Friday, my regular day off, has been frittered away on the couch. Although, I suppose it counts as good spousal bonding time since Erik was sitting next to me. Erik chose to watch James Bond movies. I read through several months’ worth of a blog by a woman who placed her child in an open adoption. It so gripping that I was able to completely ignore hours of James Bond. Her story was full of grace and grief, but also packed with honesty. I was absolutely entranced.
This afternoon, Erik and I picked up 5 organ pipes,wood flutes, that we purchased on Tuesday. My parents alerted us when they saw them for sale at Architechtural Artifacts. A few years ago, they bought several pipes at another architechtural salvage place in Chicago and hung them as a series of wall-mounted shelves in their dining room.
After searching through three floors of unusual items (marionettes, ancient dentist chairs, street lights, french bistro signs, giant light pixtures, pulpits…) we found the pipes.
Our pipes will take up residence in our storage area until we move sometime this summer, when they will begin a new life as shelves, or whatever else we can do with them.
I don’t know what organ builder made them, for what church. The only identifying information on them: each is stamped with its note and underneath “pedal bournais.” I love the idea that these pipes spent years making music, leading singing, and they will become a part of the place where I live.
Plus, we spent $40.00 to buy 5 pipes. Fine wood wall-mounted shelves would have cost much more.
I will admit to an inordinate love for Christmas music. I’ve been known to extend the playing time of my Christmas CDs well into February. On Christmas Eve day, at about 10:00am, I am generally glued to the to radio to listen to the year’s live broadcast of the festival of lessons and carols from King’s College, Cambridge. Even my decision to attend St. Olaf College was probably unduly influenced by its world famous Christmas Festival. I love the old songs, and the new ones, about baby Jesus and shepherds and stars, kings and stable animals, joy and love and peace on earth.
But the song of the angels at Christmas, “peace on earth,†is dissonant with the sounds of the world around us. A few years ago, I came across a very different Christmas song, one that recognizes this dissonance. U2, the Irish band, tucked it in the middle of their album from 2000:
Heaven on earth,
we need it now
I’m sick of all this hanging around
sick of sorrow, sick of pain,
sick of hearing again and again
That there’s gonna be peace on earthJesus, this song you wrote,
the words are sticking in my throat
Peace on Earth
Hear it every Christmastime
But hope and history won’t rhyme,
so what’s it worth?
This peace on earth.
I can think of no better way to say it: those words—peace on earth—stick in our throats. Our hopes for the world do not fit, do not rhyme with the facts of the newspaper, or with our own messy personal lives. And so we sing peace on earth with a note of pleading. Please, God, make it so.
Is this too pessimistic? For this one day each year, maybe we could, maybe we should just ignore the mess, and enjoy the day. In fact, I don’t want to send anyone home with indigestion due to a downer of a Christmas sermon.
But, buried deep in this story of Jesus’ birth is the reality of a God who comes to us where we are, a God who joins us in this world, a God who comes to us in the middle of the mess.
In reality, Luke 2 does not present a particularly warm fuzzy picture of Christmas. The story is full of the downtrodden, displaced, and disenfranchised.
Caesar, the greatest dictator of the age, decides he needs a more accurate picture of his possible tax revenues. When you control the entire known world, it’s easy for some sources of revenue to fall through the cracks. From the comfort of his Roman villa, he makes a decree—inconvenient to everyone else in the known world. Every man must go to register in the town of his ancestors.
For one man, the inconvenience takes on biblical proportions. Joseph has just survived the scandal in Nazareth of new wife who is unexplainably far along in her pregnancy. He has to travel all the way to Bethlehem. It’s a point of pride in the family that they are descendents of the greatest king Israel ever knew—David, of Bethlehem. But this journey is hardly full of pride. He decides to takes his greatly pregnant wife (biblical proportions, again) with him to register in Bethlehem. She’s nearly due, but maybe this will be better anyway, a way to avoid the gossips of Nazareth.
