Right Into the Middle of It All

LNPC Christmas Eve 2012

Luke 2:1-20

I need to hear the Christmas story this year, to remember that God crept in beside us, that this world is shot through with love and hope. I’m craving the good news of great joy for all the people.

But there’s a line in the Christmas story that has always bothered me.  It’s when the choir of angels sing, “On earth peace among those whom he favors” – it’s also been said, “Peace on earth to men of good will,” or “peace on earth to those who please God.”  

 

Of course, we human beings are divisive and exclusionary, it’s sin’s hold on us, the way of fear that has us always competing and comparing, always striving to be good enough, and deciding who isn’t good enough. So translating it this way fits our distorted projection of who God is and what God must be up to.  

 

But it doesn’t fit what we know about the Kingdom of God, and who God really is and what God is really up to in the world, particularly at Christmas, when God comes into this life to save us.  And I’ve learned over the years that wherever we make the message of Jesus Christ narrow and obstructive we’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way and it’s worth retracing our steps.  

 

So, I did some digging into the Greek this week. And it turns out that the word “favors” means pleased in, delighted by. It’s the same word God speaks over Jesus at his baptism; This is my beloved child, in whom I am deeply pleased.

So when those ecstatic angels who cannot contain themselves blast their joy into the faces of the terrified shepherds, they are singing, Glory to God in the highest heavens! And on earth, peace to the humans, in whom God is utterly delighted! Y’all humans are God’s favorite! Glory to God and bottomless connection between God’s very own beloved children!

 

God is so utterly committed to us that God came right in with us to share it all, so that we might never again be separated by death, so that the end of this story is decided once and for all.  Christ has come to free us all from the bondage, judgment and suffering we inflict on ourselves and others, and bring us into peace.  God’s peace is not just for a few, for those who earn it or deserve it or claim it.  God has come for whole earth, and every person here belongs to God and to the rest of us. There is no pain or suffering of a single one of God’s beloved human beings any place on this wide planet that God is not intimately bearing with and tending to. There is no human joy that God is not celebrating.  

 

Each of our lives get to be part of glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth, our lives get to be for peace between all beloved human beings on this whole wide earth. God is doing this, it has begun and will continue until it is complete.  

 

Right now everything feels hard, we’re weary and strained, the future is unclear, the present is not simple, the world is aching, and life and death are close to the surface. So what better time is there to tell each other again about God coming in as a tiny, vulnerable human baby, born incognito, in the middle of unfortunately-timed road trip, to a teenage girl and the man who agreed to be the child's daddy? 

These two beloved, overwhelmed humans were living in the midst of great unknown and upheaval, making do with whatever they had, and welcoming God into the world, right into the middle of it all.  

Beloved human, God is utterly smitten with you, and with every person on this planet.  And God is here with us all. So we will tell each other the story again, and welcome God into the world, right into the middle of it all.  

May you go into your Christmas, whatever it looks like and whatever it holds, with your heart open to whatever cocktail of joy and grief, love and disappointment, hope and longing may be bubbling within you tonight. God comes in to be with you just as you are, and to bring us all peace. 

Christ has come; the world belongs to God.  Christ is here; we are not alone.  Christ is coming; the future is God’s.

Amen.

 

Recipients of Grace: God-bearers and Love Sharers

 

Luke 1:26-38

 

When I announced on Facebook last week that my book is coming out in June, I experienced that Facebook phenomenon - where people from different parts of my life, people I haven’t seen in decades, people I knew in different parts of the country or different countries, responded to me with well wishes. It was so nice to hear from them, but I grew increasingly uncomfortable when I realized how many of these people sending me kind messages, are actually in the book. So many of them.  

People who said, “So excited for you, Kara! I’ve just pre-ordered my copy!” are going to open the book unsuspectingly in June and get partway through and suddenly recognize themselves on the page.  Some are there by name, many others not, but when they get to their part they will know it’s them. 

 

But somewhere in the middle of the week I shifted from mild horror to gratitude.  God has met me through so many different people, in small ways, and big ways, and ways most of them were probably not even aware of at the time. So my story is their story too.  

 

We are part of each other’s story.  We forget this, but it’s true. We are all connected. Every person’s story is part of other people’s stories, and they are all one big story – the story of God, the story of love.

