Sermons: December 2010

(Rev. Tim Vivian)

Third Sunday of Advent (Year A: RCL)
December 12, 2010

Isaiah 35:1-10                                    Psalm 146:4-9
James 5:7-10                                      Luke 1:39-55
During this Christmas season Congress is contemplating passing the following:

  • a $70 billion dollars a year tax cut for millionaires and billionaires;
  • a pittance of unemployment insurance for some of the unemployed;
  • and nothing, absolutely nothing, for the “99ers,” those who have maxed out their unemployment benefits.
While Washington may well send the rich away happy with visions of dollar signs dancing in their head, Congress this past week denied a $250 cost-of-living increase for those receiving Social Security.

At the same time, seventeen per cent of Americans are now unemployed, underemployed, or have given up looking for work. One out of six. To make those numbers more real for us, that’s more than 20 people at Grace.

And we have wars, and rumors of unending war.

Amid all this comes Christmas, with its undying faith, hope, and yearning.
One great danger of hope and faith is that they so easily become sentimental and schmaltzy, a teddy bear and blankie for adults. An even greater danger, as Karl Marx saw, is that hope and faith can become yet another Big Pharma drug that promises salvation—and, at no extra cost, a cure for acne, baldness, and bad breath.

The story of Jesus, however, refuses, absolutely refuses, to let us be religious drug addicts, even during Christmas. As sacred myth, enduring story, the birth of Jesus must—absolutely must—have with it the slaughter of innocent babies by King Herod in Matthew’s Gospel.

Without Herod, without the awful reality of power and the abuse of power, the birth story is a lie, a confection like cotton candy: all sweetness and sticky goo; lots of calories, but nothing substantial or sustaining.
Our Gospel reading today is Luke 1:39-55, the Magnificat, the Song of Mary.

“Magnificat” comes from its first word in Latin: "Magnificat anima mea, Dominum," “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” In this poem Mary gives thanks for God’s favor in giving her a child, Jesus.

Just as John the Baptist is the forerunner of Jesus, so too Mary and her Magnificat are forerunners to the meaning of Jesus, his ministry and message: 
[The Lord] has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly.

We await the birth. Without what Mary says before the birth of Jesus, however, there is no Jesus of the Gospel, just some pimped-out pusher selling drugs to rich kids from the suburbs.

As with most things in the Gospels, what Mary says has a history, a back story, in the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish Testament.

Luke has modeled The Song of Mary on The Song of Hannah in 1 Samuel; in that poem Hannah gives the Lord thanks for the birth of her son, Samuel:

My heart exults in the Lord;
   my strength is exalted in my God.

But before we get too warm and comfy, we need to pay attention to what comes next:

My mouth derides my enemies,
   because I rejoice in my victory.

The Song of Hannah, as its first lines show, is a poem of contrasts, of reversals; reversal of our expectations is a theme dearly loved by both the Jewish and Christian scriptures. As Hannah proclaims:
The bows of the warriors are broken,
        but those who stumbled are armed with strength.

In The Song of Hannah, reversal emphasizes God’s power.

Psalm 107 also show this:
[The Lord] satisfies the thirsty,
and the hungry he fills with good things.

Luke uses this verse in the Magnificat, but look what he’s done with it:

[The Lord] has filled the hungry with good things--
      and sent the rich away empty [emphasis added].

In the Psalm, “hungry” in the second line parallels “thirsty” in the first; “satisfies” in the first line parallels “fills with good things” in the second:

[The Lord] satisfies the thirsty,
and the hungry he fills with good things.

With the Magnificat, Luke has radicalized God’s generosity. Yes, God still fills the hungry with good things, but now God’s parallel act is not the compassionate assuaging of thirst but rather judgement: God has sent the rich away empty:

[The Lord] has filled the hungry with good things--
and sent the rich away empty.

