In the Ordinary

Luke 2:1-20

About a week ago, I admitted to some friends here at Trinity that while I was looking forward to a lot about our Christmas celebrations, somehow I just wasn’t feeling the Christmas spirit this year. The joy and the wonder just weren’t connecting for me. Nothing felt…special…about the season.

The next night I happened to need GPS directions, and fished out my phone. At unpredictable intervals, when I connect the phone to the car, I get a sudden eruption of They Might Be Giants or Vivaldi or a Bill Bryson audiobook – always the things I forgot I ever loaded into my phone.

That night it was “Joy to the World.”

And I realized suddenly that – for all the wrapping and shopping, Christmas program prep and family schedule shuffling I had been doing to prepare for Christmas – I hadn’t yet turned on the music.

In fact, I’d almost forgotten about the carols this year.

And music is my touchstone, my talisman – the thing I turn to to ground myself in my faith. Music is my key to opening up my heart and mind to experience, truth, and memory. Singing is the way that I reach out to and receive the presence of God when I most need it in my life; the way that I pray.

So that night I didn’t frantically push at buttons to turn the unexpected music off, the way I usually do. After a verse or so I started singing along, still creaky and spotty from my Advent laryngitis. The next song in the shuffle was “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,”

and as I sang “pleased as man with us to dwell; Jesus our Emmanuel,” I started to cry, because I finally felt the season I had been missing. I felt the awe and wonder and joy of the presence of God come to dwell with us in my car, in the world, and in my heart.

It may not be music for you. It may be something else.

At Christmas, maybe you need lights, twinkling in the darkness. Maybe it’s the fresh winter smell of evergreen, or the warm scent of candle wax. Maybe there’s a certain family ritual or personal tradition; a story you tell or hear. Or a particular prayer. Something you turn to, that you count on to trigger that rush of Christmas into your life; to trigger a sense of, or a hope for, the presence of God in the world.

Because you need that.

I need that.

There isn’t one of us here today who doesn’t need the presence of God; doesn’t need to feel the love and strength of the infinite, almighty and eternal.

There is not one of us who does not need to know, somewhere in our hearts and souls, that God shows up for us, is with us.

Many of us need to experience the reality of God’s presence because we feel alone or powerless in the face of grief, anger, tragedy, illness, loss – all the things that are rubbed raw by the holiday rush and emphasis on celebration.

But many of us also need, even more, to experience the reality of God’s presence – to know that God is with us - when things are, well, fine. When life is good and there’s a lot to look forward to, but we feel disconnected.

We need God, whether we think of it that way or not, when we sense a lack of meaning or power in our lives; when we are content but not particularly hopeful or active. We need God in order to be grounded and strong when things are ordinary. Need that sense of God next to us, with us, on our side, when things are so normal that we might be, well, bored.

And we are here today because God wants that for us, too.

Wants us to know that presence of unlimited power, powerful love, extreme hope, of awestruck wonder close beside us in our world, and in our lives.

God wants us to know beyond a doubt that God is with us in times of tragedy and pain; and just as much in the midst of the ordinary, mundane, and average.

So God becomes a baby.  

Jesus – all the divine power and presence of heaven and eternity – born in the profoundly ordinary crowd of a not particularly special village.

The story we tell about that birth has accumulated a lot of romantic detail over the years we’ve told it, and it doesn’t often feel much like our real, daily life. Few of us nap with cattle, or bed down our babies with sheep. The holy light doesn’t glow out of our kitchens, workplaces, and cars, or many of the people we spend time with. Heavenly peace, nature singing, and angelic choruses seem far removed from the places and tasks, hopes and griefs where you and I need God to come.

Still, Luke is telling us a story of just how ordinary, just how grounded in daily reality this God incarnate is. He frames the moment of God’s birth in the political realities of emperors and governors, places the infant Jesus in a feed tray, and reminds us he’s wrapped up to sleep in the same way as any ordinary baby of his day. The details have become special to us over the centuries, but for Luke they are as ordinary as those blue-striped hospital blankets and a hand-me-down car seat.

The specific ordinariness of these details is a sign – a gesture of promise and meaning from God – that God shows up for us, too, in the places where it’s easiest to overlook the presence of God. God comes to us in the car on a dark winter’s night, in the constant round of meetings and emails, chores and meals; the relentless drive for results and milestones; even in the cold blue glow of a slow evening in front of the TV.

The ordinariness of the details around Jesus assure us that God shows up specifically in the places it’s easiest to overlook our own need for God with us, for God filling our routine with vibrant, active hope, profound love, powerful joy.

