The Lullaby Sung Over Us

A Christmas Eve Sermon in Two Parts...

Last February, our family went to visit the Holy Land. We stood in the town where Elizabeth greeted Mary and the child in her womb leapt for joy, and walked the streets where Joseph led the donkey through the darkness with his pregnant wife.  We looked up at the same sky that was filled with angels on the night Christ was born, over the very hills in Bethlehem where the shepherds were keeping sheep.  I brought back olive wood crosses for the congregation carved by people who trace their Christian ancestry back to those same shepherds, and we used them to pray with during Lent.

I say that because tonight, we cannot gather here apart from the poignant pain, violence and anguish people are suffering in the very place where Christ came into the world to bring peace to us all.  We belong to each other, all of us. All of us. And Christmas is shallow and stupid if it doesn’t have something to say to the real horrors of life, and the evil we human beings can do to one another.  

 

I have no more energy left for polite cheer, sentimental tradition and shallow “good will.”  If this all doesn’t mean something bigger and more powerful than death and destruction, then it’s just a mockery of those who are suffering, and I’d rather skip it.

 

So I want to begin tonight by saying, that it does. That what happens here, and all over the world this night, is a strange, subversive and upside-down power.  We’re here tonight to claim that God comes not with might and muscle, to destroy enemies and rule by force, but in weakness and vulnerability to be loved by we who love one another, to be killed by we who kill one another, and to take all the world’s suffering into God’s very being, so that nothing – not the worst that can happen – can separate us from love.

 

This Advent we’ve let Lullabies lead us. They’re sneaky, lullabies, unlike their gentle and sweet sound, lullabies’ power is fierce and grounding, linking us to the ancient song of joy that the universe still sings, giving shape and structure to our hope, and keeping us connected to God and each other because lullabies come from love, and trust in love, and lay over the tired beloved a blanket of love.

 

So all through Advent, we’ve been singing. We’re singing to stay connected to hope, to seek peace and justice, and to remember that this whole world and everyone in it belongs to God.  We’re singing to counter despair, cynicism, and meanness, to stay soft and open to the world that God loves, ready to be used in the service of love.  As we sing tonight, I want us not to be the one bearing the message, but the ones hearing God’s lullaby sung over us.

 Tonight we are here to receive the God who comes in. God comes into this moment. And in this moment when God comes in, we are joined together with all those who’ve gone before—from those we’ve each loved and lost, to those who lived these moments thousands ago that we’re recounting this evening, through all those in the centuries in-between, the ones who wrote these carols from the 4^th to the 19^th centuries, and all those who sang them through the world’s wars, storms, and tragedies, along with quiet and contented Christmases gone by, to all those who are singing them around the world this very day. We’re all connected, and we are all held in the love of the One whose story we this story we sing and tell tonight. 

 

So we receive that gift too, in whatever way it appears. Tears, laughter, ambivalence, silence – it’s all welcome here, as we, and they, and God, celebrate God breaking the barriers of life and death and coming into this life alongside us, with us, and for us.

 

Now, to prepare our hearts to receive, I want to turn to the carols, or, as we are hearing them tonight, the lullabies, themselves. 

 

A few years ago, when the world was feeling particularly exhausting, I was driving down the freeway with carols playing on the radio, and the line jumped out at me, “a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices.” And I felt such longing arise in me that it brought tears to my eyes. Yes! I thought. I want this.

 

Because these songs that have been sung in the world for centuries, have become the background sound of shopping and movies, we’ve largely stopped hearing the words of truth and comfort about who God is and what God is doing. 

 

So we are going to pause a moment and prepare ourselves to really hear the words of these familiar carols. We are going to listen to the cosmic lullaby that is coming at us in many tunes tonight. 

For the next couple of minutes you’re invited to page through the bulletin with your highlighter and highlight some lines that resonate with your soul – a few messages you need particularly to hear, lines that ignite longing, or hope, hunger, or gratitude. Anything that has energy around it for you or jumps out at you, highlight it now. 

