Sunday
December 20
Echoes of Faith
By Marsh Chapel
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A Preface
If we listen with the ears of the heart, the sounds of Christmas may just envelop us, its echoes of faith may revive us. And heal us.
A voice, Gabriel, fear not.
A cough, Joseph turning.
A shuffle, Shepherds moving.
A murmur, a shudder, a shake.
Cattle, lowing.
The crisp crackle of hard soil, snow and ice, under foot.
Distant laughter, ribald and rough, out from the inn.
And Mary. Mary. Her yawn, her sigh, her song, her cry.
If we listen with the ears of the heart, the whole creation sings in ecumenical chorus, and the sounds of Christmas heal us by enveloping us in a circle of love, whose circumference is without measure.
You know, our time, and world and culture are fixed on limits. We lean more on what we can count, than on what we can count on. (repeat). Christmas inquires about our sense of limits, and reverberates with echoes of faith, a robust cosmic faith.
Our lips may echo such faith, even if our habits muffle such faith. Health care, for all or for some? Good education (with books, safety, discipline, respect), for all or for some? Employment (most people just need a job and a home), for all or for some? Civic protection for all or some? Heavenly hope, for all or for some? We do tend to live and move and have our being as if the very temporary distinctions we so prize had, somehow, a lasting life.
Here is a Christmas pronouncement of a broad peace, the prospect of love and peace, on earth. On earth. With Gandhi along the Ganges. Beside Tutu on the southern cape. Along the path of the Dalai Lama in farthest Tibet. In Tegucigalpa with the church Amor, Fe Y Vida. This is no religious quietism: cold, careful, efficient, first mile, changeless, fearsome, depressed. No, this is Christmas: warm, open, effective, second mile, free, growing, creative and hopeful!
A Tale of Two Tales
The early church told two stories about Jesus. The first about his death. The second about his life. The first, about the cross, is the older and more fundamental. The second, about the manger, is the key to the meaning of the first, the eyeglasses which open full sight of the first, the code with which to decipher the first.
Jesus died on a cross for our sin according to the Scripture. That is the first story. How we handle this story, later in the year, come Lent and Easter, is a perilous and serious responsibility, given the myth of redemptive violence in which so much of our national and global thinking is now enmeshed. This morning, we do light a virtual candle, light a candle, for our siblings across this great land, 300,000, 300,000, taken by COVID, to a farther shore and a greater light. We wail for them, even as Rachel and others wailed long ago. Yet this week, across the globe, the first vaccines appeared, including right here in the USA. In Canada, first responders were pictured receiving vaccination. A country of 36 million, and a government that has already purchased 80 million vaccines. Those receiving, and those watching, wept. To remember the past year, and now the approaching vaccine, a latter-day miracle for sure, is to weep, with Rachel, at Christmas.
That is, the first story, the death story, the story of Jesus’ death, another season’s work, needs careful, careful handling. Today I might briefly say again what we have said each year in Lent: Remember that it is not the passion of Christ that defines the Person of Christ, but the Person who defines the passion. Remember that it is not the suffering that bears the meaning, but the meaning that bears the suffering…that it is not the cross that carries the love but the love that carries the cross…that it is not crucifixion that encompasses salvation, but salvation that encompasses even the tragedy of crucifixion. The resurrection follows but not replace the cross, for sure. Still, it is also true that the cross precedes but does not overshadow the resurrection. It is Life that has the last word. Later in the year, come March and April, and who knows what life will be like by then?, we shall return to story one. At Christmas, we listen for story two, the story of Jesus’ life, the story of Jesus birth, and its echoes of faith. I wonder: are you ready, Christmas Sunday 2020, ready in a new way and ready for the first time or the first time in a long time, to hear the susurrations of faith? Have you faith? Where is your faith? How is it with your faith?