But the trip goes horribly wrong. By the time they reach Bethlehem, Mary is in labor. Walking for three days will do that to a woman who is great with child. And Bethlehem may be Joseph’s ancestral village, but no distant family member is willing to take them in. So much for Middle Eastern hospitality. There’s not even space in the local inns. And so they must hunker down in the first century equivalent of a Motel 6 parking garage. No local midwife comes to help, and Mary gives birth with cattle and donkeys attending. They wrap the baby in rags and make due with a cow’s feed box for a crib, and say a prayer that all concerned will make it through the cold night.
In the middle of the night, the doors open, and the visitors stream in. Their visitors are not happy relatives, or the innkeeper’s wife, but shepherds, known by all to be unclean, unkempt, and unscrupulous. And these ones, apparently a touch insane as well, muttering about messengers in the sky, and peace on earth. There they all are, cramped into a corner of a barn, amidst the cows and the muck, in the middle of the mess.
This week, Mary, a pastor friend of mine, was reflecting in her online journal about the idea that Christmas is primarily a family holiday. That idea makes her nervous, she says. She writes:
It narrows down the Christmas event to Mary and Joseph’s experience in Bethlehem. What about the angels? The shepherds? The many who heard the shepherds talk about it and wondered what in the world they were talking about? The Christmas event was not about Mary and Joseph gazing down in wonder at their son. The Christmas event that took place in a smelly sheep cave on the outskirts of that little Judean village was about me and you and President Bush and Martin Sheen and Florence Nightingale and Ghandi and Mao Tse Tung and the Lost Boys of Sudan and Fidel Castro and my favorite three-year-old boy who loves to bop the angel on the top of his creche because then it plays Away in a Manger and he can sing along.
Then she points out that the reality is that family and Christmas can get messy, anyway. Family at Christmas is a mixed blessing for many, and even a misery for some. If Christmas is about family, she says, we are missing the one who is in the middle—Jesus, who even as a baby attracted a mixed bag—a too-young mother, an unsure father, shepherds and sheep, cows, and a surly innkeeper. And in the middle of it all is this baby, Jesus. The point of it all is not about Mary and Joseph and the child. It’s about the child himself, God with us in the middle of the mess.
This story is not just a sweet tale to tell in the middle of winter, not just about mothers and babies and angels. In the gospel of John, the same story is told with a cosmic focus. John describe the birth of Jesus from behind the scenes, using poetry that sends shivers down the spine when you realize what it actually means:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being In him was life, and the life was the light of all people…And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1-4, 14)
Contained in that baby, fragile as any other newborn, vulnerable to the whims of innkeepers, weather, and dictators, was the grace and truth of God. This Jesus was not just any child, but God with us, the creator of the world come down to live among us.
But this Jesus, like any baby can only cry or gurgle, cannot open his mouth to speak, to explain, leaving the shepherds to make what sense they can about this good news of peace, leaving Mary to simply store away the memories of his birth and ponder them in her heart.
And leaving us with the angels’ words, “peace on earth,†sticking in our throats. God is here, but the world is still messy. How can we understand this?
From Jesus’ silence as an infant, we do not get a clear message or explanation. That silence can feel drown out by the rest of the season. In an article in Slate magazine, Jack Miles (who wrote God: An Autobiography) reflects on this silence of Jesus in the Christmas story. He makes this rather odd, but relevant comparison:
In the madness of the holiday season, the Christmas story is, for me, like a toddler lost in the roar of a shopping mall, its meaning like a penny in the toddler’s pocket.
The idea of the story easily becomes lost, covered over by the rest of the season—songs and gifts, shopping and parties, and even idealized families. And because the central figure, a baby, does not interpret the story for us, it’s easy for the story and its meaning to get lost in the shuffle.
Perhaps, on this night, we are not supposed to ignore the world. We know all too well that it is messy. At 7:00 on a Christmas night, many of our reasons for being here remind us: travel plans that were not perfect, family dinners interrupted, absence or estrangement from those we have loved, or simply the need for shelter to keep us warm. We know we will open the newspaper tomorrow and be reminded that all is not right in the world.
And yet, at the center, is this baby Jesus. Silent, without explanation, but still present, in the middle.
And perhaps this is all we have to know as we celebrate this birth.
The word became flesh and lived among us.
God is with us, God is here, in the middle of the mess.
