Mary points a way through our darkness...

NOTE:  Here are my worship notes for Sunday, December 23, 2012.  They have been shaped by both the Common Lectionary texts for Advent IV and the massacre of our children in Sandy Hook, CT.  I am grateful to both Sojourners and Working Preacher for additional resources. 

 

Introduction

Like many of you I have found this Advent to be troubling and complex:  I had hoped for a time of deep and quiet contemplation – a tender waiting for the birth of our Lord that would be bathed in silence and poetry – but that was not what happened.  Instead, I found myself busier than ever – not with obsessive incidentals or trinkets – but rather with prayer and tears and time in your homes as we embraced before surgeries or personal hardships.  And then came the massacre of our babies in Sandy Hook…

Our partners in mission and ministry at the national church office in Cleveland issued a prayer that cuts to the heart of the matter for me as this Advent season comes to a close.  Let me share it with you now:

Loving God, our hearts are broken as we take in the tragedy at Sandy Hook School in Newtown. Tears flow as we see the pictures of young children, teachers and parents fleeing a scene of terror and fear, and as we hear the shaken voices of those who escaped. But mostly, Holy One, we are simply stunned that this kind of violence has once again erupted in our nation. We lift our prayers to you now, prayers that your comfort will surround the families of those children and teachers who lost their lives, and prayers for the community of Newtown. We pray for the hope brought afresh to us by the birth of the Prince of Peace this time of year. May it be born in us and infuse all of our relationships. May your hope and peace touch this world as never before.  May your love crowd out our despair and feelings of helplessness. And may the star which rested over that manger light the way we take as peacemakers. In the name of the One who is to be born we pray. Amen.

This morning I want to use this prayer – and the appointed readings for the season – to put our grief and inner chaos into perspective.  Dare I suggest the perspective of the Christ Child about to be born within and among us?  As you know, I’ve asked that our children NOT be present with us for this portion of worship because I want to speak candidly with you and I don’t want to frighten them any more than they already are, ok? What’s more, I want to encourage you – especially our parents, families and educators – to join with me in a response to our fear and grief that challenges the cruel insanity of the status quo.

A number of you sent me emails after last week’s message wondering what we might do as a faith community to add our light to the current darkness.  One man wrote saying, “The President was right in embracing his children close and giving thanks to God for them… but if that is all he does – and all we do – then nothing changes.”  And that would be crazy because as I so often say out loud, the classic definition of insanity is… doing the same things over and over while expecting different results.

One of the passages of Scripture that guides my head and my heart is found in Ecclesiastes – it urges us as people of faith to be still and discern God’s invitation to action before jumping on any bandwagon – you may know it from the song “Turn, Turn, Turn.”  It warrants another hearing today:   

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

We are currently in a time of grieving – a time of seeking – a time of tearing and rending and weeping.  But this season will not last forever – indeed there are some things that need to be said and done right now in order that we move from silence to song and violence to peace.

Insights

Our parents and educators, for example, need to be speaking with their children about this current tragedy in ways that are faithful, honest and clear.  We need to be telling them not only what happened but where the Lord may be found – and what the Lord requires – in this ugly reality.  You see, we live in a time – and a culture -- where most of the adults in our children’s lives have no spiritual grounding.  That doesn’t make them bad people – please don’t mishear what I’m saying – but it does mean they do not have the resources and tools, the wisdom of ethical and moral tradition, to help them put this horror into context.

Christian Piatt, a pastor from Portland, OR, suggests five things our children need to know and hear from us at this moment in time that are grounded in our Christian faith

First what happened?   His response is:  Something terribly sad. A man hurt some children and adults in a school in Connecticut.  Some of them died. The teachers and students were very brave, and the community is working together to take care of those who survived and those who lost someone they loved. Even the President went there to be with them.

Second why did this man hurt those children?  The truth is that we don’t really know… Sometimes people do incredibly terrible things to one another, even if the person they’re hurting didn’t do anything wrong. Maybe he was very sad, or angry. Maybe he was sick. But whatever the reason, I think we should focus on helping those hurt by all of this work through their sadness and hopefully find some kind of healing. We need to remember to tell each other we love one another, to give an extra hug to someone who needs it, and to respond to people who are mean with kindness. I think it’s what God wants from us.