 

And then we’ll begin.

Following Lessons & Lullabies...

When our son Owen was born, the nurse handed Andy the tiny, swaddled child, red-faced and crying. Andy instinctively began bouncing him, and then spontaneously sang what was to become Daddy’s bedtime lullaby over Owen for years to come, “Owen dear, do not fear, do not fear, your Daddy’s here. You might be sad, you may be scared, but you’re not alone.

It is a fearful thing to live and one day die.  As my young nephew quipped to his mother, “I did not consent to being born.” We just begin, and one day, quite regardless of whether we consent to it or not, our earthly life will end. And from our first breaths, we already sense how precarious all this is. Even before we can say so, we already feel scared, and we feel sad, and we feel alone. 

Being human is fundamentally, existentially, terrifying.  If we’re not currently afraid, we undoubtedly have been, and we most certainly will be again. We are united in this human experience with Mary, with Joseph, with the shepherds, and the vulnerable Christ Child. With Palestinian children, and Israeli grandmothers, with Russian moms and Ukrainian dads, with all who suffer starvation and war, and all who are trapped in depression or entombed in addiction, with beloved ones whose minds and memories are slipping away, and with all those whose bodies are ravaged by illness, with those teetering on the threshold of unknown, and those grieving the loss of what was. All people, throughout all time, are, very often, afraid.  

Two thousand years ago, a child is born into a time of upheaval and strife, under the shadow of an oppressive empire, into an insecure and unstable moment, in a less than ideal delivery room far from home. Ready or not, the child comes.  His parents welcome him in pain and joy, acutely aware of their perilous circumstances.  

And what a dangerous thing it always is, bringing a child into this heartbreaking world, filling our hearts with love, and guaranteeing our lives will know loss and sorrow and so will theirs.  

Two thousand years ago, in the darkness a new mother sings a lullaby over her newborn son.  She does not know what lay ahead for him.  Shushing his cries as she bounces him in her arms, in her own mixture of wonder, exhaustion, and fear, the young mother gazes into the face of her tiny son and sings, Jesus, dear, do not fear. Do not fear, your mommy’s here. You might be scared, you may be sad, but you’re not alone.  

And in the way of human children, our God is welcomed in.

"The crux of our Christian faith is this mind-boggling story that the Almighty crept in beside us. Came into this world as a helpless baby, into the arms of those he came to save, to share this life with us, to be with us. And then Jesus dies, taking all that separates us from God, all destruction and brokenness, even death itself, into God’s very being. Then Jesus rises from the dead. And the power of death and division is shattered by the unquenchable light and incarnate love of the world. And there is nothing, nothing, nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus."

There is nothing stronger than this. No army can defeat a mother’s love for her child. No technology or weapon is stronger than the bond between true friends. There is no terrorist or demagogue, no corruption or evil, no illness or suffering, of any kind, that can stop love.  All over the world, through next door neighbors, and kindergarten teachers, and great uncles, and little sisters, and strangers reaching out to help each other, the transformative power of love leaks between the cracks, and spills over the edges, and rises up between us with healing and tenderness, and even in the midst of terrible bondage, love sets us free.   And as anyone who has lost a loved one can tell you, not even death itself ends love. Love cannot be stopped. 

While nations rage and powers shake, in every place at every moment, love is breaking through, people are sitting with one another in their suffering, celebrating with each other in their joy, listening, seeing, sacrificing, embracing, joining God right where God already is. God’s love is embodied. We are part of that love. We are held in that love. This is God’s way.  From love we came and to love we will return. And in between, when we love, we are joining in the greatest force on earth.

Like a lullaby in the darkness, love holds us fast. This doesn’t make it feel any less like darkness.  But in that darkness, the light shines.  Because into that darkness God comes.  

Do not fear! The angelic chorus proclaims over the whole world, Do not fear, your God is here! You might be scared, you may be sad, but you’re not alone!

PRAYER

Holy One, we entrust ourselves, 

those we love dearly, 

all those we belong to throughout the planet, 

and the very world itself, 

into your arms, you who holds us all in love. 

