Sermons

As I shared with those who receive my weekly email, I’m reluctant to leave Advent, that 4 week period of tradition before Christmas. I’m actually sad about it. This long period of waiting and preparing, this period of refraining from singing carols and instead singing those Advent hymns no one really knows or wants to sing, finally ends. Tonight we celebrate a baby born for us, given to us, technically not until midnight, but we cheat so we can all have our dinners. You’re also more likely to stay awake during the sermon, but there’s no guarantees.

I learned this Advent season, that advent is to Christmas what Lent is to Easter. In the arc of any good story, whether it’s literature, or theatre, or a good movie, or scripture, there’s an arc. A beginning, a middle and an end. And if you skip over the middle to get to the end, you miss the deeper meaning. The

Christmas story is no exception. If you rush over the struggle, the doubt and the questions that belong to Zechariah and Elizabeth and the unbelievable trust that lives in the mystery and chaos for Mary and Joseph, than the birth of the baby we all celebrate this evening, might as well be just another birth.

The beauty of scripture is that the arc of the story is not linear, not a once and for all experience that we remember as having once happened, but a continual playing out of that experience as it continues to happen in our lives today.

Christ was born and came into the world for us over 2000 years ago, but the Gospel writer John who wrote significantly later than the other Gospel writers replaces the birth narrative by going back to the beginning of creation. There is no manger, no baby, no Joseph and Mary, no shepherds. In the beginning, Life itself comes through God with Christ. Nothing in this life, is without the light of Christ, because light and life itself are one.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
(John 1:5)

And this was especially clear to me during Advent as moments of illumination, moments of light and love presented themselves, broke through the darkness.

I have the privilege of walking with people who walk in some kind darkness. Those suffering the loss of a child, those diagnosed with illness, people suffering depression, job loss, divorce, addiction. I’m willing to bet there is not one of us here tonight who is not affected either directly or through a connection to someone you care about, who is not affected by some kind of profound loss.

We fill the sanctuary with lights, we decorate the outside and inside of house with lights, we light candles, and our eyes are drawn to the stars in these long dark nights, and if we’re lucky we get caught in the comfort of a stare…we get lost in staring at a small light in darkness, and allow ourselves to stop and see, not with our eyes, but with our whole being, what is happening for us, for our neighbors, for our country and our world. Biblical seeing is a change in perception, a new understanding, I was blind but now I see…And if you’re like me the headlines from this past year alone, is enough to make any of us question our faith because of a world that seems to have been overcome by darkness, blind to human kindness and decency. All of which, may not miraculously go away come Christmas morning.

And you probably thought you were going to show up and hear a lighthearted feel good sermon, and few carols and skip out of here didn’t you?

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Theologian Barbara Brown Taylor in her book, Learning to walk in the Dark, tells the story of Jacques Lusseyran, a blind French resistance fighter who wrote about his experience in a memoir called And There Was Light.

When Jacques was a boy he had full use of his eyes, and it wasn’t until his parents noticed that he was having trouble reading that they fitted him with glasses. Beyond that, he was an ordinary boy who did all the things that other boys do, including getting into fights at school. One week, around 1932, during one of those fights he fell hard against the corner of his teacher’s desk, driving one arm of his glasses deep into his right eye while another part of the frame tore the retina in his left. When he woke up in the hospital he could no longer see. At the age of seven he was completely and permanently blind.

He learned from the reactions of those around him what a total disaster this was. In those days blind people were swept to the margins of society, where those who couldn’t learn how to cane chairs or play an instrument for religious services often became beggars. Lusseyran’s doctors suggested sending him to a residential school for the blind but his parents refused,….The best thing his parents did for him was never to pity him. Soon after his accident his father, who deeply understood the spiritual life, said, “Always tell us when you discover something.”

In this way Lusseyran learned that he was not a poor blind boy but the discoverer of a new world in which the light outside of him moved inside to show him things he might never have found any other way. Barely ten days after his accident he made a discovery that entranced him for the rest of his life. He wrote- “The only way I can describe that experience is in clear and direct words,” “I had completely lost the sight of my eyes; I could not see the light of the world anymore. Yet the light was still there. Its source was not obliterated. I felt it gushing forth every moment and brimming over; I felt how it wanted to spread out over the world. I had  only to receive it. It was unavoidably there. It was all there, and I found again its movements and shades, that is, its colors, which I had loved so passionately only a few weeks before.

If we could learn to be attentive every moment of our lives, he wrote, we would discover the world anew. We would discover that the world is completely different from what we had believed it to be. (Christian Century)

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (John 1)

The light shines in the darkness… in those parts of the story we’d like to skip over. Those days we are sure the world can never be saved from itself… the blessing of Christmas breaks in and shines on those who are searching, those on the outskirts, in the most unlikely of places, who wander in the dark to see a baby who will change their perception of life. And the ones who rejoice first, are the most unlikely players, a young girl from a poor family, not royalty, a man engaged to a girl who disgraces their reputations by becoming pregnant, but because of his ability to trust a dream, endures the harsh judgment and shame of the world, a world that loves to judge and hate, and exclude and oppress. To that world, to that darkness, God brings a baby born at night, in a barn instead of a palace…

… and the first to the scene are some shepherds, among the most shady characters at that time, the ones the society of the world did not trust or like, they come to receive the blessing first, because as the Gospel writer Luke would have us remember, God comes for all people, even the ones you and I don’t like, the ones the world judges as not good enough, shleps if you will, the ones at the family dinner table no one understands, because he doesn't fit in, or the neighbor who has no time to say hello, or a world that divides itself into us and them categories…. God makes no such division in Christ and Jesus comes as a blessing for all of us, and you and I have a place in a story that changes the way we see the blessings that live around us and inside of us.

Something in the darkness gives way, breaks through…a stone is removed, and what was once dead is born again. And no one knows how, and no one can explain the science of it or the logic of it, or even the faith of it. When light returns, in that moment, the unfathomable mystery of birth takes over, and we see, we realize, love was never lost, but had been hiding, in exile, and is being given to us once again, in the birth of a baby who changes the way we see…

The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light…(Isaiah 9:2)

Since becoming blind, Lusseyran wrote. I have paid more attention to a thousand things,” One of his greatest discoveries was how the light he saw changed with his inner condition. When he was sad or afraid the light decreased at once. Sometimes it went out altogether, leaving him deeply and truly blind. When he was joyful and attentive it returned as strong as ever. He learned very quickly that the best way to see the inner light and remain in its presence was to love.

To see…to biblically see is to experience with your whole being…Do you see what I see? Can you pay attention, to your whole life? Every wonderful, tedious, boring, miraculous moment beyond the surface of it, and into the light of it, into the life of it… above you and below you, beside you, inside of you… comes the birth of the Christ child for you. Can you see it?

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Let us pray…Take our lips and speak through them take our minds and think through them, take our hearts and set them on fire. Help us to be the masters of ourselves that we might be a servant for others.

Amen.