Sermon: Quite in Spite of Ourselves

Quite in Spite of Ourselves

By Charles T Rush

December 24, 2000

got this from an atheist fraternity brother, who happens to attend the Episcopal Church. It was titled something like Santa's big job. “There are approximately 2 billion children in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million. At an average rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes.

Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth. This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household, Santa has around 1/1000-th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get onto the next house.

Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed

around the earth we are talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total

trip of 75.5 million miles...This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second--3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.” The article went on to calculate the payload of Santa's sleigh and how hard it would be to start and stop. It was signed- or it should have been signed- The Grinch. My wife wrote him back, “So Santa is very busy, what else is new”.

Santa unabashedly exists in our home. My wife never saw any point in demythologizing St. Nick when the kids turned 9. Reams of evidence have been presented in our home like the size of the jolly old elf and the slim chute in our chimney. How could he get down that thing? We had a coal fireplace at our house in Princeton. Not even anorexic Santa could fit into. Complicated explanations have been advanced for how Santa handles apartment buildings, homeless children, people in hospitals, and even submarines. But there is also mysterious evidence. There is the tell tale bite out of the cookie, the kids always find before Mom and Dad wake up and the unmistakable sip taken from the egg nog, two facts which continue to demand explanation. Despite the onslaught of years of relentless skeptical questioning from our children, my wife has held firm. And she won. My college kids, aged 20 and 21 both mailed me letters this fall of possible gifts they needed for Christmas with a p.s. “Please get this to Santa Claus. I know you know how.” And I do.

I once asked my wife about her commitment to Santa in that way that spouses ask these things with a hint of suggestion that maybe a slight change would be in order for the future. She said, “if God can work some good through men like George Bush, Al Gore… and even you dear, She can work with St. Nick.” I've decided to let that one go.

Our text today is a wonderful tale about God coming to the absolutely ordinary, the people that don't ever make the papers or the police blotter, and enlisting them in the great revolutionary conspiracy of love that will set the world on its ear.

Scholars are of a consensus that Mary was a young teenage girl born into a patriarchal society where she had almost no power, very little education, very few rights, just a step up from subsistence existence. Her countrymen were occupied by the Romans, subjects in their own land to rather brutal oppression. Those crosses that Jesus eventually died on lined the street coming out of Jerusalem that led down the mountain. Mary was not only a very side player in the great drama of human history, she would have been a candidate for one of those wistful pictures in National Geographic of some remote Bedouin in some far away romantic back drop.

But Mary's reputation rose dramatically after she died. Today, it can probably be said that she is the most influential woman in history. So many millions of people have petitioned her for prayer for everything from lotto numbers to an only child with terminal illness. She has carried so many burdens. With the advent of the monastery, she became the mother and feminine image of devotion for countless generations of monks that were cut off from women altogether. So many men to nurture.

She is unquestionably the most popular woman in Art History, without a close second. Giotto, Michaelangelo, Tinoretto and thousands of other painters have venerated her with the most elevated attributes of piety and womanhood. Indeed, as her reputation as a miracle worker advanced, artistic depictions of her became down right angelic and other worldly. You can almost track her importance in history by seeing her relationship to Jesus. Most of the time, she is holding Jesus in her lap, but by the late middle ages (at the height of her popularity), she and Jesus are almost co-equals, the King and Queen on their thrones, with equal halo's radiating around their heads.

I visited Ephesus a few years ago to look at the archaeological excavation near there and I stopped by to see the house where tradition holds that she died. She reportedly moved there with the apostle John and died in a humble home in the hills. Ephesus is in modern day Turkey, and the Turks do quite a lot to discourage Christianity and Christian historical sites. Despite that, the day I went to her house, there were probably 5,000 Christians that waited patiently for their turn to enter, say a prayer, and leave. Her stock grew almost miraculously after her death.

But that was later. Today, she is just a scared teenager that God wants to bless with a child. She is anxious and afraid. The angel comes to her and says, “Hail, oh favored one, the Lord is with you. But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be. And the Angle said, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.'”(Lk. 1:29,30).

When God draws near, the first word spoken is ‘fear not'. We need that. Do you remember Jessica McClure? She was the child that disappeared in her back yard. I think she was right around 2 years old, walking in her back yard in Texas, when she slid into a very small hole that was the entrance to an abandoned section of pipe from some kind of mine. A huge task force of hundreds of neighbors were mobilized and eventually she was freed from something like a hundred feet below ground where she was stuck. That rescue effort was organized in two parts, which got my attention. The first part wasn't actually to rescue Jessica. They worked to get someone down near her, as close as they could get, so that they could talk to her and keep her calm. They knew that people in crisis situations can panic and do something stupid that accidentally injures them. How true that is. How simple, yet profound that God comes to us and before we are commissioned, God first allays our fears. God calms us down.