However quiet, however many questions we have, it is still good news.
Thanks be to God.
Here it is, the perfect background music for Christmas-sermon composing. The King’s College, Cambridge Festival of Lessons and Carols is on WFMT radio. King’s does the orginal lessons and carols service. And no one does it better. Someday, I want to wait in line for hours and actually be there. I am an enourmous fan of Christmas music–a contributing factor in my decision to attend St. Olaf College, which does the best American Christmas music fesitval. You can hear St. Olaf’s version this year on the web.
I’ll admit it. The Sunday night sermon has suffered for the past week at the expense of other things. Tomorrow morning, the sermon gets done, whether the Spirit is moving vigorously or not. The problem is the other things have been good things. Here’s a list:
Somewhere, in the midst of all of this, a sermon on what it means for God to show up in our everyday, often messy lives is percolating. Tomorrow, it has to take shape.
For just over a year, I’ve been engaged in a process I fondly refer to as “Presbyquest.” I was ordained as a minister in the Christian Reformed Church two years ago, but I was finding it difficult to find a position in parish ministry, and to find any position where I could remain within a reasonable geographic distance of my husband and his career needs. So I began to explore the possibilty of transferring my ordination to the Presbyterian Church (USA). Yesterday, after committee meetings, four written examinations, interviews, documents, I finished the process. I went before the Presbytery of Chicago and was accepted as an official Presbyterian minister.
The event itself was distinctively of that particular denomination. But it was such a reminder that the Church of Jesus is more than all of the denominations we humans have managed to splinter it into. And, a call to serve is a call to serve this whole Church rather than just a small part of it.
A week and a half ago, I received word that one of my former students died in his sleep. James was a senior this year at the school where I taught religion for two years. My colleagues and friends who are still there sound exhausted. I am sure that the students are devasted.
James was not my best student or even my favorite. He was an active member of period 2 Scriptures my first year, the class for which the principal declared an automatic trip to her office for the most minor offence. I sent him to the principal’s office for cheating on the final exam. But I still remember the enthusiam he showed playing tuba in the band, and the video project on the ten commandments that he produced with two other students. It included their awkward and unintentionally hysterical attempt to sit as a panel of experts and narrate. Somewhere under the sophomore boy was a an interest in what I was teaching, even if he would never admit it.
And by the time I had him for World Religions a year later, I could see the ineveitable maturing process taking hold. He was interested enough in the subject matter to be one of two students who took me up on an optional field trip to a synogogue for Sabbath prayers. He poured himself into a video presentation on the life cycles of a Hindu deity. And I will never forget that James was one of only a few students who had two parents at every parent-teacher conference. They were wonderful, and every time I saw them, I knew deep down that James would turn out OK.
Combined with the ineveitable church-during-the-holiday-season lunacy at work, this news hit me hard. I keep thinking about “my kids” at the school, praying for them, shaking my fist at God for letting this happen, and trying to sort out what I might do. Tomorrow, I do what I can: show up and be there for James’ funeral, held at the school. The students are being let in early for a viewing, and I will be there before they show up, because I know that the only thing I can do is just be there with them, and maybe listen and cry a little.
But I want to do something for James’ parents, too. I’m planning to write them a letter, and tell them what I remember about James, what I might say to him if I met him in 10 years. I’ve been composing it in my head since last week, and it is finally time to write.
On Sunday morning, I spent six straight hours focused on the Lord’s Supper, though not because I am some kind of spiritual giant who can meditate on the sacrament for an entire morning.
At 6:00am, my alarm clock launched into my daily morning dose of National Public Radio. The person who schedules their programing is most definitely an absolute genius: Sunday from 6:00 to 7:oo in the morning is devoted to the program Speaking of Faith. An excellent choice, because we church-types are among the few who are awake at that insane weekend hour!
This morning’s program was on Communion/Lords Supper/Eucharist. It was wonderful, and I am already trying to figure out how to use it to start discussion among a future Worship Committee. Don Saliers of Candler School of Theology was interviewed and made beautiful points about how communion ought to flow out of worship into service to the world, just as Christ opened himself to us. I was also entranced by his way of thinking about the huge differences in how Christians today “do” communion. He compared it to a beautiful, haunting melody: when you hear it sung by one voice acappella; when you hear it orchestrated for full strings; when you hear it arranged for piano and oboe; in each case, you hear and enjoy the same melody, and from each different persective are reminded how beautiful that melody is.
