NO SERMON - Tha Hanging of the Greens

NO SERMON - White Gift Sunday

NON LECTIONARY!!!

Isaiah 63: 7-9
Psalm 148
Hebrews 2: 10-18
Matthew 2: 13-23

Rachel is Weeping for the Children

Sometimes you just gotta change horses mid stream. I was half way through finishing my sermon yesterday when I took a friend’s advice, hit delete and changed the readings and the topic for my sermon. These lessons are usually read once every three years on the first Sunday after Christmas. We know the story, of course, but it’s a part of the whole “Christmas Story” that we would rather forget about!

It’s been a roller coaster week. I accompanied the family of Stacy Cheverie to court on Monday and Wednesday. Tuesday I did my usual round of visiting and preparing for Christmas. Wednesday evening I ate far too much at the Choir party and we settled on the music for Christmas eve. Thursday morning the cold whose arrival I had been trying to deny and avoid for a couple of days, hit me like a ton of bricks and I spent as much time as I could sleeping, in-between the coughing and the sneezing (of course). Together with the family I felt relief that the accused changed his plea on Thursday. Everyone could now begin to move on! On Friday I, along with millions of others, was shocked to hear the news from Newtown Connecticut. In case you have been in a bubble for the past two days, on Friday a 20 year old dressed in black and wearing a military vest, entered an elementary school and opened fire - killing the principal, the school psychologist, four other adults and 20 children before turning one of his guns on himself. It was discovered later on that he had killed his mother at their residence.

When you turned on the news you saw the terror in parents who were trying to contact their children, the tearful reunions of those whose children survived and the tears of a President charged with speaking to his nation about this most unimaginable of tragedies.

Let me re-state the obvious.

Children!

Children!

20 Children!

20 Children between the ages of five and ten. Children so young they could not possibly remember Columbine, or Virginia Tech or 9/11. 20 innocent children.

Even so, the children in Janet Volmer’s class were children who knew what to do when their teacher locked the door and pulled down the shades. They had practised those things - procedures put in place because of the events I just mentioned. They went to their safe space in the classroom, and the teacher read them a book, or perhaps several books. Another teacher, Kaitlin Roig huddled 14 six and seven year old children into the class bathroom and locked the door. She assured them that everything was going to be OK - she wanted this assurance to be the last thing they heard, not the sound of gunfire. They had practised the drills, as apparently all children do in every school in America, but on Friday they knew that something was very wrong.

Apparently Newtown Connecticut has only had one homicide in the past ten years - now they have 26 in one day.

The most appropriate passage I could think of was the one I read just before I began this sermon, “the sound of Rachel weeping for her children”. The context of that passage is “the wise men have inadvertently gone to the wrong person to ask the wrong question and the paranoid king has retaliated. In an attempt to preserve his power he orders the death of all the boys of a certain age.“ Jesus is on the way to Egypt because an angel has warned the family not to stick around! It seems to fulfil some obscure passages of scripture, but it does nothing for the boy children in question.

Reflecting upon the event, Matthew quotes a passage from the prophet Jeremiah which speaks of the inconsolable weeping of mothers for their children.

We might ask why the angel could not have also warned the parents of the boys who were in danger.

Surely someone who was a student of that school will have been home with a cold or the flu on Friday or had to go to the dentist and was not there when Adam Lanza entered the school and opened fire and his or her parents might well cite this as “God’s way of keeping their child out of harm’s way”. This sounds good, UNTIL you place it along side the questions of the parents whose children were there and especially those whose children who have died. This answer may be comforting for some, but it really does not work.

There is no way to “fix it” or “kiss it better”. There are no “answers” - even if we discover, through a note or a blog, why this young man had such anger and hurt in his heart, or how his severe mental illness did not result in his commitment to an institution, we will still be left with the existential question, “Why”.

Why, if he was so unhappy with his life, could he not have jsut taken his own life, in private, in the woods somewhere. Why did he have to do it this way?

Why?

