{"id":2111,"date":"2018-12-23T11:00:16","date_gmt":"2018-12-23T16:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=2111"},"modified":"2019-09-17T11:43:59","modified_gmt":"2019-09-17T15:43:59","slug":"simply-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2018\/12\/23\/simply-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"Simply Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here to listen to the entire service<\/a><\/p>\n

Micah 5:2-5a<\/a><\/p>\n

Hebrews 10:5-10<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to listen to the sermon\u00a0only<\/a><\/p>\n

Child<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Bethlehem Ephratha, though thou be little, from thee shall come<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n

One summer we had a chance to take our granddaughter out for lunch.\u00a0 Children are the landlords for the kingdom of heaven.\u00a0 Children show the manner of entry into the kingdom of heaven.\u00a0 Children receive the touch of the kingdom of heaven.\u00a0 The little place we chose has a long history of children and summer, of burgers and ice cream.\u00a0 It sits nestled into a long, lovely valley, an actively agricultural valley of corn fields and dairy barns.\u00a0 We were not quite alone in the small dining room, though that designation itself seems overwrought.\u00a0 The room \u00a0\u00a0simply provided space for a collection of tables and chairs.\u00a0 An older woman sat, back to door, enjoying her luncheon hot dog and potatoes.\u00a0 After lunch, as a reward for eating all of lunch, our granddaughter had an ice cream cone.\u00a0 I want to try to interrupt all the twittering texting emailing rushing half listening cacophony of our current life with the dripping joy of one two year old an one small vanilla cone.\u00a0 Our older friend peered over her hot dog and potatoes and with eyes bright pronounced a silent blessing.\u00a0 Everything about an ice cream cone in the summer brims with what is good.\u00a0 The cold clean taste.\u00a0 The texture soft and grainy.\u00a0 The drip drip of melted cream falling on lips, then chin, then tiny hand, then shirt, then floor.\u00a0 The dive nose first down in for more.\u00a0 Sheer happy joy, for the moment, \u00a0attends such a child on such a day with such a treat.\u00a0 Simplicity.<\/p>\n

And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them; and the disciples rebuked them.\u00a0 But when Jesus saw it he was indignant, and said to them, \u2018Let the children come to me, do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.\u00a0 Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.\u2019 And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands upon them\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

Some of the old, good things about life well before and well beyond college age can bring their refreshment, a powerful refreshment, into communities of twenty year olds.\u00a0 I notice the way our students respond to children when, occasionally, there are little people on campus.\u00a0 You can see the minds moving: this once was me; one day I will have children.\u00a0 An education frees you from the confines of the early twenty first century by immersing you in Plato and Shakespeare and Galileo and the Russian Revolution.\u00a0 In the same way, just a glimpse of the child and cone free you from the confines of life at twenty.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, like children, in simplicity, we need to re-enter the kingdom of God. I notice how much detail my granddaughter sees that I miss.\u00a0 The dog in the water.\u00a0 The bird behind the tree branch.\u00a0 The rabbit peeking out from under the berry bush.\u00a0 The sound of the water running into the culvert.\u00a0 Perhaps it is this simplicity of direction observation, dulled over decades that causes us to misstep.<\/p>\n

M Atwood:\u00a0 \u2018Children begin saying \u2018That\u2019s not fair\u2019 long before they start figuring out money\u2026Debt, who owes what to whom, or to what, and how that debt gets paid, is a subject much larger than money.\u00a0 It has to do with our basic sense of fairness, a sense that is embedded in all our exchanges with our fellow human beings\u2019. (NYT 10\/08).<\/p>\n

The least, the little, the simple\u2026simply Christmas.\u00a0 A childlike attention to simple things.<\/em><\/p>\n

Buddha<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Bethlehem Ephratha, though thou be little, from thee shall come<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n

Last month of a Sunday afternoon we gathered for Holy Baptism here in the chancel.\u00a0 Afterward, one of the guests asked who was in the Rose Window above.\u00a0 \u201cThat is the Lord Jesus Christ\u201d, we replied.\u00a0 \u201cBut he looks like the Buddha\u201d came the response.\u00a0 With some pique, it could be added.\u00a0 Well.\u00a0 There is a simplicity here, shared it may be, between the two.\u00a0 Our latest grandchild is now being raised by a Methodist father and a Buddhist mother, and will be baptized this winter.\u00a0 So the question had traction.\u00a0 Granted so many differences, simply put, there are similarities, as in our time granted so much diversity, there is unity yet.\u00a0 And we are going to have to learn to share the spiritual care of the globe with some other religious traditions, now and then, are we not?<\/p>\n

