Christmas Eve 2022

Christmas Eve_2022 December 24, 2022 It’s not uncommon for me to be haunted by snippets of song in my ordinary days. Those of you who hear me preach with any regularity probably get sick of hearing about the ways that the Holy Spirit communicates with me through the annoying habit of lodging songs in my head. This tendency is even more pronounced in the days leading up to Christmas. Maybe it’s the Christmas carols swirling around us everywhere, the so-familiar soundtrack of this season? A few years ago, I had a phrase of lyrics lodged in my head that I kept repeating, trying to figure out where it was from, until I finally took to google to help discern the message the Holy Spirit was prompting in me, typing in “the weary world rejoices…” Well, of course the whole line goes: “a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices…” and it’s from the beloved Christmas song “O, Holy Night.” This was a reminder to me that even the most familiar songs and words, when taken out of context, can take on new life, new meaning. “Sing to the Lord a new song!” our psalm demands of us-year after year-on this holy night. Sing, sing, sing! It commands us three times in its first two verses. A new song? Really? I don’t know…we all like our familiar carols with their hazy nostalgia and their safety this time of year. New songs are hard to learn. If you’re a singer, you have to learn new words, new music, new timing and breath. Dusting off an old familiar song is so much easier—we mostly know the words and timing; we know where to breathe; we know the notes that we struggle to hit. Some of these songs are so familiar we don’t even really have to think about singing them. Our bodies just do it. But sometimes, old, familiar songs can become new in unexpected ways. Maybe a different musician plays it differently than we are accustomed or in a different medium. Or an old, yet newly compelling phrase gets lodged in our heads as an invitation to look at our lives through this lens. Old songs can be refreshed, made new when the unexpected happens. This year, my soul was snared by another line from “O Holy Night” when I read a blog post by the Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber. (Bolz-Weber is a writer who writes books and a regular blog, but if you look for her, know that she used profanity regularly and abundantly in her writing.) In this blog post, Nadia Bolz-Weber writes about how “O Holy Night” is speaking to her this year.i She starts by lifting up the phrase: “long lay the world in sin and error pining” and she talks about the word pining, how the lyrics mean that we, in our lives and in the world are “failing gradually from grief, regret, or longing due to sin or error.” This phrase helps us acknowledge that we have messed things up. We see this in our individual lives: when we go astray from our promises; when we treat people badly; when we live out the old unhealthy stories and patterns of our lives or our families over and over again in our relationships; when we make choices that take us off the path of love that God would have us follow to live our best, fullest, most whole-hearted lives. Sometimes these paths away from love become so much easier to trod, like those old familiar songs are easier to sing, and it feels beyond us, even impossible, to get back onto the path of love. We know that we need help. And that’s part of what we celebrate this night. God doesn’t leave us alone to languish in the darkness. As the song says, we were pining “ ‘til he appeared and the soul felt its worth.” In and through the birth of Jesus, God once again claims and names creation as good—taking that old song and making it new again for us. Sometimes it’s so hard to believe that God values us or cares what happens, so God reveals the value God holds for each one us by becoming one of us, and then showing us how to walk the path of love. But it’s an unexpected path often through unsought places, much like the story of the first Christmas shows. A young peasant woman gives birth to God in a town far away from her home, in a place where there are so many people there is no room for her to be in the house with family. The shepherds who are working in the field that night are visited by an angelic host of messengers who terrify them at their appearance. And unexpectedly, even tonight as we celebrate birth, we also talk about death. How God was born as one of us, how that path of love led God to offer God’s-self up to death on a cross, and how even death couldn’t contain God’s love for us—as it bursts forth from the grave in the light of the resurrection. And then, in the new/old song, the music swells and the other voices join in singing: “fall on your knees, and hear the angel voices…” What does it mean to fall on our knees? It’s a posture of supplication asking for help, a posture of relief in finally admitting that we don’t have it all together and we can’t fix this for ourselves or our loved one or for anyone, no matter how hard we might try. It’s a posture of reverence before something so inspiring and overpowering that our legs can no longer support us. It’s a posture of trepidation and maybe a little fear, as we are faced with the challenge and the invitation to sing a new song or to sing anew old, familiar songs in new and different ways. i. You can access Nadia Bolz-Weber’s blog post here: Fall on your knees - The Corners by Nadia Bolz-Weber (substack.com)

