Sunday, December 19, 2010

How God chose to do it


"Emmanuel," he shall be called, "God is with us, God with us."
I am always intrigued,  when we peel back the layers of Christmas wrapping and garland and get to the details of the story beneath, at the WAY that God chose to come into the world, to go from being God Almighty to becoming God WITH us.
We’ll talk in a few days about the absurdity of the birth event itself – the pronouncement to… random shepherds out in a field.  The labor and delivery in… an animals’ stable, and other such surprising details of God’s big personal debut.
But back up into Advent some more, where we sit today and wait for God's coming, and I am amazed all over again at God’s decisions.

"He will come to save the people from his sins," the angel tells Joseph. The angel tells Joseph, who is stuck in a real predicament, legally contracted to marry this girl who turns out to be knocked up.  Virgin birth for some is a sign of purity or divinity, and it certainly speaks volumes of a God who brings life out of impossibility. But like it or not, whatever it may actually be, all appearances indicate there has been some shady business afoot.  And poor Joseph, this isn’t even his child, so what does it say to him about his wife to be? And what does it say to the whole village about this girl he’s been pledged to?  He is within his rights to have her stoned for adultery, but decides to be kind and quietly divorce her instead.  So, when God comes to save people from their sins, it is as the bastard child of a loose woman and her humiliated fiancĂ©. 
This is the first decision of God’s coming that I question.

The second decision I question is the use of Mary and Joseph to begin with.  It seems like God is taking some awfully big risks all around.  Mary. Really? Why not someone tried and tested? A priest’s wife or a wise queen, a spiritual leader of some sort? Instead God picks Mary, a young unmarried girl in a nowhere town, and just kind of springs this messiah mama thing on her.  Thank goodness she said yes, or what then?

And Joseph - this commonplace carpenter, by the way - he’s getting ready to do the only thing he can think of that is both proper and compassionate, that doesn’t hurt Mary too terribly but follows some semblance of propriety and God’s law. Of course, God lets him puzzle out his plan first, and just when he is resolved to divorce Mary, God has another angel tell him in a dream that it will be ok and he should just go ahead and marry her and carry on as usual, because this is God’s baby. And You, Joseph, are to name him Jesus, which means, God saves, because he is coming to save all the people.
And so Joseph also signs on. 

But to what?  God doesn’t spell things out very clearly beyond that – after all, they do end up delivering in a pile of hay in a smelly barn outside an overcrowded inn in a busy town far from home.  Not exactly great planning.  And don’t even get me started on what happens after he’s born, it just seems like the whole thing gets patchworked together with this disorderly assortment of ordinary people bumbling through it all in shortsighted ways.

The thing that it leaves me with is incredulity. Amazement. A little awe.  God has got some guts. Coming to earth in this way. Just who does he think he is? Like he owns the place? No dignity, no dignitaries.  No etiquette or solid arrangements in place.  Starts out as a scandal, born like he’s homeless and then becomes a refugee, all before he walks or speaks his first word…  I guess what I am saying is that God just comes right on in any old way he pleases, doesn’t use the front door or the guest bathroom; barges in the back way with mud on his boots like he’s one of us.

And I think of Joseph and Mary, because when they’re such average, ordinary folk as this, it’s easy to go there, and I wonder, what I would do in their shoes?
And it partially frightens me because I have no idea what I would do. Would I say yes?  Would you?  Perhaps.  Maybe we would.  But it’s clear that the only "yes" one could give in a situation like this is a yes to the moment, to the overall concept, without any idea of what it meant in actuality. 
What would the next day be like? Or the day after that? What kind of long-term plans would it require or personality traits would it expect of me? What am I actually committing to?
So any "yes" that we could give would be a kind of brave but scared little yes, a nervous little yes that says, ok, God, you want to do it this way, I guess count me in.

And maybe that’s another thing I question about how God did this whole “coming into earth” thing.  I really like to know ahead of time what I am getting into, and it doesn’t seem like any of these folks had a clue.  They were pulled into this thing that just kind of unfolded as they went along.  Why didn’t God lay it out a little further in advance for them, give them some more heads up?  God seems to be placing an awful lot up for grabs.

God made some unusual choices in how God decided to become "God with us."   So, all this begs the question, What kind of God would come this way?
“You’ll never get a second chance to make a first impression,” goes the saying, so why this way?  You could do this any way you want, any way in the entire cosmos, and this is the way you choose?