In fact, one sign of just how ordinary God-with-us is in this story is the presence of the one extraordinary detail: the angels. A sudden glorious awe-inspiring mighty host appears in the fields outside Bethlehem because otherwise no one would notice how ordinary God has come to be.

God provided angels that day long ago so the shepherds would notice the extraordinary in the ordinary; sent them to spark the story that you and I hear and tell and sing today.

God sent the angels.

God sent carols to my car.

God sends to you, sends to us, the original story and everything we have built around it since: lights and candles, song and prayer, family rituals and cultural traditions; trees and wreaths and candy canes, so that you and I will notice, too. So that we will not miss God’s constant commitment to be among us, to be with us.

So that we’ll also experience the presence of profound, proactive love; of powerful hope and deeply grounded joy and peace in all of the most powerful, painful, and above all, ordinary moments and ages of our lives.

So listen today to the angels.

And listen again in August, in March, in a busy week, on a dragging Thursday afternoon.

Hold on to the story, the lights, the prayers and stories and symbols; hold on in season and out of season, treasure these things in your heart, like Mary. Because these things are how God reminds us to notice God’s constant presence.

Listen, always, to the angels, singing:

Veiled in flesh – in the familiar and ordinary – the Godhead see; Hail the incarnate Deity; pleased… with us to dwell. God with you and me and us, Jesus, our Emmanuel.

God Insists

Isaiah 7:10-16, Matthew 1:18-25

Like any good Hallmark movie or holiday sitcom episode, today’s Christmas story starts with a relationship problem: Mary is pregnant and it is not Joseph’s kid.
There’s the implication of infidelity and the story starts with a pending divorce.

You and I, the audience, know what Joseph does not: that there’s no infidelity. This is a misunderstanding, a lack of knowledge, that’s pulling the couple apart. We also know that Joseph is a good guy. An upstanding, solid, faithful guy. One who does right and for whom good things should happen.

It’s got all the essential elements of a good holiday story and now we’re invested. We want it to work out for them, so we are primed for resolution.

In contemporary Christmas stories, resolution comes from true love, seasonal good will, fate, or the intervention of the family dog. Divine intervention is not the usual method of resolution in the stories we see on TV.

Matthew’s readers might be better primed to expect the action of God, but for Joseph himself – as it would be for you or me in most of our own relationship problems – an angelic dream is probably pretty unexpected.

I mean, Joseph wasn’t praying for a miracle.

He wasn’t looking for salvation – not for himself and not for the whole nation of Israel.

He was just trying to solve a family problem, as best he could, without hurting anybody else worse than he had to. He’s trusting to himself to do the right thing, and letting that be enough.

And then this dream.

An angel of the Lord – unmistakably a divine messenger – appears in his sleep and speaks directly to him: Don’t be afraid, Joseph.

Don’t worry about the consequences, don’t try to manage this quietly to avoid scandal. Go ahead. Marry Mary. Name her son as your own: he is going to save his people from their sins.

Wait, what?

It’s one thing to have God’s assurance that Mary hasn’t betrayed him. But parenting the Savior of Israel…? Parenting the Son of God is not the solution to his relationship problems Joseph was looking for.
But it’s what he’s getting.

The narrator steps in here with an explanatory note: It’s like that other story, remember? The one Isaiah told, about a pregnant young woman whose child is a sign of God with us.

Matthew’s first audience would have gotten that reference as a confirmation of divine intention, a cultural reference to expectations of the Messiah who would come and fix the world for God, whom Israel has been waiting for so long.

And many might also remember the context of that reference – you and I heard a little of it this morning:

Isaiah the prophet is talking to King Ahaz of Judah, who is under threat from the neighboring kings of Damascus and Samaria, determined to sweep Ahaz up into their fight with Assyria, the big bully in the neighborhood. That’s a situation always dangerous for the little nation caught in the middle.

Isaiah wants to encourage Ahaz to stand firm as God’s king, not get swept into foolish choices by fear. So Isaiah invites him to ask God for a sign: for guidance and reassurance and support.

Ahaz declines.

It’s okay; he’s fine. No miracles necessary.

I won’t test God, he says. I don’t need to see what’s in the divine rescue kit.

Independence is a fine thing. But refusing to depend on God - depending instead on one’s own self - is a profound failure if you’re the king of God’s people. It’s a dereliction of duty, a betrayal of your responsibilities to God and to the people you’re supposed to lead.

It’s a lack of faith. And a lack of faithfulness.

So God – speaking through Isaiah – won’t have any of that.

You don’t want a sign? I’m giving you a sign.

