Month: December 2022

Christmas Day, 2022: Luke 2: 1-20

Today is Christmas. We remember the story of the couple who travelled 70 miles to address a political demand. They come to a very crowded town, because all of David’s descendents had to travel to Bethlehem. There is no room for them, but they have a stable. A baby is born, and shepherds are told of his birth, and come to admire him.

We are used to hearing the story as one about a family who is not welcomed. But a recent article in the Christian Century by Kelly Nikondeha reframed the story for me. What if we thought about the story as one of people making room for everyone who needed it, even though there was really no room left? This squares with Palestinian concepts of hospitality, after all. Many of us have slept on sofas, or in attics, or other found places. I have friends who have camped outside a crowded house at a holiday: they join for meals, but there’s no more room.

What if we imagined other women coming to the stable to help Mary? Before the shepherds arrived, there were other women, helping Mary and Joseph, providing care for the new family. This was what happened in pre-modern societies: women helped birth children, and cared for women who had just borne them.

Most of the images we have of the nativity are of an isolated couple in a stable disconnected from a community. The stable was in town, so in the midst of life. When local women learned that a woman needed help, and they came. The stable was warm, and there was bedding. 

This imagining of the story makes it a story of people caring for each other, welcoming a stranger in need. It is a story of community. It is a fitting start to the story of Jesus, who himself  built a community that welcomed everyone.

Over the years, I have added figures to my creche. The central figures are lovely wooden ones my father bought in the 1960s. But the rest is now entirely non-canonical, with a lama, an elephant, a penguin, some Lego Santas and Cookie Monster, among others. When one friend saw my creche, the next year she appeared with a rubber duckie Jesus and Santa.  They have now joined the crew.  When asked about it, I tell people that since we say that all are welcome at God’s table, all are welcome in the stable too.

As we welcome the Christ child, we are asked to welcome those who show up and need to be cared for.

We wish all of you a Christmas in community.

Fourth Sunday in Advent (December 18, 2022): Isaiah 7:10-16; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18

The story is familiar; we hear it every year. An unmarried woman receives a visit from an angel, who tells her she will bear a son, and the Holy Spirit will impregnate her. Her fiance, who is rightly concerned that his allegedly virginal intended wife is pregnant, gets a visit from an angel in a dream telling him that Mary is pregnant not by some local man, but by the Holy Spirit. I think he would be reasonably justified in responding with incredulity.

This is a weird story. In one of the great understatements of scripture, Mary’s response to the angel is “she wondered what kind of greeting this might be”. Both Mary and Joseph accepted visions which they might legitimately have dismissed as unreal. Both took actions which put them at odds with social norms: Mary agreed to be pregnant outside of marriage, and Joseph agreed to marry her (and delay sexual activity) while she was pregnant by the Holy Spirit.

We are so familiar with the story that it is easy to forget how strange it is. Today’s gospel gives a sense of the context in referencing Joseph’s initial decision to “dismiss Mary quietly” so she wouldn’t be subject to public disgrace. But the Lord appeared to him in a dream, and he changed his mind. We are used to honoring Mary’s acceptance of the Holy Spirit. But Joseph too accepted a vision from the Lord, and did something hard in marrying a pregnant woman.

There’s a medieval English carol, The Cherry Tree Carol, which tells the story of Joseph and Mary traveling, when the pregnant Mary has a craving for cherries. An exasperated Joseph responds, “Let the father of the baby gather cherries for thee”. Needless to say, the highest branch of the cherry tree bends down so Mary can reach the cherries. I’ve always loved the carol, because it portrays Joseph and Mary as normal people. Medieval peasants expected Joseph to resent the situation because they would have.

Over the centuries, we have become accustomed to the Christmas story, but it is worth remembering how strange it is, and how both Joseph and Mary acted with courage against the expectations of their culture. What they did was hard. May we, like Joseph and Mary, also be willing to say yes when the Lord calls us.

Third Sunday of Advent, December 11, 2022: Isaiah 35:1-10; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11; Psalm 146:4-9 or Canticle 15

A few days ago a friend and I drove up into the foothills of the Sierra for a day out. As we drove through grasslands that a few months ago had been dry and brown, you could see the green emerging. Yesterday’s heavy rain will further the greening of the land. Seeing the green makes me happy, and so when I read Isaiah saying that “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing” I feel the joy. I have seen the almost miraculous greening of the land when the rains come.