Like the Buddha, we need to come down from heaven, down from our very worthy, but limiting intelligences.\u00a0 Like the Buddha, we need to celebrate any birth, with Siddhartha\u2019s birth.\u00a0 Like the Buddha we need to explore the world outside the palace, to explore other spaces and times.\u00a0 Like the Buddha we need to find our own forms of Siddhartha\u2019s famous renunciation.\u00a0 Like the Buddha we can benefit from the simplicity enjoined in any and every ascetic practice.\u00a0 Like the Buddha, we face the challenge of Mara\u2019s temptations, of life\u2019s temptations.\u00a0 Like the Buddha, who preached his first sermon, we find our true voice by finding our earlier voice.\u00a0 Like the Buddha, we seek peace, a kind of nirvana.\u00a0 Such a simple peace allows us to move, to grow, to change.\u00a0 \u201cWhat\u2019s won is done, the joy is in the doing\u201d, wrote Shakespeare.<\/p>\n

This is why experience matters.\u00a0 As D Brooks wrote not long ago:\u00a0\u00a0 \u2018How is prudence acquired?\u00a0 Through experience.\u00a0 The prudent leader possesses a repertoire of events, through personal involvement or the study of history, and can apply those models to current circumstances to judge what is important and what is not, who can be persuaded and who can\u2019t, what has worked and what has not\u2019.<\/p>\n

Our age needs prudence: the capacity to \u2018foster public virtue through moral instruction and official ritual without coercing dissenters.\u2019 (anonymous).<\/p>\n

Dr. Jean Twenge, of San Diego, in her new book, iGen,<\/em> identifies markers of health to aid those struggling with depression and suicide, in *face to face interaction and conversation, in *reading printed material, and in *attending religious services (SKY citation).<\/p>\n

The least, the little, the simple\u2026simply Christmas.\u00a0 A child like attention to simple things.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thought<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Bethlehem Ephratha, though thou be little, from thee shall come<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n

A church service like this one reminds you of your childhood.\u00a0 Not your youthful past, your childhood.\u00a0 You are a child of God.\u00a0 Howard Thurman famously concluded his masterpiece, Jesus and the Disinherited<\/em>, with just this thought.\u00a0 To allow such kingdom sensibility to live, though, requires all the heavy thought and truth telling we can muster.<\/p>\n

J Mang: \u2018it is likely that nothing will match the reassurance of a Sunday morning spent in church.\u00a0 But for an ever growing number of Americans, the conviction that the church is built on shaky philosophical grounds is more powerful than the longing for unconditional comfort\u2019.\u00a0 The two cannot finally be disjoined.\u00a0 Nor can the religious longing ever easily be written out of human life: \u2018whatever introduces genuine perspective is religious\u2019 (Dewey).<\/p>\n

A GM executive, wrote:\u00a0 \u2018we have vastly underestimated how deeply ingrained are the organizational and cultural rigidities that hamper our ability to execute\u2019.<\/p>\n

D Sorokin:\u00a0 \u2018The 21st<\/sup> century has begun with seemingly unbridgeable chasms between secularism and believers.\u00a0 One step in averting such a parlous situation is to recover the notion of an Enlightenment spectrum that, by including the religious Enlightenment, complicates our understanding of belief\u2019s critical and abiding role in modern culture\u2019. Would you not love to master the simple art of efficacious compassion?<\/p>\n

Proust wrote, \u2018Beauty.\u00a0 That beauty of which we are sometimes tempted to ask ourselves whether it is, in this world, anything more than the complementary part that is added to a fragmentary and fugitive stranger by our imagination over stimulated by regret\u2019.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the simple voice of conscience will rise up and touch us:\u00a0 \u2018I felt like I was betraying myself, like this isn\u2019t really what I like to do, this isn\u2019t who I am, this isn\u2019t the experience I want to be having.\u2019<\/p>\n

Simplicity can be paradoxical.\u00a0 Tillich: \u2018God does not exist.\u00a0 He is being-itself, beyond essence and existence.\u00a0 Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him\u2019 (ST 1, 205). Dag Hammarskjold:\u00a0 \u2018God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal Deity, but we die on the day our lives cease to be illumined by a radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder whose source lies beyond all reason.\u2019<\/p>\n

The least, the little, the simple\u2026simply Christmas.\u00a0 A child like attention to simple things.<\/em><\/p>\n

Poem<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Bethlehem Ephratha, though thou be little, from thee shall come<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n