What kind of God would come this way?
Well… a God who would come this way would be:
A God who has nothing to prove.  
One who doesn’t care one whit about appearances or public image. 
Not too worried about getting dirty, either. 
A God who likes to pull in the unexpected characters and out of the way locations.  
Gets a kick out of surprise and irony.  
Challenges the status quo.  
Is not easily intimidated.  
And who likes a little celebration and fanfare, but in the quirky, marginal way, not really center stage. 

This would be a God who comes for us all. Not for the wealthy or the well-connected or the powerful or pretty. Not for the righteous and the rule-keepers and the good girls and the brave boys.  
For us all.  And to prove it, decided that when it was his turn, he was going to come poor and disconnected, in a scandalous way to some very ordinary people.

He is in the line of King David, but not really, he’s adopted in by the love and naming of his adoptive father Joseph.  God comes to earth as an adopted kid.  And does it one haphazard step at a time, just like all the rest of us.

“This is the beginning,” the gospel of Matthew 1:1 declares, “the genesis of the good news about Jesus Christ…” And after a long genealogy that begins with new life out of Abraham’s old age and Sarah’s barren womb and ends with Jesus adopted in by Joseph, it goes on, where our text picks up, “Now the beginning, the birth, the genesis of Jesus the Messiah happens this way…”

This is the beginning. Again.  God is doing a new thing.  The Holy Spirit that hovered over the waters at creation hovers over Mary, and over Joseph, and over this whole situation, and the God who made it all now comes into it all by this same Spirit.  The new-thing Spirit, the hope-from-chaos Spirit, The life-out-of-barren-and-virgin-wombs Spirit.  God is doing something completely new, unexpected, unpredictable. And this is just the beginning.

Today’s Advent word is love.  We use that word today to pray for love and yearn for love and celebrate all the ways we experience love. And we take those places love is warped or waning and we point them out to God and wait for God’s response. 

But Love is who God is, and the reason God comes to begin with.
And it is "yes" to God’s love that Joseph says, maybe without even knowing that’s what he is doing. Yes. I will be part of your wild plot, your crazy conspiracy of love.  Yes I will choose to take her as my wife even though she’s pregnant. I will endure the looks and conjecture, the whispered rumors and reputation ruining, and say yes to be part of this thing you’re doing here.

And we say yes to God's love all the time without realizing that’s what we’re really doing.  “I will participate in God’s plot of love,” we say, when we uphold another’s humanity, when we listen to someone, really listen, when we give something up for someone else.  “I will be part of your love, God” we answer, when we share, or forgive, or confess, or embrace, when our ordinary lives bump into others’ ordinary lives, and we hang on and dig in for their sake.  We say yes like a peasant girl and a carpenter and some awestruck shepherds on a hillside outside town.

The amazing story of God’s Advent, God’s coming, is seen in retrospect.  It makes sense after the fact, when you get to pull back from the details and see the whole thing for what it is.

But in the moment it’s a single dream about an angel, it’s a conversation, some tears, a decision.  In the moment it’s paying taxes and packing donkeys and a dreary uncomfortable journey and painful contractions and nowhere to sleep.  In the moment it is just a moment, an ordinary moment made extraordinary because it is part of this story of Love, of God loving the world so much that God joined it with us, through us, through our ordinary moments and our yeses to God’s weird requests and to the person, or the invitation, standing before us.

Love her, be his daddy, is God’s message to Joseph. Say yes to that. Move forward into this life that I am laying out before you.
Don’t be afraid to do it. 
Say yes, and put one foot in front of the other, and see where it leads.

Christmas is by no means triumphant or sparkly. It’s messy and strange and uncomfortable, and anyone who makes it anything else is deceiving themselves.  Peel back the shiny paper and see it for what it is –
why, it’s just like the rest of life!  
Awkward and tiring and scary, a little exciting, a little confusing.  
That’s how God came in.  
Put himself completely in the hands of conflicted people, struggling to do the right thing and wondering even what that is.  Trusting these ordinary folks to trust him.  To take care of him like one of their own. To love him.
To say yes to God’s love. To loving God.

It may not be how you or I would plan it. 
It’s certainly not how anyone expected it to be.  
But it’s exactly how God chose to do it.  
This is the beginning of the story of Jesus Christ. 
The new beginning.   
Shall we say yes and see where it all takes us?