A good friend of mine was telling me about one of his parishioners. She was a very talented lawyer. She volunteered on many community boards and at his church. She was organized and gregarious. She was also one of those lawyers that when she put a suit on and entered the board-room was capable, in his words, of ‘kicking butt and taking names.' He'd seen her do it a couple times. She had four boys, great athletes, solid scholars. Her youngest one was a consistent underachiever, except in partying, where he had quite a reputation around town. He was the only child to attend the local college, rather than Duke where she and her husband went to school. She used to say that she probably nursed him too long. Things had been testy the last couple years of High School and she was glad to have him out of the house at college. There was still some distance and frustration and carping at this kid, none of it to any avail.

My friend gets a call from his secretary that he'd better head over to the hospital because this kid was involved in some fraternity prank that ended in people getting seriously injured. Alcohol was involved- surprise. And the police were in on this.

He gets to the hospital emergency room. As he pulls up, Action News 4 is outside and a reporter is roaming the hall. The kids mother is talking to the police, who are filing a report. No one is quite sure what happened but some laws were broken. Several people were seriously hurt. The kid has spinal injuries and injuries to his head. He will probably make it, but maybe not.

She wasn't able to reach her husband who was on a business flight to Dallas. In addition to talking to the police, the reporters from the TV want to talk to her and she almost feels like she needs to do a press conference to set things straight. There she was doing what she does best, managing a crisis even-handedly and she was at the center of this one. In the middle of these conversations, she leans over to the Minister and says, ‘I keep trying to punch the damn rewind button and it doesn't do anything… it just doesn't do anything.'

He looked at her, really looked at her. She was good to go for a press conference if she had to do one. Business suit, great hair, poised. But he knew her very well. He kept his focus on her eyes and in her eyes he saw fear… not just the worry and anxiety of a mother, he saw the fear of a little girl. He asked the officer for a moment, walked her down the hall to an open office door. He said, ‘hey' and he opened his arms and gave her a hug. She sobbed so hard he almost had to hold her up. Over and over she said, “I just want one more chance.” They just stood there for a while crying, crying… for everything.

Sometimes that is what we need to do for each other. The angel said, ‘do not be afraid, for you have found favor with God.' Hugging usually says the same thing far more effectively.

I bet that some of you this morning are feeling just a bit frazzled right now. There are still a bunch of things that have to be done. You are feeling like you need to get the holiday right and that is going to take a big push between now and tomorrow. And some of you are worried about stuff in the back of your mind- about family members that aren't getting along, about work situations that are more than a little tentative, about romance that isn't going so well, about people you love that are sick. You are worried that stuff may not turn out all that well and it makes you nervous putting together a holiday celebration. You want to be jubilant but it is not coming naturally.

I'm glad you started your morning here. I want you to remember that the most important thing about the Holiday is people. We celebrate the birth of the One who came to invest in people, who showed us how to open ourselves and love others.

I want to remind you that it is going to be okay, that God can use you to bless other people. God will use you to bless other people, quite in spite of yourself. God took Mary, an ordinary teenage peasant girl and blessed her, and through her she blessed so many other people that today she is the most recognizable woman in world history. All she did was say ‘yes' to God. It is not about you, your talent, or lack thereof. It is not about your patience or lack thereof. It is about God. Say yes to God; open yourself to being filled with the Spirit of God's love. For the next 48 hours I want you to see yourself as a conduit of grace to other people- affirm them, empower them, respect them, let them bloom, bless them.

And the strange thing is that it will all come back to you. Reinhold Niebuhr once said that in Christianity, self-fulfillment is a by-product of the fulfillment of others. He got that right. Jesus taught us to be focused on meeting the needs of other. About ourselves, he said not to worry too much about what we shall wear or how we shall dress… for God knows what you need. But the curious thing is that it does come back to you, maybe not directly, not from the people you actually empower and heal. But somehow, some way, when you need someone to stand you up and hold you, they will appear. The angel said to Mary “Hail O favored one. The Lord is with you… Do not be afraid, for you have found favor with God.” My brothers and sisters, Merry Christmas.

Amen.