January 01, 2012 "New-Ness"

Isaiah 61:10-62-4
Luke 2:22-40
Christmas Eve found us, surrounded by worshippers, many in pajamas ready for dreams of sugarplums, others with a diamond or a new gold band on their finger. Christmas morn our homes were lit with trees the floor covered in discarded paper. The morning after Christmas the guests who had stayed too long had left, when the phone rang with report of a friend who had died early on this day after. Returning from time with the family, the funeral home called with news of another member from the 1970s who had died, and their family wanted to come home for the burial. Then the mother of a bride called, for one of the weddings this May. She was inconsolable, as it appeared the 25 year old groom had suddenly and unexplainedly died. As much as we try to make preparations for Christmas, as much as we shop and decorate and bake cookies, Christmas belongs to God... Christmas is so much more than Christmas Eve and Morn, it is all the most-ordinary of life juxtaposed by God miraculously entering in. As great as our expectations are for Christmas, our human means are limited, and the birth of Jesus is not only about the Shepherds and Manger, but about Simeon who has been waiting decade upon decade for the coming of the Christ. Christmas is about Anna, whose life of nearly 90 years was very ordinary, yet she had been promised that before she died she would see the coming of the Savior!

The post-Modern theologian Miroslav Volf has described that there is a difference between Optimism and Hope. Optimism is living life, believing based on all we have ever known of life, that there is possibility. Hope is grounded in the reality of God, hope is belief in what has seemed unreal. In 1945, in Poland, a Jewish woman named Ruth Krauss wrote a children's book, titled The Carrot Seed. In the story, a child plants a carrot seed, and waits, watering the ground, watching for something green to appear. His parents know that the earth has been bombed, the soil saturated in the blood of death. For their child's sake, they want to believe the carrot could grow and they satisfy themselves that he is busy. Yet, the child who planted the seed, who waits day after day, nurturing hope, believes against reality, and when finally the carrot greens are pulled from the earth, not only is there a carrot, but the carrot is bigger than the child.

If All we do is live in the moment, working hard, and playing hard, we have no expectation of what could be or what is, only memories of what has been. We long for the economy to turn around. We wait for the next election, without expecting anything other than a shift of power the other way. We long for peace as the absence of war, without righteousness or justice, or respect for the humanity and dignity of the other. We make resolutions to live life differently, without the willingness to wait, even more the dedication to change.

Across Africa across the world, Doctors Without Borders and CARE International have built thousands of Clinic buildings, that stand as eroding shells, lifeless husks, because after the building was built, after optimism of what could be was established, a new clinic needed to be built, a new crisis grabbed attention. After 7 long years of dedicated work, where we set out to build a clinic for $30,000 over $3M of donations have been raised and spent, and out of Civil War there is a new Nation in South Sudan. We have been responsible for changing the infant mortality rate from 8 out of 10 dying before age 5 and the maternal mortality rate from 50% dying in child-birth; the possibility is before us that the clinic will continue self-sustaining without our involvement. The question is not about numbers or dollars, not about lives saved, but about what this mission, about what this 7 years, has meant to those who gave support, to witness that we can make a difference in the world.

Sometimes, that difference is about offering life out of death, about changing the world. At other times, it is about what Emerson described “To laugh often and much... To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children... To earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends... to appreciate beauty... to find the best in others... to leave the world a little bit better... whether in the life of a child, the planting of a garden, or the redemption of a social condition... to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived... This is to have succeeded.”

Our Biblical passages this morning, in the week following Christmas, are less about celebrating another year as “The Birthday for Time,” than about the realization of hope against our grounding in the past. In Ancient Israel, the great Monarchy was destroyed. Babylon rose to power, and all previous cultures were brought down. The Great Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem, was laid waste, not one stone left upon another. For decades, those who had been kept alive from what once was Israel watched and waited, as the empire of Babylon rose and fell. Persia rose and fell. Greece with Alexander and Aristotle and Plato rose and fell. The whole history of human culture, of the building of dynasties and power is about rising, only to be destroyed. Isaiah's witness is counter-cultural, that out of what was crushed will come new-ness. Out of the rubble of the past, will come something as yet unknown. Where the world knows only the rise and fall of time, faith believes that only after the seed has fallen into the ground can the husk be let go for new life to sprout.

Martin Luther described that God became small for us, showing us God's heart and vulnerability, that our hearts might be converted. A child has immense power over us. The most burley calloused hands of a man, cradle a newborn as if pillows of down. The most powerful and resounding of voices is changed to a falsetto cooing, by the touch of a baby.

These stories from the Bible remind us that Birth is dangerous. We have come to believe in the hope of expectation, that months before birth, we know the sex and the name, Grandparents schedule supersavers to be present when the baby is born. But Birth is dangerous. In America, where the amount we spend per birth is higher than anywhere else in the world, our Maternal Mortality rate is the 11th highest among developed Nations; and from 2009 to 2010 doubled from 7 per 100,000 to 13 per 100,000 with serious life-threatening complications for the mothers in 65 out of 10,000 births; and while the Infant Mortality rate has declined in the last decade, in America we still bury 24 babies per 1,000. Birth is dangerous, Life is dangerous! The point of the birth stories in the Bible is not so we would have creches on the mantle, but to bear witness that God did not come from Heaven as a Warrior invincible, untouchable, but instead embraced everything of life as we live life. There was reason why the Law of Moses required a sacrifice be offered for the birth of a child, ...to thank God! For most of us, we cannot imagine a sacrifice for a birth... the required sacrifice was an unblemished lamb, for a poor couple a pair of turtledoves.

For centuries, Church teaching has wrestled with the strict adherence to the Law regarding Jesus. He was the Messiah, God in human form, so without sin... why then did he suffer on the cross? Why did he need to be Baptized? The answer being that on the cross he suffered for the sins of all humanity. In his baptism, all the world was forgiven. So in the sacrifice for his birth, there was sacrifice for all the mothers and babies of all the world.

In the Christmas story, we have come to expect the Donkey and Ox, the Shepherds and Sheep, the Wisemen and Camels, none of which does the Bible name. What we never expect is Simeon and Anna. Anna, whose whole life had been so ordinary. She had married and been widowed and devoted herself to the care of others... could there be a more ordinary life, yet Anna was promised that she would see Salvation! And Simeon, whose whole life had been waiting for the Lord, not only for a few moments, or for a week or month or years, but for decade upon decade waiting for the Lord before he could die. In this New Year, there will be deaths and births, there will be the fall and rising of Nations, in the midst of all that is new, may there also be what has meaning, may there be sacrifices which are given in sincere thanks to God for the living of Life.