From Generation to Generation: We Tell This Story

Christmas Eve             Luke 2  

What are some of your very favorite Christmas stories? 

Ooooo, I like that one too.

These are the stories we tell and listen to and watch for every year alongside the story of Jesus because they tell us something about what we’re longing for in our lives.

The gifts and feelings that we’re hoping will be a part of this night.

 

One of my favorites is the story—The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, and specifically, I love the Muppets version. I love seeing Scrooge’s transformation from a selfish, lonely miser to someone who finally cares for those who have been loving to him all along. I love how Charles Dickens cared about so many people who were having a very hard Christmas—because of failed systems, because of unfair gaps between rich and poor, because of cold and greed and lack of care.

 

Jesus came into our world exactly for the people who most need the world to be transformed. In a New York Times article last year called “Christmas is Weird,” Esau McCaulley tells a story from his Alabama childhood about receiving an amazing gift and how this Christmas story is exactly for everyone who feels left out of the usual Christmas stories of comfort and joy. Esau hopes that we will care about this:

This Christmas, many boys and girls will wake up in very difficult circumstances. Their basic prayers for food, rescue, safety or a particular toy will go unanswered. Many of my most urgent and desperate [prayers] during childhood went unanswered for years on end. Why God answers some prayers with miracles and not others is a question [people] have pondered for centuries.
But Christmas… has never promised to soothe every pain or cure every ill. Unfortunately, life with God doesn’t work that way. Instead, Christmas is the grand miracle that makes space for all the smaller miracles. It gives us enough hope to walk a little farther in the dark toward the glimmer of something that seems too distant to reach.
Christmas is, in the words of the Gospel of John, the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. The path to that light has taken many forms…
these odd incidents led us directly into the presence of a child who filled our hearts with wonder…
Christmas suggests that God has not forgotten anyone. [God] came as a child, weak and vulnerable, unable to lift his head without assistance or to wipe his own bottom. [God] did this so the weak and broken things might feel comfortable approaching the divine.[1] 

These are the stories we tell and listen to and watch for every year alongside the story of Jesus because they tell us something about what we’re longing for in our lives. We’re longing for people to be kinder to one another. We’re longing for good gatherings with people we love. We’re longing for people to reconcile and for peace to spread throughout the world. We’re longing to see evidence of love coming alive.

 

But remember this, if you are feeling weak and vulnerable and broken this Christmas… the story is so much for you—the story of having no place to go but finding a place, the story of being welcomed from the outside to the warm inside, the story of traveling from a distance to see a miracle.

 

Remember tonight that God comes to meet you, not in how things should be, but meets you exactly where you are—and in the grand miracle of Jesus birth, God makes space for all the smaller miracles.

 

Watch for them… and may each one give you hope to walk a little farther in the dark toward the glimmer. Tell the stories… because the path to God’s light has taken many forms. 

Embrace the odd… because our own odd stories lead us directly into the presence of Jesus who fills hearts with wonder.

 

Thank you for coming and sharing and listening this Christmas Eve—and when you go to whatever’s next tonight, may you leave with comfort and hope, love and wonder, peace and joy.

---

[1] Christmas is Weird by Esau McCaulley

   https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/opinion/christmas-is-weird.html

 

From Generation to Generation: We See God in Each Other

Image from A Sanctified Art

Advent 4 – Luke 1

It is not often that we get a full fourth week of Advent. Next year, we’ll light the fourth blue candle on Sunday morning and by Sunday afternoon it will be Christmas Eve. But this year, we have a full week until Christmas Day, a full week to savor this theme… from Generation to Generation, we see God in each other. 

I love the poem that Rev. Sarah Speed shares in the daily devotion for today called Where I Saw God Last[1]… and then she describes person after person from her city life—teenagers who cannot control their laughter, the saxophone player at 42^nd street, the woman at the end of the block with her yappy dogs and her books in the window, the abuelita, the Perisan man at the grocery who tells me to be safe when I leave…

If we were going to write our own poem of all the God sightings in the last couple of days, I wonder who you’d name? Take a moment and picture who’ve you met who has been a God-in-flesh or maybe God-in-disguise. Just before the funeral on Friday, Thaly Cavanaugh showed up and my heart leapt with gratitude even before she spoke and let me know how to correctly pronounce Bos Klan’s name. We’ve been saying Bos for years… but it’s Bos (bo). It happened again when I looked up and saw members of Christ showing up for Bos’ family and when her grandson shared his memories and gratitude. We are well-trained to see God in creation, like the incredibly beautiful snowy branches heavy with 30 degree snow all week, but this week, we’re invited to watch for all the sightings of God that we’ll encounter this week in the people we encounter in daily life.

 

Dr. Christine Hong, who writes tomorrow’s devotion, shares the story of her parents being Korean immigrants. Her mother said that whoever met you at the airport decided your destiny. In other words, however greets you at the threshold as you become a new immigrant determines the direction your life moves.

 

She makes this connection—“Elizabeth greets Mary on the threshold, not only of her door but the threshold of something new in Mary’s life and for the world. Mary is met by her cousin who greets her with welcome, anticipation, and a powerful blessing.”

Whatever fears these two women had about the births to come, they were met by the courage of the other. The courage of a young woman who braved travel in perilous times, the courage of a woman giving birth when giving birth is dangerous. “They were one another’s spiritual midwives”—singing transformation into being, grounded in each other’s courage and steadfastness. “They wondered together in liminal space, on the threshold of a new world. And through their spiritual and relational partnership, Mary and Elizabeth framed the path of partnership for their children too.”[2]Beautiful.