As a people of faith what do we do? As a people of faith what do we do in the season of Advent?

Well, one thing is that we would do well to hear the Christmas story again and hear what we pass over because we have heard this story so often it seems normal, natural and of no account!

This what the story tells us. I’m not REALLY adding anything, just reflecting on what we are told each and every year!

Mary was a single mother. Joseph stood by his pregnant girlfriend when every written and unwritten rule in his culture told him to walk away. Common sense would have told him to walk away! His family would have told him to walk away. The scripture tells us that they went on a long journey as she neared her due date. I’ve never had a baby but it would seem to me that any length of journey on a donkey (we will assume they did indeed have a donkwy) would bring on labour. They arrive to discover that there is no room in the inn. The inn would not have had a private room with even one queen size bed, no bathroom with running water, no hot tub, no clean sheets and towels. But it was a place for weary travellers to stay for the night however meagre it was! They were shown the door, or perhaps the flap of animal hide that acted as a door, to the barn out back. “You could stay here. It’s the best I can offer you”.

Now think of the barns that you knew from your childhood , not the ones with concrete under the inch of frequently changed straw, but a messy, smelly barn with various animals belonging to the inn, and to those staying at the inn, all straining against their tethers, many wary of one another, all wary of these humans who probably were not very calm at all.

In the 21st century we all probably keep our babies too clean, but I don’t know of anyone who would advocate making a manger into a crib or taking an infant onto a messy stable.

But the scripture tells us that this was where Jesus was born. There was no room for him in the inn, so he came into their world in the midst of noise and filth in addition to the natural fear and anxiety associated with the birth of a first child to a young mother. As time went on, it didn’t get much better. A bunch of dirty stranger show up - and shepherds who had been out in the fields would not have been “Irish Spring” clean - and then, later, we aren’t sure how much later, wealthy star gazers arrive and give him expensive gift. Then, in the middle of a sleepless night they have to head for the hills - quickly, and under the cover of darkness.

The Christmas story is not set in greeting card perfection - the Christmas story is set in fear and dislocation and the shattering of innocence. Each and every one of the 600 children who attend the Sandy Hook Elementary School will have been changed in some way. For them the world is more frightening and less safe, and for them the assurances of safety from parents and other adults will have a more hollow sound. Their innocence has been shattered.

The Christmas story is not some tale of sweetness and light; deals with the real lives of a people at the mercy of a cruel and paranoid king who would do anything to keep his hold on power. The birth of Jesus came at a time when the world was in bad shape and he came to a couple who were at the mercy of the forces that made it worse than it needed to be.

It’s not about warm churches and smiling children dressed in dad’s old bathrobe or three tall men in the congregation wearing cardboard crowns, worn out choir gowns and clutching gem encrusted dollar store treasure chests and old perfume bottles- its not about sipping eggnog by the crackling fire and opening presents that have been sitting under a twinkling tree laden down with decorations that have been accumulated over several generations -

Its about the very essence of God becoming human and coming to share the rough spots of human existence - its about the holy God sitting with the mothers of Ramah and the mothers and fathers of every disaster and war and accident. Its about God sitting with the parents of Newtown and so many other places .

There will be a search for answers. We might find out what was troubling this very troubled person. We might find someone else to share the blame. There might be a cry for stronger gun control - and there should be that , at the very least. There may be new procedures instituted at schools, such as metal detectors or security guards at each and every school, but those are things for the tomorrows that lie ahead.

On this day maybe all we can do is acknowledge the pain; to truly know the reality of a world where this can happen, for whatever reason, AND ALSO to allow our gaze to fall on that manger where the holy God came to dwell with us - in the pain and (shall I say it) crap of our lives and to sit with us, cry with us, hold us tight as long as we need to be held - for truly that is what Christmas is about - not “answers” but Emmamuel - God is with us.

If we didn’t know that before, surely we can know it now.

Amen

Micah 5: 2-5a Luke 1: 46-55
Hebrews 10: 5-10
Luke 1: 39 - 45

Are We There Yet?

