On Sunday, one of our 3 year olds (I’ll call her Claire) was sitting in the second row of pews with her parents. Next to her was one of our church elders, Harrison, who is also a pillar of the congregation in the best sense of the word and one of the few people I have ever met who is completely at home, able, and amazing with kids from age 0 to 25.
When this family went up for communion, Claire didn’t take any. But, after they got back to the pew, they saw a dad and his 3 year old go up and the 3 year old took communion (OK, full disclosure, that was my kid…who is not about to give up any chance to get her hands on extra grape juice). When Claire saw Zora taking communion she was a little peeved that she hadn’t gotten to. Parents sort of wondered about this, and Harrison explained that current PCUSA policy is that it’s up to parents to decide when kids may take communion, and if it was OK with them, Claire could.
Meanwhile, we were done with serving at the front, and my assistant and I were at the back serving an older gentleman who hadn’t been able to leave his pew. Harrison brought Claire to the back and walked her through the procedure, but she took two pieces first, and then lost them in the cup, and we just scooted those two into the bread basket to give her another chance with a new piece of bread.
It was a time I was really grateful to have a theology of communion that allowed me not to feel really anxious about the cup spilling, bread not being eaten, etc!
I love our church’s policy on communion and children (CRCNA folks, take heed as you make this big decision!). I love that every time we serve communion we might have a child who is taking it for the first time (in fact, I suspect there was another three year old who was partaking for the first time on Sunday).
I am grateful that we had an alert and loving elder in the pew who knew the policy and guided the family through it.
I am sad that we haven’t done a good enough job of educating our congregation, so that some of our parents don’t know how this works. We might need to fix that.
But I really don’t want to fix it by instituting some kind of class. Because I’m almost certain that in a church our size, we would start to have people come to the class at a certain age. And then the whole thing would get formalized and ritualized. And then we would have some sort of big “event”.
And I don’t want it be an event. I love that I can’t even remember Zora’s first time taking communion. I do remember what it was like to put that little bit of purple-stained bread in her mouth. I’m pretty certain it was her first solid food.
I love that Claire’s first communion was quiet and sweet and absolutely perfect, and that this part of her life with Christ was accidentally and providentially bound to the people who just happened to be in the pew with her that day.
It’s been over a week since you ripped open those treasure boxes under the tree. And for the most part, you know exactly what’s in them. And now you have a sense of how much you will actually use the gift. What each gift might mean, what it might really be for, which toy is your favorite, which gift you will return, which gift you wish you could return but can’t, what use you will get out of a gift, what you really love, which gifts you will remember forever, and what you will forget in a few weeks.
For those of you who are bummed out that the gift-giving is over, here’s an idea for a second shot at it (we might want to keep this a secret from retailers and marketers!): in some Christian traditions the gift giving happens not on Christmas, but on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany…when we remember the arrival of the wise men and their gifts.
Now, there’s a whole lot to talk about with the wise men. The details: (Were there really 3? And did they actually make it to the stable? How far away were they from? Was Jesus probably a toddler by this time?) The whole Herod thing: (what a terrible guy…the awful story of what he did…) The theological significance of these foreign visitors honoring a Hebrew king…
But this morning we are just going to peek into the treasure boxes.
Imagine what happens when Mary and Joseph unwrap these gifts: sitting in their home, probably one room with the carpentry tools stowed on one side and the kitchen on the other, and these marvelous magi admiring the toddler Jesus. And in the boxes and chests they set out are…gold…frankincense…and myrrh. Whatever they mean, they are riches that this little family of craftsmen in a tiny backwater town have never set hands on or even imagined.
Enough to ease their lives for a few years. And enough to make the mystery of who their child really was even greater.
Enough for them to wonder what to do with it…there was no need for a college fund, no such thing as an IRA or a stock portfolio. Could they invest in flocks of sheep? Maybe it meant another room added onto the house or money for an extra cow or goat.
But what did it mean?
Luke’s gospel sums up the story of Jesus’ infancy with this: “But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.”
I imagine they had to treasure away a few pieces of gold, maybe behind a mud brick loosened from the wall of the house, and it sat there much the same way the strange events of Jesus birth and early years sat in Mary’s heart.
