A sermon preached at the Ryssby Church on December 12th, 2015 on Luke's birth of Jesus.
Alleluia, Christ is risen!
Oh, I’m sorry, please excuse me. I tend to get Christmas and Easter mixed up. It is an honest mistake, of course, because beyond the ham they also have this very interesting detail in common. You see, on both Christmas and Easter Jesus doesn’t have a very active role to play. You could say that on the two highest holy days of the church year Jesus is largely absent.
At Easter the good news is that the tomb is empty. The good news is that Jesus is not here, he has gone on ahead of us while we stand at the entrance of an empty tomb and rejoice.
Throughout Advent we wait and watch and prepare for the promised messiah who removes disaster, deals with our oppressors, heals the lame, and gathers the outcast. We await the coming of the one who will fulfill all that God has promised in the past and pull us into a new future. And into those very large shoes steps…a baby.
Why is it that we call the days most holy, when Jesus does not seem to be here?
A cliff-hanger and a belated introduction…I am Zach Parris and I am most blessed to serve as the pastor of Lutheran Campus Ministry at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I bring you greetings this evening from your sisters and brothers on campus who at this moment are doing very strange things; running around hopped up on more caffeine than the surgeon general would recommend, pitching tents in the library, they’re actually…studying. On campus the season of final exams has come and under that stress all signs of normal life have been abandoned.
Perhaps you also find your life in a bit of disarray. My house is covered by a dusting of wrapping paper, half-finished crochet projects, and boxes that MUST make it to the post office by Monday. In the midst of all this chaos I wonder...what is it pushing us? What is it pushing life to such a frenetic pace?
I suspect that it is our relationship to both the past and the future. Students, certainly, are working to atone for the mistakes they may have made earlier in the term, seeking the salvation of a good score on a final exam. But even here, in this place, like so many of our Christmas traditions, we are haunted by the ghosts of the past.
It is an honor to be here with you in this place. Gathered in this historic church, the nostalgic embers of my past are kindled. My family’s most significant Christmas tradition was to gather at my great-grandfather's home in an apple orchard in western North Carolina, built when the family migrated from Georgia after the boll weevil came through. After dinner we’d always go to the midnight service at the old family church on the top of the hill; a church even older than this one.
Way out here and in the profession I am in, I can no longer make it to the annual celebrations in my great-grandfather’s home. Truth be told, even if I could, it wouldn’t be the same. My great-grandfather has long since died; along with many of the other faces that were always there.
Every year I feel the tension, the incompleteness of this Christmas. It’s not what it once was. So, I do what I can to recreate it. I observe the traditions I can in the hopes that it will bring the fullness of life that I knew in my past into my present.
Perhaps that is the danger this time of year. It’s the trap that snares the emperor tonight. It’s the trap into which I willingly run time and again. I’m seduced into thinking that if I just check all the right boxes, if I get all the right answers on the exam, if we just get everything counted and under control, then I will come to know the fullness of life that God has promised and brought to me and to all of us in the past.
Tonight the good news speaks against this false and futile prophesy. Tonight the good news is that we aren’t the ones who bring this fullness and life, that our fate and hope do not rest on our ability to get everything counted, every box checked, nor the Christmases of our youth re-created. Tonight the life of God comes into all of our present imperfection.
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I give thanks to you not just for this invitation and your support of Lutheran Campus Ministry, but for your pastors. In particular, I have found Pastor Paul to be an excellent conversation partner as I ponder the mysteries of the universe. Recently he challenged me.
You see, I love big abstract ideas and tiny details. I get caught up in the massive imagery of the season. Isaiah’s talk of mountains being made flat and valleys filled in and skies filled with angels talking to shepherds. I confess I spent a significant amount of time this week with the Greek word used when Mary “ponders” these things in her heart. It’s more literally that she “threw them together” into her heart. It’s the same root word when Jesus “casts out” demons. I mean, wow, just chew on that for a few days! My theological lens is focused sharply on the reality that God is the one who does all the work, all the heavy lifting, that God is the one who brings us to new life and love. In response to these massive descriptions of the work of God, Pastor Paul wanted to know, if that’s true, is there anything that we can do to prepare for Christ and Christmas?
Tonight, Paul, I have your answer and to prove it, I even have a very practical piece of evidence to submit. I am convinced there is no practical way to prepare for the coming of Christ. I know this, because I am currently preparing for the coming of another human being into my household. In a little over four months, my wife is going to have one of those, uh, you know, little humans, a baby. I suppose this is the time in which we should be preparing. Sure, there are things we are doing and things we should do to prepare. And yet…I…am…terrified. I’m terrified because I know what I don’t know. Many people have given us advice; most of it well intentioned, nearly all of it welcomed, but I don’t think there’s anything that anyone can tell us that will actually prepare us for the transformation that is coming to our lives.
All I know is that my future holds something particularly broken. I know that come the end of April, my house will include a very fragile human. I hear this endeavor will involve incomplete nights of sleep. I hear this endeavor may involve a significant amount of close contact with human excrement. Yet, I also hear that this endeavor will be filled with new life and love beyond measure.
But you know what? I don’t believe it. It doesn’t make any sense that all that brokenness and incompleteness might add up to a life that is more than the life I have known. I just can’t believe that. Yet, I hope, I have some measure of faith in, and trust that this is true. I cling to the faith that the fullness of life I shall soon come to know does not lie in the great and prosperous future that awaits my unborn child nor in their common lineage with Jesus as refugees in a foreign land, but that in the moments of fragility, in the incompleteness, perhaps even in the midst of human excrement life shall come.
This is the mystery of faith. It is the mystery that comes into the world tonight, that in the moments when God seems most absent, God is most present.
If we listen very carefully to these old walls that's what we'll hear. We won't hear stories of perfect Christmas’ past. We'll hear stories of births and deaths, of famine and plenty. We'll hear the broken stories of a people trying to scratch out a new life an a foreign land, and that in that brokenness the life of God was present.
What are we to do? How are we to prepare? Like Mary, hold the mystery and be held by it. Prepare this Advent by embracing the present, by embracing this moment in all of its imperfection; the first Christmas without a loved one or the candlelight service where the preacher went a little too long. Hold this moment, but also be held by the promise that this is the place, here and now, where the life of God finds us. That may not make a bit of sense…but I am told that it is true. Amen.
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