With that fabulous conversation to ponder on the ride to church, where we were celebrating communion at each of the three services. And this morning, I was paying close attention to the practical logistics of communion in this church. With three services and 1,500 or so congregants, it is a major operation. A group arrives to set-up early Saturday morning; the number of elder-servers is staggering and that organization of these folks takes three coordinators. It takes a woman from church more than a full day’s worth of time to bake wafers for one Sunday.
I stood in the narthex to watch the procedure. A constant buzz, coming and going, several seperate groups of volunteers trying not to trip over each other–servers; ushers; tray clearers–each group directed by their own volunteer coordinator. And everything done “decently and in order.” (Usually, Presbyterians use that phrase from their Book of Order to describe church polity, but here, at least, it also applies to communion.)
At first, I missed the spontenaity and hominess of communion at smaller churches I’ve been a part of. But then I settled into a corner and watched, and saw amazing things. Like Don Saliers had suggested, it was a very different arrangement of the familiar eucharistic tune, but still just as hauting and beautiful, with layers I’d never heard before: The high school kid who is completely devoted to being a youth deacon intensely focused on his task clearing finished trays (full disclosure–he is also my cousin, and I was terribly proud of him in that moment); The server coordinators standing in the back with their arms high in the air as a signal when all pews had been served, although it looked for all the world like their hands were blessing the congregation in an uncharacteristically charismatic fashion; The usher who helped to entertain a fussy baby in the narthex; The fact that everyone involved, from the Saturday set-up group to the servers to the people who would wash over 1,000 little cups when it was over, was truly and completely devoted to serving these people gathered, and saw their job not just as decorum but as service.
And finally, around 12:30, I was on my way home. So, there it is–6 hours of unintentional meditation on communion.
I don’t know what the 1,500 people who took communion have been doing the last few days, but I hope that their being served the body of Christ by that great bustling bunch of Christ’s body in the narthex has somehow extended into the world in the last two days.
One of my responsibilities at work is coordination of my church’s relief efforts for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. For the past few months, this has mainly meant that I attempt to connect donations with people who have been displaced to Chicago. It has been the most rewarding and the most frustrating thing that I do. On good days, it has meant hands-on help of a couple who arrived in Chicago in September and stumbled into our church for help a few weeks later. They have been a joy and delight for each of us who has helped them.
On bad days, I’ve had to wade through the mess that these disasters have created even for those of us who want to help. Every avenue to do something good can feel like a confusing, twisted path, filled with obstacles. The obstacles have become a physical reality of my job. Last week, when I left for a Thanksgiving vacation, my work cubicle was sixty percent occupied by what seems like the entire boxed-up contents of an apartment, generously donanted, and still looking for the right place to go. Of course, ignoring the pile while I was gone did not make it go away. When I returned today, one of my co-workers had placed signs that say: “Erica’s Flea Market–No Offer Too Low.”
But another way to view that pile is not just as a physical manifestation of my To-Do List for the coming week. It is also a reminder that doing something good and worthwhile takes effort and time, and sometimes many, many phone calls.
For the past two years, I taught high religion at a college prep school on Chicago’s West Side. The pace for teachers and students was furious and frantic. From the end of August until May, with two weeks to breath in December, we crafted curriculum, graded grammar, pieced together projects. My classroom was filled with my lectures, the students’ voices, the scraping of pens taking notes, the squeak of chalk, and we were glad that this noise drown out the sirens outside reminding us of the rough realities of our neighborhood. At the bell, we all spilled into the hall where students had five minutes of blessed freedom to be teenagers—in other words, it was very noisy. And I gathered my thoughts for the next class. At the end of the day, I collapsed into an exhausted heap at my desk, and lugged files labeled “to be graded†to my car. I drove past my students walking home with backpacks stuffed to overflowing with books and homework, backpacks on wheels because of the weight of their work. This school’s motto is “the school that works.†And work we did.