 

Next week, we’ll hear the Christmas story from Luke 2, told in the context of Joseph and Mary traveling to Bethlehem for the census of the Roman empire. There were two main motivations for requiring a census: to count the number of able-bodied men who could be drafted for war, and to determine the number of taxpayers in every location. In other words, the census was designed to consolidate the empire’s military strength and economic power. In contrast, Mary and Elizabeth sing about dethroning the powerful and lifting up the lowly. Her song is a song that both comforts and unsettles, just depending on our perspective. Just depending on what we are most concerned about needing to protect.

 

The song of these women has been used by liberation theologians in various times and places as part of their resistance to oppressive regimes—in the 1970s in Argentina, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo used Mary’s words to publicly protest the disappearance of their children and the song was sung throughout Latin American in the 1970s and 80s. Before that, in the context of resisting the Nazi regime, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called the Magnificat, “the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary hymn ever sung.” Throughout the generations, Mary’s words have become a rallying cry for those deemed “lowly” or “outcast.” How can we honor the revolutionary power of her words?

 

Next month on the second Saturday, the Books & Brunch group will talk about Cole Arthur Riley’s book This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation and the Stories That Make Us. Arthur Riley writes this in a chapter called Belonging, “We need other people to see our own faces—to bear witness to their beauty and truth. God has made it so that I can never truly know myself apart from another person… I want someone to bear witness to my face, that we could behold the image of God in one another and believe it on one another’s behalf.”[3]

 

For so many of us, it is life-changing, revolutionary for someone to truly see us. It is life-changing, revolutionary to belong to a community where we are looking for God together, looking to experience God’s presence in one another. And this is what Mary invites us into today, in the presence of her dear cousin, to see God in each other—and to prepare to be what she became so long-ago, a God-bearer in a world that so needs each of us to show and share and see God.

 

In a few moments we’ll speak together these words—

We know that this life of connection is easier said that done, which is why we gather in this space, week after week, generation after generation, to be reminded: We see God in each other. 

We’ll say, “Plant this story of love so deep in our bones that we cannot help but share it from generation to generation.” 

And we’ll say, “No matter where we go, no matter what we say, no matter what we do, we belong to God. We are held. We are loved. We are forgiven.”

 

Let us take all this into this fourth week of Advent— a full week to savor this theme… from Generation to Generation, we see God in each other.

---

[1] Rev. Sarah (Are) Speed, Where I Saw God Last, From Generation to Generation: An Advent Devotional, p. 31

[2] Dr. Christine J. Hong, From Generation to Generation: An Advent Devotional, p. 32

[3] Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation and the Stories That Make Us, p. 81

From Generation to Generation—we can choose a better way

 Joseph changed his plans. 

His original plans began out of a place of fear. 

In his restless sleep, he began to dream and in that dream, an angel visited. 

The angel began with telling Joseph what angel visitors and messengers of God always say,
“Do not be afraid.”

Don’t think that Mary betrayed you. Don’t be afraid of what the community might think. This one who is going to be born will be Jesus—which means God saves.

God is with us.

 

Image from A Sanctified Art

Advent 3: Isaiah 35 and Matthew 1   

Our theme today written by the creative team at Sanctified Art says this, “When Joseph awakes, he once again has the courage to choose a better way. He chooses to stay with Mary, to become an adoptive parent. Like Mary, he chooses to say, “yes.”

 

When have our ancestors also chosen a better way?

 

On Friday, I was called to the home of Bos Klan who died after two years of health challenges. As I sat with “Lot,” Bos’ daughter and Lot’s siblings, they shared about their journey in the 1980s with their mother from Cambodia. Bos was originally from Thailand but had moved to Cambodia with her husband. As war broke out, their family tried to escape and during the escape, a bomb exploded near them. Bos lost her husband immediately and her teenage daughter was seriously injured. “Lot” was just 7 years old as she lost her father and her big sister. Their family went to a refugee camp where her mother had to be incredibly brave in the face of many fears and an unknown future. Still today, this history is so painful and brings fresh tears of grief. Bos, mother of 8 and grandmother of 14 and great-grandmother of 14 was so strong. She came to this country as a widow. She raised her children and cared for grandchildren and great-grandchildren living in poverty, without the benefit of a car. She took them on the bus, cooked food over the fireplace, and sniffed them (her way of kissing). She made the earth bloom with her gardening skills. She learned English, passed her permit test and the citizenship test. She shaped four generations through her faith and courage, as she made Saint Paul, Minnesota her home for near 40 years. Lot repeated many times how her mother read her Bible often and went through the house singing Amazing Grace… both in English and in Khmer (ka-mai). In her last weeks, she was speaking in all three languages, calling out for the relatives who went before her into death. Her death is bittersweet for her closest loved ones as they do not want to lose her but rejoice that at last, all her sorrow and sighing flee away. She is at peace.

 

Like Joseph, Bos had to rearrange her whole life because of life’s circumstances… some of which no one would ever choose. Yet, like Joseph, Bos found courage and listened for God’s loving voice of grace and she has a whole family tree who have grown and flourished from her nurturing presence.

 

Today, our children are sharing the main message—a message of preparing to welcome very special guests with whatever we have to share. May we let them show us how to welcome, how to anticipate, how to take joy in this present as it unfolds. May God fill us with courage like Mary, like Joseph, who said “yes” and became bearers of God’s deep love and amazing grace.