 

“In the sixth month,” our text begins, which isn’t a beginning at all.  We act as though the incarnation of God coming into this world in the flesh begins here, with this moment of great invitation in the conversation between Mary and Gabriel, but it doesn’t begin here, really.  This part of the story starts six months into someone else’s story – Elizabeth and Zechariah, who were old and childless and are now expecting a baby boy who will be the messenger of the Messiah, and Elizabeth is 2/3 of the way through her pregnancy by the time Gabriel is sent to recruit Mary.  

 

But that story is inside another story too, and that inside of others; this thing goes back farther and reaches out wider than any one person or family, any one people or nation, any one year or century or millennia, even. Abraham and Sarah, Ishmael and Hagar are part of this story, Isaac, Rebekah and Jacob and Leah and Rachel and generations and centuries of a people longing for a Messiah, people enduring oppression and finding freedom, losing and finding their way, trusting and longing for God. It’s the story shaped by the rise and fall of empires, by flood and promise, and it goes all the way back to a voice speaking life into being, light into darkness.  

 

No story is ever on its own, no person’s story is ever just their own.  Which is to say, no moment or act of love is ever isolated – it’s all connected; we are all connected. 

 

So when Mary receives this invitation to be part of God’s coming in, God’s love coming right inside of all of this to be with us as one of us, she hears also, at the same time, that she is not in this alone.  That even now her relative Elizabeth in her old age has conceived a son and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. Gabriel says, Your part starts here, Mary, but Elizabeth and Zechariah – this is their story too that you are stepping into. And they are already part of yours. You are not in it alone. 

 

This is the 4^th week of Advent when we light a candle for Love.  Love is what we are here for - we are made to love and be loved.  Love is our life instinct, the energy that drives us back to our source and purpose.  Love is our deepest belonging – to God and to each other. 

Loving each other is to vulnerably give ourselves to another and receive them, and when we love another person we feel that depth of belonging, and tap into the belonging that holds us all together in God. God breathes love into us and that makes us alive, connected, human. And love never ends. Not ever.  

 

No life is ever just our own – we lie to ourselves when we act like this is so. We always belong to all others and they to us. But from this moment onward, Mary will feel it. She will know herself and all others to be held in God’s love – she will see her participation.  Mary was being invited to have her life commandeered by love. She is being asked to bear God, as God comes in to love the world. 

 

“Favored one” Gabriel calls her. That’s a misleading translation that makes it sound like it’s something Mary has done that has endeared her especially to God and earned her this place.  Really, that word “favored” means, recipient of God’s grace, one on whom God is pouring grace.  So when Gabriel says, “Don’t be afraid, you have found favor with God,” he is really saying, Don’t be afraid, God is pouring grace on you.  

 

God will come into Mary’s impossibility with grace and claim her for the embodiment of love, and from this point onward, she must see the world as loved by God. She can’t not see all other people as those to whom, for whom, God comes in, because it is through her own body that God is coming to them, it is by her hands and words and actions and tears and laughter that love will touch the world.  

 

Mary’s invitation is unique – to bear God within her, let God love the world through her. But Mary’s invitation is also the invitation God extends to us all every moment. To vulnerably open our hearts and let God claim our lives.  When we do we too will bear God within us and let God love the world through us. 

 

How can this be?  Mary asks.  It’s impossible.  And Gabriel preaches to Mary what our own tired, fearful, confused and frustrated hearts need to hear, though we can barely allow ourselves to hear it.  Our vigilant safeguarding heads block us from hearing it, but I invite you to hear it now, as Mary’s heart opened up in spite of her own protective head to hear this from God’s messenger: Nothing is impossible with God.  Nothing.

  

Lots of things are impossible with us. So many things are impossible. We know impossibility in the core of us, and we fight against it all the time. We can’t extend our lives, our health, our minds.  We can’t guarantee those we love stay always safe and well.  We have broken dreams we can’t reclaim, and broken relationships we can’t figure out how to mend, and brokenness woven right into all the complex layers of our relating to each other as a nation.  Day after day, we live right up close to impossibility.   I mean look at us, this virus that we can’t see is ravaging the human population of the whole entire world. If there were ever an Advent to feel our human impossibility, this is it.  This is the time for sitting in the darkness and longing for the light. 

 

So when God sends messengers to tell us that you and I will bear the love that we are incapable of bearing, that we will be people through whom connection and belonging reach into the world, into the places of need and struggle, to those from whom we feel impossibly disconnected, we too say, How can this be?

How can this be since I am afraid? How can this be since I feel nothing but contempt or confusion toward those people? How can this be since we have nothing in common, we don’t believe the same things even? How can this be since I am so far away? How can this be since I have nothing to give? No experience, no resources, no voice? How can this be?

