Christmas Eve

 

December 24, 2024

 + I think most of us know what it’s like.

 Most of us know this feeling.

 Most of us, I hope, have felt that amazing moment when fear is turns into joy—into something beautiful.

 When darkness is turned to light.

 When our anxieties give way to relief.

 That is certainly what Mary and Joseph must’ve felt as they found shelter on that night.

 That is most certainly what they would’ve experienced when the Baby finally came and they realize, for certain, that this birth was something exceptional.

 All that fear they had felt as they traveled all that distance, all that anxiety they felt when they realized they might not have a place to settled down, all of that turned on a dime.

 And into the darkness and fear of their life, came dazzling light.

 This is what we too are clinging to tonight.

 This we too are holding on to.

 This is what we are hoping in as we move forward.

 Because, for those of us who trust in God, who know that God is good and that God always provides, we know there is always light in the darkness.

 We know that always there is always an end to our anxieties and fears.  

 We know that, even if we seem insignificant to the powers that be, to those who have the power and ability to turn us away, God never turns us away.

 God always provides us, like Mary and Joseph, a safe place.

 I know this Christmas season can sometimes feel like a bit much.

 Most of you know how I feel about the “Christmas season.”

 It IS too much sometimes.

 The expectations that things should be just right, just perfect, just always happy and joyful, are sometimes too much for all of us.

 I understand the tendency we all have of getting caught up in society’s celebration of Christmas.

 It’s easy to find ourselves getting a bit hypnotized by the glitz and glamour we see about us.

 I admit I enjoy some of those sparkly Christmas displays.

 But the problem for me is that there is a lot of hope in all of it, but sometimes the hope gets lost.

 The hope gets swallowed up.

 We seem to get distracted somewhere along the way and lose sight of what it is we are hoping in.

 The great Archbishop of Canterbury (and probably the greatest of my personal heroes), Michael Ramsey once wrote: “Our Christmas is no less Christmas and our joy no less joyful because we are keeping Christmas with a very dark and troubled world around us…Our rejoicing at Christmas is not an escape from life’s grim realities into a fancy realm of religion and festivity. Rather is it a joy that, as we face and feel the world’s tragedy, we know that God has an answer: an answer for [hu]mankind to receive. In a word, this is a time of hope.”

 Tonight, on this dark, cold night, we celebrate that hope.

 While darkness still exists, we now see that in the midst of that darkness, there is a glimmer of light. 

 It is dim at times. It doesn’t seem like much. But it is there.

 And as we strain into that darkness, we realize that hope does comes to us as Light.

 We celebrate the hope of that Light that has come to us in our collective and personal darknesses.

 We celebrate the Light that has come to us in our despair and our fear, in our sadness and in our frustration.

 And as it does, we bask in the glory of those two emotions—the two emotions Christmas is all about—hope and joy.

 Hope—in our belief that what has come to us—Jesus—God’s own Child, our hope—is here among us,

 And Joy—at the realization of that reality.

 As we come forward tonight to meet with joy and hope this mystery that we remember and commemorate and make ours this evening, we too should find ourselves feeling these emotions at our very core.

 This hope and joy we are experiencing this evening comes up from our very centers.

 Our lives are different because of what happened that evening when Jesus was born.

 Because of that event, we find that our hope is more tangible—more real—that anything we have ever hoped in before.

 And that is what we are rejoicing in this evening.

 Our true hope and true joy is not in brightly colored lights and a pile of presents under a decorated tree.

 Our true hope and joy is not found in the malls or the stores.

 We know that our true hope and joy are not there because by Saturday, we’re going to see that what the rest of the society  is celebrating in this Christmas season will be disposed of.

 Our true hope and joy is more powerful and more tangible than anything that is so disposable.

 Our true hope and joy does not come to us with things that will, a week from now, be a fading memory.

 Our hope and joy is in that God has come close to us, that God’s Light has shined upon us, and this reality causes us to leap up with joy.

 Our hope and joy is in that almighty and incredible God who would come to us, not on some celestial cloud with a sword in his hand and armies of angels flying about.

 Our hope and joy is in God who comes to us again and again in our darkness.

 Our hope and joy is in a God who comes and accepts us and loves us for who we are and what we are—a God who understands what it means to live this sometimes frightening uncertain life we live.

 This is the real reason why we are joyful and hopeful on this beautiful night.