That’s the thing about some gifts…there are some that you just don’t really understand until later on. Some that change meaning as the years go on. Some gifts start out as one thing and turn into another. Gifts can take on different meaning.
When I was about 10, my great grandparents bought everyone of their great grandkids a Bible, engraved with our names.
I think I knew it was important at the time, because I handed it back to my Great Grandpa Hank and asked him to write in the front that he and Great Grandma Alberta had given to me. (I guess, with over a dozen great grandkids, writing us each a note was a step they understandably skipped)
When I was little, I thought the pictures in the Bible were too babyish for me. When I was a teenager, I learned to loved the words, but wished I had a more grown up Bible for youth group. When my Grandma Alberta died a few years later it meant more. When Grandpa Hank died my freshman year of college, it meant even more. When I stood on my Great-Grandparents grave to say prayers and help bury my grandmother right next to them, that Bible became irreplaceable.
So, did Mary remember, when she was helping to prepare Jesus’ body for burial, when the other women went to the market to get the embalming spices, the myrrh and the frankincense, that once, years ago, she had taken to market to exchange for the money? The frankincense and myrrh that had been a baby gift for her son?
And the mystery of everything that has happened is bigger than the treasure boxes of the wise men, the little treasure box of Mary’s heart…because the gifts of the season are not comfy sweaters or uggs or zhu zhu pets or Wiis or food processors…the gifts are not the boxes of gold and frankincense and myrrh…the gifts are not eve the amazing birth and surprising stories that Mary and Joseph pondered and treasured…
The gift is Jesus. And we say it too often that we forget…the gift is Jesus, baby born in Bethlehem, but also Emmanuel, God-among-us.
In Ephesians, Paul reminds us…it is not the gift of a cute and cuddly Baby.
This is a gift of cosmic significance.
So it may begin meaning simply that God affirms the life-giving love and care of a kind mother, the bright beauty of a baby.
But the meaning of the gift, the mystery of it, grows and grows each time we look in the treasure box.
This is a mystery: that God should grow in a woman’s belly,
This is a mystery: that God should be born among us…
This is a mystery: that the stars and angels should sing…
This is a mystery: that everyone from shepherds to wealthy men should come…
This is a mystery: that God would walk with us, pray with us, suffer for us…
This is a mystery: that God would save us from ourselves by becoming one of us, in such a strange and remarkable way.
This is a mystery. Unfolding and unfurling. Stretching out over time and space.
And every time we open the treasure box, we will see it a new way, in a way that changes everything we thought we knew, over and over again.
It is mystery. It is epiphany. It is a great and mighty wonder.
It is the greatest of all treasures.
So, keep seeking, keep pondering, keep taking it out of the box…
God-among-us, God-one-of-us, Savior of the World, Creator of the Universe, word made flesh…
It’s been a long day. Mostly church related. Not bad. Just long. I am tired, body, soul, spirit, voice and joints and the soles of my feet.
So, one quick thought, jumping off from a conversation with a colleague last week:
Advent is really supposed to be a season of preparation, pulling back, pulling away to prepare. It’s probably a good time to scale back and not do as much. But everyone, even churches, is packing in every last drop of Holiday stuff that they can fit.
So, do we suspend every last activity? We were talking about this in conjunction with the Wednesday evening Advent meal & bible study & kids activities tht three of us have been working our tails off to make happen.
For our bunch of people who are showing up for these nights, we know that this is a different “event”, a time when they do pull back: parents are able to leave kids with someone who loves them and go sit quietly together to think and pray. Kids are playing together and reading together in a way that is less structured and more playful and spontaneous that we usually let them be. And then we all come together for a big meal, eaten slowly, at big tables, with what feels like an enormous extended family. Dads come to church from their work commute. Moms hand babies to people past the baby-years. The kids run circles around the room and chase each other and shout alot. I know it’s more of a family dinner than we get in at MY house most weeks.
But still, there are the 3 crazy pastors running around and looking frazzled because we added the organization of this to a season that is terribly busy.
So, we asked each other, what kind of modeling are we doing for our congregation, that we are crazy and busy and frazzled?
I am so tired tonight, but it is all worth it because I know there are about 50 people who were able to slow down and do something different and be God’s people together for an evening.