Third is could this happen to me?  You might reply by saying: We never know for sure when we’ll get hurt or when someone might try to hurt us. Like when you ride your bike, you know you might fall and get hurt, but that doesn’t mean we let the fear that something might happen keep us from ever riding again. Life is pretty much the same way. There are risks every day, but we get to choose to live our lives as fully as possible every day, even if there are sometimes that we might be hurt. But also know that we love you and will do everything we can to care for you and protect you. And there are lots and lots of people in your life who feel the exact same way.

Fourth why did God let this happen?  Here we need to be honest and tell our children that we aren’t completely clear about this.  But also tell them that we “choose to believe that God is at the beginning of all life:  mine, yours and everyone’s. God is also in the love that holds us together. It’s what helps make our lives special and beautiful. But there is always a risk with love. There’s a chance our hearts will be broken, but that’s not a good enough reason to stop loving. It’s hard to find God in something so terrible, so dark, so ugly as all of this. But I do see God in the way we all come together in response to this kind of hurt. We may be mean to each other sometimes, but we can’t ever get rid of love. That’s where I see God in all of this.”

And fifth what do we do now?  The best thing we can do to honor the life God has given us is to live it every day as fully as possible. If you have feelings about all of this, that’s okay. It’s normal to feel sad, scared, or angry. It’s fine to have questions. You can always come to me to talk about your questions or how you feel. Keep the people from Sandy Hook in your heart, offer a prayer for them and when you feel a little bit afraid or sad, find someone you trust to hug. We all need each other, and if we always try to put love first, we’ll be sure to honor the gifts God has given us.

If our spiritual tradition teaches us anything, it is that God’s people often find themselves in the midst of unimaginable suffering.  And when that happens, the Lord invites us to act as light in the darkness.  Clear and loving words of faith are essential for our children right now – and that is one thing we must do at this moment in time even as we grieve.  For like St. Paul told us:  we do not grieve as others do.  We are people born of hope – so even our grief must express that hope – especially to our children.

Another thing we must do at this moment in time is challenge the scapegoating that has already started to take place among the various political and religious partisans.  Another mission partner in ministry, our friends down at Gould Farm in Monterey, recently posted this insight and I urge you to listen carefully:  All the focus on the small number of people with mental illness who are violent serves to make us feel safer by displacing and limiting the threat of violence to a small, well-defined group.  But the sad and frightening truth is that the vast majority of homicides are carried out by outwardly normal people in the grip of all too ordinary human aggressions to whom we provide nearly unfettered access to deadly force."Speak up for the truth: People living with a mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetuators.”

What I hear in this is a prophetic critique of the status quo; it points to our obsession with violence and stubborn refusal to acknowledge sin and resonates profoundly with the passion of the Old Testament prophet Micah.  His words from the eighth century before Christ sound all too much like 21^st century America.  Biblical scholar, Melinda Quivik, notes that when you look at Micah’s writings as a whole:  He rails against the social and moral abuse rampant in the land. Those with power have taken away from the poor their land and inheritances (2:1-5), evicted widows from their homes (2:9), fixed the scales and weights to cheat customers (6:10-11), taken bribes (7:3), and more. The language is as graphic (3:1-3) as the butchery of Sweeney Todd, so horribly do the "haves" treat those who have less… And YHWH's wrath is not just against the political rulers and the wealthy, it is also against the prophets and religious authorities whose words serve only themselves: "those who cry 'Peace' when they have something to eat, but declare war against those who put nothing into their mouths" (3:5). There is no hope for them, for "the sun shall go down upon the prophets, and the day shall be black over them..." (3:6). Micah declares the ruin of the holy city Jerusalem.

When preachers and pundits tell us that the massacre at Sandy Hook has something to do with God’s wrath over taking prayer out of the schools – or that this is the Lord’s angry response to President Obama’s cautious commitment to gun control – we need to be able to challenge them with love and truth.  We cannot return hatred for stupidity, nor encourage character assassination against those with whom we disagree.

We are people of faith, hope and… what?  Love – love that is willing to embrace our enemies.  Love that lays down a life for a friend.  Love that goes the extra mile and seeks out grace rather than judgment every time – even unto the Cross.  Do you remember St. Paul’s description of Christian love in I Corinthians 13?  Eugene Peterson’s reworking of the ancient text is crucial for us right now:

Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have. Love doesn’t strut, doesn’t have a swelled head, doesn’t force itself on others, isn’t always “me first,” doesn’t fly off the handle, doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, doesn’t revel when others grove, takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, puts up with anything, trusts God always, always looks for the best, never looks back, but keeps going to the end. Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete… Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, and love extravagantly knowing that the best of the three is love.