 

And the word comes back to us just as that word has come to all bearers of God’s love since the beginning of time: Nothing is impossible with God.  

So it’s ok if things are impossible with us.  Nothing is impossible with God. 

 

Your story is the story of God who comes in. And it’s part of the stories of all those around you. It doesn’t start with you, your involvement begins in the sixth month—or the sixth year, the sixtieth year, the six hundredth year—of someone else’s story, just as someone else’s story starts in the middle of yours, and one day you may find that you are mentioned as having been a bearer of God to them.  We are all connected, and we are all held in love.

 

I love that Mary’s first move after the angel leaves is to hightail it to Elizabeth and Zechariah’s house.  Perhaps like those three in those days, we might look on one another as recipients of grace and remind each other that we are not in this alone. Perhaps like they did, we might help each other trust the God who comes in as God seeks to come into the world through us, and together navigate the deep toll it takes to live in such stark awareness of being so very beloved, among and alongside all these other deeply loved humans on this planet for whom God comes in. And together, like Zechariah, Elizabeth and Mary, right up against our own impossibility and the world’s, we will live from the nothing being impossible for God.

 

May it be so.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Amen.

Birth Announcement

 Some of you know that for the past four years I have been working on a book. Some of you have nudged me along with your supportive cajoling, and buoyed me through with grace when the gestation was longer and more arduous than my own impatience imagined it should be. It turned out to be just what this book needed to become what it was meant to be. So thank you, friends.  And thank you, Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church who recognized this calling and offered accountability and encouragement throughout - this is their story too.

I'm so pleased to announce that The Deepest Belonging is coming out June 1 and is now available for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop (independent booksellers).  

Where does God meet us in this life? Rooting Christian faith in joy, freedom, and trust that God interacts with us in this life, The Deepest Belonging: A Story of Discovering Where God Meets Us invites readers to walk through surprising doorways--weakness, vulnerability, smallness, rest, and honesty--into a new perspective of the Christian life and the role of the pastor.

Kara Root draws wisdom from three compelling stories, all about finding freedom on the other side of fear. In one thread, Marty, a member of the small congregation Root serves, learns that he is dying. In the second, Root finds that her once-invincible faith of assurance and answers collapses.

These stories come together in a third, when the congregation does a unique and counterintuitive thing: it commissions Marty to a "ministry of dying." By embracing instead of fleeing death, Marty, this community, and Root herself are infused with life through shared experiences of God. They learn to be vulnerable and brave. They discover--again and profoundly--an unguarded faith of wondering and watching for God's presence.

This is a book for all pastors and church leaders, as well as for those disillusioned with Christianity and the church and longing for something more real and honest. It explores questions such as: How does God meet us? What is church for? What is a pastor? What does it mean to be truly human?

The Deepest Belonging is a call not to resist but to embrace our vulnerability. As a move away from religion seeking security, protection, and influence, this story invites individuals and congregations to return bravely to the core of our humanity: our belonging to God and one another.

PEACE: Living the Permanent in the Temporary

ADVENT 2 

2 Peter 3:8-15a

Sometimes the drama of some of our scripture writers can feel like a bit much, especially in the genre known as apocalyptic literature – something we don’t recognize readily in our time.  Both Jewish and Greek apocalyptic imagery is used in this letter - chaos, destruction, fire and earth-shaking power and upheaval that we find hard to stomach but would have been familiar to those receiving this letter. (I like to imagine a first century person trying to make sense of our sarcastic banter-filled romcom genre).
 
When we struggle with how to read something in the bible, it helps to come back to our question, Who is God and what is God up to?
 
God is bringing about a future, this letter tells its recipients, in which there is a definitive and dramatic end to evil. 
 
Apocalypse in the Greek means to “uncover, reveal, lay bare, or disclose.”  Apocalyptic literature often paints scenes and stories of destruction that tears open the status quo to bring God’s justice and peace by first exposing and revealing all that is for what it really is.
This is good news if you’ve got nothing to hide.
 
Everything done on this earth will be disclosed, we’re told – no powerful secrets, no profiting on the back of the weak, no back room deals, no human degradation, systemic injustice, no abuse or destruction will prevail, all arrogance and greed and cruelty will be revealed for what it really is. 
 
And God is generous and patient with us.  God’s preference is that that everyone let their life and heart be put back in alignment to God’s way of love and connection, so that none have to face the condemnation of judgment. But the bottom line message is that evil will not go on forever, there is an end to it, and what will remain is the very essence of God in Christ – love and belonging goodness, and connection that is stronger, deeper, wider, eternal, and cannot be broken.
That’s what God is up to.
 