 This is why we are feeling within us a strange sense of happiness and excitement.

 This is why we are rushing toward this holy event, toward the God who renews us in what we once thought was our barrenness.

 Let this hope you feel tonight stay with you now and always.

 Let the joy you feel tonight be the motivating force in how we live our lives throughout this coming year.

 We, like Mary and Joseph, have come so far.

 We, like them, have hoped so strongly.

 This is what it is all about.

 This feeling we are feeling right now is the true joy that descends upon us when we realize God has come to us in our collective darkness.

 And this joy that we are feeling is because the Light that has come to us will never, ever darken.

 

4 Advent

 

Dec. 22, 2024

 Luke 1:39-49 (50-56)

 + As you know, I have been studying Judaism for the last several years, and for my it has definitely deepened my own Christian faith.

 I have found that to truly understand the Gospels and the life of Jesus, I need to sometimes to see what was happening not through Greek, Hellenistic eye (which we as Westerners tends to do all the time), but rather to look at all scripture through a Hebrew lens.

 At times it’s hard to do so.

 But it has also been revolutionary for me, as a Christian, as a priest and even as a poet.   

 Seeing the Gospel stories through a Hebrew lens is sometimes difficult.

 But one aspect of doing so has been the approach to the scriptures we find about viewing representatives of God as divine beings.

 For early Hebrews people it was not uncommon for them to see the people who they believed were sent to them from God as being divine.

 We find this most profoundly in the story of Jacob and the Angel.

 Which is one of my favorite stories in scripture.

 The angel, of course, is not God, but God’s representative.

 But for Jacob, as he wrestled with angel, he felt he was truly wrestling with God.

 Certainly, for the followers of Jesus, who saw him as a very unique representative of God, they saw him as divine.

 And in him, they saw God.

 More importantly, they saw in Jesus a loving, compassionate and wildly inclusive God. 

 It did not take much of a leap for the Greeks to take this Hebrew view of God’s representative and formulate something as complex and mysterious as the Trinity.

 We’re not going to get into all of that today.

 It’s the last Sunday of Advent, after all.

 But we can see God’s divinity in other people in scripture as well.

 And when we start seeing that divinity in someone like Mary, for example, we are offered a glimpse of something particularly unique.

 We are offered a glimpse of the feminine aspects of God, which we find in the story of Mary. 

 This is important, because, there are not many opportunities in scripture for women to act in the capacity of representative of God.

 But we do see it uniquely in Mary.

 Bear with me.

 In our Gospel reading for today, we find Mary and her kinswoman—probably her aunt—Elizabeth rejoicing in the ways in which God was working their lives.

 Mary, carrying within her flesh God’s very Son—the Messiah made flesh, this very unique representative of God—carrying actual divinity within her— and Elizabeth, carrying within her flesh John, who would later be the Baptist calling to us from the Jordan River (and also, might I add, a representative of God to many people as well), meet and there is a spark between them.

 What is that spark?

 That spark is God’s energy at work in them.

 What I have always loved about this story from scripture is that neither Mary nor Elizabeth probably can fully comprehend what is going on within them.

 How could they?

 How could any of us?

 But what they do know is that something strange and wonderful and HOLY has happened.

 God is happening. And in a big way!

 Mary, the young virgin, has conceived under mysterious and certainly scandalous circumstances and is about to give birth.

 And Elizabeth, the barren elderly woman, also is also about to give birth.

 Neither should be having a child.

 Yet, somehow, they both are.

 These sort of things don’t happen in ordinary life.

 Certainly nothing even remotely like this happened before in the lives of these two  Jewish women.

 But now, here they were, greeting each other, both of them pregnant with children that came to them by miraculous means.

 And, although they might not fully understand why or how, they feel real hope and joy at what has happened to them.

 The full expression of this hope and joy finds it voice in the words of Mary’s song

 “My soul glorifies the LORD

and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”

 And in doing so, Mary truly does embody God.

 The divine dwells within her in a very unique and beautiful way.

 And because God does, she becomes something more.

 She becomes a unique representative of God.

 Certainly she is a representative of God to Elizabeth.

 And certainly she continues to be to many of us even today.

 But, of course, it can’t just end there.

 It is isn’t enough that we simply look to others a representatives of God.

 We also must, in turn, strive to be representatives of God, here and now, in our world part of the world.

 Essentially this is our goal.

