Sermon: Surprised by Joy

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Surprised by Joy

By Charles Rush

December 26, 2004

‘L

fe is full of surprises', so goes the platitude. Someone pointed me this week to one of the surprises of the season, the useless gift. These sort out into some familiar categories.

File this under little sister. Jim, from North Dakota, remembers when he was in college, ‘my baby sister, then 3, wanted to give everyone a gift. She had a piece of hard Christmas candy she had tried but didn't like, but from the taste of it, she thought I would like it. So she wrapped it up and gave it to me on Christmas Eve.'

Rick from Orlando remembers that when he was 5, he wanted to give his Dad a present, so he wrapped up his razor and his left shoe in a box and put them under the tree. The next morning Dad went ballistic, late for a meeting, unable to shave.

Then there are the clueless Aunts and Uncles. Karen of Okalahoma says “My Aunt gave me a French-English dictionary. I have never taken a French class… it baffles me to this day.”

File this under “same time, next year”. Felicia from St. Louis reports, ‘For 5 years straight my grandmother would give me a pair of black suede pumps. I never had the nerve to ask her if she remembered she gave me the same thing last year.'

But that cuts both ways. Noreen in Saskatoon reports that once her sister gave Grandma aftershave. Maybe she knew something about Grandma the rest of the family wasn't ready to handle.

Mingled in with the bric-a-brac of the season, the perfunctory chatchka's that you have to give at the office party, there is also more profound hopes that well up in our hearts. Zecheriah sings this wonderful song in praise of God, this morning. It is the incredible hope that comes with the birth of a new child. Zecheriah was an older man. He thought his time had past him by and that he and Elizabeth simply would not have any children. Then, miraculously, she does.

I remember hearing a psychiatrist give a paper a few years ago. He made a side comment that the decision not to have children was perhaps the most important single decision of your adult life. From it flowed so many other issues of generativity and meaning that would develop and emerge as you mature and grow old. That woke me up in the middle of a pretty dull academic afternoon.

Over the years, I have reflected on his comment, and it seems to me true that issues around children are more profound than people generally recognize because they are so wrapped up with fundamental spiritual issues-hope, sacrifice for the future, and living for something that is beyond you.

I have had the occasion to listen to people talk to me about miscarriage. The grief surrounding it is often far deeper than our society realizes. It is often far deeper than the couple realized until they went through it.

And one of the great unspoken taboos of our age is the difficulty some people have getting pregnant and how much anxiety that causes. We live in a world where we think we are entitled to a lot of things. We simply presume that we will be able to get pregnant when the right time comes. And if there is some difficulty, we simply assume that there is technology that will be able to fix it. But, sometimes it can't.

I have a friend that was born into a fertile family. The matriarch, the grandmother, has 16 grandchildren. She used to say that her sisters got pregnant every time their husbands just winked at them. She was the only sibling from her generation that couldn't get pregnant. And she wanted to. She was a great mother in waiting. She watched for years as all of her siblings started their families. She was a great Aunt to all her nieces and nephews. After she got married, she was gracious when people asked her when she was going to start a family of her own. Those are tough questions to answer when you emotionally know what the answer is, even though you haven't brought yourself to actually get a full medical assessment just yet.

In fact, it was hard for her and her husband to actually talk about it. Deeply dashed hopes are like that, the elephant in the middle of the room that no one wants to acknowledge. They had been married for several years, tried to get pregnant, but couldn't. It affected their marriage more than they knew. One day, it seemed like a rash thing but, looking back, it wasn't really. Her husband told her that he had started an affair with another woman. There was more. The woman was pregnant. There was more. He was leaving to get married to another woman he hadn't known all that long and raise a family together. I believe this news was delivered on Christmas day. And a Merry Christmas to you too.

She was such a trooper through that whole, painful time of her life. I can't begin to imagine the hurt, the rage, the loneliness, the sorrow. The ‘why me'? The profound absence of God, too.

Fast forward. Years later, after many changes, she met another man, a wonderful man. You would have thought that God had chosen this man from before the foundations of the universe to be with her and for her. They dated, fell in love, then came she came to this impasse. She felt that she needed to tell him she couldn't have children. They weren't even married yet, but she knew they had to get this through if they were going to take this relationship to the next level. That in itself made the whole thing so weird because they hadn't exactly talked about marriage or anything yet. She was filled with anxiety, all the demons of the past came back to haunt her in one tempest filled night. She was feeling inadequate. She was waiting for rejection… again. She was dreading miserable loneliness. She was going to be so controlled during the discussion but once she started talking leading up to what she wanted to tell him she started crying and she just couldn't stop crying.

She's crying about something important she has to tell him. He thinks she is about to break up with him and he is about to start crying too. He was holding her, listening to all her fears. Finally she blurts out that she can't have children. Immediately, he says, “Children… oh we'll get children. We'll adopt; It will be okay; we'll adopt.” How's that for a sort of marriage proposal?