Like many people before us, in many times before this, we, now, are in apocalyptic times.  There is a great upheaval and change, things are being revealed, laid open for all to see, and through the chaos and struggle something is coming on the other side of this that we are not yet in.  It’s painful, confusing, and the ground beneath us feels very unstable.
 
And one paradox in apocalyptic times is that when people don’t feel peace, we tend to work against it. In our desperation for security we scramble for footing and we end up pushing away the very thing we long for most.  These times are ripe for conspiracy theories – they’re a way to feel powerful and know “the truth,” so predictably, right now we can see them everywhere. And these times are also filled with invitations to demonize each other, demands to pick sides and pass judgment, to define battle lines and destroy enemies. 
 
Friday on the PBS NewsHour Mark Shields said, “…the first thing I learned when I came to Washington [is] that you don't question the motives of somebody on the other side, that they love their country and their children as much as you do. And they may be mistaken, they may be ill-informed, they may be illogical, but you don't start off with, ‘they're evil.’”
Now we start off calling each other evil.  And when we don’t even hesitate to label each other as evil, we open the door for evil. We downplay evil and open our hearts to welcome in wider division, deeper hatred, greater revulsion toward our human siblings – we make it ok to threaten others with violence and destruction.  We cease to live in our true identity as those who belong to each other and to God. And when we stop seeing others’ humanity we begin to lose our own humanity. 
 
If this is our starting point, how can we ever find peace?  
 
This brings us to our second question. This letter is written to a community struggling to figure out - what is a good life and how do we live it? They were dealing with dissention and strife on top of persecution and suffering, and while people were peddling conspiracy theories among them, they were wondering how to tell what’s true.
 
“Scoffers are going to scoff” the letter says earlier, exposing with colorful language those whose greed and deception are on full display as they manipulate and lie and take advantage of others for their own gain, undermining the message of Christ. But, when we are stirred up, divided and afraid, exposing lies for what they are just entrenches us further in our division.
 
So, what do we do? How should we live? Peter answers: We should live like God’s reality is really real. Live in peace.  Anticipate God’s future with our lives.
 
Remember last week we said: Hope is trust in the future that doesn’t come later.  And it comes not from within us but from outside us- from God. And that we get to hope through contagious patience, through acknowledging our need, naming the despair and waiting for God’s arrival there. 
Hope is what fuels peace.
 
But while hope meets us from outside us, peace is something we can make. Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the peace-makers.” Peace is the experience of life as God intended - everyone belonging to God and belonging to each other. It is Shalom, completion wholeness – of you and me, of creation, of society, of life. So blessed are the wholeness bearers, the rift-menders and pain-sharers, the unity-rememberers and future-forecasters.
 
Peace-making is not weakness, capitulation, burying your head in the sand.  Peace is the strongest, truest form of life –that God created us for and is leading us to. Peace outlasts all conflict and chaos. 
So the most powerful thing we can do in these times is to be peace-makers. 
 
But that means we must first be grounded in peace. 
In challenging and uncertain times, without peace ourselves, we will feel threatened and overpowered by chaos and fear, easily persuaded that we should rise up and fight dirty.  The way of fear convinces us we are in an urgent, constant, competitive battle - for the soul of our nation, for the future of our church, for the honor of our family, for the integrity of our position, for our own well-being and survival, whatever it is, the stakes, we’re told, are life and death.  So we are justified in contributing to the division and pandemonium, because we tell ourselves that if we don’t, then evil –evil ideology, evil decisions, evil policies, evil practices, let’s face it, evil people will win.  
 
But, there’s another way.  If we fueled by hope we can be rooted in peace. And hope tells us that nothing is hidden that won’t be revealed, that evil will not stand, that love is stronger and permanent, that all brokenness will be healed and all injustice and wrong will be made right, and the future that doesn’t come later consists of peace, God’s wholeness, and we can right now live from that place. 
The Holy Spirit is here, now, already doing that work. It will not end.
 
We are made free. We need just to let go our crazy tight grip and trust that.  We can see each other through eyes washed by grace, hear each other with hearts humbled by belonging, reach out to each other with compassion stirred by recognizing the powerful motivator fear wreaking havoc, that needs love to cast it out. 
 
