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The Incarnation, Emmanuel, God-with-us, in the muck of life - that is the reason I still call myself a Christian.

12/27/2019

WHAT IF GOD WAS ONE OF US?
Christmas Eve, 7:30 and 11 PM
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell

Luke 2:8-20

In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

There are all sorts of reasons that people stop believing in God.  Sometimes it’s a trauma so intense, so painful, that we cannot imagine how a God of love would allow such a thing to happen.  My grandfather was one of those, after being left alone to raise eight children when my grandmother died before she was 40.  Other times, people stop believing in God because of the clash between science and what they have been told the Bible teaches.  They assume those two disciplines – religion and science - speak the same language – but they don’t.  Some others just loose interest as the years pass.  But of all the non-believers I’ve ever known and loved, the majority of them stopped believing in God because of religion.  These folks, once part of the church, experienced hypocrisy, the love of money, and the abuse of the vulnerable at church.  Sometimes they were the abused ones.  And so, the only conclusion they could come to, the only one that made any sense, was that all of this – the building, the liturgy, the tradition - was a bunch of hogwash.

Maybe you are one of them.  Maybe you don’t really believe any of this.  Maybe you are here tonight because of tradition or because of grandma or because you’re trying to keep the peace at Christmas dinner tomorrow.

Well, I know how you feel.  Despite my title and the fact that I am standing in a pulpit on Christmas Eve, dressed like, I know, first-hand what it’s like to doubt because of religion.  I’ve seen religion do a great deal of damage in the world.  I’ve seen it used to draw lines between people – who’s in and who’s out. I’ve seen it used, as a weapon to bash those not approved of, used as a manipulation or as a power play.  And so there have been times when I too was tempted to call it all a bunch of hogwash.

Those who don’t believe have been in the news a lot in recent years.  Non-believers are coming out of the closet in large numbers.  And people assume that the swelling ranks of those who don’t believe is a new phenomenon. There have always been those who entertained doubts, they just did it quietly for the most part.  And there have always been those who wanted to believe but were pushed out by religion.  Some of those were around that first Christmas night.

In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping what over their flocks by night.

I’ve never really given those shepherds much thought.  My view of them has been shaped mostly by movies and the Charlie Brown Christmas Special and my own role in multiple Christmas pageants, dressed in a bathrobe and with a towel on my head.  At the 5 PM children’s service today, I had a pillowcase on my head.  And so my view of shepherds in the ancient world is a romanticized one.

But those shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night, were actually some of the most persecuted and misunderstood people of their day.  And religion played a major part in their persecution.

By the time that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, shepherding was at the very bottom of the social order.  It was the job that you took when no one else would hire you.  It was the job you could get when you got out of prison and no one wanted you.  And that made shepherds the brunt of a thousand jokes; the folks you could make fun of at polite dinner parties and no one would object.

Shepherds were commonly categorized as liars, degenerates, and thieves.  Thus, it was easy for politicians to use them as foils against all of society’s ills.  If there was a rise in crime, blame the shepherds.  If they moved into your neighborhood, sell your house.  If there was civil unrest, blame them.  If you wanted to score cheap political points, make the conversation about them.  After all, they’re all just liars and degenerates and thieves.

So demonized was this group of people, that their testimony was not admissible in a court of law.  Why would you believe a liar?  Additionally, many towns in ancient Palestine had ordinances barring shepherds from even entering the city limits.

And to make matters worse, the religious establishment, who should have been advocating for the outcasts as the Hebrew Scriptures teach, instead took a particularly dim view of the shepherds.  Because they lived with the sheep, and because sheep need tending seven days a week, the shepherds were not able to keep the Sabbath as others did.  They had to work on Saturday.  And because they did, and because this was breaking a foundational religious law, the shepherds were considered ritually unclean. And any ritually unclean person was shunned by the rest of society.

