Our Christmas

           I hope your Christmas was spectacular.  Rosie and I went to Cleveland to see our third daughter and her kids.  This was a great trip and necessary for all of us to celebrate the love that we share with each other.  Our other kids, and our grand-kids and great-grands also celebrated with us this wonderful feast of the Incarnation.  We gave gifts and received them and had a chance to experience the joy that family brings. 

            But family isn’t only our relatives.  We gather in our churches also as family.  We are the family of God, redeemed by our Lord Jesus and called to share the love that God has provided for us with the whole world.  That isn’t an easy job.  Sometimes we feel very much alone in this, especially when we see the privation and hardship that exists is so much of this world, and in our own neighborhoods.  Every time that I turn on the television set, I see stories of shootings and crime.   Stop shooting, we love you signs are up all over the place around here.  We are well aware of the isolation and damage that exists on our own city and our own blocks.   

            So what do we do about it?  It seems to me that the people of Homewood and other places in Pittsburgh where crime seems to be rampant have done a lot.  You have established community groups to talk and to share.  You provide for those who have nothing, and do everything that you can think of to make your neighborhood safer.  I have long admired what goes on in this place to create the Kingdom of God in the middle of confusion.

            Christmas is about hope and inclusion above everything else.  Jesus was born into a time of conflict and terror.  The stories of the killing of the children by Herod the King because of his own paranoia at the news that the wise men brought him about the birth of another King of the Jews, is what set him on this path.  I have always been pleased with the warning that the wise men received from the angel in a dream to go back to their homes another way and to avoid Herod’s invitation to report to him the location of the newborn king.  God had a hand not only in the birth of our Messiah, but in the protection of Jesus in the aftermath of that birth.

            Christianity is a religion that is firmly established in mystery.  We, thankfully for preachers, don’t pretend to have a lot of answers.  We rely on the scriptures to give us the questions to ask and the hope that is offered.  I love the first eighteen verses of John’s Gospel that sets out in poetic form the coming of the Word of God into this world.  The Word that existed from the beginning of time becomes flesh and dwells among us.  This is the essence of the meaning of Christmas; the coming of God to this earth to walk in the shoes of humanity; to feel hunger, thirst, pain, joy, rejection and finally death.  This, for me, is the reason that I can worship this incredible God.  This is God who has lived my life and has known my dreams and my hurts.  This God offers me something beyond my failures; the hope of eternal life with all whom I have loved and with the certainty that there is meaning in all of the things that I see in this world and don’t quite understand.

            Jesus comes to us just as we are, not waiting for us to deserve God’s presence, but in the state that we exist.  God, through the birth of Jesus offers us the beautiful Grace of forgiveness and the promise of hope forever.  I can receive the sacrament of the presence of God with the assurance that my sins are forgiven.  What else could we possibly need?  May God bless you all in this magnificent season.

The Time is Now

            Our daughter gave us a lovely clock which we have hung in our bathroom.  Around the face is proclaimed:  The time is now.  Smell your roses.  Take your walk.  Read your book.  What beautiful words.  I look at them every day and think about how time goes on and how little I make of it. 

            I just celebrated my eightieth birthday.  That might seem like old to some people, but it doesn’t to me.  Our kids came and brought a cake, gave me presents and we all celebrated with a wonderful evening.  I loved it.  But I can’t get that clock out of my mind.  The time is now. That is a constant reminder of where we are.  This is the moment.  It is the one to live, now.  I think that a lot of the time,  I think that time is more flexible.  I can do things later, or maybe not at all.  I need to be hit over the head with that phrase:  The time is now.  This is the moment.  Now. 

            If my eighties are like the rest of my life, they will be filled with events.  In 2005, when I was seventy-three, I had a brain tumor.  Because of a remarkable neurosurgeon named Sabatino Bianco, I was cured of it.  The rather large tumor was removed from the left frontal lobe of my brain, and after about two years of recovery, I had my faculties back and could get on with my life.  That was a profound moment for me.  I remember going into the operating room and slowly becoming calm.  I closed my eyes before the anesthetic was given to me, said a quiet prayer and knew beyond a doubt that things would be all right.  They would be all right whether I lived or I died.  I knew absolutely that God was present with me in that frightening moment.  That time was incredibly important and I had God’s help to regain my life.  

            Restoration is the message of Christmas.  When I read the lessons, they are all about how things have gone sour for the people and how desperately they need to be redeemed.  They are hungry for God’s presence in their lives, in their communities.  And that is what God promises to all of them.  In Isaiah, it is written:  Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. And in Matthew’s gospel, the angel tells Joseph the same thing and he takes Mary as his wife and they wait for the birth of her son, which at the angel’s command they name Jesus.  

            What a powerful story of restoration and redemption.  That is what Christmas commemorates and how we need to live to mark this glorious season.  May God bless us richly in this time that is now. 