And so, just like I don’t model Sabbath particularly well on Sundays (when I regularly put in 13 hour days!), I don’t model Advent very well. But I need to take a Sabbath for myself (oh, sweet, sweet Friday…I think of it as the day of he week that god made just for me). And I might need to remember to take Advent for myself…probably not in December, but sometime.
In the middle of all these Advent stories about naming remarkable babies (Jesus and John), here’s a poem that has had me thinking lately about the importance of naming:
How badly the world needs words.
Don’t be fooled
By how green it is,
How it seems to be thriving.
“Willow” rescues that tree
From its radiant perishing.
How much more so then
When you name the beloved.
–Gregory Orr
So many echoes in that:
God calling creation into existence by speaking and naming.
Jesus asking, “Who do you say that I am?” And simply by confession and naming him the Christ, we declare him the beloved.
“I know my sheep and my sheep know me…” Jesus calling us by name.
That in God’s very naming of us, salvation from perishing begins because we are loved enough to be known and named.
And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write:
These are the words of the holy one, the true one,
who has the key of David,
who opens and no one will shut,
who shuts and no one opens:
Revelation 3:7
I’ve been to all sites of the 7 churches in Revelation. Eight years later, I only remember snippets of each one. And how almost every site felt windswept and deserted and vacant.
Sometimes waiting isn’t vibrant and things burn out. There aren’t churches in some of those cities anymore…in fact, there aren’t cities in some of the cities anymore.
But those 7 churches are still important enough that tour buses of Christians pull up to visit. And people read Revelation and hear the stories and warnings their own churches need to hear.
Dinner tonight is a good bellweather of how I’ve been eating lately…good intentions mixed with crap.
I made enchiladas from “scratch”:
corn tortillas (which I obviously didn’t make myself)
wrapped around:
locally grown squash that I roasted yesterday in a moment of inspired advanced preparation
pulled chicken BBQ of the big-grovery-store-bought kind, which I did not even read the ingredients or nutrition information of because I was to scared to find out…
topped with:
a mixture of enchilada sauce and mole (again, both store-bought)
queso anejo
I just can’t bring myself to go completely organic or local. Or, to eat completely healthy foods. But, I can recommend this dish. It was delicious.
But we must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the first fruits for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and through belief in the truth. For this purpose he called you through our proclamation of the good news, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter.
1 Thessalonians 2:13-15
Given than I can’t make it through 4 weeks without waiting to break out the Christmas music, the last 2000 years of waiting are pretty incredible.
I appreciate that the Epistle writers have this constant sense of urgency…they think the end is coming soon.
We, however, are getting a little lax at waiting with any sense of urgency.
Sometimes I wonder if Paul and the other epistle writers would be bothered that their sense of “soon” was not a few years, but thousands.
But here’s something amazing…look at the thrill they had in the first fruits of faith, and at watching it multiply.
Could they ever have imagined the crazy-weedy growth that all this waiting has produced?
Zora, through the miracle of Hulu, enjoyed her first ever viewing of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special.
I never noticed before: when Charlie Brown is about to give up on his Christmas tree, he hears Linus reciting the Luke 2 Christmas story again. And this causes him to give the tree another chance. It might be a scraggly, scrappy little tree. The unexpected tree.
But baby Jesus was a scraggly, scrappy, unexpected little Messiah.
What I am really waiting for, this time of year, is snow.
Today, the snow is here. Dangerous and beautiful. Quiet and white, blowing, refreshing, even astringent.
And how that fits with Advent? I’m not sure.
It might be the quiet stillness, the way it forces us to slow down and take time.
I love it when snow cancels things. Because that is often the only way to peace and quiet…abrupt, enforced sabbath.
Or the way it makes space to be alone…that the air is filled with white drifts so that we are each in our own little space.
Maybe it is the danger…a reminder of how fragile things are.
Or the way perception shifts, from texture and color to white blunt-edges forms.
It might be the pure joy of something new. (Zora built a snowman last night and I had to lift her up so that she could kiss him goodnight, little lips all red from his icy cheek.)
I know snow has nothing to do with Advent unless you live in my climate and hemisphere. But I still think they’re linked.