Now when people are shunned, they have two basic choices.  They can either accept their condition – even come to believe it’s true - and slink quietly into the shadows.  Or, they can be more proactive in their condition and simply stop caring that they are shunned.  They reject the society that rejects them. They may even claim that as a badge of honor.  Not belonging becomes its own identity.  And when religion is a cause of your social isolation, well then, forget religion!  -- And maybe, just maybe, that’s what these shepherds had done.  Maybe, just maybe, they, like some of us, had stopped believing altogether. But it was to them – these skeptics and the doubters and the outsiders – that the angel of the Lord appeared.

The Gospel of Luke is written from the point of view of the outcast - the weak, the vulnerable, the misunderstood – those are the heroes of Luke’s Gospel. So it’s not surprising that the angel of the Lord did not appear to the King.  She did not appear to the priests.  She did not appear to those who went to Temple every week.  Instead, this herald announcing the birth of the Savior of the world - trusted that precious message to nobodies.

Now, that alone was shocking enough.  But there is even more scandal here.

Shepherds were also the brunt of jokes because they lived with the animals they cared for.  They slept with them and ate with them and everybody thought they smelled like them.  But the angel of the Lord told the shepherds that this Baby would be found wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger – an animal-feeding trough.  The Son of God would be found among the sheep and goats and cows and manure and the smell – the very things that made the shepherds outcasts.  That’s where God would be found.

Back in the 1990s, when I had left the church and was feeling very much the outsider because of the church, the singer Joan Osborne recorded a song that, in some ways, literally saved me.  The song simply asks “What if God was one of us?  Just a slob like one of us, just a stranger on a bus, tryin’ to make his way home.”

I remember at the time that some religious people were scandalized by these lyrics.  They were scandalized because they needed a God who was high and exalted; a Heavenly King, a being so wholly other that we humans could have no real connection.  They complained that this song demeaned the Almighty and brought him down to our level.  But they shouldn’t have worried about that so much – because Christmas already took care of that.

The Incarnation, Emmanuel, God-with-us, in the muck of life - that is the reason I still call myself a Christian.  And so on this holy night, I am once again left to ponder: what wondrous love is this that God would come to live like one us, to smell like one of us, to laugh like one of us, to cry like one of us, to die like one of us.  Just like us.

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"I have sometimes wondered what a Christmas pageant would look like if we allowed Mary a speaking part that was more in line with what she actually said."

12/16/2019

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SING MARY, SING!
Sunday, December 15, 2019 – Advent III
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell

Luke 1:46b-55

And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

“Oh! You better watch out, You better not cry, You better not pout, I'm telling you why: Santa Claus is coming to town!  He's making a list, Checking it twice, Gonna find out who's naughty or nice. Santa Claus is coming to town! He sees you when you are sleeping, He knows when you're awake.  He knows if you've been bad or good, So be good for goodness sake!  Oh! You better watch out, You better not cry, You better not pout, I'm telling you why: Santa Claus is coming to town!” (John Frederick Coots and Haven Gillespie)

As a kid I hated that song!  It always sort of creeped me out, this notion that there was an old man in a red suit who lived all the way at the North Pole and still could somehow manage to see everything I did.  Everything.  And not only did he see what I did, but he judged me accordingly.  I didn’t like that song because, quite frankly, it reminded me of my version of God.

God was likewise an all-seeing old man.  God knew when I had been naughty or nice and was fully prepared to reward or punish me in kind.  As a child I lived under the constant threat of the all-seeing eye of God.  I didn’t need Santa Claus to do that too.  I was already neurotic enough.

Well, obviously, I didn’t stay there in my concept of God.  Instead I grew into a relationship with God.  Through the hard knocks of life, I learned, first-hand about mercy and grace.  And I came to depend, body and soul, on that marvelous affirmation from I John 4:8: “God is love.”  I still believed that God was watching us.  I still believed that I should be nice instead of naughty.  But, I thought, in the end everything would be OK.  It was sort of a “I’m OK, you’re OK” approach to Christian faith.

I found a new spiritual home where those “I’m OK, you’re OK” values were affirmed.  In that new home, the religious concepts with which I had grown up were largely absent.  One almost never heard the H word (hell) or the J word (judgment).  Instead we heard a lot about the L word (love).  We heard the P word (peace).  And we heard a great deal about another J word (justice).  And all of that seemed very nice.  And all of that seemed the way it should be.  And all of that was being said from an ivory tower.  But the more I lived, the more I understood that one J word actually required the other.  Justice and judgment walk hand in hand.  And those who easily dismiss the judgment of God have probably never really needed the justice of God.