Isaiah’s prophecy is one of bounty and goodness, a vision of the potential goodness of God’s world: the lame will walk, the blind see. Along the way, God’s people will not go astray. And finally, “Sorrow and sighing shall flee away”. It is hard, in our world, to imagine a world without sorrow; it was equally hard for those who heard Isaiah. This is magic. Isaiah is echoed in Psalm 146, where we hear of the Lord “who gives justice to those who are oppressed, and food to those who hunger”.

We have two choices for the psalm today: Psalm 146, and Mary’s magnificent hymn about the transformative work of God. Mary tells us that the waiting is over. God “has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” The world is transformed. It has happened. The waiting is over.

This assurance that the waiting is over is picked up in today’s Gospel reading. John the Baptist, now in prison, sends his followers to ask Jesus whether he is the one whose coming John had predicted. Jesus, as he so often does, does not answer directly, but tells them to tell John what they see and hear. Again we hear the echoes of Isaiah: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” Jesus shows who he is by his actions, not his words.

In Advent we wait in two ways: we wait for the arrival of the baby Jesus, who becomes the Jesus who preaches and transforms lives. But we also wait for what will come, the future coming of Jesus. Jesus healed the sick, just as Isaiah had promised; his words and actions changed lives. We do our best to share Jesus’ transformative love in our lives. Yet we are still in the world, a world with sorrow and sighing, hunger, disease, and injustice. We are waiting for the world that Isaiah promised, and that Jesus embodied.

Second Sunday of Advent, 3 December 2022: Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19

All our readings today look to the future, a future of both goodness and change. In Isaiah, we hear of the future time when the spirit of the Lord will rest on the ruler, and “with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth”. The unnamed ruler will not just rule with justice; “with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked”. After that, peace will extend to the natural world: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid”. In this future, Isaiah tells us, “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord”.

The Psalmist shares a vision with Isaiah, but offers it as a prayer rather than a prophecy. “Give the King your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the King’s Son; that he may rule your people righteously and the poor with justice”. When this happens, people will share in prosperity, and the oppressor will be crushed. And “there shall be abundance of peace till the moon shall be no more”.

According to Paul, “whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction”, to give us hope. Paul turns to the words of Isaiah and other quotations from the Hebrew scriptures. All of them point to a God of Hope. He closes with the words we often use as benediction at Evening Prayer: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Hope is not blind optimism. It is a vision of what could be. And getting there will not be simple. When John the Baptist appears, he announced that “the Kingdom of Heaven has come near”. He promises that the one who comes after him will baptize with “the Holy Spirit and fire”. Like Isaiah, John tells us that to get to the end, there will be destruction: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will . . . gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Paul knows that the winnowing that John promised has not yet come to pass: it is still in the future. He asks the Romans to live “in harmony with one another”, to glorify God. And, he asks them to “welcome one another, just as Christ has welcomed you”. Paul asks us to live with eachother as if we are in the world that Isaiah prophesied. The God of Hope, Paul suggests, is visible in our attempts to create a model of the world to come. It may not be in the world around us, but it can be visible in small worlds.

It can be hard to hold on to hope in the world today. We live in a world which appears to be defined by scarcity (real or artificial), not abundance. There are wars, and people flee them. Climate change has brought more extreme weather: there are droughts and famines, but also flooding caused by more intense hurricanes and monsoons. The richest people in the world live an unsustainable lifestyle with mega-yachts, private jets, and trips to space, while an increasing number of the rest live one crisis away from disaster. It is hard to believe that we can get to the other side of this without significant suffering; we hope, like the psalmist, that the poor will be rescued and the oppressors crushed.

What do we do? Hope for Paul is not just a thought, but an action: harmony, welcome. We welcome those who wish to live into this world of abundance, because when you live in abundance, you can live in harmony. Such actions are not confined to church: they need to define our approach to the world. We need to know who the oppressors and oppressed are, so that we can work against the oppressors and support the oppressed.

Hope is not just assuming everything will be rainbows and puppies at some point in the future. It is living it into existence, in all parts of our lives.