Sunday
January 1

Christmas Strength

By Marsh Chapel

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Matthew 2:13–23

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The dawn is breaking, slowly, over the snow-blanketed city.  You have assembled yourself for the morning, with your coat and hat and mittens.  You stand like a medieval knight with his standard, you with your broom or shovel in hand, and dawn is breaking slowly, say in upstate NY, say in Buffalo, a week after the great snowfall.

Shakespeare knew the beauty and terror of the dawn:

The grey eyed morn smiles on the frowning night

                  Chequering the eastern clouds with streaks of light

                  And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels

                  Form forth days path and Titan’s fiery wheels

                  Now ere the sun advance his burning eye

                  The day to cheer and night’s dank dew to dry

The great poet and playwright knew, as was said of our Lord in his earthly ministry, knew the heart of man.  He knew the complexity of moral judgment.  He knew the ambiguity of corporate and governmental life.  He knew the strange subterranean interplay of spirituality and sexuality.  He knew the elusive mobility of truth, which, to be spoken, requires a lifetime of rapt attention, and sometimes years of isolated pain and imprisonment. What this country may need to start a new year is neither a chicken in every pot nor a good 5 cent cigar nor a plain, new, fair, or square deal, but, a rivetingly taught course or two in Shakespeare!  Or Paul of Tarsus.

As you start, at whatever dawn you face, ponder this Good News:  Christmas gives strength to start.  A new year?  Strength to start.  A new path?  Strength to start.  A new relationship?  Strength to start.  A new diagnosis?  Strength to start.  A new commitment?  Strength to start.  A new situation? Strength to start.  Christmas offers strength to start.

In the first place, we may plainly affirm that together we find a shared strength at Christmas.

We listen to the words of St Matthew, the story of the Magi, and we hear them as God’s Word.  The words of Scripture are “holy” in that they stand over against us, they take the measure of our self-deception, they outlast our passions and defeats and very lives.  These verses will live longer than we, and rightly so. They will still be heard when we will not be. They will be heard when YOU will not be. So,  they have the power to help us to begin the service, the day, the week, the year, looking out in Christmastide at a new year.

The words of Scripture start with the whole of life in view and with the end of life in view.

We too must make our various beginnings, and so we are not displeased to find here an inspired manner of entry.  By example the Kings assert strength to start.

The passage opens the year with joy, and leads us into a new vocabulary of love and delight. Words of wisdom, that the Kings celebrate, and which will adorn the Gospel as the gospel unfolds.  These words are meant to become our living vocabulary, dictionary, glossary.  We are to learn them again as the New Year unfolds:

Grace

Peace

Thanksgiving

Saints together

Gifts-charismata

Guiltless

Fellowship

In Christ

God is faithful

Oh, that we would bathe ourselves at the outset of each day in such a shower of strength!

For you, all of you, have been found in a new situation.  You are “in Christ”. You have been seized, at least for a worship hour, and so maybe for a lifetime, by the confession of faith that is the confession of the church.

Start the day strong—much will befall to challenge by dusk.

Start life strong in childhood—much comes later to unsettle.

Start with laughter and play in summer—much in autumn proves more difficult.

Start this New Year with strength, and like a skier carried along by gravity, you will pass by and over and around the bumps.

Start this week and each week with the hearing of the Holy Word—much that is less than holy will greet you later.  Go to church on Sunday.

In the second place, we may plainly affirm that the gifts of Christmas are reliable in time of need, are firm in the face of danger.  They make us confident when we need to be and inwardly secure when we have to be.

Whether we are young or mature or old, whether we are babes in Christ or approved in Christ or wise in Christ—we make our starts with strength, recognizing that, as one author began one famous book, ‘life is hard and life is a struggle’.

For the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the people of skill, but time and chance happen to them all.  I once said to my father, a graduate of Boston University in 1953:  ‘this is not fair’.  He replied as you would have done:  ‘whoever told you life is fair?’

Life is not fair, not by a country mile.

Not fair to those who suffer untimely loss

Not fair to those stricken with unexpected illness

Not fair to those whose limbs are taken and torn

Not fair to those who should have been chosen

Not fair to you

Time and chance happen to all.

Not fair to those of whom our south Texas weekly internet congregant, and theological poet, Rev. Milton Jordan, writes:

Imagine Joseph’s difficult decision. He and Mary have a child less than two weeks old. They do not have any documents to prove they are married. Visitors who have heard rumors of this new heir in David’s line have come to see for themselves, and they report that Herod has also heard these rumors. Joseph knows what this means, and he knows how few options he has.

With few resources, perhaps a gift or three from some of the visitors, Joseph takes Mary and their newborn child and strikes out across the country looking for safety in another land. Imagine them now, their few resources long spent, at a crowded border crossing asking for asylum in this foreign land.  

