Scriptures: Isaiah 9:2, 6-7; Luke 1:26-38
Sometimes when I stand up here on a Sunday morning I have something to say. What I mean is that sometimes when I stand up here on a Sunday morning I have some thing to say, some idea I want to get across, some issue I want to take sides on, some appeal I want to make, some coherent message I want to communicate. Sermons are sometimes referred to as “the message”, and sometimes that’s a good term, because there are times when I do feel like I have a message. Of course you may not know when those times are because I do realize that there is always the possibility that what seems like a coherent message to me, may not be so coherent to you, but that’s another story.
There are other times when I know I am supposed to stand up here on Sunday morning and say something, but what that something is is not so clear. I don’t apologize for that, and I don’t mean by that that on those occasions I have nothing to say. I never think that I have nothing to say, because I never think anyone has nothing to say. It’s just that sometimes what I have to say on a Sunday morning doesn’t come wrapped in words that even I consider coherent, much less anyone else, doesn’t come as a neatly packaged “message”.
My inner life often consists less of messages and more of fragments, images, thoughts rather than “a theme”, thises and thats of feelings, pieces of prayers, lots of pieces of prayers. As I say, I don’t apologize for this. It’s just the way our lives are on the inside. (I shouldn’t speak for you. Maybe your inner life is very coherent, clear, filled with clear messages coming in and ready to be dispensed. Mine is not so much that way, at least not all the time, and (I guess you have guessed by now) not today.
Fragments. Images. It seemed like on this Sunday nearest Christmas, a good place to begin would be with images of birth, holy birth, human birth. We began our service with some of those images today. If it is not the central image of Christmas, it is certainly one of them: the Madonna, Mary and Jesus, or more simply mother and child. John Corlett and Julie Hughens and I have spent some time thinking about Advent and worship together this year, and one of the things we wanted to do was experiment with visual images as part of worship. Today, since I’ve already told you that I am starting my sermon less with a theme than with fragments and images, I thought maybe I’d experiment a bit with images as part of the sermon. Here’s one (or a couple):
Project traditional European paintings of the Madonna
I confess that for most of my life I have not been a great fan of pictures like this. Images of the holy virgin Mary bending over or holding in her arms the holy infant Jesus have not only not inspired me very much; they have been somewhat off-putting to me. As a kid growing up in a not very religious atmosphere, the pictures of Mary and Jesus I associated with Christmas always seemed to me to be rather medieval—those circles around the head—rather Catholic, rather too just plain religious, as in pious. As though I was expected to genuflect when I looked at them.
They also were associated—because these were the images I was exposed to—with a Christianity that was very European and very white. Before I had the words to describe the feeling, I think I had the sense that these images suggested a kind of Christianity that was so culturally biased it wasn’t even aware of its cultural bias, a Christianity where the purity of the virgin and the holiness of the child were represented by their whiteness, and the purer and holier they were, the whiter they were. That’s just a feeling I had, but my guess is that I got that feeling from somewhere; I didn’t just make it up. And furthermore, the images of the virgin and child suggested to me a faith that lived mostly in stained glass windows and hung on museum walls, a faith that often had little to do with real life. As I say, for much of my life I have not exactly been enthralled with images of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus. Even the language of the baby Jesus put me off. Sweet, pure, gentle, white Mary. Cute, cuddly, holy, white Jesus. Faith surely needs to be made of realer and sterner stuff than this.
Two things have happened over time, however. For one, I became aware of Madonnas of other cultures, and as I did, I became more appreciative of the universality of the image. Mary and Jesus were liberated in my mind from their cultural captivity to European Christianity. They were liberated from their whiteness. And the faith they represented no longer seemed so much like a stained glass kind of faith.
Show images of Madonnas from other cultures.
Also, as I became aware of different renderings of the mother and child theme, I was no longer so sure of what families were holy families. I could look at a portrait of a mother and child and not be sure whether I was looking at Mary and Jesus or at any other human mother and child. It gradually became not so easy to tell the difference between the two—the holy family and the human family. And in any case, what I came to see in various images was the holy family’s humanness and/or the human family’s holiness. It was no longer so easy to separate the one from the other, to tell the difference between Madonnas and just plain people.
