Christmas Day (II)
Homily delivered at Trinity Parish Ashland (Oregon)
24th December 2014: 6:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. Sung Eucharist
Homily delivered at Trinity Parish Ashland (Oregon)
24th December 2014: 6:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. Sung Eucharist
The Rev. Dr. Anthony
Hutchinson, SCP
God, give us hearts
to feel and love,
Take away our hearts
of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
Our
lives are messy. We have marriages and
family relationships that require a lot of work, and that sometimes break
up. We have noble ideals, goals, and values, but
find it hard to live them. Sometimes
they conflict with each other.
We
tell stories to each other, especially to our children, to try to make sense
and bring order to our lives. The good
are rewarded; the wicked, punished. Courage
and honor and love triumph and we live happily ever after. At least that’s how the story runs.
Bruno
Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment
tells us that fairy tales are ways of processing the messiness of life. That is why they are so popular, so lasting,
and so troubling.
Stephen
Sondheim’s Into the Woods, featured
by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this year, to be released tomorrow in film
version by Disney Studios, plumbs Bettelheim’s themes. Happily ever after? No.
Act II tells the more complex tale.
What we thought were triumph and resolution only entail newer, and
deeper woes. In the end, it is all about
telling the story, sharing our hope, and our fear. “Careful the things you say, Children will
listen. Careful the things you do, Children
will see. And learn.”
We
try to teach our children and grandchildren to have faith and hope. We try to have faith and hope ourselves. But life really is gritty. Life is complicated.
We
tell each other it will be OK. We
continue in all seriousness to tell little ones this time of year about a jolly
old elf who knows who’s naughty or nice, and gives us, if not our heart’s
desire, a commercial simulacrum of this.
And we wonder when they lose faith in the deeper stories. “Careful the
things you say, the things you do.
Children will listen and see.”
Messiness! Not just fairy tales try to manage it. Political ideologies give us an action
plan. But we find that if we are honest,
political programs and utopian schemes can bring the bitterest disappointments
of all. I have a dear friend who is a
long-time member of the Chinese Communist Party. I remember well the night she told me, with
tears in her eyes, her loss of faith in Chairman Mao, in the Party, and all its
“clever management of the truth.” Her
pain was acute because she still yearned for in her heart of hearts the values
of equality, fairness, and truthfulness that are at the basis of the Marxian
enterprise. I see the same jaded pain
in Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. when their political programs falter, and
once hopeful leaders fail and disappoint.
There
are different ways of handling life’s messiness. One is simply to try to control, contain,
and make it right through force of will.
Not a good recipe, given that we ourselves are messes. Another is to “man up” and just accept the messiness,
pretend it’s OK. Whether as a simple “suck
it up,” or a more philosophical Buddhist rejection of desire and attachment
that causes our pain in the world, the basic tack is the same. “Give up on desiring anything better. This is as good as it gets.” Peace of heart lies in acceptance, sometimes
of the unacceptable. Attachment is the
problem, so detach. But detachment not only relieves us of pain,
but also robs us of engagement and relationship, of hope for something better.
Another
way is simply pretend that the world isn’t messy, and that it makes perfect sense.
Denial. This is like an eight year old who plugs his
ears and sings “Na-na-na-na-na-NA I can’t hear you!” Look at religious
fundamentalism’s denial of facts, whether experiential or scientific. Look at its foolish Gospel of Wealth, its
claim that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked, despite plenty of
evidence that in this life the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer: denial,
pure and simple.
Christmas
is hard on us, I think, because it rubs our noses in the difference between the
ideal of how things ought to be and the reality of how things are. We regret failings in relationships all the
more; we yearn for those we love but who have died.
Christmas
stories affect us so much because they touch us deep, in places we don’t like
to think about. As Longfellow wrote
during the Civil War, “I heard the bells on Christmas Day, their old familiar
carols play. … But hate is strong, and mocks the song of Peace on Earth,
goodwill to Man…”
Unfortunately,
we take these great stories about Jesus sometimes as if they were fairy
stories. We use them in our denial. We try to make them all very nice and neat:
prophecies and fulfillment, evidence of order, and the love and power of
God.
But
the fact is: these scriptures themselves are very messy! What we later see as prophecies of Jesus’
birth started out as religious political propaganda for a failed Davidic royal
line. “A virgin shall conceive” originally was “a young woman shall bear a
royal child, Hezekiah, who will restore good times and right religion to Ahab’s
corrupt nation. Even the stories Luke
and Matthew tell of Jesus’ birth are so at odds with each other in their details,
the best we can say is that they each express faith in Christ, rather than
biographic details.
Despite
this, some Christians simply can’t give up on these stories as a cure of
messiness. They plug their ears, sing
“I can’t hear you!” when the messiness is pointed out. Jewish friend tell us,
“Isaiah says young woman, not virgin.”
They say, “but Isaiah had to have said ‘a virgin shall conceive!’”
The
thing is this—the point of the stories is that within the messiness of human
life, God is found. Hope for true fulfillment of true desire is grounded in true
confidence of God’s love. We need
not turn to fairy stories, wish fulfillment, apathetic detachment, denial or
truth management. God is love, made
manifest in this little baby, who later in his very human, mortal life, would
conquer death itself.
Titus
says, “the goodness and loving kindness of our God and Savior has appeared, and
has rescued us.” This means salvation from
messiness was found in Jesus of Nazareth, salvation from the very messiness we
dread. That’s why we affirm in the Creed
that he was truly God, but also truly human.
Belief
in the incarnation, the enfleshment, of God in the baby Jesus is belief in
hope, in embracing messiness without rejecting it or pretending it doesn’t
exist. It enables us to keep attached,
to keep feeling the longing God has placed in our hearts for something
better. Belief in the wholly unexpected
birth of a holy baby to a young woman who doesn’t need a man to make her whole,
is belief in Love redeeming the world it created.
The Medieval mystic Meister
Eckhart helps us to understand this:
“We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity... But if this does not take place in me, what use is it? It all comes down to this: the eternal birth should take place in me.”
“We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity... But if this does not take place in me, what use is it? It all comes down to this: the eternal birth should take place in me.”
“God with us” includes
the idea of “God in us.” When we, like
Mary, say yes to God and in saying yes, carry Jesus out into the world, we give
birth to the Christ: not as myth, or
fairy tale, or political program, or even as history. We give birth to Christ as reality itself,
we, the ones transformed by his love. We
take that love into the messy world we find around us, and share our hope and experience
of grace and rescue.
In
the name of God, Amen.
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