Sunday
December 19

Another Look

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service

Luke 1:3945

Click here to hear just the sermon

It may be time to take another look at prayer.

Christmas 2021 for us may bring a time to take another look at our devotional life, our worship life, another look, at prayer.  Our Advent daily devotions have guided us in this direction, day by day.  All fall we have noted that faith comes, to most of us, one step at a time.  Yes, there are some for whom a blinding light on the Road to Damascus, a blinding light on the road of life, carries us to faith.  But most of us come along more gradually, one step and then another.  One such step in faith is to find the rhythm of prayer, of devotion, that fits your own-most self.  This morning, it may be, is a time for that step, to take another look at prayer, at mystery, at the numinous, at worship.  The elusive presence of the divine lies at the marrow of the Christmas gospel, embedded in the strange stories of the season.

Our Gospel this morning is a case in point.  Luke acquaints us with two births, John and Jesus, two mothers, Mary and Elizabeth.  Multiple generations are engaged in audible utterance, at the dawn of a new age.  I heard the sound…the child leaped.

The Holy Scripture read in worship itself may call you this morning to another look at prayer.  A familiar introit has called us to prayer.  There are hymns, hymns sung, and you hear them. You recognize again a kyrie, a sung sorrow, crucial to being human today.  Mercy, have mercy.  Some courageous soul has led a psalm.  Anthem, hymn, reading, prayer.  And a story so well known that it is unknown.  A story of birth.   Let there be no separation between what is said and what is heard.  Let the snow filter fully down this morning, snow upon snow.  Let the message of the day be yours and ours.

For Jesus’ birth is like all births, in that physical sense utterly predictable.  Yet ask yourself where in life you have felt closer to miracle than at the moment of birth.  An ordinary extraordinary.  For the telling of Christmas, from the very first, was about more than one birth, more than one kind of birth.  The gospel writer is trying to say what cannot readily or easily be said, to connect the sense of the extraordinary with the experience of the ordinary.  There were many births in first century Palestine.  To this one birth there came attached a second birth.  Yes, that of John alongside that of Jesus, but more so his birth, somehow, alongside our own.

Charles Wesley caught the marrow of the message in a phrase: “born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth”.  For the Wesleys both, it was the incarnation of Christ, his birth and life and word made flesh, which rooted and grounded their reverence.  The English carols we most love, both those Charles wrote, and those that influenced him and were influenced by him, bring their disciplined obedience to a fever pitch.

Our Scripture lessons today bring harmonic support to the intersection of the ordinary with the extraordinary, which intersection is the mailing address of prayer.  Micah, Mary, Hebrews, Elizabeth–whether in prophecy or in song or in address, the voices of today’s Scriptures also lift up the strange paradox of earthly heaven and heavenly earth.

What does the Scripture mean by the birth of the Christ, and what especially does this mean for us, for our second birth, as the hymn has it?

Are we able to enter again into our mother’s womb, either in figure or in truth?  But no.  This is the question Nicodemus raised, to no avail.  We cannot return to an earlier condition, nor to an earlier conception of an earlier condition.  Heraclitus was so right so long ago:  no one ever steps into the same river twice.  The second birth clearly is not a physical or conceptual retreat, or return, or recapitulation.  It is a step forward, another look, another step, in faith.

Are we to assume a second naivete, at the heart of the Wesleyan second birth?  Paul Ricouer, and others using other terms, have recalled to us the mature, midlife importance of such a second birth.

The Scripture in other quarters clearly connects the meaning of the birth with the meaning of the name of the newborn, ‘one who will save his people from their sins’.  Paul may speak of the Christ as the Lord of a new creation.  Mark may affirm the Christ as hidden and crucified.  John may herald the Christ at his coming as one with God, revealing God.  Matthew early and late acclaims the atonement wrought in Christ, the healing from past error, the steady saving removal to higher ground.  This is a great hope, the hope of freedom, deliverance from what has hurt in the past.  Today, Luke heralds two births, the Baptist and the Christ, John and Jesus.  Two. When saving liberation occurs, there is a kind of second birth, a new lease on life, a new life.  This second birth is the one that carries you forward, one step, to take another look at prayer.