Help us receive your love and care, 

and let your love shape our living.

Attune our hearts to the infinite and unbroken lullaby, 

sung by the Spirit over all the earth, 

embodied in God-with-us. 

Amen.

Song of Joy (Advent 3)

December 17 - Advent 3

1 Thessalonians 5:16-24

This is the week of Advent dedicated to joy. Joy is when our very innermost selves reverberate with God’s touch.  Last week we said “peace” means wholeness and fullness – life as God intends it to be. Joy is when that wholeness, that absolute connection to God and each other, is felt with a jolt.  It’s a momentary taste of life as it was meant to be. Anne Lamott says, “Peace is joy at rest. Joy is peace on its feet.” In the past we’ve called Joy “pre-membering” God’s future breaking in now, momentarily tasting what Hope, our theme the first week of Advent, articulates. 

But letting down your guard to be open to joy is extremely vulnerable. To take deep pleasure in a moment of true connection touches us in our very core. It can be scary to be this real, this alive.  We’re exposed as simply human, when so often we protect ourselves from this reality. 

 

Not to mention that these days, joyfulness might seem naive or out of touch.  With so much suffering and violence in the world, perhaps we think that if we’re seeking joy, we must not be paying attention. But scripture suggests it’s actually the other way around: When we are really paying attention, joy finds us.

 

“Rejoice always,” Paul says, but we tend to separate that from the next instruction, to “pray without ceasing.” This has been interpreted and attempted countless of ways over time. From the extreme, like the group that demands people turn away from an ordinary life to keep a 24-hour prayer and worship service going for decades, to the ancient practice of personal breath prayers, trying to match your breathing to scripture of repentance to God, so that it eventually constant prayer becomes an unthought practice, Christians have been trying to understand and practice this praying without ceasing business for millennia. 

 

We most often think of prayer as stepping out of the world momentarily to turn toward God, but Bonhoeffer says prayer is inextricable from our life in the world, merged with our concrete activity and relationships with others.  Christ comes into this world to share life with us, so we meet Christ as we share life with each other.  Prayer – or listening to God, attentiveness, availability -  happens in our concrete life, our daily work and activities. When Paul admonishes us to pray without ceasing is, Bonhoeffer describes this as “finding the You of God behind the It of the day’s work.” 

 

Our prayer reaches beyond the deliberate times of pausing and addressing God, into all parts of every day, infusing meaning, into ordinary life, opening us to joy. So, to pray without ceasing actually means tuning into our belonging to both God and our neighbors, practicing awareness of our connection both to the One from whom our life comes and to those to whom our life flows.  When everything we do becomes a prayer in this way, Bonhoeffer describes it as, “a breaking through from the hard It to the gracious You.”

 

The “hard It” of the day can be horrifying. Right now, we dare not turn our gaze away from Gaza and the terror unfolding minute by minute there. But that’s today’s hard It. Yesterday we were looking at Ukraine – which is still a living nightmare, but our limited attention spans can’t hold everything at once, so we pick and choose which It disasters and crises to highlight. Mass shootings are stacking up multiple per day, people seeking a safe place to live are dying on the seas, and the week before Christmas we keep toying with 50 degrees above zero—our planet is in crisis. 

That’s to say nothing of the more personal realities we carry with us like a heavy cloak around our shoulders – the heartbreaking struggle of someone we love, our own private rage or sorrow, the burdens of addiction or separation – it’s all the It – the ground on which our lives unfold, the stuff of working and relating we do every day as human beings.  

Mix all that intense stuff up with the mundane list-making, germ-fighting, money-counting, deadline-meeting, chore-completing, gift-buying, worry-piling, traffic-fighting pressures of modern day-to-day life in a noisy and busy holiday season, and joy can feel remote and inaccessible, if not superfluous or shallow, pumped through tinny speakers in big box stores, or flashed before our eyes in sappy advertisements interrupting our binge-watching, and gradually the yous around us blend into the hard It that serves as the backdrop of our joyless lives.