Is this not fairly the heart of the simple gifts we shall share in a moment at the Lord’s Table, and at the Lord’s behest?  It was a borrowed upper room, not a paid for condo, in which the meal was shared.  It was a circle tinged with betrayal, not a safe protected team, within which he washed feet and lifted cup.  It was an evening before defeat, not a twilight of victory past, during which wine and bread were given.  It was lack that gave way at last to hope, treachery that was the doorway to a later hope, suffering, the suffering of the cross, that made way for the hope in which we now stand.  It was Jesus giving himself to us in sacrificial love, in a week when we may have known disrespect, betrayal, and insult.

Whatever harsh word you now have reason to hear and overhear, hold on.  It is not the last word.

Start with that trust and strength.

Paul suffered shipwreck and lash and hunger and despond.  Yet he could still sing with confidence:

 If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation…

                   He who has begun a good work in you will complete it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ…

                   Have you begun with the Spirit to end with the flesh?…

                   It is the God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ…

                   He is the beginning, the first born from the dead that in everything he might be pre eminent…

                   For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we preached among you, was not Yes and No, but in him it is always Yes.  For all the promises of God find their Yes in him…

Resolve to choose and memorize one of these verses of hope wrought in struggle, in 2023.

Whatever silence and despair now accompany you, hold on.  Your lasting friendship is in Christ.

Martin Luther recounted his many attempts to find peace with God through self-discipline, through religious duty, through acts of contrition, through his own works, until at last he collapsed.

At last, he found his way out from the harsh word of command from authority to obedience, and out into the meadow of hope in a calling word from wisdom to happiness, from the Kings to the Christ.

“But this availed me nothing; nor did it free me from a fearful and dreadful conscience…This is God’s Word… this one thing God asks of you, that you honor him by accepting comfort; believe and know that he forgives your transgressions and has no wrath against you.”

We learn late or early that without explanation rain falls on the just and unjust alike. In time of trial, though, you may start again with strength.  You have the love of God, the Gospel of Christ, the Grace of the Lord, the baptism of the church, the prayers of the church, the Lord’s prayer, the ten commandments, the sacrament of communion, the word of absolution, and the decision of faith.  Use them, rely on them, let them buoy you up, in time of trial.  What more do you need?

In the third place, we may plainly affirm the strength that comes from beginning with the end in view.  Though they found him an infant, one who does not speak, they saw him a King, One whose voice rings out to all the world.

This Christmas Sunday reminds us that the Lord Christ is both Alpha and Omega.  When at last we set down our various tools and trades, when at last we have lost our eyes and ears, when at last our final paycheck has come, when at last the various dawns have given way to dusk and dusk and dusk—here too we are in Christ and nowhere else, of Christ and no one else.  Somehow all the little subplots and sufferings of this present time are going to find their full place and point in a greater story, the day of God, the life-span of Jesus Christ.  Today is God’s, and tomorrow is God’s, too.  Earth is God’s, and heaven is too. Somehow, somehow, somehow…

So, we need and want to be together, with and for each other, come Sunday, right here, right now.  To know one another, to love one another, and then, at last, to remember one another. As our Haines, Alaska internet listener, and obituary composer, State Writer Laureate Heather Lende put it:

Writing about the dead helps me celebrate the living, my neighbors, friends, husband and five children, and this place, which some would say is on the edge of nowhere, but for me is the center of everywhere (If You Lived Here I’d Know Your Name , p, 9)

Only such a hope can sustain travelers like us, who seek wisdom and who seek love, even as that hope has sustained the church for sixty some generations. Such a hope strengthens the Magi:  unsung saints and heroines, and those whose names recall a sure Christmas strength.  Some are enshrined in Scripture:  Matthew, Paul, Mary, John. Some are known in Tradition: Ghandi, Heschel, Sadat, Teresa.  Some are from closer experience: John Dempster, Frances Willard, Daniel Marsh, Lawrence Carter. And one, more sung than unsung now, greets us on this plaza every morning, with birds in flight, emblematic of a real Christmas strength. Only such a hope could have strengthened Martin Luther King on August 28 1963 in Washington and all the long bitter way to April 3 1968, his last earthly night: “I just want to do God’s will.  And he has allowed me to go to the mountain.  And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land…So I’m happy tonight, I’m not worried about anything.  I’m not fearing any man.”

At Christmas, you start with confidence about the end. You are strengthened to start in the hope of Jesus Christ.

Christmas strength.

Strength in Christ.

Strength in times of trial.

Strength with hope for the end.

Put on the whole clothing of Christ!

As you stand at the dawn of the rest of life…

We will put it in terms familiar…

Put on the whole wardrobe of Christ, as you seize your shovel:

Put on the sweater of grace

Put on the boots of peace

Put on the mittens of thanksgiving

Put on the tuke of fellowship

Put on the scarf of faithfulness

Put on the snowsuit of sanctification

Pick up the shovel of salvation

And the ice-pick of hope

And the salt of happiness

For today, by grace, you are given a Christmas strength.

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

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