 It is our goal to embody God’s Light and Love and Presence within each of us as well.

 We are—each of us—called to be unique representatives of God in this world.

 We, like Mary, are called to carry within us Jesus.

 Wherever we go, we should bear Jesus within us.

 Like Mary, God’s own gift to us dwells within us.

 Like Mary, God’s very Word dwells within us!

 And like Mary, we should be able to rejoice as well, at this fact that divinity itself dwells within us.

 We too should sing to God, in joy and hope:

 “My soul glorifies the LORD

and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”

 Now, we have been hearing the Magnificat quite a bit this morning, as we should.

 This “Song of Mary” is one of my beautiful scriptures we have.

 But before we think this is some nice little song to God from an innocent teenage girl, I would like you to remember how radical it really is.

 How defiant it is.

 And how political it is.

 Oh, you didn’t catch Mary’s political jab?

 It’s right there:

 “…[God] has scattered the proud in their conceit.

[God] has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *
and has lifted up the lowly.”

 This is no meek and mild teenager!

 For her, living there, in that time, that says a lot.

 And it’s echoing pretty loudly for us here and now.

 God, we realize from this Song of Mary, does not let the “proud” in their conceit last long in that place.

 We know that God has no problem casting down the mighty from their thrones.

 Mary’s song of defiance is our song of defiance today for us as well.

 And that, even in our defiance, we are full of hope in a God truly does do these things.

 Like both Mary and Elizabeth, this hope and joy we are experiencing later this week should be coming up from our very centers as well.  

 This is really how we should approach the miracle that we commemorate on Tuesday evening and Wednesday.

 Like Mary and Elizabeth, we will never fully understand how or why Jesus—God’s very Son made flesh, God’s Word indwelling in our midst—has come to us as this little child in a dark stable in the Middle East, but it has happened and, because it happened, we are a different people.

 Our lives are different because of what happened that evening.

 That is how God works.

 God loves us enough that everything we have feared will be taken from us.

 And that is what we are rejoicing in, along with Mary and Elizabeth, this morning.

 Our true hope and joy are not in brightly colored lights and a pile of presents until a decorated tree.

 Our true hope and joy are not found in the malls or the stores.

  Our true hope and joy do not come to us with things that will, a week from now, be a fading memory.

 Our hope and joy are in that Baby who, as he draws near to us, causes us to leap up with joy at his very presence.

 Our hope and joy are in that almighty and incredible God has send us the Messiah, the anointed One, the One promised in the prophecies of scripture, in this innocent child, born to a defiant teenager in a dusty distant land.

 Our hope and joy are in a God who send us this amazing gift—who has sent us LOVE—real and abiding LOVE--with a face like our face and flesh like our flesh.

 LOVE embodied.

 This is the real reason why we are joyful and hopeful on this beautiful winter morning—on this last Sunday of Advent.

 This is why we are feeling within us a strange leaping.

 This is why we rushing toward God’s very Messiah who has come to visit us in what we once thought was our barrenness.

 Let the hope we feel today as God draws close to us stay with us now and always.

 Let the joy we feel today as God comes to us in love be the motivating force in how we live our lives throughout this coming year.

  Let us greet God’s Light with all that we have within us and let us welcome him into the shelter of our hearts.

 And, with Mary, let us sing to the God who sends Jesus to us with all our hearts,

 “My soul glorifies in you, O Lord,

and my spirit truly rejoices in you, O God, my Savior.”

 Let us pray.

 Our souls glorify you, O God. Our spirits truly do rejoice in you. Visit us, here in this place in which we dwell, and live within us. Let us carry your Presence with us wherever we may go. And go with us wherever we may go. Let us be your representatives to those who need your love, your light, your radical, all-inclusive love, now and always. We ask this in the Name of Jesus our Messiah who is about to dawn like the Sun into the night of our souls. Amen. 

 

 

 

Christmas Letter

 Christmas, 2024

 

My Friends at St. Stephen’s,

 

As we near the joyous commemoration of the birth of Christ and prepare to celebrate all that that birth means to us as fully loved and fully accepted children of God,  we also find ourselves anticipating the new year of 2025 and all that it potentially holds for us. 

For my part, serving as St. Stephen’s continues to be truly one of the most fulfilling experiences of my priestly life. Our life together of ministry, worship, music and outreach has been a source of great personal joy for me and has helped me to see how gracious God is in showering blessings upon faithful, committed people who truly do seek after God.