But Mary did.  Blessed Mary, the mother of our Lord, needed the justice of God because she was a poor, uneducated, unmarried and pregnant teenager.  She lived under the oppression of a government bent on her subjugation.  She had watched her parents and relatives and friends suffer the constant humiliations of a police state.

In Mary’s world, the divide between the rich and the poor never seemed to narrow because government policies favored the rich.  Mary never had a chance at full Roman citizenship with all its rights and privileges because she was the wrong kind of person.  She was destined to be part of the visible but largely ignored underclass.

But Blessed Mary was not only shaped by the dominant culture of Roman Imperialism.  Mary was also steeped in the traditions of the Jewish people, who believed that God would one day set this world right.  She had heard the stories of the great prophets, who called the people to live in hope and expectation despite their circumstances.  And she knew that some of those prophets were women like her: Miriam the sister of Moses, Deborah one of the great judges of Israel and the childless Hannah, who longed for and received another baby of promise.  Mary lived, like we do, in that in-between place of the world as she knew it and the world that she hoped for.

One day, pregnant and afraid, Mary went to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who was also pregnant with John the Baptist.  And when those two faithful and strong women met each other, the moment was suddenly charged with the power of the Holy Spirit.  And Mary, like Miriam and Deborah and Hannah before her, began to prophesy.  First she talked about the incredible thing that God had done for her.  She sang that despite her lowly position, God had looked on her with favor and chosen her for special purpose.  And she prophesied that all the future generations would call her blessed.  I sometimes wonder how we Protestants fulfill that prophecy since we so remiss in speaking about her at all, let alone calling her blessed.

Blessed Mary sang about the shape the world was in.  And then she sang about what God was going to do about it.  She proclaimed that the wicked and the selfish and the corrupt would get what was coming to them (judgment); and that God would give to the oppressed what they needed (justice).

Her prophetic song is called the Magnificat, and although we might read or sing it at Christmas time, most Protestants don’t pay it much mind.  And besides that, its basic premise messes with our images of the Mary of Christmas pageants - silent and serene and utterly harmless – a womb without a voice.  But I have sometimes wondered what a Christmas pageant would look like if we allowed Mary a speaking part that was more in line with what she actually said.  Can you imagine your daughter or niece or granddaughter coming center stage, lifting her head and voice, and thundering the words of a prophet calling out for justice?

Thundering Mary said that the One coming into the world through her own flesh would change everything.  Forget “Silent Night, Holy Night.”  This child, she sang, would turn up the volume and raise a ruckus.  Through this baby, God would scatter the proud like sawdust in the wind.  Through this Jesus, God would bring down the powerful from their thrones of arrogance.  God would fill the hungry with good things, but the rich would go to bed with their stomachs empty.  The coming of Christ would be good news for the “have nots,” but bad news for those who have because they took it from those who didn’t.  -- And that, in essence, is the message of Christmas.  That’s hard to wrap in bows and feel sentimental about, but that’s exactly what Blessed Mary sang.

And her powerful song has never stopped.  Every time people see their worth and demand justice, Mary’s sings.  Every time the poor demand their place at the table, Mary’s sings.  In the protests for freedom that are currently rocking our world, Mary’s song is heard above the din.  When people put their own bodies on the line for what is right, it is her holy song that inspires them.

Mary put her own body on the line.  She said yes to the angel.  She said yes to the unbelievable.  She said yes to an incarnational faith.  Blessed Mary literally gave birth to justice.  And in that regard, she is not exceptional – because that is exactly what we are all called to do.

The medieval German mystic, Meister Eckhart, once famously said that we are all called to be the mothers of God.  Now don’t get lost in those words, dear Protestants.  What Meister Eckhart meant was simply this: in each of us, in every reaction to injustice, in every act of kindness, Christ is given physicality through our own flesh. And each time that happens, the Kingdom of Heaven has come near, and judgment and justice walk hand in hand.