You don’t have to be a liberal recovering hippy rock ‘n’ roller to see that Mary here is a radical. As we know all too well, the rich not only own things; because of this ownership they run things. Two per cent of Americans, the wealthy, now control 80% of America’s wealth.

With wealth comes power: the control of government, and governmental policies. The median income of those in Congress is now about one million dollars. As a result Congress may soon bless the wealthy with millions of goodies while handing out lumps of coal to the unemployed, poor, and Socially Insecure.

What was true in Mary’s time and place is also true in ours.

In other words, Mary’s statement in the Magnificat is not just some dreamy wish. It’s an act of subversion; what she says is an attack on the status quo.

Both Luke and Mark begin their Gospels with reversals like this one. This is not an accident. Jesus is many things, and we’ve turned him into many things he wasn’t, but one rock-solid thing about Jesus was that he overturned the status quo, just as he overturned the tables in the temple: “The first shall be last and the last first.”

Unlike Matthew and Luke, Mark doesn’t begin his Gospel with a birth narrative:

As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,
“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
   who will prepare your way;
the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
   ‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
   make his paths straight.’”

There’s just a hint that something’s not right here: what’s the sound of one messenger crying out in the wilderness if no one’s there to listen?

But Mark knows that his audience understands exactly what the prophet Isaiah says:

A voice cries out:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
   make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
   and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
   and the rough places a plain.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
   and all people shall see it together,
   for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

The glory of the Lord will come—but it comes not with pleasantries and baby-kissing; the Lord comes only with reversal.

What the glory of the Lord really is, what the glory of the Lord truly means at Christmas, so Mary declares, so Luke declares, so Mark declares, is not the cotton-candy glory of Washington, or Wall Street, or the North Pole.

The glory of the Lord comes only with reversal: Every valley shall be lifted up, every mountain and hill made low; the first last and the last first; the proud scattered in the thoughts of their hearts; the powerful brought down from their thrones, the lowly lifted up.

The Son of God born in a stable.

Amen.



Christmas Eve                   December 24, 2010            

December 25 (Selection I, RCL)

Isaiah 9:2-7                                       Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-14(15-20)                              Psalm 96

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.  

As our Presiding Bishop points out in her Christmas message this year, that sentence from Isaiah, with its image of light in the bleak midwinter of our discontent, is familiar and comforting.

The familiar words go on to say that light has shined on those who live in deep darkness, that God has brought joy to people living under oppression, for a child has been born for us. The name of that child—cue Handel’s Messiah here—is Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

This evening we heard something in the ninth chapter of Isaiah that we hadn't heard before in Episcopal churches: verse 5. Our lectionary, the three-year cycle of biblical readings, often leaves out what Monty Python calls the “naughty bits.”

Verse 5 of Isaiah 9 is startling; but as our Presiding Bishop points out, this verse is important: it helps explain why our hunger for light is so intense, and why our joy is so great when it comes:

For all the boots of the tramping warriors
and all the garments rolled in blood
shall be burned as fuel for the fire.

Verses 1 through 3 of the ninth chapter of Isaiah speak repeatedly of a light to come and the joy that Israel will soon enjoy. But if light is promised, that means the people have “walked in darkness”; worse, they have “lived in a land of deep darkness.”

Verse 4 explains why: like field oxen, the yoke has been their burden; like prisoners, whether in Pharaoh or Mubarak’s Egypt or our own Guantánamo, they have had a “bar across their shoulders,” “the rod of their oppressor.”

Verse 4 is tough, but it’s verse 5 that completes the nightmare darkness: the “boots of the tramping warriors” conjures for us images of goose-stepping soldiers marching in swastika salute across charred and devastated land.

As Bishop Katharine points out, for Isaiah the coming of the prince of peace will mean the end of all war and violence. An occupied people will finally live in peace. The tramping of boots will become only dim recollections at the shrines of our ancestors.

Or will they?