Look, see this pregnant young woman? Her child is the sign that God is with you; that’s his name, even. And by the time that child is weaned those threatening kings will be a distant memory, forgotten. Less than two years, probably.

God is going to save God’s people whether you ask for it or not.

God is going to save Ahaz and the kingdom of Judah whether or not Ahaz is willing to accept the help.

God is going to be born of Mary; God is going to save God’s people, whether Joseph was looking for it or not. The stories we hear today insist that God is going to save even if it never occurs to us to ask.

God is proactively faithful to us, to God’s people, God’s whole world, whether or not we ourselves are faithful.

God insists on being with us when we aren’t looking for help, or for company.

God is going to help, to save, even when we say, “No, thanks, I’m good. I’ve got this.”

God insists on proving trustworthy when we would much rather trust ourselves.

That’s amazing.

The proactive generosity of God is beyond our imagining.

And it can sometimes be a little hard to accept.

Not for Joseph, apparently. Joseph wakes up and does exactly what God proposes to him; takes up his role in God’s salvation.

Joseph apparently hears and accepts the angel’s assurance that he has nothing to fear from the uninvited eruption of salvation into his life.

But it can be hard for many of us.

I know I find it a lot more attractive – much easier! – to put my trust in myself than to accept uninvited help.

When I’ve got my head down into a task, a challenge, or a problem to solve, uninvited help and unasked solutions seem like interference. When I’m methodically testing every single bulb to find the burnt out one in that strand of lights on the Christmas tree, I don’t want your whole new lights. I’m not ready to hear that the tree looks great without them, either. And telling me to quit worrying about the lights because Jesus is going to come anyway is….

well, it’s true. It’s reassuring. (But I still want to fix the problem my way, too.)

And when it’s a bigger battle than tree lights – serious illness, grief, a dangerous scarcity of money or a frustrating scarcity of time, or the sometimes avalanche-like overwhelm of the holidays?
Well, like Ahaz, I like to say I don’t want to put God to the test. I can manage it myself. Because it’s emotionally hard to depend on a solution, a salvation, that I can’t control myself, can’t even imagine, and just have to trust.

But that is exactly what God invites us to, today.

God invites – calls – us to test out the reality of God’s proactive, generous love for ourselves. To accept God’s insistence on helping, though it’s almost never the form of help I thought I wanted, and rarely as comfortable as what I planned.

God invites, calls, us to accept the uninvited offers of signs, of reassurance and encouragement that come our way and to believe that God is at work to disarm the threats to our faith, our love, our wholeness, even (sometimes especially!) when we might be able to do it ourselves.

To learn to look for salvation when we don’t feel the need. To look not only for my own salvation, but to expect the desire and action of God to transform the whole world.

What we hear today is an invitation – really an implied command – to be, like Joseph, faithful in our acceptance of God’s faithfulness to us. To receive God’s faith toward us, God’s absolute insistence on Immanuel, on God being with us, now and always, to the end of the age.

Mistaken Identity

Matthew 11:2-11

It happened to me when I heard my dad say that his 20-something kids seemed to be happy in their strange, career-less (ok, dead end) jobs, so he himself was happy.

Wait, what? What happened to the parent who always coached and urged and expected me to succeed, to build a career? What happened to the one who holds up the model and the standard I’ve been trying to reach?

Maybe it’s happened to you, too. A child or a spouse, a parent or a good friend says something you really weren’t prepared for. Does something that is wildly far from everything you’ve learned to expect from them. Takes on a responsibility you’d given up on them ever sharing; expresses love in public for the first time; wants to buy the house she said was out of reach; quits a job you knew he’d never leave…

And you think to yourself: 
Wait! What happened? Who are you?

It’s disorienting. The world becomes a little unstable, even – maybe especially – if it’s a change you longed for. As if a weight you’d been pulling against with all your might floats away, or the unmoveable boulder you’ve braced your foot on shifts.

Who are you? you wonder.

And then very quietly, maybe unconsciously, that shift makes you wonder, Who am I?

If I don’t have this unmeetable standard to live up to anymore am I no longer a rebel?

If I don’t have to do it all myself, am I not the strong one? If I’ve been forgiven am I no longer a failure – do I have to succeed now? If I don’t have to keep being persuasive, or defend myself, am I not the teacher, the protector, the one helps everyone be right?

If I was wrong about that person,

am I wrong about myself?

It’s disorienting.
And we heard today how it happened to John.

John the Baptist, in prison because his preaching and prophecy made the king nervous,

is having a bit of an identity crisis about the person he has built his professional identity, his life, around. About the Vindicator whose coming motivated him to preach all those risky things.