So, sing Blessed Mary, sing! And teach us your song.  Sing about how Christ longs to be born through us.  And sing it until we learn it.  Help us to sing it, until the Kingdoms of this world have become the Kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ.

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We sometimes need a bit of shock and awe to get our attention long enough to stop, consider, and then turn around.

12/8/2019

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Listen here!

SHOCK AND AWE
Sunday, December 8, 2019 – Advent II
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell

Matthew 3:1-12

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. “I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Some years ago, a parishioner gave me a print of a New Yorker cartoon. The drawing is of minister standing outside a lovely stone church, dressed in his finest vestments, and with a very self-satisfied look on his face.  He’s greeting the people as they spill out into the sunshine. But the people look anything but serene.  Instead, their hair is standing on edge.  Or it’s burned down to the nub.  Their clothes are singed and tattered.  Some have huge dark circles around their eyes. And the caption simply reads: “Excellent sermon.”

How would you define an excellent sermon?  What is it that you hope to hear from Pastor Alison or me on any given Sunday? Do you come here looking for comfort or encouragement?  Is it a good story you want?  Or do you want us to entertain you?  Maybe it’s a little bit of all those things.  But if I had to guess, I would say that what you probably don’t want is a sermon that leaves you deeply unsettled, disturbed, perturbed.

I heard lots of disturbing sermons as a kid, but one of the most memorable actually happened at a UCC Association meeting.  If you don’t know, an Association is a group of UCC churches within a particular geographical area.  This church, for instance, is part of the New Haven Association.

As was our custom in that Association, we gathered in the sanctuary of the host church for the worship service that would open the meeting.  The appointed time came, but oddly there was no prelude, no one on the chancel, no one in the pulpit.  We began to shift uncomfortably in our seats thinking that something must be wrong.  All of a sudden, from the back of the church, a voice boomed: “You brood of vipers!” she shouted.  “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Bear fruit worthy of repentance!”  The voice belonged to one of my colleagues – a very nice woman - most of the time. She walked down the center aisle of that church, a bowl of water in one hand and a branch with leaves in the other.  She dipped the branch in the water and flung it at us over and over again, shouting all the while: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!”

I told this story at staff meeting this week. And our Sexton Kevin chuckled and said that one could get away with that at an Association meeting, full of clergy, but that I probably shouldn’t try it here.

That woman who called us “a brood of vipers” was, of course, quoting John the Baptist. John the Baptist, who looked like a lunatic.  John the Baptist, who could never pass the first round of a Search Committee interview. John the Baptist, dressed in a camel’s hair tunic and eating honey and bugs.  John the Baptist, preaching that the end was near.

Despite his strangeness and the harshness of his preaching, or perhaps because of it, people flocked to hear him. The Roman historian Josephus reports that on one day alone, as many as 50,000 people showed up for his sermon. But why?  Why make the trek into the wilderness to hear that you need to repent?  Why spend a day traveling just to hear that the world as you know it is ending?  What was it about that message, which most of us don’t want to hear, that was attractive to them?

Well, I think the answer to that question is two-fold.  First of all, unlike we who live pretty good lives, those folks were happy that the world as they knew it was about to disappear, because that world was stacked against them.  They were poor and oppressed. They had no power or agency.  The boot of the Roman Empire was on their necks.  Their religious leaders had sold them out, trading faithfulness for expediency.  So when the dominant social order means disorder for you and your family and your village, who wouldn’t want it to end?

Secondly, John preached that those folks, who had little to no power, could actually participate in this new world order.  They could be part of the change that was coming in Jesus.  They could repent and prepare the way of the Lord.

But why was that message of repentance attractive to them while it may be the last thing we want to hear? Part of the answer to that is that they understood that word differently than we do.  How can we understand a word that has been so parodied and perverted?  It’s the punch line of a 100 jokes.  It’s used and abused by huskers, seeking to manipulate and control, to divide and to conquer.  It’s the hammer of judgment for people we don’t like or approve of.  In addition, we imagine repentance to be feeling – usually feeling really sorry or terribly ashamed of something we have done.  We imagine it to be the demand of a God who is disappointed and angry all of the time.  And if we don’t repent, then we imagine the threat of damnation.

