December 18, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
Mary, it says in Luke’s birth narrative, ponders in her heart all that the shepherds and angels tell her. Maybe she did, but as an adult child, her son, Jesus, keeps Mary at a distance. Only in Church mythology, and high doctrines of Mary created by the church centuries after the fact, is there any kind of special relationship between them. We like to look back at that birth through the eyes of everything we imagine we know about Jesus, and we like to wonder about his birth and his mother and his childhood, because we see and hear him as a man who changed the course of history – who in fact, whether we know it or not, acknowledge it or not, change your life and mine.
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Sermons@TRINITY
2 Advent, December 13, 2009
Pondering These Things by Gay Hadley
Neighbors said it first.
Surely this child
belongs to someone else.
Mary, too, when she held him,
sang him to sleep,
watched his deep, brooding eyes,
wondered where he came from.
We ponder our children,
blessed or not, depending
on your point of view.
We are afraid for the ones
who talk early, speak
with a shivering wisdom.
We fear the world
will be afraid.
And we know we may lose
them, not understanding
why, except to think
they must belong
to someone else.
Good morning, and thank you for the music.
You hold your baby in your arms,
you rock her or him,
and their fat little face looks up into yours.
You wonder.
You wonder…
about what she will be when she grows up.
You wonder…
about what he will think of you when he grows up.
You wonder…
about what the world will be like
when they are older and you are dead and gone.
You wonder.
You can’t help but wonder.
But then,
when you take them to preschool or Headstart,
or kindergarten or Middle School,
or to their first day of High School,
or you leave them at college or in the first apartment,
you wonder…
You wonder if others will love them,
love them as much as you do.
You wonder…
will other people understand them,
appreciate them,
care about them as much as they should be
understood, appreciated and cared for?
Will the world be afraid of them,
will they lose their way among those in the world?
I think about my mom.
She died in 1998 at the age of 83.
I think about what her mom and dad
must have wondered.
She was adopted at birth.
It was such a secret,
such a shame to her,
that her own children never knew her birth name
until she was dead and our father told us.
That is so sad,
and consistent with a time and a culture
that feared difference…lack of conformity…standing out in any way.
I wonder about what her parents wondered:
Her birth parents and her adopted ones?
She was brilliant and very different.
She grew up in rural Michigan
driving at the age of 12
because her dad was a country doctor,
and her mom would not drive.
So my mom, not yet a teen,
drove her dad on rural roads,
and dropped him off at homes
where he would spend the night
delivering a child,
or sitting with a sick person through dark hours.
(Imagine that kind of medical care –
half pastoral, half medical and totally personal).
She skipped two grades in school
and graduated from high school only 2 months
after she turned 16.
“We are afraid for the ones
who are different,
who talk early, speak
with a shivering wisdom.
We fear the world
will be afraid…”
She was different.
Terribly introverted
yet with a brilliant mind that required her to vent
what she knew and thought and believed.
Unable to do it with grace,
she was socially awkward and odd
and a first-rate character.
Mostly, growing up,
I was embarrassed by her
even though my friends loved her.
My friends loved to talk to my mom
because she treated them like adults –
she, who did not know how to calibrate any difference
between people.
She, who was oddly different
but did not treat anyone differently
because she did not know how.
I see it now for what it was
but at the time I hated it.
I never wondered.
It takes a lot of time and distance
for children to wonder about their parents
the way parents wonder about their children.
In the brutally honest gospel stories,
Jesus and his mother don’t get along.
They have a raw,
painful relationship.
Mary, it says in Luke’s birth narrative,
ponders in her heart
all that the shepherds and angels tell her.
Maybe she did,
but as an adult child,
her son, Jesus, keeps Mary at a distance.
Only in Church mythology,
and high doctrines of Mary
created by the church centuries after the fact,
is there any kind of special relationship between them.
We like to look back at that birth
through the eyes of everything we imagine we know about Jesus,
and we like to wonder about his birth
and his mother
and his childhood,
because we see and hear him as a man
who changed the course of history –
who in fact, whether we know it or not,
acknowledge it or not, change your life and mine.
So we look back through the wrong end of the telescope,
seeing him through all the mythology and stories…
and we imagine
that Mary and Joseph would wonder about the future;
about his greatness;
about all the things he would do.
Yet we know that infant mortality
was nearly 60% in those days,
among those people,
in that place.
We know that his life expectancy, at best,
was 30 in those days,
among those people…in that place.