As we move forward together into this future full of hope and potential growth, I ask for your continued prayers for St. Stephen’s and your continued presence on Sunday mornings, Wednesday nights and whenever else we gather together to worship and to do ministry.

Please know that I pray, as always, for each of you individually by name over the course of each week in my daily observance of the Daily Office (Morning and Evening and the celebration of the Eucharist. Above all, know that I give thanks to God every day for the opportunity to serve such a wonderful, caring and loving congregation of people who are committed to growth and radical hospitality.

My sincerest blessings to you and to all those you love during this season of joy, hope and love.    

PEACE always,

2 Advent

 

December 8, 2024

 

Luke 3.1-6

 

+  We are now well into this strange and beautiful season of Advent.

 

As I’ve said before—and will no doubt say again—I love this season.

 

You all know:

 

(This is a terrible thing for your priest-poet to say, but…)

 

I’m not a big Christmas fan.

 

I never have been.

 

But Advent. . . that is right up my alley.

 

Prophets and prophecies fulfilled.

 

God coming to us.

 

Talk about the end of things.

 

It’s all so fantastic and yet so compelling.

 

And just when we think we have it all kind of figured out, who do we encounter?

 

In this morning’s Gospel, we are faced with the formidable figure of John the Baptist.

 

I used to not like John the Baptist.

 

He always seemed kind of frightening to me.

 

He was kind of crazy, after all.

 

But over the years I’ve really come to like John the Baptist.

 

He is actually an incredible saint.

 

And someone very important to the story of Jesus.

 

Certainly it would be difficult for any of us to take the words of a man like this seriously.

 

Especially when he’s saying things like, “prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

 

How could WE do any such thing?

 

How do we make pathways straight?

 

Somehow, in the way John the Baptist proclaims it, this is not so much hopeful as frightening.

 

It is a message that startles us and jolts us at our very core.

 

But this—whether we like it or not—is the true message of Advent.

 

Like John the Baptist and those who eagerly awaited the Messiah, this time of waiting was almost painful.

 

When we look at it from that perspective, we see that maybe John isn’t being quite as difficult and windy as we initially thought.

 

Rather his message is one of almost excruciating expectation.

 

Which we talked about last week in my sermon.

 

For us, as followers of Jesus, we too are living with this excruciating expectation.

 

But our expectation is not something we do complacently.

 

We don’t just sit here and twiddle our thumbs in our patient waiting.

 

Rather, in our expectation, we do what John the Baptist and other prophets did.

 

And what is that?

 

We prophesy.

 

We proclaim.

 

We assess the situation, and strengthened by what we know is coming to us, we make a kind of educated guess—inspired by God’s Spirit—at how it will all turn out.

 

And we profess and proclaim that message.

 

Our job as prophets is to echo the cry of the Baptist:

 

“Prepare the way of the Lord, make the paths of God straight.”

 

We should find ways to prepare for God’s coming to us.

 

We do it in many ways during Advent.

 

We light the candles of the Advent wreath.

 

We listen to the message of the prophets from the Hebrew Scriptures.

 

We slow down and we ponder who it is we are longing for.

 

And we wait…

 

As prophets, as fellow seers of the future, we are proclaiming that moment when the Messiah will come to us.

 

We know he is coming.

 

We know his coming is imminent.

 

But sometimes he seems so agonizingly slow in his coming to us.

 

One of my favorite books is called The Forgotten Desert Mothers.

 

It is a book about early Christians who took the words we heard this morning from the Baptist as literally as they could.

 

These desert mothers and fathers have a lot to teach us.

 

Like, us, they lived in an age of uncertainty.

 

Many had suffered dearly during the persecutions against Christians in the early years of the Church.  

 

Others had previously been pagans who lived lives of excess.  

 

It was a time when nothing in the world seemed stable.

 

Governments gave way to stronger governments.

 

Differing religions battled each other for what each perceived to be “the truth.”

 

And so too did many Christians.    

 

It sounds familiar doesn’t it?

 

In the face of all of this uncertainty, these men and women heard the call of the Baptist. “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

 

In response they did something we might find unusual.

 

We, as modern Christians, are taught that we must not only live out our faith, but also, in some way, must proclaim our faith to those around us.  