You know what I am talking about! As a child, you have whined, or as an adult you have heard the whine, “Are we there yet”. And its not just children who want to know! It’s not just children who get tired of the journey. A colleague of mine and his wife were making a hasty trip, from eastern New Brunswick to somewhere in Ontario or Quebec to visit a critically ill relative and his wife’s sister asked that question, over and over, before they had even crossed the New Brunswick border. I guess I should tell you that they were ALL in their 40's.

When it gets this close to Christmas some of us would like to be able to go home, open the presents, eat the turkey and trimmings and then go to sleep for about a week! Except that the turkey is still frozen and we’re still looking for the those darn stocking stuffers we stashed away months ago.

But we know, that Christmas will come on Tuesday, December 25, whether we are ready or not, or whether we are ready now and want to get it over with. Some of you have an extended Christmas because your five married children have five different sets of in-laws with which to negotiate Christmas dinner and travelling. The past few weeks have been very busy and the next few days probably even busier for some of you.

The season of Advent is designed to slow us down, to not let us get ahead of ourselves and to prepare. And we do like to get ahead of ourselves. A great deal of this has to do with marketing. The seasons of the marketing year flow seamlessly from back to school - starting sometime in July, to Thanksgiving, to Halloween, to Christmas, to St Patrick’s Day, to Easter to Mother’s Day, to the end of school to vacation to back to school. Have I covered them all? With each sermon edit, I thought of one more!

This year I heard that there was an informal agreement on the part of some stores and radio stations to keep the Christmas music on the shelf until the first of December - in most cases they really mean Winter Holiday music!

When I was in theological school we were taught to avoid Christmas Carols until Christmas Eve. We never celebrated Christmas at the school. In December the first year class organized an Advent Serfvice. Since the school closed well before Christmas and we all went elsewhere there never was a Christmas Service.

In today’s society, you would never know it, but technically Christmas is a season of 12 days that STARTS on Christmas Day. Most of us are so tired with the pre-Christmas that we want to pack it all in on the 27th.

I know lots of couples who spent a great deal of time preparing for the birth of their first child and preparing the nursery - getting the right look, the nice wallpaper, the nice rocking chair for mom to nurse the baby, the crib and matching change table; most don’t have that luxury with babies two and three. Then there the car seat, the stroller and the baby carrier so you can carry baby hands free - you have to have those things!

Mary and Joseph did not have as much to think about as we do these days but there would have been some things.

Advent is not just about reading about the birth of baby Jesus in Bethlehem all those centuries ago and the preparations that may have been necessary. It is also about preparing for this birth into our own lives here in PEI in 2012. It is also abour preparing for that time when the peace the Christ Child came to bring is a reality.

I have my pessimistic side - I can rant with the best of them. But I am also a person of hope and optimism. Babies are about hope and optimism. If we look at Refugee Camps and Camps for Internally Displaced Peoples - which exist because of war and unrest we see children, lots of children. People living in these places have families because children are a sign of hope.

As one of you said to me not long ago, a baby connects the past with the future in such a wonderful way. In that child’s features we can see the reflection of the parents’ - as the child grows we can see so many things that are deeply genetic - but in a child’s eyes we can see the future.

At Christmas time nears we celebrate and anticipate God’s future - we yearn for and anticipate a time when pain and suffering caused by human action and sin will be no more. God’s future is a time when events such as school shootings, war and financial collapse because of corruption and greed will be no more.

No, of course, we aren’t there yet. We can be a people who can envision this kind of future. Seeing it is believing. Believing is the first step in living. As we live as people of faith though we can live into this reality by living as if it were real. We can treat people with justice, mercy and compassion and demand it of those in power. And just as Joseph and Mary journeyed to Bethlehem step by step , worried step by worried step, sometimes weary step by weary step, we too journey toward God’s future, step by step.

Surely, we like John the Baptizer, when as yet unborn, can rise and meet the one whose birth signalls the beginnings of such a time.

Amen.