Sunday
December 18

Now the Birth

By Marsh Chapel

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Matthew 1: 18-25

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Life and Truth

We long to know the meaning of the gospel in life.  Our hearts yearn for such a sense of meaning, as our minds reach for the same.

Last week, a devoted radio congregant, a weekly listener, wrote to respond to the service and sermon, doing so with an evocation of his years, the early 1960’s, as a student here.  In a PS addition to the letter, he quoted Miguel de Unamuno:  My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live.  The next day, another listener, and friend, said, The Marsh services and sermons are about life and truth.  Said John Wesley; If thine heart be as mine, then give me thine hand.

Matthew

We have left St. Luke, now, to follow the trail of Jesus’ life, death and destiny, this year, in the Gospel of Matthew.   Matthew relies on Mark, and then also on a teaching document called Q, along with Matthew’s own particular material, of which our reading today is an example.  He has divided his Gospel into five sequential parts, a careful pedagogical rendering, befitting his traditional role as teacher, in contrast to Luke ‘the physician’, whose interest was history.   We have moved from history to religion, from narrative to doctrine.  Matthew is ordering the meaning of the history of the Gospel, while Luke is ordering the history of the meaning of the Gospel.  You have moved from the History Department to the Religion Department.  Matthew has his own perspective.

Some of that perspective involves a developing and developed Christology, an understanding of Christ.  For Matthew, the birth narrative conveys the proper ordering of the meaning of the history of the Gospel.  Birth narratives still matter, as if the politics of the last several years in this country were not enough alone to remind us.  Who is he?  Where did he come from?  Who are his parents?  Who are his people?  Who formed him, He who now forms us?

You have missed having read the generations from Adam to Christ.  These are found before our reading.  Fourteen by fourteen by fourteen, are the generations.  From Abraham to David.  From David to Babylon.  From Babylon to Christ.  They run from Abraham to Joseph, who was betrothed to Mary.  To Joseph.  To and through Joseph.

Abraham.  Isaac. Jacob. Judah.  Tamar.  Amminadab.  Boaz.  Ruth.  Jesse. David.  Solomon.  Uriah.  Rehoboam.  Jehoshaphat.  Amos.  Josiah. Jechoniah.  Zerubbabel.  Zadok.  Eleazar.  Matthan.  Jacob.  Joseph.

Every one of these names, earlier in Chapter 1, is worth a sermon!  We could start next week…

Matthew 1 tells of the birth of Christ.  Jesus Christ (though a later scribe dropped ‘Jesus’, though most texts hold to it), to move Matthew a little more away from Luke, pushing religion away from history, you could say.  The freedom we have to interpret the Gospel for ourselves begins with the Gospels, themselves.  Each is different from the others.  John is magnificently the most different of them all, the most sublime, the most mysterious, the most divine.  Matthew tells of the birth of Christ.  Then he will tell of the teaching of Christ.  Then he will tell of the healing of Christ.  Then he will tell of the cross of the Christ.  Then cometh resurrection.  In five moves, he is teaching us, Matthew, the teacher.  He orders the meaning of history, as Luke orders the history of meaning.

In the birth, it is the cradle we most need to notice.  The wood of the cradle, by which Christ is born, is of a type with the wood of the cross, by which Christ is crucified.  Born to give us second birth, the birth of spirit, soul, mind, heart, will, love, faith.  Born to give us second birth.  Is one birth not enough?  No.

You are meant to live in faith, to lead a life of loving friendship, to wake up every morning to the sunshine, the light of God.  You are meant to walk in the light.  Walk in the light.  For this, you need to hear a word spoken from faith to faith.

Christmas, as a cultural break, provides a seam, an opening, for grace, both apart from religion, and as a part of religion.  You are given the light of God, to rest in your hearts, to illumine your hearts and minds, to give you peace and hope, all through the coming year.  We will need that in 2017.  We will need that courage this year.