Something somehow has brought you to prayer this Sunday morning.  Here you are, present or listening or both.  Maybe you have been at this intersection before, and are ready to take another look.

Nudges come from many directions. You may have heard the Methodist minister from western Kentucky, Joey Reed, last week, standing in the rubble of his Mayfield Kentucky church, in the basement of which he and his wife had survived the tornado.  “I realized it might be my last few moments of my life on this earth and I was very glad to be with my wife,” he said. “I know her prayer and mine was that we’d be spared. I was afraid for my children, what would happen to them and how they would respond to this.”  And then he began talking about helping others, regathering the congregation, holding on to the precious memories of that building, and, with grateful tears, looking forward to solemnizing the marriage of this daughter.  That is, in the midst of trauma, he called on the grammar of faith, he called on the language of worship, he called on the cadences of prayer.

Or, it may be, the beautiful music of our organ and organist draw you, week by week.  Through the late afternoons of pandemic, with office the quiet, the organ playing in the nave above brought us another look at prayer.  A powerful listening look at prayer.  The organ preaches its own sermon, lifts its own prayer, week by week, as a friend’s reminder of Thomas Troeger’s poem recently recalled:

With pipes of tin and wood make known
the truth each star displays:
creation is a field that’s sown
with seeds of thanks and praise.
Articulate with measured sound
the song that fills all solid matter sings.

With pipes of tin and wood restart
the fire the prophets knew
and fan the flame within the heart
to do what God would do.
Pull out the stops that train the ear–
the flute and reed to listen and more subtly hear
God’s call through human need.

With pipes of tin and wood repeat
the music danced and played to welcome home
and warmly greet the prodigal who strayed.
Let healing harmonies release
the hurt the heart compiles
that God through music may increase
the grace that reconciles.

With pipes disclose the song the world has blurred,
the hymn of life and love that flows
from God’s renewing word.
Then boldly open wide the swell
and with a trumpet call
announce the news we thirst to tell:
That Christ is Lord of all.

 Here is a Christmas word.  You are still listening, if you are listening.  I am still preaching, for a few more minutes.  And we are together, amid the daily, hourly difficult pandemic worries to one side, and a sense of the Extraordinary on the other.  For all the sorrow, there is still, on your part, and on mine, and on others’, a listening ear, a willingness to tune in, a hard to articulate longing, a reaching toward…Another.  Another look.  What is that listening?  What is that willingness?  What is that longing?

One form of the second birth is here.  One form.  A second religious birth, a second connection, a second opening.  You would not listen if there were not some meager eagerness to wake up to…Another.  Generosity, compassion, forgiveness—these are the hallmarks and doorways into that second birth.  You have the heart to give something to others, generously to give something without expecting any personal return.  You have the spirit to be present with someone whose own spirit is sore, spiritually to walk with a fellow human being.  You have the soul to forgive a past fault, whether it was thirty days or thirty years ago, mercifully to move on, and say so, and mean it.  Your generosity, your compassion, your forgiveness—at least your longing for and leaning toward and listening to them—these are the natal cries of a prayer.  Another look.  At prayer. You may be ready to pray, or to pray again.

Last Sunday we prepared for worship, readers and choristers and clergy, looking greatly forward to the chance to pray, and to sing, and to sing the glorious carols of Christmas.  We expected a modest gathering, a partial percentage of our regular seasonal attendance.  And then, we processed in to the nave of the Chapel, and, my goodness, the church was full, or nearly so. It took the breath away.  It was another look, given by those ready maybe to take another look, another look at religion, at singing, at sacrament, at Scripture, at sermon, at worship.  Another look at prayer. The worship of Almighty God is not a matter of indifference.  Said that strong gathered throng last Sunday:  the worship of Almighty God is not a matter of indifference.

Take another look.  Take another look at prayer, at a kind of prayer that suits you, fits you, is meant for you.

In the new year, you may be given a gift of another look, a new start on a genuine religious life.  Howard Thurman would not be surprised:

When the song of the angel is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost

To heal the broken

To feed the hungry
To release the prisoner

To rebuild the nations
To bring peace among brothers and sisters
To make music in the heart.

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel

Comments are closed.