But true repentance, while it might involve regret and sorrow for what we have done, is really about something far more transformative than wallowing in self-recrimination. Repentance, simply put, is about a change of direction.  Repentance is about the realization that some behavior or attitude or habit is actually detrimental to you and others.  And once realizing that, you turn around and walk another way.

If only it were that simple, right?  The problem with us humans is that our harmful or selfish behaviors are often far more ingrained and pernicious than simply being confused about the way to go.  We sometimes need a bit of shock and awe to get our attention long enough to stop, consider, and then turn around.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s why John lays it on so thick.  John preached about slithering vipers and a razor sharp ax at the root of a tree and, the “piece de resistance,” something called UNQUENCHABLE FIRE.

Most of my life, I heard that interpreted as the fires of hell – the result of refusing to repent.  Maybe you have too. But here’s something interesting: most of the time when the Bible speaks of fire, it doesn’t speak of it as punishment. Instead, fire is about cleansing or refining.  It’s about a new beginning, rebirth, resurrection.

Serotiny refers to an ecological adaptation exhibited by some seed plants, in which the release of the seed only occurs in response to an environmental trigger, rather than spontaneously when the seed matures. The most common and most studied environmental trigger is fire.  I was interested to read this week that there is a species of pine that only releases the seeds from its cones when there is a forest fire.  For those trees, it takes extreme heat to create new life.

I am, so often, that pine tree.  So John turns up the heat.  John understood that fire could release new life, new hope in us.  And because it can, that makes the message of repentance really good news. Its ultimate purpose is not to manipulate or frighten or punish us. To repent – to change direction - is to actually be set free from those things that really manipulate and frighten and punish us.  Repentance creates space for something new and wonderful to be set free in our lives – like a seed.

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Christ comes again and again and again. Are we ready? Are we watching?

12/1/2019

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CHRIST WILL COME AGAIN, AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN
Sunday, December 1, 2019 – Advent 1
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell

Matthew 24:36-44

“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore, you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

A few Sundays ago, I spoke about the technical meaning of the word “Apocalypse:” which is a revealing or an uncovering.  But today, I want to use that word in its more common usage, as in “the end of the world as we know it.” And more specifically, about “the end of the world” as the Bible is said to predict it.

We don’t really talk much about the end of the world in churches like ours.  But in the church of my childhood, it seemed that we spoke of little else.  And all of that “end of the world talk” used to scare me to death.  It was so depressing for a young person who had his whole life in front of him.

Even at church camp, riding horses and learning archery, I could not escape all of that Apocalyptic talk.  I remember one summer being forced to watch a film entitled: “A Thief in the Night.”  Its basic premise was one I had been raised with: that Christ would come again when we least expected him, that he would rapture or take away all of the righteous ones.  But the rest – the vast majority of the people left on this earth, who did not have the right kind of theology – would suffer something called the Great Tribulation.  That film depicted all of this in great detail and gave me nightmares for years.  How is it, I used to wonder, that God would so blithely abandon so many of his children just when we needed God the most?

This theology, in addition to literally scaring the hell out of me, had some other very  negative results.  It set up an “us versus them” approach to everything.  It divided the world between the saved and the unsaved.  And because we were so fixated on being saved, we had little time to serve our neighbors or to care for the earth or to simply enjoy this incredible blessing we call “being alive.”

The passage we just heard Pastor Alison read, was one of our primary texts in this apocalyptic theology.  It seemed to describe the very things we had been warned about – this idea that the good would be rescued but that the bad would be left on their own.  Matthew describes it like this: two would be in a field.  One would be taken.  The other left behind.  Two women would be working together.  One would be taken.  The other left behind.  The passage ends with this ominous warning: “Therefore you must also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

In the church of my childhood, we were convinced that this passage was all about us.  We were convinced that we were the one living at the end of time.  We never considered that those passages must have also meant something to the people who first heard them.  Those words had to have resonance in the first century as well as our own.  Because the truth of the matter is that the earliest Christians were convinced that they were the ones living at the end of time.  They could have never imagined that 2000 years later, the church would still be waiting on the Second Coming of Jesus.