Sunday, December 5, 2010

The Peaceable, Impossible Kingdom, and we who hope in it



The other day Jeanne (our music director) pointed out to me that all these passages we have lately seem to say the same things. And she’s right. That’s part of Advent. We have artificially broken out these ideas into four weeks – hope, peace, joy and love-  but all of them are nestled in the darkness of Advent speaking out a reality that embodies the kingdom of God in full hope, and peace that floods the earth like water in the sea, and joy that springs neverending from the souls of all the people on earth, and love that defines and defends everyone.  They all have these grand and sweeping prophetic promises of God’s coming future. 
Reading these things, week after week, can potentially begin to feel mocking if we actually listen to their words because they speak about things that are completely impossible, visions of peace beyond anything we could begin to fathom.

“The peaceable kingdom” we call this vision in Isaiah 11.  In this vision a “a shoot springs from the stump of Jesse” – new promise from the line of David – (Jesse was King David’s father), life where things seemed over and done with, and such life it is! Where fierce predators lie down next to their vulnerable prey and they eat peacefully side by side and a young child leads the way – utter fantasy.  And we continue to read these various visions week after week in Advent in the midst of a world that seems farther and farther from anything resembling true peace.
And yet we keep going with this, as though somehow saying that God came to the world to save us at Christmas, and then talking about this beautiful and peaceful world God promises makes any difference at all in our day to day lives.  
So do we really believe in this idea put out there by scripture that seems utterly disconnected from reality?  Advent can send us into a real quandary if we allow it to.

But week after week, for a while anyway, we keep reading these things, and every week we put ourselves in that uncomfortable place of waiting for God.  
We read these Old Testament texts that seem to anticipate Jesus, God with us, as the promise of peace and hope.  We say, and sometimes even believe, that God has come and joined us even in this waiting, giving us in blood and flesh the promise of the future for which we wait, but nevertheless, we still wait.
Whenever we feel the horror that cancer still claims the ones we love and so does alcoholism, and anger, we are still waiting. 
Whenever we feel that disconnect between the love we know ties us to each other profoundly and the terrible things that come out of our mouths instead, or the petty things that come between us, we are still waiting.
Broken hearts and broken bodies and broken promises and the general breakdown of just about everything and everyone around us means we are waiting waiting waiting and it’s only so long you can wait before you start to ask, where are you God?

And the temptation with Advent and Christmas is to want to avoid this question and the deep and fearsome places it takes us, so we loiter in the shallows and stay surface, cheerful and strained, and we act like we’re basically satisfied with how things are, and so thankful for the good old fashioned religion that Christmas gives us - it’s just enough to dull the pain.
Or we widen the gap between the honest and the “faithful” by somehow believing that because we have Jesus we should be feeling more peaceful and hopeful and joyful and loving than we are. Or telling ourselves in the midst of some darkness or another that if we just prayed hard enough a miracle would happen, or that if we only had more faith we wouldn’t BE suffering or feeling so lost or confused.  And we might even say to other people in the midst of their own darkness that if they just believed in God, everything will be ok even if we don’t really believe that ourselves, or even if we do.

The truth is, Advent is the biggest joke around if every single year we say, Yay! Jesus is coming into the world to save us! and then we say it again the next year and again the year after that and in the meantime people still die and life is still hard and nothing at all ever changes, but we pretend every 12 months that somehow Christmas is supposed to be some big thing.  
But when we turn from the darkness in favor of a cheap, flickering lightbulb then we are about as from Advent’s true intent or the real meaning of Christmas as one can get.
So how do we keep waiting faithfully?
Or more to the point, how in faith, do we keep waiting?

However, the kingdom of God that is coming is also already here, we say. So, year after year, on behalf of a world that is mostly without hope we wait for hope, and live like it’s real.  And for a people nearly devoid of peace we wait for peace, and live like its real. And for a culture that is rarely truly joyful and very often unloving, we wait for joy and love, and live into the joy and celebrate the love we’ve sampled. 

We wait for those who don’t know there is something to be waiting for, and we wait for ourselves too because we need hope as much as the next person and peace is just as scarce in our own homes as it is anywhere else. 

Because God has come, we wait as those with whom God waits. We wait as the community in which the Spirit of the living Christ dwells, and we long for the fullness of God because we have tasted it from time to time and we know it is good.  As the people of the kingdom of God, waiting is something we must do.

Advent is the gift that rouses us from our complacency, when we start to accept the darkness as status quo, when we stop seeing the light or looking for it, and settle instead for a twilight existence.  Advent’s gift is that it reminds us to keep waiting.

