in Christ Jesus.’”**

*as quoted by J. Robert Wright in Readings For The Daily Office From The Early Church, p. 24

**taken from “The Cruelest Month” by Norman B. Bendroth, from The Christian Century, December 30 2008, p. 10

Mass and activities canceled Sunday Dec 21, 4 Advent

Friends in God--due to unusually severe winter weather, we shall not open the church building for Mass or other activities Sunday December 21, 4 Advent. We fully plan to be open and offering Mass on Christmas Eve (10:30 PM) and Christmas Day (10:00 AM). Check this 'blog tomorrow late morning for a sermon reflection for the Fourth Sunday of Advent. And check the 'blog for updates on weather conditions and how they may impact church activities.

The Collect for this Sunday is particularly beautiful...

"Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that at his coming our Lord Jesus Christ may find in us a mansion prepared for himself..."

Stay safe and warm, and pray for those among us who suffer on account of the weather.

Saturday 12/20 greening party canceled

Friends: the Saturday 12/20 greens-making party scheduled is canceled due to snow. Please check this 'blog for updates in church schedule, including Sunday AM Mass which is in doubt due to predictions of freezing rain.

Brigid's Table meal cancelled

Friends in God: Due to both present conditions as well as predictions for the next 24 hours, we have reluctantly cancelled Brigid's Table Christmas meal. Many thanks to all who have donated generously or who intended to volunteer.

Please check back on this 'blog for updates on parish service or activity schedules. And hey! Let's be careful out there! And keep in mind and prayer those who suffer most from this weather.