Simply Shaking Hands

            We lost Nelson Mandela this week.  It wasn’t unexpected, he has been ill for a long time, was 95, and obviously near the end of his life.  The world has gathered in South Africa to pay tribute to him.  Four American presidents, including Barack Obama came to the service that honored his legacy.  There have been many wonderful things said about this great man who brought freedom to many in South Africa, but what has surprised me greatly has been the continued use of accusation against him.  He was called a terrorist by Dick Cheney, and a Marxist and a communist by others.  They repeated these things in this past week.  The surprising thing is that these comments didn’t diminish the beauty of Nelson Mandela one bit; instead they reflected very poorly on the people who said them.  And when President Obama shook the hand of Raul Castro at the gathering of heads of state, he was criticized by those who thought that such a gesture would be out of place in this turbulent world where Cuba is seen as an enemy by many Americans. 

            What stood out for me was that this gesture by our president at the Mandela memorial was very much in keeping with the life of the man who was being honored; a man who forgave his captors and did everything in his power to bring the warring factions in his country together after he was released from the prison on Robben Island.  Here was President Obama extending his hand to the leader of Cuba, without expecting anything in return.  It was a healing moment from which nothing will come except good feelings and the possibility of continued discussion, certainly in the image of Nelson Mandela 

            In the gospel lesson today, John the Baptist is in prison knowing that his own end is probably near.  He sends his disciples to Jesus to ask him if he is the one whom he has expected to come, or if they all should look for another.  This seems to me to be a disappointing thing for John to have to do.  His own expectations have been shattered.  He expected a messiah who would overturn the powers in charge and create a heaven on earth.  This is what John had been preaching in the desert and he was obviously disappointed with what Jesus had turned out to be.  Jesus’ reply to John is notable for its elegance: 

                                     Go and tell John what you hear and see:

                                     the blind receive their sight, the lame walk,

                                    the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead

                                    are raised, and the poor have good news brought

                                     to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no

                                     offense at me.

            John’s disappointment is certainly understandable.  Which of us hasn’t looked at this world at one time or another and wondered why God doesn’t fix it?  There is certainly enough wrong around us to make us wonder what God has in mind with this creation.  I am always amazed that God has put up with so much from us for so long.  We haven’t really been very good stewards of the world that we have been given. 

            Yes, there is a lot wrong; but there are also some wonderful things around us.  We celebrate the life of a man such as Mandela who healed and forgave and brought people together in a country where there had been horrible ripping apart.  The message here is that God is present in the small places of our lives.  When Mary in her song to God after the conception of Jesus, sings of how the lowly have been lifted up and the mighty put down from their thrones, we get a sense of what the real coming of the Messiah meant for her and for us.  This lowly woman was made the greatest in God’s kingdom by the simple act of agreeing to be the mother of God.  There is not a much more awesome moment for me in all of Holy Scripture.  If we want to see God in action in this world, we need to look to the small things that are done to bring us together; to see things like Obama and Castro shaking hands and the life of Mandela celebrated because of the wonder of his forgiveness and his ability to laugh in the face of all of his pain.  God bless us in this Advent season as we wait again for the Messiah.  May our Messiah bring us continued hope and joy.

A Time For Peace

             Billy Crystal has written a wonderful book, autobiographical in character called Still Foolin’ Them.  It is a remarkable statement about aging.  He has reached his sixty-fifth birthday and is reflecting on his life and what it means to get older.  I am also getting older, all of us are, and it is wonderful to read his story and fit it into my own life.  As many people have said, “Getting old is not for sissies,” and I certainly agree with that.  With aging come lots of things that we aren’t ready for.  Medical problems build up and we begin to understand that none of us are going to be here forever.  That ought to be obvious, but it really isn’t.   Most of us live our lives in expectation of their never ending.  We approach the world with a kind of selfishness that causes us problems and doesn’t work too well in terms of what God has in mind for his creation.

            I love the passage from Isaiah that talks about how God will develop redemption of this creation.  A root will grow from the stump of Jesse, says the prophet and that root will produce a branch that will cause the wolf to lie down with the lamb and the lion to be a partner of the kid.  They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord God.  This wonderful passage is a prophecy of the coming of the Messiah, whom we celebrate at Christmas.  The birth of the Christ who brought the Love of God to this earth, is what this is all about, helping us to understand the strength of Love in the living of our lives.  The way that this Love shows itself is the way that we treat the poor and those treated unjustly by the world; Peace is the result of this magnificent Love.  It is something that is called out of all of us by the God who created each of us.  It is how we are called to live.

            In this Christmas season, we don’t see much of this anymore.  The television set is crying out to all of us to go shopping for more inexpensive bargains.  We are being asked to spend these days in the pursuit of things, not justice; for trinkets, not welfare for the poor.   Living like this is not what God has in mind for us.  He wants the poor to be fed, clothed, sheltered and helped.  Whether this suits us or not is not important.  That there be justice on this earth is required of all of us.  It is not something that God will do in a great stroke of magic.  We are the way that creation will be made whole.  That is why we are here.  

            This Christmas season needs again to be a time of reminding ourselves of what it is that we are called to do and to be.  None of us can fix this world by ourselves; but as communities of those who are led by the Christ, we can be a beacon to the world of what it is that God requires of us all.