12-16-12 “Family Gathering”
Third Sunday in Advent
scripture: Luke 1:
39-56
It’s a strange and dissonant duet we hear this weekend.
In one ear we hear Zephaniah’s melody rejoicing,
“Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with
all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!” The LORD has taken away the judgments
against you, he has turned away your enemies. The king of Israel, the LORD, is
in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more. -(Zephaniah 3:14-15)
While with the other ear we hear Rachel weeping for her children and
refusing to be comforted because they are no more. (Matthew 2: 18).
Each week Michael Feldman opens his radio game show by calling out, “What
Do You Know?” and the audience shouts back, “Not much, you?” Yesterday’s pre-recorded show was
having fun with popular Dec. 21 foolishness. Feldman opened the show by asking
the announcer,
“Is there anything you
want to say before it’s too late?”
To listeners who knew what he hadn’t when the show was recorded,
who were up to our ears in the events of as grim a Friday as we can
imagine,
it was suddenly a real and urgent question. What would we say if we knew we’d never get another
chance? And, on the edge of raw
disaster, how do any of us ever know we’ll ever get that chance again?
When I was 8, my mother’s last words to me, dropping me off on the corner
for school, were, “I love you.”
And I have been so grateful ever since. In the early endless hours God birthed my theological
imagination. I knew that anyone
who said, “God took her” (for any reason) was wrong. God had given her life in the first place and God received
her life now. My 8-year-old self wasn’t worried about “why.” She didn’t do
anything wrong and God didn’t need her more than my family did. I knew God was
taking care of her and would take care of me.
We struggle to express the sorrow
With which our very beings vibrate this weekend,
words beg to be birthed:
words of explanation, words of comfort,
words of love.
The end of the world has come early,
Calamity crashing down in the least expected time and place,
on the most undeserving victims.
Instead of the wonder of Christmas
(lights, pretty packages full of potential, travel plans…)
we are caught up in wondering what to say to our own children.
We wonder if there is any place or any one that is safe.
We wonder what we can possibly do to stanch a flow of violence
that breaks the skin of normalcy, exposes raw nerves, re-opens old
wounds.
If you have ever lost a child,
if you have ever walked with one who has lost a child, of any age,
you know what I am talking about.
You know at a level much deeper than words.
Mary and Elizabeth meet in another of history’s gaps.
They gather as family, old and young, for mutual support
while they begin birthing prophecies that fill and flow through them
not in a sentimental dribble but with a holy power that cannot be
stopped.
They have conceived the inconceivable:
Elizabeth, a wild prophet out of her supposed infertility,
Mary, the world’s salvation in the form of a soon to be armful
of warm, wet, hungry, and soft wiggly wonder.
What might God conceive in you?
What might God be bringing into being, birthing, through you?
These mothers have no idea what challenges lie ahead.
Elizabeth’s son will choose the oddest clothing- wild animals skins (not
just prints!), eat weirder food that any of our children will ever demand
(though they may have sampled locusts
and wild honey behind our backs).
And what about Mary?
Pre-adolescent Jesus will run off in the temple,
making his panicked parents reverse their journey home
only to find him intently discussing the fine points of Jewish law
with Jerusalem’s great teachers.
How embarrassing that their humbly birthed son doesn’t know his place!
And this upstart will meet Joseph’s relived, exasperated rebuke with what
any of us might hear as a startling put down.
“I must be about my father’s [i.e. my real
father’s] business.”
Adult Jesus will have his mother pulling her hair out with worry
(come home before you get hurt),
and will rebuke her for doing so,
insisting on the path that will walk him up to an appalling death
right before her eyes.
The God who wants nothing more than for us to know our place
as beloved creatures in an extraordinary creation,
the God of Elizabeth and of Mary, that God, our God,
flows in through the cracks inflicted by sin,
the space broken open by evil.
That God, our God, fills in the cracks with love.
That God, our God has an infinitely capacity to hold that pain we create,
and feels every wound with
us.
That God, our God is a vessel of creative healing.
That God our God, is the God who, with the coming of Christ,
chooses to work not though Armies, litigation, and legislation,
which are human battle fields,
but through tender, vulnerable, broken hearted lives that find their
strength and rise with God’s hope full purpose.
Then what are we to say about evil?
Evil is not a being locked in combat with God, villain vs. hero,
a slippery, slimy character that we can blame.
And we are not game pieces shuffled between or smacked back and forth
celestial players.
Evil is a distortion, a perversion of human will
that seems to take on a life of its own. Evil is real,
a force pushing back against God’s good.
It cracks the façade of our intentions.
The fissures run right through human history.
In Japan, masters of Kintsugi fix broken
ceramics with a lacquer resin made to look like solid gold. Because the repairs are done with such immaculate craft, and in
precious metal, it's hard to read them as a record of violence and damage.
Instead, they take on the look of a deliberate incursion of radically free
abstraction into an object that was made according to an utterly different
system. It's like a tiny moment of free jazz played during a fugue by Bach.…. A
pot that would normally have been trashed was recognized as the perfect
background for work in precious kintsugi.
We who follow Christ know that in the end,
God’s vision of wholeness will be fulfilled.
We know that the alpha and omega, the fecund beginning and the
holy end are one,
but we are in the center and the patterns in it are being worked out in our
own lives, as they were in these women’s and their sons’ and in lives in Connecticut, Syria, the Holy land today, in lives all across our planet.
Are we helpless while we wait?
Elizabeth’s son
John would grow up to exhort his friends and neighbors and strangers of all
persuasion to bear repentance fruits. Don’t justify yourselves by your
heritage…
“ Even now the ax is lying at the root of the
trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and
thrown into the fire."
And the crowds asked him, "What then should
we do?"
and he said, "Whoever has two coats must share
with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise."
And the tax
collectors asked him "Teacher, what
should we do?"
He
said to them, "Collect no more than you ought to."
And the soldiers
asked him, "What about us, what should we do?"
He said to them, "be satisfied with your
wages, Don’t extort money by threats or false accusation." -Luke 3:7-18
In her novel, "The
Other Side of the Sun" Madeleine L'Engle’s heroine encounters painful
undercurrents in her husband’s family, a past erupting into the present, when
she spends time with them while he serves his military duty. The soon to be new mother discovers
this poem from an earlier bride:
In this parched place of desolate wilderness,
This war-torn, hate split world, oh, who will
bless,
Bless and redeem the bloodstained, tear drenched ground
So once again the healing sun will blaze,
The small birds sing, the flowers be found,
And lion and lamb in loving Joy may graze?
Who is there left the truth of love to guess?
How shall we stand the violence of the sun?
How hate redeem, how brother's love confess?
What will be left when wind and fire are done?
Only on love's terrible other side
Is found the place where lion and lamb abide.
Prayers:
Rev. Mel Kawakami and our brothers
and sisters of the Newtown United Methodist Church as they care for the first
responders as well as those who seek the respite of their sanctuary.
We pray
for the responders themselves, that they may make time in the midst of caring
for others to hug the ones they love.
We pray
for those whose own memories of lost children break the surface, re-submerging
families and friends in waves of grief.
We pray
for all those who worry about what their own family member might do.
Especially,
we pray for families with empty arms and broken hearts. Bind up their wounds, o God. Gather
their tears as holy and healing waters. Sustain them in their grief and make a
way where there seems to be none.
benediction
Philippians
4:4-7
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say,
Rejoice.
Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The
Lord is near.
Do not worry about anything, but in everything by
prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to
God.
And the peace of God, which surpasses all
understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