After a year there, I knew that I was missing something as the religion teacher. I taught my kids about God, but I wanted them to know God. And we were just too busy with books and Bibles, pens and chalk, timelines and essays. We had to slow down. And so, with the nothing-short-of-inspirational support of my department chair, Fridays became prayer day. And one week, I decided it was time to try an experiment with my section of junior World Religions. We would just sit and be silent. For ten minutes. Friday came, and I was nervous. Ten minutes silence with teenagers? What was I thinking? This particular group of kids, the year before, had made it their personal, God-given calling to be my ministry-baptism-by-fire. But they were still more mature than my freshman classes.
We started with the usual bickering over who got to light the prayer candle in the front of the room, and a little tittering and note-passing while I said something about silence and listening for God. The quiet began; desks creaked while students settled in. About half put their heads on their desks. Eyes closed. I knew some of them slept, but I didn’t care: it was a sacred moment, even for the sleepy. We were all quiet, but unlike the quiet of a test or quiz, there was peace. I found room in the day to pray for these students. Ten minutes was too short. We were all hungry for more quiet. And for the rest of the semester, if Friday prayers didn’t involve silence, there was strong protest from my class.
But I’m not sure silence on Fridays were a success. I’m not sure we ever got the full hang of being silent. At least, I don’t know if we ever got around to listening. We talked about the silence sometimes, and we talked about listening for God, but none of us heard anything. No one ever offered a word that God spoke in their ear during those ten minutes.
Besides, I don’t know that I was the best person to teach my students about silence. I am a sound addict. It is a rare occasion when I do not have radio, music, or the TV running in my house. From my apartment, I can hear the hourly Metra train a block away, car horns and police sirens, my neighbors downstairs, all of that blended with the sound of my heating and the hum of my refrigerator. When I walk out of the door in the morning, I am plugged into my headphones, and at work I am surrounded by the noises of a busy church office.
And yet, like my students, like our entire culture, I hunger for silence, for a little space, a little peace and quiet, amid the noise and clamor of everyday life. Underneath the noise, I am sure I am missing something, and I am sure there is something I need to make room for. But when I am silent, it often seems like there is nothing there to hear, except my own thoughts creeping up on me.
I suspect it is partly the hunger for silence, for room, that brings many of us to church. It seems right and refreshing to be here as we stand on the edge, about to speed into another week of noise and busy-ness. This place is so different from what is beyond the doors, and if we can bring a bit of this space with us, hang onto just a piece of this hour, we hope the memory can create some space in our week, and that maybe, within that space, we might listen and hear just a whisper of the voice of God.
Psalm 95 is about creating space to listen to God. Many Christians know these words as an opening to prayer, an invitation into the worship service. Catholic priests say this Psalm each day before their morning prayers. But, most Christians only know the first seven verses of the Psalm. The next four are tricky and demanding, so we often leave them out. However, the journey of listening to God is incomplete without the end of the Psalm. The hardest part of the Psalm to hear is the part that urges us to open our ears to listen for God.
There is another word for listening that could help us think about this: meditation.
Richard Foster is a Quaker author who wrote a book about spirituality after experiencing his own spiritual burn-out. He says we often make the idea and practice of Christian meditation too complicated. Silence and meditation become something only the spiritual super-stars among us can accomplish. We imagine it involves the hard work of emptying our minds of everything, and that only the most elite religious types can pull it off. But the definition of Christian meditation is simple, according to Foster, and his definition of meditation and the path to it are not unlike the outline of Psalm 95.
Foster says that meditation is simply listening to and obeying God. As invitation to that place of listening and obedience, we look around in awe at this creation, and stagger awe-struck into the presence of the Creator. This Creator is the King of the Universe, whose hand orchestrates the thunder and wind, rain and snow, wind and fog in their dramatic shift from season to season. This is the One who owns the sandy depths of Lake Michigan and the clouds swirling around the Hancock Building. But this is also the One who traces the veins of each leaf on a tree, who carves the intricate print of each of our fingers. This is the One who is shepherd—who calls out to us as a shepherd to the sheep, who guides us with such care that the Psalmist calls us “the sheep of God’s hand.†The One who owns the heights and the depths calls us into relationship. And so, as the Psalmist invites us, we come into God’s presence and we sing praise. Even more, we worship and bow down. We make noise that is good and acceptable to God.