At the end of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the star-crossed lovers Jake and Brett are together; it should be a happy ending, with the lovers hand-in-hand chauffeured off into a Hollywood sunset.
But this is Hemingway, not Hollywood. Brett turns to Jake and says,

“Oh, Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together.”

With his usual laconic style, Hemingway now describes what’s happening:

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic.
He raised his baton.
The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against Jake.

Brett and Jake are here literally thrown together, but their contact is accidental, not intentional; pushed together by forces beyond their control, although they touch, each is isolated and alone. It’s a heartbreaking scene.

Hemingway uses this heartbreak to set up the last line of the book:

“Yes,” Jake says in response to Brett’s heartfelt longing to be together, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

In this unforgettable final scene, in a novel that takes place after the shock and awe of World War I, Hemingway has captured the profound alienation and isolation—the deep darkness—of modern men and women; in spite of all our progress in so many things since the ‘20s, in many ways our darkness has only deepened.

Here we are, some eighty years after Hemingway wrote, in a new century, surrounded by two wars, on the eve of yet one more Christmas star. Here we are at Grace, a light that shines in a Bakersfield so often wrapped in deep moral darkness.

In her Christmas message, the Presiding Bishop asks that we remember the terror of war when we hear Isaiah’s words about light, that we remember the hunger for peace and light when we hear the shocking promise that a poor child born in a stable will lead us all into a world without war.

In my sermon two Sundays ago,I opened with a lamentation that Congress was about to give millions of dollars to the very wealthy and only pennies or ha’pennies—or nothing—to the unemployed.
After that sermon, in a thoughtful email one of our parishioners wrote me that in this season of hope I was being too negative. My first reaction was “Wow! Someone’s actually reading my sermons!” Sometime later I realized what I should have said in reply: “Well, if you think that’s negative, you should see what my poor long-suffering wife puts up with.”

But the human reality is that each of us here is a compound of darkness and light, light and darkness, radiant and bitter angels; each of us here is an alloy of goodness and evil, compassion and wintry hard-heartedness; a complex of giving and greed, cynicism and trust, war and peace.

The Gospel reality is that without darkness there is no light: Isaiah’s hope and expectations subsist along side of warnings and lamentations; without both, there is no Jesus. And here’s what’s equally true: for Christians, without the light of Christ there is only darkness. Without the hope, compassion, love, and forgiveness embodied by Jesus—in whatever way, in whatever religion—there is only darkness.

The Prologue to the Gospel of John declares that the light has shined in the darkness and the darkness has not been able to defeat it. If we live without the hope, compassion, love, and forgiveness embodied by Jesus we have twisted John’s declaration into a bloody, defeated car wreck: the light has indeed shone in the darkness, but we--we—all too often allow the darkness to swallow it whole and spit the remains into the gutter.

Tonight, Light shines in the darkness. This coming year our task, and our great joy—let me emphasize that: our great joy—is to keep the light shining. As Bishop Katharine concludes, “remember the power of light when you go out into the darkness.”

Even more, remember the power of Christ’s light when you are surrounded by darkness—whether of your own making, or the darkness made visible by others.

But most of all, be yourself that light this coming year. Be light. Give thanks for everything and everyone you illuminate.

And give thanks for everything and everyone who illuminates you.

Amen.

NOTES
  1. Parts of this sermon are adapted from the Presiding Bishop’s Christmas message to the Episcopal Church: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/79425_126182_ENG_HTM.htm.
  2. http://www.graceepiscopalbakersfield.com/Sermon121210.html.
  3. For a funny, and painfully accurate assessment by Stephen Colbert, see:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/368914/december-16-2010/jesus-is-a-liberal-democrat.


Parts of this sermon are adapted from the Presiding Bishop’s Christmas message to the Episcopal Church: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/79425_126182_ENG_HTM.htm.

http://www.graceepiscopalbakersfield.com/Sermon121210.html.

For a funny, and painfully accurate assessment by Stephen Colbert, see:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/368914/december-16-2010/jesus-is-a-liberal-democrat .