So we wait as those impatient, urgent, saying, Come Lord Jesus! because we know God has come and is coming. We know that cancer isn’t the final word and disease and despair are not what defines people.  And so we, of all people, have a reason to cry out about the world’s pain and darkness. We, of all people, have eyes to see that the darkness does not belong and so to rage against it even as we trust in the one who is the light whom the darkness can never overcome.

A few weeks ago I preached about eschatological imagination. We were reading from a similar text in Isaiah, where the writer imagines the new heaven and new earth, and even mentions “the wolf and the lamb feeding together, the lion eating straw like an ox” along with all sorts of other descriptions of a people cared for and secure.  I said that it was the vivid and specific imagining of a reality that comes from God’s future and not from our own hands that gives us the courage to see and live into the kingdom of God now.
  
And I shared a story about Owen living from his eschatological imagination, being able to talk honestly with a boy who had been teasing him, and to reach out in friendship to this child even though Owen had felt so belittled by him. He had let himself be so taken with the vision of a way of living where people could be strong without making others weak, gotten so grounded in that view of the world through the lens of God’s future, that he lived from that place even though it wasn’t what he had been experiencing.  I posted the sermon on my blog and a few days later, I got this response:


Bronwen said...
hi Kara,
I'm in Adelaide, Australia. Thanks for this - my family was burgled last week, including surprising the intruder inside our kitchen at 3am when I'd just re-settled the baby I'd been up feeding... One of the things I've been struggling with since is how to manage my jangled nerve endings and concern for the safety of my son and partner - and to balance this "rational" fear with our desire to live open and welcoming lives. We don't want to put bars on our windows and huge "keep-out" fences around our yard. We want to engage with the community in which we live - we've been inviting neighbours and passers-by to pick and eat the vegies we grow just outside our fence line, for instance. So, your story about Owen hit a spot for me - in our eschatological imagination, we want our neighbourhood to be a place where people can sleep safely at night - where there aren't people so desperate for quick cash (for drugs, or whatever) that they will invade someone else's home... where we can engage with each other with interest, and care, rather than fear. I guess I'm in the middle of "wrestling" with just how to do this at the moment... thanks for the encouragement!

In this cycle-  me sharing my little boy’s story here in this little church in Minnesota, Bronwen sharing her story from Australia, me sharing hers with you, we are all seeing the darkness and living from the light, we are letting the vision of peace and harmony speak into a reality where it is often sorely absent.  It is not easy to live from this place; I am awed by Bronwen’s courage to wrestle with how to do that.  But sharing our stories, welcoming each other in our struggles and struggling together is living the kingdom of God, and sharing our stories, welcoming each other in our struggles and struggling together gives us strength to live, and wait, faithfully.

Throughout this season in our church, our big question has been What is church? And we’ve asked it each week.

When we recalled the story about the Israelites rebuilding the temple after returning from exile we said that the church is where God resides – that we are the people who retell and remember God’s faithfulness in the past and share the stories of God’s presence with us now.  This is living in the kingdom of God.

When we encountered these visions in Isaiah the first time around We said the church is a people with eschatological imagination – that we live from the future reality instead of what we can see, we let ourselves be guided by visions of hope, wholeness, respect, mutuality and love – which are promised to the world when God’s fullness is all in all, and shared in the world now.  This is living in the kingdom of God.

When we saw on Christ the King Sunday our king hanging on a cross and dying, we saw that God’s kingdom is the kind of kingdom that is best revealed in the person of a crucified God, and so we recognize that suffering is part of the human story and that God shares it with us.  We said that the church is the people who see and hear that God’s kingdom is breaking in all around is and so we watch for and join in its unfolding.
And we saw that God reveals God’s kingdom in the daily stuff of life, so we seek ways to actively participate in its coming in all sorts of ordinary ways, listening, praying, helping, caring, singing and sharing.  This is living the kingdom of God.

Today, with another vision of God’s future, and the words of promise and blessing to the community of faith, we see the church as the people who wait together and hope together, guided by a vision of peace. We share our stories of struggling and welcome everyone and their own stories of struggling.  We hope with and for each other, and for the world when there seems to be no hope of peace. We are the community of shared hope who struggle, and wait, together.  This is living the kingdom of God.

May we, with all the collective courage and conviction of a people who have glimpsed the future’s peace in the person of Christ, again wait faithfully for the coming of our Lord.
Amen.












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