Matthew is apparently fighting on two fronts, both against the fundamental conservatives to the right, and against the spiritual radicals to the left.  In Matthew, Gospel continues to trump tradition, as in Paul, but tradition itself is a bulwark to defend the Gospel, as in Timothy.  Matthew is trying to guide his part of the early church, between the Scylla of the tightly tethered and the Charibdis of the tether-less.  The people who raised us, in the snows of the towns along the train tracks of the Lake Shore Limited, Albany to Buffalo, and on to Chicago, knew this well.  That is, with Matthew, they wanted to order the meaning of the history of the gospel.  They aspired to do so by opposition to indecency and indifference.  They attempted to do so by attention to conscience and compassion.

Conscience and Compassion: Swimming Merit Badge

At one time, the little towns and smaller cities of Upstate New York were populated with Scout Troops and Methodist Churches, one to foment decency and one to honor difference.  The Scouts, at least, had a list of twelve points in the law of the Scouts that kept a measure of and on decency, whether or not every Scout so lived.  It is important to tell the truth:  so, a Scout is trustworthy.  The Methodists, at least, had a pot luck dinner every Wednesday formed out of wide ranging culinary differences, all brought together, with the inevitable digestive turbulence, e pluribus unum, on a long table with a table cloth not quite long enough for the table.  The world is full of difference:  so, we get together and enjoy one another’s odd casseroles, as a foretaste of the globe.  When asked to bring an artifact of his church, the Methodist brings not a Bible, like the Baptist, or a Rosary, like the Catholic, or a Yarmulke, like the Jew, but—a casserole dish!) Now many of these towns are depopulated, and many lack any longer a strong Scout Troop and many lack any longer a vibrant Methodist Church.  This changes the culture, the civil society, in the rural lake country of New York.  There is less traction for decency and for difference.  I suppose the same—a denigration of decency and difference—might be found too today in Wisconsin, in Michigan, in Ohio, in Iowa, in Western Pennsylvania.   When, at an earlier age, you are not challenged to see and say, ‘That is not decent, that kind of speech’, or you are not challenged to see and say, ‘That disrespects difference, that kind of talk’, then, you are more inclined to accept indecency and indifference, and you may be more vulnerable to demagoguery.  We need more seminarians who will forego the joys of coastal, urban life, and go home to the towns and cities of Wisconsin, of Michigan, of Ohio, of Iowa, of Western Pennsylvania—and of Upstate New York.  It is something to think about, in this era, this season of burgeoning American indecency and indifference, our openness to the normalization of what is not decent and what denigrates difference.

We had moved into Oneida—named for one of the Iroquois tribes—the year before.  By that December friendships had formed.  Our Scout Troop, in the cold week after Christmas, assembled to drive the long, long distance (all of 20 miles!) to Rome (New York, not that to which all roads lead by any means), to swim in a relatively new (YMCA?) pool.  In the ice cold, to be transported to steaming warm water, the gym windows beclouded with moisture, that was a treat.  (The cold this week brought the memory). But to get there we needed four drivers and only three arrived.  It was a Saturday, and my dad was in the church office, upstairs from our Scout Hall, probably trying to write a sermon for the next day, just 14 years after his graduation from BU.  ‘Dad, could you drive for us? ‘.  With no spoken reluctance, he tapped his pipe, closed the notebook, and put on his coat.  We had a blast!  I suppose we worked on swimming merit badge along the way, but all that remains in memory is the laughter, going and swimming, warmth in the deeps of cold, and friendship in the deeps of anonymity.  A Scout is friendly:  he is friend to all, and a brother to every other Scout.