In love we can confess that it is own our addiction to violence, the stagnation of our own collective moral imaginations and the sad fact that we have allowed our own politicians to sell their souls to the NRA that is at the core of this tragedy – not God’s wrath – and not some political scapegoat.  In love let us speak truth to power – and here is part of the truth we must own as our own.  

Gradually and without much fanfare, we have become a nation that refuses to distinguish between guns that are needed for hunting – and perhaps self-defense – and the kind of weapons that only the armed forces and police used to own:

·    Fact: in the four counties surrounding Sandy Hook, CT there are more than 400 gun dealers.  As Jim Wallis of the Sojourners Community notes, in America today there are more gun dealers than McDonald’s restaurants.

·    Fact: on Black Friday alone – the day after Thanksgiving – the FBI received more than 150,000 requests for background checks for firearm purchases; they received more than 2 million in the month of November. And most astoundingly, there are 311 million people in America and now an estimated 280 million guns.

·    Fact:  there are more and more guns in our society, they are being allowed in more and more public places, and they are more and more legal to be concealed. That is the direction that the gun business and gun lobby has taken us — because today the gun business and the gun lobby are now the same thing.

In love we have been called to confess our own complicity in this mess; for only then we can stand firm against any exaggeration in this time of grief.  Then we can challenge fear with hope and ask patience when quick – and all too often stupid – solutions are offered up.  Then we can even be some of the light in this time of darkness.

And our model for this, beloved is Mary, the mother of our Lord.  That’s one of the deep blessings of this season – and a time-tested tradition of spiritual wisdom – we can see how others have not only endured their suffering and confusion by faith and love, but how they have been led into new birth and deeper integrity, too so that they bring blessings to a frightened world.  You see more often than not what our tradition offers the world in the face of tragedy and suffering cuts deeper theology and clear, rational words of explanation.  No, what people of faith share best when hard times come is love – acts of love – deeds of real flesh and blood compassion without judgment.

In our story, when a young, Palestinian peasant girl’s life is turned upside down, by prayer and trust she chooses to embrace God’s mystery rather than question or oppose it.  But she knows she needs help so the story tells us that immediately Mary heads for Elizabeth’s house to get some comfort, wisdom and company.  Mary knows – and the older Elizabeth comprehends, too – that when the going gets rough we need one another.  We can’t make sense nor bring healing to tragedy all by ourselves.  And there are two fascinating details in this story deserve remembrance:

First, as soon as young Mary calls out her greeting to the older and wiser relative, Elizabeth, who is also pregnant with the yet unborn John the Baptist, what happens?  The little baby Baptizer starts leaping around for joy in his momma’s womb.  He dances in anticipation inside her body and Elizabeth breaks into a song of praise:  Holy Mary, Mother of God, blessed are you and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.  In solidarity and faith, blessings beyond our wildest expectations are received and shared.

And second, as she rests more deeply into the comfort and compassion of Elizabeth, Mary finds a new peace that allows her to go forward.  She begins to see something of God’s upside-down grace at work in her life – in her own womb – and her world.  She doesn’t understand it all – and she won’t until Jesus speaks to her at the foot of his Cross – but she senses that somehow God has entered this moment in love and will lead her through whatever she must face.  And let’s not forget that Mary also gives herself enough time to talk things through, too because the story end by telling us that she stayed on with Elizabeth for three months before returning to her home.  No rushing to judgment or jumping on band wagons allowed just to feel better or some-how productive.

 

Conclusion

Now if Mary is a sacred model of embodiment for us – an Advent apostle of trusting God’s grace and love even in the midst of tragedy, suffering and confusion (and I think she is) – then maybe as the new year unfolds we might follow her example. 

·    What would it look like if we brought together parents and educators in this congregation and others to begin a dialogue about how to keep our children safe?  We could eat together – that’s Biblical – we could tell one another our hopes and fears – like Mary and Elizabeth – and we could trust that in solidarity and faith God’s love would become flesh within and among us. 

·    What would it be like if by faith rather than fear God’s people let the Holy Spirit invite us into actions to shed light into the darkness as an alternative to our fear?  Do you think the body of Christ – and others, too – might discover new ways of spreading peace and grace and hope beyond this season of grieving?

“My soul magnifies the Lord,” Mary said – that is my entire being celebrates and honors the grace of God – and in this “my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for God has looked with favor upon the lowliness of his servant.”  There is a time for grieving – and for silence – a time for singing and a time for healing in peace.  Let those who have ears to hear, hear.