Years later, they did. We followed them through the entire adoption paper work, the enormous, voluminous paper work, the reference checks. They found a boy to adopt in Viet Nam. Then the authorities there shut down adoption in their province. They were encouraged to find another child in another province. No, they would wait for this boy. It took a whole year filled with more paper work, more bureaucratic hassles. Then, one day, they had to drop their jobs indefinitely, both of them, and fly immediately to Viet Nam. The enormous bureaucratic hassles once they got there, the veiled threats for pay offs, the waiting. Finally, after three weeks of waiting, they got him.

They were coming back through Newark airport at 5:30 in the morning. Kate and I went to meet them between flights. They had been on a series of flights from Ho Chi Min city with a year old child that took 27 hours. What a nightmare marathon start. Natural birth mothers get a few days rest and a family to come wait on them. Adoption mothers, these days, get to run the gauntlet to get started. They got off that plane jet lagged, tired, elated, laughing and crying at the same time. The sun was just coming up in the East. We brought them the first over priced, branded coffee they'd had in three weeks.

There is such a visceral, profound hope-filled joy in children. St. Augustine once said “With each new birth, hope springs eternal.” I recently sent a note to one of my godson's. It was one of those things his mother will file away for him to keep that he will read when he is older. It was a series of blessings and hopes for his life. One of them said that ‘you will get it right where we screwed it up.” That is the hope we pin on the next generation. Hold those babies in your arms and think, they have to do better than us.

Israel had been in that position for a long time. Prophets had not spoken in two hundred years. They were occupied by the Roman army, prisoners in their own land. They felt abandoned by God. Zecheriah and Elizabeth were symbols of the whole country, spiritually and physically infertile. God comes to them and makes them a promise of a son in their advanced age. Zecheriah can't believe it, won't believe it. God strikes him mute until the birth of John and our text is the song of praise that he sings when John is born.

I think part of the simplicity and the profundity of the Christmas season is wrapped up in this spiritual hope for new birth- for justice and peace in our world, for something new in the next generation, for something new that God is doing.

At the same time, spiritually and physically, this season reminds us how much we want to go home. Even if we've never had much of a home to go home to, the idea of being at home is a profound spiritual longing. We want to be loved and accepted and find our place at the table. Like the wonderful parable that Jesus gave about the man that invited people to his wedding banquet and said ‘go out to the highways and by-ways and invite them all to come in- the lame, the dispossessed, everyone has a place at the table. Jesus taught us to see everyone as our neighbors, even those that are our historic enemies, to take care of the Samaritans we find on the side of the road. Jesus taught us that we all need to be healed. We all need to find our way home. We look to the next generation with the profound hope that our homes will be healed. We hope that, in fact, the Spirit of God's hospitality will break out in our midst and those around us will find real love and acceptance.

The following is a true story that appeared in New York Magazine under the column “True Tales of New York”, written by Gloria Gonzalez (my thanks to Lanny Peters at Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, GA who brought this to my attention).

You grow up fast in Spanish Harlem, especially if your parents are supers of the building. You see a lot… F.B.I. agents looking for former tenants, welfare caseworkers lurking in the alley trying to catch a father ‘visiting,' the bill collectors posing as relatives.

There are also the good times, the open-house parties every Friday night after cashing the paycheck. One long-awaited celebration was the night that Jose was due home after three years as a United States Marine.

Every family had contributed a home-cooked dish and a dollar for the beer and soda. Neighbors began decorating the apartment with crepe paper and balloons the night before, and someone dispatched to the local funeral parlor to borrow folding chairs.

The day of the party, relatives arrived from the Bronx and from as far away as San Juan. Papo, Jose's cousin and I were posted on the stoop as lookouts.

A taxi arrived and deposited its passenger. Papo and I paid scant attention to the tall brunette in the off-the shoulder blouse and billowing skirt.

It wasn't till she screamed our names and swept us off the ground in a crushing hug that we realized that the perfumed woman was Jose!

In a daze we lugged her suitcases up two flights, our eyes fixed on Jose's ankles, strapped into stilletto heels, as he took the stairs two at a time while urging us to hurry.

With the music of Tito Puente in the background, Jose threw the door open and announced, “I am home.” The needle was pulled on Tito Puente.

“Me, Jose, the person has not changed. Only the outside. You are my family and I love every one of you. If you want me to go I will go and not be angry. But if you find it in your heart to love Josefina, I would love to stay.”

No one spoke. Everyone stared. Those who didn't speak English waited for the whispered translation. Even the outside city noises seemed to halt abruptly. I stood in the doorway, still holding the suitcase, not daring to enter.

After what seemed like hours- but could have only been moments- his mother stumbled forward and said to her son, “Are you hungry?”

I was eleven. It was the best party I ever went to.

-Gloria Gonzalez, West New York, New Jersey

No matter how they come- diseased or healthy, depressed or on top of the world, morally compromised or full of virtue, whether they are friends or strangers, may the Spirit of God's hospitality break out in your midst, may you be privileged to feed them and welcome them home.

Amen.