2nd Sunday of Advent Year A

2nd Sunday of Advent Year A December 4, 2022 It’s the 2nd Sunday of Advent. Do you know what that means for this day? It means it’s “Grumpy John the Baptist Sunday!” Every year on this Second Sunday of Advent, we get a picture of John the Baptist, who is a key figure in all four gospels, quite unusual. And boy, is he in rare form today. There is something strangely compelling about John the Baptist; all these different people are going out into the wilderness to hear what he has to say. And today, he targets the Scribes and the Pharisees, two competing segments of Judaism of the day—not unlike how Christians in the Republicans and Democrats of our day are at odds. So, it’s interesting that in Matthew’s gospel, which we know was written to a primarily Jewish audience, John goes after the most religious people who have come out to hear him. “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance….Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” It’s an interesting challenge: open yourselves and your religion up to God’s transforming work or God is going to make of you…a stump! When we lived in the rectory at our first church in McComb, Mississippi, we were haunted, for a season, by a stump in our front yard. The stump was the remnant of a tree that had fallen on the rectory during Hurricane Katrina, and every time I looked at it, even after the damage to the home and our possessions had been repaired, it felt like a reminder of a wound. Eventually, I was silently grateful when the church had someone come out to grind up the stump and make it disappear, so I didn’t have to look at it every day. So, I can certainly relate to stumps having some negative connotations. Our Old Testament reading for today, the passage from Isaiah, also talks about a stump in Isaiah’s vision of a peaceable kingdom. “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” For Isaiah, the stump is a hopeful symbol; as long as the roots of the stump are intact, it is still a living, growing thing. This image of the stump in Isaiah shows that all is not lost, that there is still a rooted foundation for new life to grow, even when it seems that disaster has struck, and the tree has been chopped down. When we moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, I was intrigued by an artistic phenomenon there. A chainsaw artist named Marlin Miller had carved a number of beautiful wooden statues of native creatures—dolphins, birds, fish—out of stumps; trees that had been cut down because they were so damaged by the hurricane. These statues dotted the coastline of the Mississippi sound. I saw them as beacons of how hard change and transformation can be and also a reminder that beauty and new life can come out of the hardest and worst things. These old, seemingly-dead stumps were transformed by the artist’s skill and loving attention into signs of hope and even joy. I have certainly known this reality in my own life, over and over again, and I wonder if you have, too? Have you experienced times in your life when change was inflicted upon you or even when you gave yourself willingly over to transformation and what felt like an ending became a source of new life, beauty, and hope, what seemed like a stump became a source of new life? I can’t help but wonder if the people who were flocking out to hear that grumpy John the Baptist preach in the wilderness weren’t longing for some of this, sensing that God was already at work in the world around them, in the foundations of their faith, as John prepared the way for Jesus the coming Messiah. Did they sense the shifting foundations? Were they hopeful for the dramatic transformation that was coming? At our diocesan convention a few weeks ago, our Bishop Frank Logue and two of his canons all spoke at length about the seismic changes that have happened in our greater Episcopal church since Covid. They spoke about the shock and dismay that they felt when they compared attendance and budget numbers for the diocese from 2019 with those of 2021. Those numbers would suggest a rapid decline across the diocese. They also shared stories of new life, new hope, of God’s continued faithfulness in congregations across the diocese, and they shared stories of how God was bringing new life out of stumps. I will confess that I felt a little disconnected from all of this at diocesan convention, and I have wrestled with it since then. While the decline in numbers was certainly true for us in 2021, it is not where we find ourselves here and now, as we close out 2022. In fact, these days, I’m pleasantly surprised to find that our attendance numbers are close to where they were in 2019, and our finances are in pretty good shape. And yet, we find ourselves dramatically changed from the pandemic. While it might seem like things are “back to normal” here, we’re different. We now have three Sunday morning services instead of two. We find ourselves living into slightly different rhythms; we have the addition of a virtual congregation, which we never had before; and weekly attendance rhythms have changed, especially for our families with children still at home. There is still a sort of stumpishness (through this change that has been inflicted upon us) clinging to us after Covid, that may never dissipate. I invite you to join me in contemplating this and praying about it. In this season of hope and expectation, may we, too, be curious about the invitation from grumpy John the Baptist, a challenge to be open to God’s transforming work. May we be visionaries like Marlin Miller, looking to see the beautiful new creation that God can reveal to us in the living scars of the stumps of Covid. May we trust in God, who gives us strong roots of faith and tradition to anchor us even as God calls new life forth in, through, and among us.