He asks Jesus: Are you the one who we’ve been expecting (whose coming I’ve been proclaiming!), or are we waiting for someone else?

You’re not doing what I expected, what I planned for and taught about and committed myself to. Who are you? Do I even know you?

Was I… wrong?

Jesus hasn’t been acting much like the action-hero conqueror John proclaimed he would be. He’s not smiting the sinners, not overthrowing the Roman oppressor, not burning the chaff with unquenchable fire. He’s not silencing the guns in shops and schools and streets or punishing the liars and cheaters manipulating our public trust, either,

Instead, he spends a lot of time teaching random crowds on Galilean hillsides, healing a kid here and a leper there, touching individual hearts, encouraging the poor and dispirited. It’s good stuff, yes, holy. Miraculous, even. Impressive and delightful and good for the soul.

But John was prepared for judgment. Had committed his life to preparing other people for judgement: God is coming, shape up! The wicked are about to be smited; get ready!

That’s what he was born for. He knew it.

And he knew he had met the Messiah; knew he had personally encountered the one he was waiting for, baptized him, even.

But. But this isn’t what he was expecting.
Not what he was prepared for.

Who are you, Jesus? Do I even know you?
Was I wrong about what that meant for me??

So he asks: Are you The One, like I hoped and thought and said? Or are we waiting?

And – as he so often does when given a multiple choice question – Jesus says “Yes.”

Go and tell John what you see and hear: The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed… Go and tell John healing. Tell John hope and renewal and resurrection.

Give John this answer: Jesus says YES to our longings.

The hearing of the deaf, the walking of the lame, the rejoicing of the oppressed – these are, indeed, the ancient longing and expectation of God’s people. These are things that are supposed to happen in the age of God that the Messiah is supposed to bring.

But they were supposed to be universal, not individual. The whole dying world given life, every social blindness and deafness replaced by clarity and listening; the whole limping spiritual system set on a firm and balanced path. Not a cleansed leper here and a seeing blind man there.

And all that healing was supposed to happen because the Messiah conquered the evil and vanquished the forces of oppression. Not go around teaching us to be free in our hearts and bravely righteous in the face of evil systems.

John was prepared for, braced against, the overturning of the world order; the cleansing so complete it’s like a hurricane. John prepared others for the dramatic, permanent change not just of their lives, but the whole world.
And now Jesus comes trickling healing and grace into our hearts, and John doesn’t know how to respond.

John maybe even doesn’t know who to be, if this is what God’s doing.

It happens to us, too.

We get used to the idea of a gentle Jesus who loves everyone and wants us to be nice, then read one of the gospels cover to cover and are shocked at how abrupt and forceful Jesus seems to be; how fierce about the holiness of God.

Or you or I might instead be prepared for the church or for Jesus to judge us, to reject us – at least if anyone finds out what a mess I am inside, that I don’t fit in, or that I have nothing left to give, or that I’m not spiritual enough, or that I’m too much of a mystic. You might brace yourself against rejection or misunderstanding and be confronted with eager love and generous welcome that throws you off your balance.

Jesus says YES to our longings for healing and redemption, for hope and renewal, for a world that’s full of God’s fierce and comprehensive love.

Just not the way we thought. Not the way we were prepared for.

And that’s disorienting.

Because we shape ourselves to what we expect, instead of what we long for. We make ourselves rebels or conformists, adopt meekness or aggressive defences; we teach ourselves to ignore either our sins or our faith, based on what we expect or don’t expect from God. Based on who we think Jesus is.

So we need to know, just like John needs to know:
Who are you, Jesus?

In order to know for sure: Who am I ?

Jesus never gives a simple answer.

Instead, Jesus says, Yes.

Yes to our hearts’ deepest – often unacknowledged – longings for healing and renewal, strength and transformation, comfort for our bitter pain and challenge for our bored indifference.

Yes when we expect No.

And that’s disorienting.

Because God’s love is so profound; so beyond our expectation and imagination,

that the direct experience of God’s love made manifest in our own lives or the shape of the world is always going to catch us off balance.

Which may be good news, after all, when we’re balanced in the ordinary, unholy, uneven world.

Because when our balance is forced to shift,

when we wonder who we are,

it’s a chance to see who we actually are not to ourselves, but to God.

That we are simply and primarily beloved.

A chance to know that who I am

is not what I do for God, or what others say of me, or what I have to offer,

the good and the bad of all of that.

No, who I am – who you are – is deeply and entirely beloved of God,

who is both fiery and gentle,

fierce and calm,

personal and universal,

and always not what we expected.