In fact, in verse 34 of this same chapter of Matthew, Jesus makes this prediction to the people listening to him speak: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.”  One of my seminary professors called this the Bible’s most disturbing verse, because, he said, it seems to not have been true at all.  That generation did pass away, and still Christ has not returned.  This so disturbed the second and the third generation that they had a crisis of faith.  We see that in some of St. Paul’s epistles.  They wondered where Christ was.  And so to address this concern, the church changed its theology and its expectations about what it meant to wait for the coming of Jesus.

Now, you might be wondering why we’re are talking about such things as we gear up for Christmas.  You might be wondering why I’m preaching on such a dour text when you feel ready to sing “Joy to the World.”  Well, for one thing, the lectionary texts were already chosen for me.  And besides that, it might do us all well, in this season of giddy hedonism and consumerism run amok, to think about what it means to wait for Jesus in our day.  And it might do us well, in this season of waiting, to see the first and the second coming of Jesus not as two distinct things, but as one continuous event.  And if we can do that, then this season of Advent, with its repentance and silence and preparation actually starts to make sense.  We need this time to make our hearts ready to actually see Christ each time he returns.

Seeing Jesus has always required preparation.  The first time he came, Wise Men, first studied the stars and then traveled a great distance to find him.  The first time he came, shepherds came in from their fields and scoured the streets to find him.  No one was exactly sure who they were looking for.  Most folks, even when they saw him, had a hard time believing God would come to us in poverty and amongst the animals.

But 2000 years later, we’re so familiar with the story that there is no surprise left in it for us.  We know the setting and all the characters.  We know story and how it ends.  But what we do not know, and what should keep us on our toes, is a Christ who didn’t just come at Bethlehem, but comes again and again and again and again.  Christ keeps coming, and always in brilliant disguises. And always, as Matthew says, “at an unexpected hour.”

I read this passage now with very different eyes than I did as a child.  I read it conscious of the fact that it had to have resonance with its first hearers, as well as Christians in every age.  I read it and see in these words the promise that Christ will come again, and again, and again.  Therefore, Matthew says to us, “Keep awake!”

A few weeks ago, we had a presentation here at church about the humanitarian crisis at our southern border. This presentation was not about the politics of how to handle immigration.  It was simply about the human need already present in that place and what people might be able to do to alleviate the suffering.

One of the slides we saw was of a drawing by a little girl attempting to demonstrate the journey that she and her family had made from Guatemala to northern Mexico where they wait in an asylum-seeking process.  The little girl had drawn the footsteps of her journey between the two places.  She had thrown in some flowers and butterflies to signify the beauty she saw along the way.  And then across the top, in her child-like handwriting, she had written: “Todo lo puedo en Cristo que me fortalece.” Which translates, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

And in that electric moment, Christ came to me just as surely as he did 2000 years ago.  In that moment, Christ was absolutely present.  And my eyes suddenly filled with tears as I realized, once again, that this ever-elusive Christ will come again and again and again when we least expect him and when we most need him.

Advent is meant to prepare us for the very coming of Christ into this world.  And so I ask you: how will you prepare?  How will you make your heart ready to receive him?  How will you open your eyes to behold him?  For in the faces of the poor and dispossessed, Christ comes.  In the dehumanized and the ill, Christ comes.  In the lonely and the forgotten and the hated and the misunderstood, Christ comes again and again and again. Are we ready?  Are we watching?  Are we waiting?

“Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

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The Incarnation, Emmanuel, God-with-us, in the muck of life - that is the reason I still call myself a Christian.

"I have sometimes wondered what a Christmas pageant would look like if we allowed Mary a speaking part that was more in line with what she actually said."

We sometimes need a bit of shock and awe to get our attention long enough to stop, consider, and then turn around.

Christ comes again and again and again. Are we ready? Are we watching?

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