 

But this is to mistake mindless cheer or self-satisfying distraction for joy, keeping us focused fully on the It, as though It is all there is. Joy, as the prophets foretell, joy that Advent invites us to hush still and listen for, is a deep, timeless, nevertheless reality that breaks into time. The You who is underneath and behind the It - all the its that have ever been, as dark as they have ever been - the You who sang the world into being, is here now, is coming, is never absent the darkness, but bringing, always, light, in fact, IS the light the darkness cannot put out.  Joy tunes us into the powerful song underneath.

 

Mike Woods, who preached here the first Sunday in Advent, reminded me of a scene near the end of Madeleine L’Engle’s book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, when Charles Wallace and the unicorn, Gaudior (which is Latin for joy), are on a difficult mission. As they gallop through a starry galaxy, Charles Wallace struggles to stay awake and Gaudior cautions him, “Do not go to sleep.” An exhausted Charles Wallace replies, “I’m not sure if I can help it.”

 

“‘Sing, then,’ Gaudior commanded. ‘Sing to keep yourself awake.’” And with that, “the unicorn opened his powerful jaws and began to sing WITH the stars.” (and heaven and nature sing…)

 

Singing in harmony, the boy and the unicorn “moved through the time-spinning reaches of a far galaxy, and he realized that the galaxy itself was part of a mighty orchestra, and each star and planet within the galaxy added its own instrument to the music of the spheres. As long as the ancient harmonies were sung, the universe would not entirely lose its joy.”

 

There is the terrible and understandable temptation to ignore the deeper song, forget the bigger picture, overlook the longer story. To let the hard It of the moment fill our whole horizon, blocking us from the You of God, the yous of each other, drowning out the song of the stars and the universe. We forego joy for foreboding, trade trust for fear, let ourselves be overwhelmed by the darkness, and cease praying instead of praying without ceasing.

 

But every day, the God who breaks in, is breaking in. Jesus came that we might have his joy, joy complete, anyway joy, the gift of awareness of our aliveness, moments of awakened resonance between the ourselves and all else. 

 

When the podcast in your headphones makes you stop and double over on the sidewalk gasping in laughter, and when your child steps out of the airport’s sliding doors and makes his way to you.  When you ask, and ask and ask, What would make my heart sing? And seek to live that. When, in the midst of your dad’s funeral, the congregation sings the line, “though Satan should buffet” and your teary sister beside you bursts into loud giggles and drags you down with her, and when the spectacular pinks and oranges of the early morning sun stops you still at your window, you’re hearing the eternal song of joy breaking into time. 

 

You’re sensing the God whose love is our origin and destination, puncturing the hard It to reach our soft and tender yous, that raw and vulnerable place inside, all wrinkled and unshaven and without make-up, where our childlike wonder still nests.   

 

We join that song when we listen to another person, unhurried and available. We are praying without ceasing when we make eye contact, human to human with a stranger, or hold onto the humanity of those we oppose, keeping them a you instead of making them It. Receiving the moments of transformative laughter and quiet awe, is praying without ceasing. And in all of these ways we make ourselves available to joy, which the universe has not yet lost.

 

Paul is saying that the will of God in Jesus Christ is for us to live tapped into the deeper aliveness with which the whole universe reverberates. To rejoice always, to live in joy.  And to seek out this reality by praying continually, by embracing and not resisting the Holy Spirit nudging us toward others, toward hope, toward healing, toward wholeness. To not resist being corrected and harmonized again with our true identity as beloved, and our true purpose of calling the world back to its belovedness. To recognize evil and oppose it, to seek out good and grasp onto it. And through it all, to trust that the One who is faithful will keep being so.

 

God’s future that is even now breaking in. Beloved, tune into the mighty orchestra, in which each life is an instrument. Stay unarmed and open to being seized by defiant, nevertheless joy. Practice trusting in our belonging to the You who holds us all and all the yous that pass before us each day. And on behalf of a broken and weary world—a beautiful and beloved world—let down your guard and join in the song: rejoice.