Our family, four children, lived on the minister’s salary, then $6,000 a year, and in the minster’s parsonage.  It was a living.  They, parents, never complained to my remembrance:  they were joyful, proud people.  You live on what you have, so not to burden others.  In those years, because you were eligible to move, to itnerate every spring or so, you planted a garden, taking pride in its planting, not fully knowing if you or another would harvest.  There was a pride in the way these vegetable gardens were planted and hoed and weeded.  ‘They really make a good garden!’—that was high praise in the itinerant ministerial community, which like all such, had its share of gossip.  You take in pride in what you do.  ‘Any profession is great, if greatly pursued’ (O W Holmes).

After the swim, that evening, in the Rome (NY) YMCA, because it was 5 or 6pm, the idea circulated among the swimmers that we should propose to the drivers to stop for a hamburger, at a new hamburger chain, Carroll’s, it was called.  The swimmers had the imagination, but the drivers had the money.  This seemed like a top idea.  Warmed in the swim, and in the fellowship of friendship, I went to my father.  He was filling his pipe, and smiling.  ‘Dad—the other guys are going to stop for a hamburger on the way back home.  Can we go along?’   My father was a genuinely and naturally happy, optimistic man.  He did not let hurt easily confound him. ‘Who ever said life was fair?’, that was his response to unfairness, hurt.  So I remember that night, because his face fell, a little, at the question: can we stop for a hamburger, too? ( I mentioned that my dad was a proud person, I think.)

He said something like ‘maybe’, or ‘we’ll see’.  Then, after a while, with the troop running around and shouting things, I saw him slowly walk over to one of the other drivers, who was a factory owner, a lay speaker, and a friend.  I saw a conversation in process.  I saw my father looking at my friend’s father.  I saw my friend’s father fish out his wallet.  I saw my dad–I just wonder now how much it might have hurt him–accept a few bills, and put them into his own, empty, wallet.   It was the end of the month, the end of year, the week after Christmas, a time of quiet, but a time of lack, I guess.   Having now lived a while, raised some children, seen and felt some hurt, maybe I should better appreciate, a little, what that moment, that willingness to sacrifice pride to give love, may have cost.   In the icy winter, in the atrium of a small YMCA, on a Saturday afternoon, with a sermon back on the desk, still unwritten.  If I had known then what I know now, about what can hurt, I would not have asked.  But if I had not asked, I would not have known, now, what I saw then.   Life asks things of us, when we are least prepared, and when we least expect, but ask it does.  How we respond becomes the alphabet of faith.

For a time, now, across our culture, and thanks in part to the weakening of Scouts troops and Methodist churches in the northern Midwest, indecency and indifference seem to have won the day.  We do not need to recount, in this country.  We need to recant.  Not to recount, but to recant.  We have learned what Jeremiah warned us in September:  you usually cannot know humility without first enduring the bitter suffering of humiliation.  As a people, now, we are learning the one through the other.  Yet. Nonetheless.  Nevertheless.  Hear the Gospel.  It is a first step toward humility.  The further steps come, in middling fashion, upon a long road, in the civil forms of civil society that slowly teach what we seem in part to have forgotten—decency and difference–not indecency nor indifference–but conscience and compassion.

So we live into Advent in a difficult time, and there is little that can be said to minimize that dark difficulty.  No.  No false hope.  We must face it and live it through, whether or not we can live it down.  We simply will have to live it through:  we can attend to affairs of state, to due process under the law, to respect for forms of government.  It will take a decade.

 But remember: Who hopes for what he sees?  We hope for what we do not see, and wait for it with patience.  Zadie Smith knows about birth and a warm swim on a cold winter night:  Things have changed, but history is not erased by change, and the examples of the past still hold out new possibilities for all of us, opportunities to remake, for a new generation, the conditions from which we ourselves have benefitted…Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated, and reimagined if it is to survive. (NYRB, 12/22/16, p 37).   As did Vaclav Havel: “Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world beyond our horizons.  It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, no matter how it turns out.”

We long to know the meaning of the gospel in life.  Our hearts yearn for such a sense of meaning, as our minds reach for the same.  May such meaning fill your longing and feed your yearning, this Christmas, 2016.

– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean. 

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