Every Advent, I dig out a letter
I received from my then bishop right after Christmas 1983. More than anything
else, this letter reminds me what Christmas means and grounds my faith in this
busy time.
The
bishop’s letter was a reply to a rather long-winded and, frankly, whiney Ember
Day letter I had written him before Christmas.
It had been a difficult fall. I
had wanted to begin seminary that fall, but he, my bishop, had insisted I work
for a year. I ended up working in my
hometown, and living with my great-grandmother.
I felt like I was spinning my wheels.
My
relationship with my family wasn’t good at that point in time. My sister had just gotten pregnant and had
eloped. I was tutoring a teenager with
hemophilia who was having a rough time of it.
I was not a happy camper. I
poured it all out. I marvel when I
re-read that letter that my bishop didn’t prescribe a few more years of
growing up.
But
Bishop Wilbur Hogg (yes, that was his real name) wrote me wise words.
Your weeks before Christmas have
for you indeed been full of blows and shocks, and these events are not
respecters of our own times and conveniences.
We are never waiting as one issue at a time is settled. Events are continually keeping us off center,
and keeping us on the go. Even in
Bethlehem the only stationary actor is the innkeeper. The shepherds come in from the fields, the
wise men travel from the eastern mountains, and even the holy family must pick
up and travel to Egypt because of the paranoid jealousy of Herod. In the middle of all this activity a baby is
born in a cowshed and God visits his world.
The mix-up is apparently the atmosphere in which, at least in this
world, God works.
It was the first time I
understood, as I said last Sunday, that the good news is not only that the
light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it. It is also true that the light shines in the
darkness, but does not simply get rid of it.
What the light does in the darkness is help us to see, to be honest
about what waits in the dark for us, confess our fear of it, but then face it
with courage and hope.
No one
ever preaches on Christmas Eve on the reading from Paul’s Letter to Titus. Most preachers look on it as an annoyance
more than anything else. I certainly
thought so, until I read the passage in the translation called the New English
Bible and its successor the Revised English Bible. You just heard it in our usual translation.
For
the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all.
Ho,
hum. But listen to the words translated
a different (but perfectly legitimate) way.
For the grace of God has
dawned upon the world with healing for all humankind.
How often does the grace
of God–God’s way of unconditional love–dawn upon us as a surprise, as the
suddenly discovered way forward through the darkness. It isn’t as if it wasn’t there all the time–it
surely was. But we so often feel
overwhelmed by the darkness, by the confusion or busy-ness or pain or guilt of
it that we miss it. We keep trying to figure our own way through some problem
or mess, but, again as I said last Sunday, we cannot make the light for
ourselves. We must receive it.
The grace of God dawns
upon us and begins, at least, to light the darkness. This grace is a revelation, usually, that we
are loved in spite of the darkness, and that others are as well, and so the way
forward is forgiveness or reconciliation with ourselves or one another. Or suddenly we can see our bondage to
something or someone that is controlling our lives, and the grace of God–which
is our liberty as a child of God–enables us to break free.
Either of these experiences–or
any other experience of the grace of God–brings healing. The word “healing” here is meant in its
broadest, most holistic, and Christian sense.
We find our wholeness, our balance, the integration of all the parts of
our lives–even in a world that leads us often into fragmentation, keeps us off
balance, unsure of ourselves, and fearful.
These thoughts are what
Paul is trying to get across in the rest of that bit of his letter to Titus we
heard. It’s full of religious code words
so we might easily turn it off–talk of “godliness,” of “renouncing worldly
desires,” and “exercising temperance.”
Paul is talking about the kind of balanced wholeness each one of us
longs for, but is a struggle to find in this world. Paul is talking about his–and God’s–desire
for our freedom from all that keeps us from our wholeness.
Now what has this to do
with Christmas? In a word, everything. For we Christian folk, the birth of
Jesus is “the grace of God dawning on the world for the healing of all
humankind.” Why is this so?
Because it is such a
radical, revolutionary, revelation of God.
God coming among us not in strength and triumph, but in weakness and
vulnerability. Messiah, Savior, Healer,
revealed to us not as adonai–Lord over us–but as emmanuel–God with
us.
“This shall be the
sign,” the angels tell the shepherds.
“This will be the sign that the Messiah has come.” Go not to Jerusalem but to Bethlehem. Look not for a king but for a baby. Look not for a baby clothed in royalty in a
palace, but in strips of old cloth in a feeding trough in a barn.
Amazing. Truly, absolutely, astounding. Even if the prophets had hinted that the
Messiah would be somewhat different than people expected–no one expected
this. No one expected God to visit his
people in the mix-up and mess of life.
It is grace that dawns
upon us–unexpected and surprising, though there all along. And it heals precisely because of its
unexpectedness and its surprise. It
heals because it is not our own doing.
It draws us out of ourselves, makes us more than we ever thought we
could be, and gives us things for which we never asked.
And this experience–and
here it is where what we Christians call the “good news” explodes across the
sky like a multitude of heavenly hosts–this experience is for absolutely
everybody. It is not just for the
powerful or the successful, or those who have some secret knowledge about life
or about God, or those who seem in this life to get everything right, who seem
to “have it all together.”
For the grace of God has
dawned upon the world with healing for all humankind.
There was no reason for
Paul to insert the word “all” into that sentence except to effect this very
explosion. Nobody gets left out of this
experience of dawning grace–of the light that cannot be earned but only received–the
love that seeks not to bind but to free–that seeks not to separate but to
integrate–that makes for healing in our lives.
Pray, my sisters and
brothers, for a dawning of grace this night–of the life-transforming experience
that in this babe of Bethlehem we are loved no matter what, and can claim our
freedom as his sisters and brothers–children of God with him.
Let the air explode with
angels of good news. Glory to God. Peace–healing–on earth for absolutely
everybody and in every mixed-up circumstance you or me can imagine. Let us make haste to this glory and this
peace.
I leave you with a quote
from Bishop Charles Henry Brent, the Bishop of Western New York, our bishop,
from 1917 to 1929. He could not have
imagined the technology at our fingertips, but this quote is still right on the
money:
Modern life
is fine in many of its aspects; it is diligent in its labors, honest in its
investigations, courageous in its enterprises.
But it lacks one needful thing.
It is too reasoned, and not sufficiently spiced with the recklessness of
those whose idealism is a controlling force that sends them to the Bethlehem
manger with the racing feet of Christmas haste.[1]
[1]
From the sermon “Christmas Haste,” a portion of which is excerpted in Love
Came Down: Anglican readings for Advent and Christmas, compiled by
Christopher L. Webber (Harrisburg: Morehouse, 2002), pp. 75-76.
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