Here is the traveling experience, rendered with simplicity, of a Palestinian poet, Mahmud Darwish:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere. As if traveling is the way of the clouds.\u00a0 We have buried our loved ones in the darkness of the clouds, between the roots of the trees.\u00a0 And we said to our wives:\u00a0 go on giving birth to people like us for hundreds of years so we can complete this journey.\u00a0 To the hour of a country, to the meter of the impossible.\u00a0 We travel in the carriages of the psalms, sleep in the tent of the prophets and come out of the speech of the gypsies.\u00a0 We measure space with a hoopoe\u2019s beak or sing to while away the distance and cleanse the light of the moon.\u00a0 Your path is long so dream of seven women to bear this long path on your shoulders.\u00a0 Shake for them palm trees so as to know their names and who\u2019ll be the mother of the boy of Galilee.\u00a0 We have a country of words.\u00a0 Speak speak so I can put my road on the stone of a stone.\u00a0 We have a country of words.\u00a0 Speak speak so we may know the end of this travel. (\u2018Victims of a Map\u2019).<\/em><\/p>\n

The Holy Scripture assumes a multi-generational perspective, no more so than in the narratives of Advent and Christmas.\u00a0 Notice that Luke pictures a conversation in the womb, Jesus and John the Baptist, Mary and Elizabeth.\u00a0 Real change takes a long time, generations of time, when it comes at all.\u00a0 Do you remember what you were confronted with 30 years ago, exactly a generation ago?\u00a0 For some of us, almost to the hour, 30 years ago, it was the sudden announcement on a bitter snowy night, to a stunned basketball crowd in the Carrier Dome, that a plane with many of our own neighborhood students, our own Syracuse University students, and students from other regions including Boston, had crashed in Lockerbie Scotland.\u00a0 The portent of that moment in 1988 eluded us, eluded all, but it was a harbinger of the struggles of the next thirty years, in one limited, little simple horror and tragedy, 182 dead.<\/p>\n

\u2018They have been called upon to face up to mystery, actually the most terrible mystery of all, and facing mystery is something that everyone must do for himself.\u00a0 In the face of such a disaster one must fall back on faith or find only bitter meaninglessness in the universe.\u00a0 To my mind this is the greatest challenge faith offers\u2014to believe that the hand of God has not been withdrawn from the world when such things happen\u2019.\u00a0 (Said of those who lost children in the 1958 Chicago fire, this could be said of us all.)<\/p>\n

The least, the little, the simple\u2026simply Christmas.\u00a0 A child-like attention to simple things.<\/em><\/p>\n

Care<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Bethlehem Ephratha, though thou be little, from thee shall come<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n

One of my favorite Boston vignettes is set in the public Garden.\u00a0 EB White liked to take his step-son skating on the Frog Pond, when they visited relatives in Beacon Hill.\u00a0 Both step Father and Son loved Boston, and its charming garden.\u00a0 One day they hiked down from their relatives apartment, took off their shoes, stuffed them under a bench, donned their skates and skated until the sun set.\u00a0 This was in the depths of the depression.\u00a0 When they returned to the bench, their shoes were gone.\u00a0 \u2018Someone needed them more than we did\u2019 was all White would say.\u00a0 Then the two hiked up Beacon Hill together.\u00a0 Still in their skates.\u00a0 That image of the great writer, enjoying the winter, loving the garden, enthralled with ice, kind to the needy, and hiking up Beacon Hill on the tips of his skates\u2014that image stays with me.<\/p>\n

The least, the little, the simple\u2026simply Christmas.<\/em>\u00a0 A child like attention to simple things.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018When Elizabeth heard Mary\u2019s greeting, the child leaped in her womb\u2019.<\/em><\/p>\n

It was a Boston preacher, Phillips Brooks, no stranger to Commonwealth Avenue, who wrote the simple lines of our familiar carol:<\/p>\n

O Holy Child of Bethlehem<\/em><\/p>\n

Descend to us we pray<\/em><\/p>\n

Cast out our sin and enter in<\/em><\/p>\n

Be born in us today<\/em><\/p>\n

We hear the Christmas angels<\/em><\/p>\n

The great glad tidings tell<\/em><\/p>\n

O Come to us, abide with us<\/em><\/p>\n

Our Lord Emmanuel<\/em><\/p>\n

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean.<\/em>
\n<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Click here to listen to the entire service Micah 5:2-5a Hebrews 10:5-10 Click here to listen to the sermon\u00a0only Child Bethlehem Ephratha, though thou be little, from thee shall come\u2026 One summer we had a chance to take our granddaughter out for lunch.\u00a0 Children are the landlords for the kingdom of heaven.\u00a0 Children show the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22],"tags":[6],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2111"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2111"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2214,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2111\/revisions\/2214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}