 

We take seriously the command to go out into the world and proclaim what we believe.

 

It is what we do when we go out to feed the hungry or to tend the sick.

 

We do it when we reach out to others in the name of God.

 

These early Christians, however, did the exact opposite.

 

They retreated from society and went off to the desert, in this case usually the deserts of Egypt and Palestine.  

 

Oftentimes, coming from wealthy homes and positions of authority, they sold it all, gave the money to the poor and went off to live alone.  

 

And we’re not talking about a few individuals here.

 

We’re talking about people leaving in droves.  

 

The deserts were literally populated with men and women who tried to leave it all behind.

 

More often than not, they formed loosely-organized communities, usually around a church, in which they lived and prayed alone for most of the time, only coming together to pray the Psalms or celebrate Eucharist.  

 

Their lives in the desert weren’t, as you can imagine, comfortable lives by any means. 

 

Some walled themselves up in abandoned tombs.

 

Others lived in caves.

 

One went so far as to crawl stop a tall pillar and live there for years on end, exposed to the elements.  

 

Even then they couldn’t completely escape what they left behind.

 

Many of the stories tell of these poor souls being tormented by demons and temptations.

 

It’s not hard to imagine that, yes, alone in a dark tomb or cave, one would be forced to face all the darkest recesses of one’s soul.

 

Part of the process of separating one’s self from the world involved finally wrestling with all those issues one carries into the desert.

 

Few of us in this day and age would view this kind of existence as the ideal Christian life.

 

In fact, most of would probably look on it as a sort of insanity.  

 

But at the time, in that place, people began to see this as the ideal.

 

People, I imagine, were tired of the day-to-day grind of working, slaving, fending for themselves in a sometimes unfriendly society.

 

They felt distant from God and they were not able to find God in the society in which they lived.  

 

The idea of going off and being alone with God was very appealing.

 

Of course, even this seemingly simple and pure way of living was soon tarnished by another form excess.

 

Some of the people who went off to live in the desert were simply mentally unsound to begin with.

 

Others went insane after years of living alone in a tomb or a cave.

 

They abused their bodies, sometimes to the point of death, by whipping themselves, by chaining themselves to walls, by not taking care of themselves physically, or simply starving themselves to a point close to death.  

 

But despite these abuses, the message of the desert mothers and fathers to us is still a valid one.

 

The whole reason they went off like they did was to shed everything that separated them from their waiting for God.  

 

They sought to make their very lives a living Advent.  

 

They were waiting expectantly and anxiously for God’s Messiah.

 

And by mortifying themselves, by chastising their bodies and fasting, they would be prepared for his coming again.  

 

Although I hope no one here is called to a life quite that extreme, I think their message speaks to us clearly in these days before Christmas.

 

We should find ways to prepare for God’s coming to us.

 

In this season, overwhelmed by all that is happening around us, we find ourselves reacting in our own ways.

 

Our own lives can be frightening.

 

And at times, these moments of expectation are frightening.

 

But, still, even in these frightening moments, we should remember: we are prophets.

 

We can assess the situation—as ugly and bitter as it is—and, inspired by God’s Spirit, see that there is a positive outcome.

 

Always.

 

God’s Messiah is coming.

 

Yes, not at the speed we want him to come.

 

But he is coming.

 

And in that moment, prophets that we are, enlightened by God’s Spirit as we are, seeing into the dark of the future, we can look  forward in hope.

 

We, the prophets, find that we can now see the goal for which we are working.

 

We can look into the gloom, into the frightening future and see that all is not lost.

 

God’s Messiah, the Chosen One, is coming.

 

He is coming to us.

 

He is coming to us in this place in which we seem sometimes to flounder.

 

He comes to us in these moments when we feel overwhelmed.

 

He comes to us in those moments when it seems we have lost.

 

He comes to us in our defeat.

 

And when he does, even in those moments, we know.

 

Truly the summation of our prophecies is upon us.

 

And what is that summation?

 

It is the fact that, in the coming of God’s Messiah “all flesh shall see the salvation of God” in our midst.

 

And with that realization, with that actualization, we are lifted from those waters and from the dark mire and muck of our lives.

 

And we are restored.

 

Once and for all time.

 

S0, do what prophets do.

 

Rejoice!

 

Proclaim the way of the Lord!

 

The Messiah is coming!

 

God is close at hand!

 

Rejoice!

 

Amen.