The Savior Within You: Advent 3, 2011
By Charles Rush
December 11, 2011
Isaiah 61: 1-4 and Luke 1: 46-55
[ Audio
(mp3, 6.7Mb) ]
r texts this morning lift up the hopes and dreams of the 99%. And who cannot understand the longing for someone “to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners.”
A cursory review of the headlines this week…
Rod Blagojevich,
the former Governor of Illinois, is going to jail for trying to sell a seat in
the Senate.
Massey Energy
settled for a $209M fine for systemic violations of mine safety procedures
that killed 29 miners in West Virginia.
Overseas, the
forensic report on Olympus, described their accounting practices as
"rotten at the core", a conclusion that lacks nuance.
Egypt is
confronting a military that operates more than a third of the businesses in
Egypt, enterprises that are not only monopolies, but largely not publicly
accountable in any dimension.
A budding
Occupy Moscow movement is starting to protest fraud in the election process,
arbitrary arrest of political opponents, and the culture of crony mobsters
embodied by the former KGB leader, Vladimir Putin.
In China, the
pollution is so bad in China that an Occupy the Forbidden City is budding.
The former
President of Israel, Moshe Katsav, is headed to jail
to serve time for rape, charges he vehemently denies… Ditto the bizarre
interview from Jerry Sandusky… Ditto the befuddling announcement on television
by Herman Cain.
And the lead
article is about 3 suicide bombs in Afghanistan that killed 60 people and
wounded hundreds during worship. Those attacked were the minority Shiite
Muslims by the majority Sunni Pakistani's, and this all among allies in a
common cause.
[Lo, behold, I
believe Wednesday was the only day this week, where we didn't have a huge
article on MF Global].
If you were
wondering if there is any place you can run to escape all of it, the answer,
provided by a short article in the Financial Times, page 6, is ‘yes'. At the
moment, that Eden in the middle of the maelstrom is in… Switzerland. There the
wee hamlet of Rushlikon, population 5,200, is
considering reducing their income tax to less than 1%, because they have so
many citizens like Ivan Glasenberg, the CEO at Glencore, whose net worth is reported to be $9.6 billion after
the IPO recently, that they can pay for all social services and might have to
return some revenue to the citizens to boot.
But for the
rest of us, as Luke Johnson noted on the op-ed page, the present moment “feels
more like the destructive phase of the ‘creative destruction' that free market
economies embody in our era. Who can't understand why we hope for ‘a savior to
rise from these streets' as the Boss says in one of his great songs.
I was
contemplating just how to put this all in some kind of perspective in light of
the Christmas story, when I had a visit from the Ghost of Christmas past. Like
most visits, I could see the Angel, but no one else around me could.
One day this
week, I was having lunch out, settling the check and about ready to leave. A
woman at the next table was getting up to leave, about my age.
I had this
intuition and looked at her again. She stood up and said, ‘Reverend'. I smiled
and said to her, “I almost didn't recognize you without your pom pom's”.
She smiled. All the people around us kept on with their conversation, as I
sucked in my gut and went back in time for an instant.
She was a
cheerleader. I was the tight end. It was our Junior
year in High School and we were making the best run at the State championship
our town would ever see in Weston, Connecticut. The world then was filled with
bad news from Vietnam but our glory was mostly about winning, draped in the
school colors, blue and gold. We dated for a few years and just seeing her
again, I was hopeful that she'd cut school with me, and then I remembered, we
are in school anymore. And she has a streak of gray.
For just a
second, I had a longing to ask her how it all turned out over coffee which
won't happen for a lot of reasons. We were kids then, just trying to figure it
all out. And in that era, we were largely on our own, our parents had a much
more restrictive scope of responsibility than our parents collectively
internalize today.
Like everyone I
knew in my generation, I found Wake Forest on my own, typed out my application
by myself, drove to North Carolina alone to interview and petition the Dean of
Admissions as a lobby of one. If memory serves, my father was slightly annoyed
that I wanted to apply to 3 colleges- he considered it a waste of money, since
I would only attend one.
My girlfriend
was pretty sure she would pay for most, if not all, of her bill at Holy Cross.
All of the people that I knew in High School had to get jobs that paid actual
money because that would be all the party money we ever got over four years of
college, almost everyone we knew bought
their own first car, and our parents only occasionally attended our sporting
events, even if we played varsity sports in college.
From one
generation to the next, there was a collective flush out of the nest such that moving
home after graduation was not even an option ever contemplated, and the word
‘networking' had not yet been developed and there were no alumni ‘welcome to
the workforce' parties and our Dad's never called their friends on our behalf.
But in the
asset side of the ledger- and it was very big- our parents gave us a wide swath
of freedom to figure it out on our own, and that is what we did, largely with
each other.
For just a
second, I had a deep desire to ask her, “How did it turn out for you?”
It is a
poignant reflection for us. We were given a lot of independence and we've been
making this up as we go ever since.
“So, how are
you?” I said.
“My kids are
growing up fast” she responded.
Yes, yes they
are… I didn't have the heart to tell her about grandchildren. Sounds way too
old, might do her in altogether. But, it is so wonderfully grounding to switch
era's right in the middle of lunch in your ordinary day. And maybe that is
actually the point of the Christmas story in our lives.
We've been
making our lives up as we go. We can't really tell how it is going to turn out
and likely we won't ever really know because change being as rapid as it is, we
can't really tell what the future is going to need from us. All we have is our
best guess. We can't tell what the future will cull from our generation, what
will be significant to them because we can't really envision they will face,
what they will then value, and what they will look back to us to guide them.