We can embody that love by sharing each other’s suffering, standing with one another where Jesus is - in our shared vulnerability and weakness. We can live our unity, even in disagreement and disappointment. We can sink into our own forgiveness and walk around forgiving excessively.  We can welcome, and welcome, and welcome each other, all others, welcome this whole wide world in all its pain and beauty and let it break us open to welcome it some more, without end, and without fear of losing anything, because we are already found in Christ. We can be people who contribute to wholeness and home, calm and solidarity, people who invest in cooperation, and highlight goodness, and attend to wonder, and celebrate joy, and add harmony whenever, and wherever, and however we can.  We can be at-peace peace-makers.
 
Making us into this is also what God is up to.
 
Heads up, though: When we live that way in this climate, we will get pushback.  
It might look to some like we’re not on “the right side.” 
 
We’re not. 
There are no sides. That’s fear talking. 
 
So look past the rhetoric and the noise. See the tender, fearful hearts of our human family members. See the longing of the tired earth and the anxiety of shaky governments and uneasiness of the apocalyptic moment of revealing that we are standing in and, hear this promise today, children of God: 
 
Evil will not prevail. God’s peace will one day be all in all.  
 
So pay attention. God is doing this in the world. And we get to be part of it.  
By the Spirit of God moving through our own words and actions, you and I can actually help bring that peace into this life now from the future that is coming. May it be so.  Come, Lord Jesus.
Amen.

HOPE: Contagious Patience for a Future that Doesn't Come Later

 ADVENT 1 

Isaiah 64:1-4

Hope doesn’t come from us. It doesn’t come from what we do, or how things are going. It’s not wishing, or propping up expectations or anything shallow or flimsy like that.  Hope comes from outside us, reaches from before us and stretches beyond us. Hope is when we exist inside the promise from the Divine about a future we can’t create.  

For us to be seized by hope, it is necessary to be grounded in reality, both the real reality that we all belong to God and we all belong to each other no matter what, but also the reality of whatever we are living in and experiencing right now.  Hope can only come in reality – not in fantasy, or religious platitudes, or sanitized scenarios that settle for the appearance of good rather than good itself.
 
This means that to feel hope, to find ourselves hopeful, we need to first embrace the experiences we are in – even the fear. We need to be willing to look at our sin – which is just a fancy word for our disconnection from God and each other in all the many ways that plays out. We need to tell the truth about the brokenness and even evil, inside us and around us. We let ourselves feel it and grieve it, and we say boldly, Things are not as they should be! because we know there is more.  Hope is knowing it could be different, it should be different, it will be different.  Hope is always about wrongs being made right.  So we need to look wrong in the face and call it wrong.  
 
Hope is the promise that we will see God’s goodness not when everything is ‘all better,’ but now, in the brokenness, in the cries for justice and the suffering of injustice, in the midst of an earth in crisis, in the grips of a worldwide illness, the corruption of governments and the selfishness of commerce notwithstanding, not apart from but right within the frailty of the human body and the vulnerability of human bonds.
 
We have talked about having an eschatological imagination – being people who live now shaped by what will be, by God’s future. A big word for those with eschatological imagination is nevertheless.  Nevertheless, we will see the goodness of God. Anyway.  Here. now. It’s like we said during Lent: Fear asks, What if? And Hope answers, Even if. 

David Steindl-Rast calls hope, "opennesss for a future that does not come later."  He says, 

Some people imagine that hope is the highest degree of optimism, a kind of super-optimism.... A far more accurate picture would be the hope happens when the bottom drops out of pessimism.  We have nowhere to fall but into the ultimate reality of God's motherly caring.
 Hope is a passion for what is possible... And since patience is as contagious as impatience, it will also be our way of strengthening each other's hope.
 
Christ has come, the light shines in the darkness. God is here with us in this life, always, always, always bringing life out of death and speaking hope to despair, meeting us here, in the real moments of our real lives and the real brokenness of the real world.  
 
Fredrich Buechner says,
"Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in the stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of humankind. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant's child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too."
 
So we watch for God. We wait for God.  In any and all circumstances. We are the people who live in openness for a future that does not come later.  The aliveness God brings is not just a remix of what is, it's something new and different, that comes into our impossibility with a new possible. 

So we long for God’s aliveness, we expect God’s aliveness, we watch for God’s aliveness in the places of deadness, with an “even if” and “nevertheless” patience that is as contagious as impatience.  
 
Advent is the season of contagious patience. We are the people of contagious patience. 
God comes in, so we watch for God. Christ is here, so we seek Christ. 
We live in openness for the future that does not come later, and God makes us people of hope.
Amen.