 

Amen. 

Song of Peace - Advent 2

DECEMBER 9, 2023 - Reflection for Contemplative Prayer, Advent Week 2

Isaiah 40:1-5

Here comes Advent, right out in front of Christmas, bringing its on-purpose darkness like a blanket, gently laying it over us no matter what else is going on around us or within us.  Advent is the whisper in the darkness, showing and telling us something that is real but hard to see or hear in the glare of LED light and the non-stop noise of our televisions and smart phones, breaking news, speeding traffic, neon geopolitics, florescent distractions, and 24-7 insistent commentary.

The darkness of Advent is a gift. A desperately needed pause.  To wait on purpose for Jesus to come.  Advent speaks tenderly and offers Comfort. Truth. Honesty. Hope. Peace.

 

It’s a hiatus that takes in reality as we know it, but turns our gaze to another reality too, a deeper one, a realer one, the one that lasts from the beginning to the end and holds us in between, even when we are not seeing it. Advent immerses us in this reality, prompting us to seek the God who comes in.

 

Advent is the night shift nurse after the painful surgery, the quiet, turned-down sheets of healing sleep.  There is nothing here in the darkness that isn’t out there in the light – the wounds remain and the recovery continues.  But here, in the shelter of Advent, waiting for God, we can talk about the hard things and the sad things and the confusing and frustrating things, where they don’t get to make us afraid.  

And where fear is banished, hope is born. And peace grows stronger, and joy is tangible. When Love casts out fear, we are brought back to God’s reality, which looks so different from the red-faced blustering and flippant annihilation of the world.

 

Advent slows the pulse, pulls down the shades, and gently shushes us still.  It readies us for a God who comes in in a ridiculously weak and vulnerable way – a senseless and undermining and eternal way. Not to rescue us out, but to share this life with us, to weave redemption right in the midst of it all and keep it all moving toward love.  

 

Comfort my defeated people, God says. Tell them I see them.  And they’ve paid way more in suffering than they ever deserved for whatever they’ve done. Speak tenderly, though, they’ve been through a lot.  And they’re pretty hard on themselves. Gently, let them know they are free. Lead them into the way of peace.

 

This is the week of Advent that we orient toward peace. Peace is wholeness, fullness, true relationship with God and one another. Peace is life as God intended.  It is the quality of everyone belonging to God and belonging to each other.

Last week, Mike Woods preached about Hope, and invited us into Advent through lullabies.

He said, 

“Lullaby power is about being so grounded in what we believe in, what we love and live for, that we cannot be dragged down into meanness or despair. It holds our hope intact. Let’s think of lullabies as containers of hope.

Singing lullabies in the dark makes us ready to bring to bear in an instant, everything we stand for, everything we love, the principles we live by, the way we wish the whole world could work. This comes from a lifetime of singing, which is THE subversive thing we do in churches: singing with joy, singing in the face of death - singing to build our courage – singing hope into the shadows – singing of a world about to turn -  singing to remember the kind of world we want to live in and hand on, and be the kind of people we God made us to be.  So, the question isn’t whether or not we’re singing a song, the question is, “Are we in tune?”

Tonight we quiet the noise around us to hear the song. And we prepare our hearts to hear the song of peace all week long. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together. This is the promise. Tonight we listen to the promise of peace.

Replacing Resolution: Welcoming the New Year with a different kind of practice

The following is an article I wrote for the YF Family Blog, you can find it there.

After the Christmas season ends, right about when we’re pining for a fresh start, sweeping dead pine needles and New Year’s confetti from under the couch, the American holiday season of “Resolution” arrives. Lucky for us, beginning January 1, every diet pill, nicotine patch, organizing gizmo, life coach app, health club membership, lean meal plan, self-help book and storage container is on sale. It’s as though Baby Jesus came to earth to give us one more go-round at changing all the rotten things about ourselves! (At least until we pitter out sometime mid-February).