Last Saturday in the later afternoon it rained heavily. That meant the best walk home, from Chapel to residence, did lie through the long hallways of the College of Arts Sciences, where my mother worked as a secretary in 1951, putting her husband through seminary, when the building was spanking new. From the chapel, the portico will keep you dry, and then take you into the building. The building is regularly teeming with echoes, voices, greetings, laughter, discourse, lecture, music, all. By that late hour, all was silent. Not a person, not a peep, not a word, down the long, lovely hallway of the College of Arts and Sciences. Solitude of a COVID sort, CORONA cause, CORONA based. Solitude. And echoes and ghosts at every step. A meeting here, years ago. Two lectures there, years ago. An Academy graduation speech, here, many years ago. A memorial reception for a lost student, there, years ago. And meetings, meetings, meetings. Now: silence, los sonidos de la silencia, Solitude. Here a photo of a colleague whose memorial we celebrated in 2017. Here a reminder of a past curriculum. And all about, nothing, nothing but quiet, with the rain falling fast outside. In the atrium, a pause, amid the ghosts, and amid the silence.
And a quickened, sharp awareness, a COVID moment: Solitude has its own beauty. Solitude has beauty. It is harsh beauty. It is a dark beauty. And it is a discomfiting beauty for those of us who thrive on presence, conversation, gathering, and human being, morning to night. But a beauty still. I wonder: does your faith have space for such solitude, such harsh, dark, discomfiting beauty? Does mine? When it gets quiet enough, there can be a hearing for the echoes of such faith.
So, we recall at Christmas, the birth story. Who was Jesus? What life did his death complete? How does his word heal our hurt? And how does all this accord with Scripture? One leads to the other.
This second, second level story begins at Christmas, and is told among us to interpret the first. Christmas is meant to make sure that the divine love is not left only to the cross, or only to heaven. Christmas in a troubled world, a world of pollution, pandemic, politics, prejudice and pain, is meant to remind us, all of us, that you do not need to leave the world in order to love God. Alf Landon said, “I can be a liberal and not be a spendthrift”. We might say, “I can be a Christian and not reject the world around”. Christmas is meant to open out a whole range of Jesus, as brother, teacher, healer, young man, all. Christmas is meant to provide the mid-course correction that might be needed if all we had was Lent. And the Christmas echoes are the worker bees in this theological, spiritual hive. Easter may announce the power of love, but Christmas names the presence of love. Jesus died the way he did because he lived the way he did. Jesus lived the way he did so that he could die the way he did. That is, it is not only the Passion of Christ, but the Peace of Christ, too, which Christians like you affirm. What good news for us at the end of 2020! We together need both passion and peace. Such a passionate year we have had. Theologically, globally, culturally, politically, ecclesiastically, we have exuded passion this year. Now comes Christmas again to announce that there is more to Jesus than passion. There is the matter of peace as well.
Creation and Redemption
With great effort, the ancient writers join the God of Creation with the God of Redemption. The coming of the Savior does not limit the divine care to the story of redemption, but weaves the account of redemption into the fabric of creation. There is more to the Gospel than the cross. The ancient writers did sense this and say it with gusto: angels to locate heavenly love on earth; shepherds to locate love on ordinary earth; kings to empower the sense of love on earth; a poor mother to locate physically the Prince of Peace, the Lord of Love, in the womb of earth, and remind us of the physique, the physicality of faith. The location of love is earth, and its circumference is without limit. God’s Christ is without limit.
God’s Christ. The Christ. Echoes of faith.
Ah, the Christ. There are many rooms in this mansion. In the Hebrew Scripture, as translated into Greek long ago, Christ referred to Cyrus the King of Persia, who at last freed the Jews from their bondage in Babylon. ‘The Christ of God’ later Isaiah calls King Cyrus. Echoes of faith.
Then Christ meant the messianic conqueror who would bring apocalyptic cataclysm, the end of things as we know it, the reconstitution of Israel, and the reign of God–the main wellspring of hope for those breathing and sweating in Jesus’ day, including Jesus. Echoes of faith.