Maybe the point
of the story is not that we are waiting for a savior to be born out there
somewhere as it is that we release the savior in each of us. Maybe the calling is for each of our families
to become open to the Spirit that we may become a Holy family ourselves. It is
easy to let it slip from your consciousness that in the script of your life,
these are your glory days. This is your time. We don't really get a chance
to zoom out and see the way things are changing around us, the way that things
are getting better. We can't always understand how we are being significant
when we are in the middle of it, living it.
Your time for
leadership, your family, your friends, your community…This is where you make a
difference. This is your context for glory, in all of its ordinariness. Perhaps,
what we are called to do, is to take the ordinary Manger of our life and open
ourselves to the miraculous possibility that we just might be anointed to bring
good news to the oppressed in our midst, to bind up the broken hearted that are
right around us, to proclaim liberty to those that are captive that we know and
love.
This list of
qualities is not esoteric and out there. You do not have to be the Son of God
to embody them. The Son of God just shows us the direction we ought to head.
You don't have to be the Son of God. You just have to follow after the star of
Hope that points towards the Christ.
Perhaps, the
point is that we have to create a possibility for a momentary peace, even in
our mangers, perhaps especially in the manger scenes of our lives because this
is where it matters. It is not simply that we don't want to show up on our turn
at the helm to fumble around in our own lives like Governor Blagojevich at his
own trial, just clueless and out of basic touch with himself, we can be pretty
serious disappointments to ourselves and our loved ones, even if we don't make
the tabloid journals with our every boneheaded mistake. Maybe it is actually
most important closest to home, where our influence makes the most difference,
and in some ways home may be the hardest place to materialize the integrity and
authenticity Isaiah describes. In some ways it is the biggest challenge to be
real with our own extended families, those that we are closest to for most of
our lives. But, if we can't be real here, then what is the point?
Perhaps it
doesn't matter that the Spirit of Christmas is just a momentary thing, on the
edge of the empire, like Bethlehem, not storming the gates of power, a humble,
modest gesture that doesn't appear that it would have much relevance beyond the
few people whose life it touches. I suspect that great ideas and traditions
usually start out that way.
I think of
Christmas itself as such a vivid example. We don't know when Jesus was actually
born but it was not likely in winter. The scriptures in Luke says that the
shepherds were keeping watch over their flocks by night, an activity you engage
in from spring through the fall, but we bring the animals inside for the
winter. We celebrate Jesus' birthday on the 25th of December because
we started celebrating it a very, very long time ago when Christians were a
persecuted tiny minority in the Roman empire. During
this week in ancient Rome, they celebrated a several day feast of Saturnalia.
It featured days of overeating, over-drinking, and the bad behavior that
results from the two. The entire Empire was on holiday and blotto. Who would
notice the Christians celebrating their little sectarian ritual down in the
catacombs, hiding from public view, so they wouldn't be arrested and likely killed
for their beliefs. They were so tiny a group that no
one cared.
But way led to
way and eventually Rome came to an end. With it, so did the feast to the god
Saturnalia. We kept the overeating and overdrinking and rolled it into a new
holiday, these little groups of Christians kept growing.
And eventually that holiday got some traction.
There was something about trying to establish a moment of hushed quiet and real
Sabbath on Christmas eve and Christmas Day. There was
something about giving presents to each other as a symbol of God's love for us
and our love for each other. There was something about invoking a spirit of
gratitude and making some traditions that have compassion for the poor in our
midst. The movement grew.
Traditions
developed, plays developed, musical scores were written. And eventually, very
nearly every single culture that was exposed to Christmas imported it and made their own traditions.
20 centuries
later, we developed secular stories that got the message of Christmas across, Santa,
Ebeneezer Scrooge, George Bailey, the Grinch, Linus and the characters of Peanuts. It has a become such a huge success that our biggest concern these
days is the over-commercialization of the season. It became such a huge success
that we prepared public places for a month around it. It became such a huge
success that practically everyone in countries that recognize it take off for
the day, like no other holiday in the world.
I remember one
of our Church members, Ann Arnott, who used to serve
in the Soup Kitchen at Holy Apostles in Mid-town, telling me she walked up
Broadway one Christmas morning when it was snowing because there wasn't a
single car on the road at 8 a.m. Even in the City that never Sleeps, we all
take off one morning of the year.
No, you just
never know the radial impact that you might have invoking peace,
reconciliation, gratitude and compassion in your small quadrant of the
universe. At the outset, I suppose that it always looks vulnerable, marginal,
not likely to have wide reverberations. Whether we want to or not, we live our
lives by faith, guided by the hope of a star rising in the East. We get the
general orientation but by faith we make up the rest of it as we go, hopefully
with better wisdom, hopefully drawing upon the best that we inherited and
pruning the mistakes from the past.
It is my prayer
in this season of miracles that you will be privileged to bless your spouse
that they might become the Mother of a savior, that they might become the
Father that brings grace and peace to the shepherds in the field of your life,
that your children might grow into compassionate service to the needs of others
as they mature, that you might create Holy Ground in your home for just a while
and that love my consecrate you as a holy family, if only for a while.
“For now”, St.
Paul says, “we see through a glass dimly” but one day, if we could see it, we
would know as we have been known by God”, so to speak, all along. In the
meantime, faith, hope, and love abide. And the greatest of these… is love. Amen.