But the truth is quite the opposite. Baby Jesus came to earth to share this life with us. Christ joins our life and dies our death so nothing can separate us from God’s love. God is here with us now, as we are, however we are. And when we’re exhausted and disillusioned from the season, we might choose to observe a different holiday than Resolution: Epiphany.

Epiphany, which is traditionally observed on January 6, celebrates the Magi, the scholars from the East, who traveled for months on end led by a star and a promise to find the Creator of the world on the lap of a peasant woman. God has come for the whole world, and there is no going back.

Where Resolution begins with our fears and our failures, telling us to fix what’s broken with ourselves, Epiphany comes right into our pain and fears, bringing possibilities and surprises from outside us. It summons us to where we might never otherwise have gone and connects us with people we might never otherwise have known. When we’re open to epiphany we’re likely to be transformed.

One way to celebrate the season of Epiphany is to start out the new year with a “star word.” A star word is a random word that becomes a prayer guide, a focus, a way to watch for God. God can use anything to speak to us. There is nothing magic about a star word. But a star word begins as a mystery; typically you do not choose it. And so, it invites investigation, attentiveness, waiting. A star word orients you to watch for God in a particular way, to be receptive to the Spirit who is moving right now in the world around you.

My star word this past year was “music” – which, to be honest, I was pretty disappointed about. After having “stillness” (2022), and “determination” (2021-pandemic time!) MUSIC felt too concrete, and didn’t inspire me or seem to fit my life. But something has happened to me as I’ve lived with that word in my attention all year: music keeps finding me.

This summer on a trip to Europe I traveled with my ears. Music met me everywhere. In the early morning bird concert shouting through wide open windows, and the church bells tolling together all over the rooftops of Vienna. In the bike wheels of five hundred happy sunset bikers whirring by in unison. Melodies sang in the screeching of the train’s metal brakes and the percussive bumping of our suitcases over cobblestones in the early dawn light—our family’s cacophonous contribution to an otherwise quiet and empty street. I heard the cheerful clip-clopping of the hooves of horses pulling carriages of smiling tourists, and felt chills run through me at the drawn-out, mournful tones of an organ being tuned in the balcony of a 16th century cathedral. I was stopped still by a solo violinist playing on the banks of the Spree. The tones echoed off the tall, glass, modern buildings across the river and reverberated back in the vast, roofless concert hall. People slowed their walking to match his melody. And at a Chopin concert at a small salon in Warsaw, sitting next to my son who had recently mastered a Chopin piece himself, I watched the pianist’s fingers move at lightning speed across the keys, making one instrument sound like a half dozen. But mostly, I watched my son. The air felt still and holy as I soaked in my child’s raptness, perched both on the edge of his seat and on the threshold of leaving home for college. Where would the music inside him take him from here? Oh! How our lives are filled with music! Music I would otherwise have missed had I not been watching for it.

So often we race through life, striving and straining, pressing forward oblivious to the beauty of those around us, the wonder of the natural world, and the presence of God right here in it all, nudging us toward joy. We stumble along, critical and ashamed, measuring ourselves against an unseen ideal. But life is a gift from God. God comes in to love and claim us all. The Holy Spirit is active in the world, and epiphany awaits. In our willingness to watch and openness to being met, we might begin to notice how the God who comes to share this life is actually sharing in our life.

There is no end to the resolutions we could make. We could always muster up a goal and get cracking. But instead, why not receive a star word and start watching? What if, instead of Resolution, we start our year in Epiphany?

Suggestions for Receiving and Using Star Words:
To share star words in a congregation, print words on star cut-outs, or write them on star ornaments. Let people “draw” a word from a basket. In a family or small group, print several words on a page, cut in strips and choose one from a hat. Decorate a star ornament with your word. Hang your star word somewhere you can see it all year long. Pray with your star word. Or hold the word with you as you head into work or school. Check in with yourself and each other from time to time, journaling or chatting – how is God meeting you through your star word this year?

My congregation has compiled this list of star words that can be used with your family, church or small group.