Christians then began to use the term to refer to Jesus, who spoke Aramaic, rode a donkey, recited the Psalms thinking David wrote them all, walked only in Palestine, never married, and was crucified for blasphemy or treason or both. Echoes of faith.
A while later Christ, in Paul, becomes the instrument of God’s incursion into the world, to recreate the world, and is known in the cross and the resurrection. Echoes of faith.
Still later, when the Gospel writers pick up the story, Christ is the Risen Lord, preached by Paul, and narrated by unknown silent ghost writers who somehow put together the story of his earthly ministry, always spoken as a resurrection account, and always seen, if seen, in light of Easter, but interpreted through the faith of Christmas, and its echoes. Echoes of faith.
John takes another trail, in the telling of the Christ, because for John none of the above really matters at all, save that Christ reveals God–wherever and whenever there is way, truth or life, there is Christ. Echoes of faith.
Still later, and drawing on all the above and more, the early Christian writers painstakingly and painfully tried to fit all this into neo-platonic thought, involving natures and persons, the human and the divine, the seen and the unseen, and described Christ in creeds, perhaps best and for sure first in the Apostles’ Creed–only Son, Lord. Most of the options then have been laid out by 325ad or so, to be regularly and fitfully retried and rehearsed into our time.
John Calvin could write that we really can’t say, definitively, where Christ, as Lord, begins or ends. Alpha, Omega…echoes. Leo Tolstoy wrote a Christmas Story about this once. “Where Love is, Christ is”. Story two.
The lovely decorated Christmas tree in your living room, with its natural grace adorned by symbolic beauty, is meant to connect the God of Creation with the God of Redemption. The story of Jesus the Christ, and his love, is as wide and large and limitless as the refraction of light throughout all creation.
We felt it, a bit, last Sunday, in the virtual open house, our congregation gathered by zoom, with voices greeting us from California, Iowa, Indiana, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, New York, Florida, Virginia, and most all the New England States.
Once we visited in the home of a friend whose lovely tree sported a particularly wonderful ornamentation. Oh, he had placed upon the boughs the more usual collection of angels, bulbs, lights, tinsel and all. But here and there, slowly illuminating and slowly darkening, there were five lighthouses. I had never seen a lighthouse as an ornament. As we shared life and faith in the living room, the slowly illuminating and slowly darkening lighthouses, all five, caught my imagination. With Wesley we affirm five means of grace, ever available, and savingly so, amid the branches and brambles of life. These are saving, Christmas echoes of faith. Prayer: as close as breath. Sacraments: in the closest church, weekday and Sunday, or maybe a love feast, at home, in pandemic. Scripture: take and read, read and remember, remember and recite. Fasting: we might say walking, exercise, attention to discipline and diet. Christian conversation: a word spoken and heard that just may be healing enough to be true, or true enough to bring healing. Even in a sermon on the Sunday before Christmas.
An Invitation
At Christmas we can listen, and remember. We are most human when we are lovers. Are we lovers anymore? Where love is, Christ is.
If we listen with the ears of faith, the whole creation sings in ecumenical chorus, and the sounds of Christmas heal us by enveloping us in a circle of love, whose circumference is without measure.
You may decide today to lead a Christian life. To worship every Sunday. To pray every morning. To tithe every dollar. To take up the way of peace, by loving and giving. You may decide upon this path this morning. Do. An echo of faith may catch you up, with a susurration, a whisper:
The birth of Christ is for you.
His way of life is for you.
His manner of obedience is for you.
His church is open to you.
His happiness is for you.
His love is for you.
His death is for you.
His life is for you.
His discipline is for you.
If we listen with imaginative ears, the sounds of Christmas, and its echoes of faith, envelop us and heal us.
A voice, Gabriel, fear not.
A cough, Joseph turning.
A shuffle, Shepherds moving.
A murmur, a shudder, a shake.
Cattle, lowing.
The crisp crackle of hard soil, snow and ice, under foot.
Distant laughter, ribald and rough, out from the inn.
And Mary. Her yawn, her sigh, her song, her cry.
AMEN.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
