Göttinger Predigten
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Christmas Eve, 12/24/2009
Sermon on Luke 2:1-19, by David Hoster
In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid; for see-- I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger." And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,
"Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace among those whom he favors!"
When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us." So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. [NRSV]
What could possibly matter more to any of us-more than getting a new job or a new house, more than recovering from a sickness, more even than turning the US economy around-what could possibly matter more to any of us than the birth of God into the world to save us from ourselves?
Can you think of anything? I can't think of anything.
Being loved by God is orders of magnitude more important than anything that anybody else can do to us or for us, bar none. Second isn't close. The love of God completes your whole life; everything else addresses only bits and pieces of the whole
So St. John puts it even more dramatically. God loves the world so much that he gave his only son to open us up for eternal life-life bound by no tick of the clock at all, nor anything that can happen to us as any of the ticks goes by.
The problem-and this is always the problem-is that we have a hard time opening up our pedestrian, business-as-usual minds to something the size of the love of God. Maybe we think nothing so grand could ever come to us, or maybe we're afraid of being disappointed, or maybe we just can't picture what it might be like, or maybe we think we don't deserve it. There are all sorts of reasons for staying down here at ground level where we get beat up by life on a daily basis.
When we get to Christmas though, we get the message, right between the eyes, that our low expectations need to change. We need to stop being governed and limited spiritually by the things that bite us every day or that bit when we were young and make us go to therapy now. God is flooding into the world in person. Hold you breath. The world is about to turn.
I think about the psychiatrist Robert Coles, author of an astounding series of books called Children of Crisis.[1] These books offer profound and creative insight into the world of children living under all sorts of terrible stress-African American children in the civil rights era, Chicanos, migrants, sharecroppers, mountaineers, Eskimos, Native Americans and, finally-no surprise here-the children of the very wealthy. He cannot imagine understanding these most vulnerable of our citizens in the absence of a moral vision of the conscious love of children that God might have. He is far from psychiatric orthodoxy.
He did not always see it that way. Coles was an atheist early in his career. He thought psychiatry was about studying forces at work on the ego, not about anything having to do with moral life. I'm not sure he's so much different from so many of us who take the forces that grind away at our ego more seriously than we take God. Yet now he writes books with titles like, The Moral Intelligence of Children, and The Spiritual Life of Children.
By great good fortune, Coles did some of his early work with a six-year-old girl named Ruby Bridges.[2] You have to have a long memory to know who Ruby Bridges is. Norman Rockwell painted a very famous picture of a slender, tiny African-American girl wearing a white dress as she is escorted by great, burly federal agents. It is 1960 and she is the first black student in the all white schools of New Orleans.
Ruby, at age six, was screamed at, called names she'd never heard until that moment (but you'd better believe she remembered what they were), threatened, accused-everything short of physically assaulted because the federal marshals were there. Years later, she recalled that while it seemed like some sort of carnival at first, she turned a bad corner when she saw a small coffin with a black doll in it, wearing a white dress just like hers. From then on, she felt awful things in her stomach.
Coles, the materialist psychiatrist, expected she would be devastated. How could her ego stand up against horrific forces like that? He stood ready to deploy his arsenal of techniques in an effort to help her, but also to learn more about what made her tick for his next book.
He was in for the shock of his young career and a life-changing experience. She didn't fold. It wasn't that she was ignorant of the situation, or intimidated into silence, or too numb to be shocked. She took the full force of vitriol slung at her with complete awareness of what it was.
What happened that Coles had never seen before, and most whites of the day simply did not understand, was that Ruby's African American community gathered around her in prayer and in so many other ways that she literally felt that her life was part of something larger than she was. She was not being sent out to be a lone hero, but given the rock solid core of hearts that beat as her heart. As a result, she could be hurt, but not to the core. The essence of her being was held in trust by her community.
At first Coles tried to dismiss that process with the accusation that she was just hiding her trauma from him. Then he trotted out the old psychiatric warhorse: group hallucination. But in the end he was just too much a man of conscience and perception to dismiss the plain evidence of his eyes. Something inexplicable happens when people's hearts are given to one another in love. People become unshakably moral when such overwhelming love confirms the divine worth of their lives. I don't know how to put it in words we ordinarily use. Maybe something like, they feel their souls, though that doesn't really get it.
Maybe it's not such a terribly thing hard to understand, however, at Christmas. Jesus came into the world looking pretty much like a six-year-old African American girl wearing a white dress, being screamed at with the most aggressive sort of verbal brutality. Herod was in a blood frenzy. Like her, Jesus is innocent, as are all the infants Herod slaughtered. People's hearts were drawn right out of their bodies at the sight of her walking up to that school. That's always God's M.O.
It was the profound moral witness of people like Ruby that changed, transformed America, woke us up to the ugliness of a society based on racism and segregation, and made us better. Who in 1950 would have thought that possible? When Jesus' crucifixion coaxed out similar love, he awoke the Sermon on the Mount in people's souls and created Christianity.
What could possibly be more important to any of us than the birth of God into our world to save us from ourselves?
And at the center of it all is love, so I will repeat myself. God so loved the world that he gave his only son to open us up to eternal life. When we see the Ruby's of the world come under assault, all the unrelenting ticks of the clock that enslave us to the soul-crushing issues of our lives fly right out the window and our hearts beat to the irresistible movement of sweeping divine change. We stand in the fullness of eternal life. Countries and worlds change when love like that is in the air.
Love is not something we read about and think about. Love is not a doctrine or a belief. Love is not even something we decide. Love is something we do. We do it because we are in love with this wondrous thing called life that fell from the lips of God. Love makes us fierce. Love changes everything.
Yet there are a lot of folks who hold back for so many reasons. Love seems to warm and fuzzy. Let's sing kumbaya. Let's never say we're sorry. Ugh.
One of Martin Luther King's top aides carried a gun for many years during the civil rights era. Nonviolence was all well and good as a tactic for changing minds, he said, but everybody knows that sooner or later bad people were going to come after us. King told him gently and repeatedly that he really didn't need the gun, but he insisted that if they came for him, he was, by God, going to take a bunch of them with him.
He eventually changed his mind. He didn't change it because King won the argument, or because he thought things through or because he just made a different choice. He got rid of the gun when he stood watching Martin Luther King bleeding to death and he realized how much he loved the man. And loving him, he realized how horrible it would be if he ever did that to anybody, anybody else. It dropped down on him like a ton of bricks that King's life had come to overlap his, one dwelt in the other as the old communion service says, and heedless, mean, ugly, violent, intent to maim and kill could not occupy the same place. The gun had to go.
Non-violence is not a tactic to change people's minds. Non-violence is a way of life. Love is that way of life, and it changes us deep down.
Jesus entering a brutal world at Christmas is like a six-year-old girl entering a racist school in New Orleans is like Martin Luther King getting into your life. Does your heart go out? Deep down, do you want to join the community of people who share life in unimaginably profound ways?
And wanting that, can you feel the world begin to turn? What could possibly be more important than the birth of God into the world to save us from ourselves? What could possibly be more important than the awakening of a love in your heart worthy of God's love and gift of his son? Love turns us around from the life of time, resistance and disappointment to the world of holiness, morality, and, yes, timelessness.
That's the truth you know in love, and that's the truth that sets you free.[3] Can you feel the world begin to turn?
[1] Robert Coles, Children of Crisis, Little Brown & Company, New York, reprinted 2003.
[2] Recently, Coles has written a book about Ruby called Story of Ruby Bridges, Scholastic Inc., 2004.
[3] John 8:32