We know that poverty limits wondering
and focuses life on the moment, here and now.
We might imagine that there was a whole lot of
wondering going on,
but in fact,
there was a whole lot of desperation going on.
The was very little food;
there was horrendous vulnerability
to arbitrary violence;
there was radical uncertainty
about tomorrow or the next day;
in short, there was deprivation
of food, shelter, clothing and basic human rights
on a scale that you and I
can only imagine in our darkest moments.
I truly doubt
that Mary and Joseph could afford to wonder.
I truly doubt
that Mary and Joseph were anything but afraid.
I truly doubt
that May and Joseph were thinking beyond how cold, and dirty and hungry they were,
and how they would possibly keep this baby from dying, as perhaps their previous offspring had died.
I bring it up
because at the center of the Christmas story
we have constructed such an astoundingly
romantic scene at the birth of Jesus,
that it truly distorts the entire life of Jesus.
Now notice please,
I do not say such things on Christmas Eve.
I am my mother’s son,
but I am a slightly improved version.
You all are the home crowd,
we can talk like friends here – openly.
In a couple of weeks
we will share this space with a lot of visitors
and occasional participants
who come for the romance of it all.
It would be exceptionally inhospitable for me to
talk like this with them.
They do not have the context or the immunity
created from a week by week exposure.
So, while I will endeavor to make a meaningful
contribution on Christmas Eve,
it won’t be at the level of frankness and openness
from which I am speaking today.
Think about this.
Moses is an abandoned slave child
raised in Pharaoh’s household
and as an adult,
rejects his privilege
and at God’s command,
leads a slave rebellion.
Buddha is a prince
raised in utter opulence who,
upon seeing the extremely brutal poverty
on the other side of his walled and gated community,
abandons privilege and becomes a mendicant.
Mohammad is of modest means
but raised surrounded by benefactors,
and himself becomes a very savvy and successful
businessman who nonetheless rejects personal affluence and embraces simplicity and generosity.
Jesus is born in stark and utter poverty,
desperately poor and vulnerable and
a miscreant to the oppressive empire surrounding him.
He never gets very far,
does very much
or lives very long.
We should recognize a theme here:
a golden thread running through the spiritual wisdom of the world – not just our own.
Are we looking for God in all the wrong places?
Are we seeking affirmation from empty sources?
Are we relying on comfort and security from that which cannot truly offer it?
Sure we are, that’s what we do.
We are human beings and we like stuff.
We like to make a nice big soft nest
to snuggle in and enjoy.
It’s natural.
We like comfort, security and pleasure.
Don’t feel guilty about it.
Don’t feel bad about it.
Don’t feel ashamed of it.
That is who we are.
But the question is,
can we do better than that?
We know, somewhere deep inside,
that if we do not better,
then we are going to kill ourselves.
Maybe not you or me personally:
but corporately,
communally,
globally,
eventually…soon.
Unless we change…we’re dead.
It is not a new message,
why do you think God keeps sending it
via those who have lived painfully
on the other side of affluence?
It is an ancient message,
sent to the kings and queens of the ancient world
on the lips of prophets.
It is a message sent to the ancient world,
the medieval world, and the modern world.
It is a message sent to every culture
and to the captains of every society.
It is a message about the hazard of living for stuff
at the expense of the truly important things
that generate and preserve Life…
instead of draining and killing Life.
That is what the Christmas Story is about,
when all the mythological and romantic elements
are peeled away to reveal the fruit.
When we peel it away
it is kind of like my mom –
embarrassing and socially awkward at the moment
but amazingly smart and wise in retrospect.
God has delivered to us a message
over and over and over and over again.
It is a message that Moses
and Buddha
and Mohammad
and Jesus echo like a broken record.
We’ve got issues with stuff.
There is nothing wrong with us for liking it
or wanting it, that is very natural.
But building our lives and our world around it,
basing our economy on it,
that will kill us…all of us.
The message is getting old, very old.
The question is whether we are going to get it
one of these days,
and if we are going to change our behavior.
“We ponder our children,
blessed or not, depending
on your point of view.
We are afraid for the ones
who are different,
who talk early, speak
with a shivering wisdom.”
The Christmas story,
like Jesus who is at the center of it,
is that kind of a baby:
A baby with a face only a mother could love.
God,
who is at the center of all our important stories,
is that kind of a child,
looking up at us with a fat face
who we are left to ponder.
So ponder it,
this embarrassing and awkward child of ours;
let us ponder it in our hearts for Christmas.
Amen.
