Glimpse of Holy
Isaiah 52:7-10; Luke 2:1-20
December 24, 2019
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
I had the silly idea that I would find time to read a novel this Advent. That didn’t happen, but I’ll take it on my Christmas road trip. The novel, called Plainsong, is about ordinary life in a small Colorado town. One plotline follows 17-year-old Victoria, who is alone and pregnant. Maggie Jones, the schoolteacher has taken her in temporarily. One day Maggie drives out to the ranch of Raymond and Harold, who are elderly brothers and farmers.
Let me read the next little bit:
"I came out here to ask you a favor," she said to them.
"That’s so?" Harold said. "What is it?"
"There is a girl I know who needs some help," Maggie said. "She’s a good girl but she’s gotten into trouble. I think you might be able to help her. I would like you to consider it and let me know."
"What’s wrong with her?" Harold said. "She need a donation of money?"
"No, she needs a lot more than that."
"What sort of trouble is she in?" Raymond said.
"She’s seventeen. She’s four months pregnant and she doesn’t have a husband."
"Well, yeah," Harold said. "I reckon that could amount to trouble."
Maggie explains that the girl’s father abandoned the family years ago, her mother won’t have her in the house, . . . and the father of her child doesn’t want anything to do with her.
"All right then," Harold said. "You got our attention. You say you don’t want money. What do you want?"
She sipped her coffee . . . looked at the two old brothers . . . . "I want something improbable," she said. "That’s what I want. I want you to think about taking this girl in. Of letting her live with you."
They stared at her.
. . .
After a long silence, Harold says, "Let’s get back to the money part. Money’d be a lot easier."
"Yes," she said. "It would. But not nearly as much fun."[1]
Tonight we celebrate the God who came to live with us. Surely there were easier ways for God to redeem the creation, to fix us, to reconcile the world to God’s own self. Declining anything easier, God chose to enter human existence like one of us and I strongly suspect it was for the sheer joy of it.
When the time came, Mary gave birth to her son. Jesus came into the world as each of us did. His birth involved labor and pain and blood and fear and longing and love and the bonding of parents and child.
In Jesus of Nazareth, God became a particular person, with a specific combination of all the gifts and limitations that one individual bears. Becoming human meant that something new happened in the life of God. God experienced the heights and depths of human existence and all the ordinariness and boredom too.
God become flesh and dwelt among us, as John’s gospel says. Babies can do nothing for themselves. They are entirely dependent on adults to provide and protect and care for them. God entered into the vulnerability that we all share. Becoming flesh – can we think about that reality for just a minute? Flesh is the beauty of a child at play and a couple in love on their wedding day. Flesh makes possible the thrill of ski-jumping or putting a masterpiece onto canvas or scuba diving or singing your heart out on stage or in the shower. Being enfleshed also involves the possibility of injury and disease and weakness, the reality of wrinkles and slowing down and needing more help than you once did. When God becomes flesh, God is repeating, even more emphatically, what God said at the time of creation “It is good. It is very good.”
My friends at Gilead Church in Chicago spent a good bit of time thinking about incarnation this year. One of their affirmations is that “All bodies are beautiful and all bodies are sacred.” They say, “We believe in a God whose love was made known by taking on a body, and what we do with our bodies can still reveal the God of love.” To illustrate this, they made a calendar with pictures of bodies, bodies of church members, sacred, beautiful bodies. They called it Word and Flesh. It honors all bodies and the stories we hold in them.[2]
God becomes incarnate to show us how very much we are loved. You may have seen this nativity scene. It’s at the Claremont United Methodist Church in Claremont, California. It depicts Mary, Joseph and Jesus as separated and caged, reflecting the plight of immigrants and asylum seekers on our southern border. It has been controversial, but this church has made statements with their nativity scenes before. They have also portrayed Joseph and Mary as people experiencing homelessness, and as war refugees in bombed-out Iraq. One year Mary was depicted as a poor woman arrested for giving birth in a bus shelter.[3]
I suppose these are controversial because they are seen as political and not religious – but have you counted how many political leaders and contexts are mentioned in Luke 2? Jesus was political. Enfleshed life is political. Maybe the controversy is because they are so specific. Except that every human life is specific. To portray the Holy Family suffering in these ways is to proclaim that all families are holy and that God has entered deeply and fully into the world in order to reconcile us to God’s own self.
Joy to the world – that’s our theme. Theologian Henri Nouwen wrote “Joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved and that nothing - sickness, failure, emotional distress, oppression, war, or even death - can take that love away.”[4] God becomes incarnate to share everything with us. The more deeply we believe that, the more fully we live within God’s unconditional love, the less fearful we will be and the more joy we will know.
Jesus, on the final night of his life, knowing that he was hours away from betrayal and death, shared a last meal with his friends, probably surprised them with these words, “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full.”
God comes into the world to show how much we are loved. The love of Christ casts out fear. And we carry that love within us. Just as the human Jesus was vulnerable, at the mercy of human beings, so are we also vulnerable and dependent on the love and strength of each other. We align ourselves with Jesus who shared real life with real humans -- laughter and songs and stories and physical pain and tears and regrets and deep sorrow. We draw upon what we know to make connections with others who are also deeply loved by God. Then, God becomes incarnate in us. We become the Body of Christ.
The song we’ve been singing this season says “as we look to one another, a glimpse of holy we might see.” I think that joy happens when we catch a glimpse of the holy.
Two weeks ago, I went to visit our sister E in hospice. She was not having a good day. She struggled valiantly through a brain made foggy by pain meds. Certain words just would not come, like the words “mountain climber” which were essential to a story she was telling. But she said your name, Michael, without hesitation. She started to share something, stopped herself and said, “Don’t tell Michael.” So I promised I would not. Then she said, “I used to play the organ in our other church, because it didn’t have pedals.”
I said, “ Michael would love to know that. Why can’t I tell him?” She looked at me for a long time and then it seemed that she concluded that in the current circumstances, there was no longer any danger that Michael would ask her to be a substitute organist, and she said, “OK.”
In addition to being confused, she was also very agitated. She was worried about something that existed only in her mind and the rest of us could say nothing to ease it. Trying to distract her, I told her that I had been listening to Christmas carols on my drive from Albany and I wondered if she had a favorite carol. She was silent again for so long that I thought I needed to offer her some suggestions or change the subject, but then she quickly blurted out “O Come All Ye Faithful”. Her niece, J, started singing it. I joined in and just kept watching E’s face. She was mouthing the words “O come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant . . .” Maybe she was even singing very softly. She met my gaze steadily. Pretty soon she was crying and I was crying, but we kept singing. She was absolutely not confused or agitated. It was a moment of joy, just a glimpse of holy.
“Mary brought forth her firstborn son and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.”
And the voice of an angel, a messenger from God announced: “Behold! Good news of great joy for all the people.”
Beloved ones, Joy to the world, the Lord is come! Thanks be to God.
[1] Kent Haruf, Plainsong, (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), pp 107-110
[2] https://www.gileadchicago.org/2020-calendar/word-and-flesh
[4] Henri Nouwen, You Are the Beloved: Daily Meditations for Spiritual Living (New York: Convergent Books, 2017) p. 169