But this is no one-sided conversation. There is more than our noise, our voices. The Psalmist tells us to prepare for the voice of God. “O that you would listen to God’s voice.â€
And then, the Psalmist reminds us why we are described as sheep.
My limited exposure to sheep involved an attempt to get a bunch to cozy up to me for a photo. It did not work out. Sheep do not always listen. It is no surprise that the Bible uses sheep as a metaphor for people. We are stubborn and slow to follow. Psalm 95 reminds us of the hard heartedness of Israel. Time after time as they traveled from Egypt to the promised land, they grumbled and balked, and turned in the other direction. They fret about water, they grumble about the boring taste of manna, they exaggerate the luxuries of their life as slaves under Pharaoh, and when they are finally so close to the promised land they can smell it, they refuse to listen to the God who tells them the land is theirs, and they turn back to wander for another generation.
But God bears with them, even when they do not listen to God.
Sheep do not always listen to their master, even if they know they can trust the shepherd. (If they did, a shepherd wouldn’t need a crook to guide them along the path.) But what does a good shepherd do if the sheep won’t follow her voice? She doesn’t just leave the flock sitting in the pasture and harumph down the down path in frustration. She goes back and gets every one of those sheep gathered in for the journey.
And in spite of God’s frustration with the wayward flock of humanity, God bears with us, even when we do not listen to God. In fact, God promises to take drastic action. Rather than leaving us to wander around lost, God promises to change our deaf ears and hard hearts.
Later in the story of the Old Testament, God makes this promise through the prophet Jeremiah:
I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
They will all know me,
from the least to the greatest.
God bears with us, even when we cannot listen. In fact, God promises to change us.
I cannot help but think about this change when I read stories of Jesus calling disciples. Jesus calls and people simply get up, leave what they are doing, and follow. The disciples recognize his voice, even though they have never seen him before, and even though they have no idea where they are going, they go. They listen and obey.
Somehow, we need to find ways to make space, to soften our hearts, to open our ears and listen for God. In worship, on weekends, and amidst the noise of the week, we need times of silence to wait and listen for God.
And yet, there is still this question: if we listen, even if our hearts are softened and our ears are opened, will we hear anything?
That is the question that remains with me after Friday prayer time with my students. We were silent, and it was still and peaceful, it restored us in some way, but we were never sure we heard anything. And in order to fulfill Richard Foster’s definition of meditation—to listen to God and obey—we need to hear something, don’t we? I could come up with explanations: perhaps we needed to be quiet longer, or in a different way. Maybe we did not pray enough to start out with, maybe none of us knew enough about God to begin with.
But our cultural hunger for silence suggests something else to me: it is not just that we are surrounded by noise, not just that we need a break from deafening sound, not just that we have become bad at listening. We are also aware that it can be very difficult to hear God, and we wonder if today, here and now, we live in a time and place where we don’t seem to hear much from God. We listen and listen, but our ears only ring with the silence.
Perhaps this is part of the mystery. This God, the Creator, who made sea and sky, who made us, and gathers us, who cares for us by hand and feeds us at this table, is sometimes more than we can handle, more than we can understand, more than we can hear. But we know that one word from God would be enough. One word would feed us and fill us and make us whole. One word would be enough.
And so the Psalmist reminds us to come into God’s presence, to bow down, to listen for God, to wait for one word. And while wait, we can only trust that God’s promises are already happening in us—that our hearts are softening, that Jesus our shepherd is good, that we remain securely in the palm of God’s hand.
We come to this table ready to listen, filled with faith and expectation—our hearts tend toward wandering, but God is faithful.
Come and listen for God, and trust that the King of the Universe who made you will come near enough to guide you.
Come and listen for God, and trust that your hearts are being softened through Jesus Christ.
Come and listen for God, and trust that the Holy Spirit is opening your ears and your heart to the voice of the Lord.
Amen.