Show images of mother and child that are not necessarily Madonnas.
I’ve come around, you see. Maybe not all the way around, but pretty far around so far as an appreciation of the mother/child image that is so central to the Christmas story. I still, I have to confess, can be bothered some by the sentimentality that is sometimes suggested in the images. I no longer feel like I am supposed to genuflect, but sometimes I feel like I’m supposed to say “aaaaawww”. I am much more attracted to images of strength than of sweetness. But then, I tell myself, this is part of the point of these images, isn’t it? Not sweetness so much, but softness, gentleness, a mother’s love, cradling vulnerable life in her arms, offering protection, comfort. Of course not every image will appeal to the one or the other of us, but in a very real way, we need them.
I think of how awash we are in images of death, images of violence, images calculated to inspire disgust, or horror, or fear, images from so-called real life, though it often seems surreal, and images from the so-called world of entertainment, though I have to wonder sometimes what we mean by entertainment. I think of how I know these images fill my inner life, even though I do not seek them out, how they probably fill my inner world even more than I know.
It may be that the fact that images of death and violence fill our outer and inner worlds make us as a whole more violent people, more willing anyway to accept violence as the way the things are, less offended by it, more hardened to it so that anyone who wants to get our attention needs to create images that are increasingly horrific and graphic. All that may be, and can be a topic for another time. I’m thinking this morning that at least it is true that those images fail to offer us comfort. And God knows God’s people need comforting, many of us do, at some level perhaps all of us do, need comforting.
I’m thinking that we could do worse than to focus our attention on the images, not in the way we do when they’re on Christmas cards where we glance at them and put them aside, but to spend some time with them, even ones that don’t necessarily appeal to us. But even if such images don’t bear any comfort in themselves, in any case they remind us of our need for comfort, us vulnerable human beings, and our need to at least be aware of what images inhabit us and how they affect us. We are encouraged to be aware of what food we take into our bodies. We may need to seek out images of birth and life rather than death and violence and be intentional about feeding our spirits on those images.
But having said all that, I’m still left with questions about what we mean by comfort. In the context of faith, to be comforted cannot be to be made at ease with the sufferings of the world as it is. I have in me another image today, that comes from the Biblical story too, the same Biblical story as the birth of Jesus. It was soon after Jesus was born and the magi had brought their gifts, and they were supposed to go and tell Herod where the new born baby was who was called the king of the Jews, but they didn’t tell Herod, and he became enraged, and in an effort to make sure that the one baby didn’t survive decided to kill all the male babies. You know the story. The scripture says: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation. Rachel, wife of Isaac, mother of Joseph with the coat (one of the ancestors of the Hebrew people) Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled.”
We don’t usually tell this part of the story, not until after Christmas. Sometimes not then. It’s not a nice story. But it‘s part of the story. All part of the same story really. And when we see the image of Mary and Jesus, we should also see the ghost of Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be consoled, whispering to us not to be consoled.
In the context of faith, to be comforted cannot be to be made at ease with the sufferings of the world. In the context of faith, to be comforted cannot be to become at peace with a violent world. In the context of faith, to be comforted is not the same, cannot be the same as being comfortable. In the context of any faith I would want to have, to be comforted cannot mean to find one’s peace in an assurance of personal salvation. Rachel is a good model for us. She refused to be consoled.
But that doesn’t mean there is no comfort. We look at images of Madonnas and if we have eyes of faith, we will also see the mystical presence of Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be consoled, and if we have the ears of faith we will hear the voice of Mary herself saying, “My God has scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts, brought down the powerful from their thrones, lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” From the place of faith we will be strangely comforted by the example of Rachel refusing to be consoled. From the place of faith, we will be strangely comforted and encouraged by the words of a pregnant teenager who sees and speaks of a different kind of world, and invites us to do the same. And from the place of faith, we shall know that in the midst of the desert, whatever kind of desert we may inhabit or imagine, there is always the possibility of love.
Images, thoughts, fragments, pieces of prayers, lots of pieces of prayers. It is not so much that these shine some very powerful light on us from beyond, clearing up all our confusions, writing messages in the heavens or sending us angel songs, and summing up the meaning of it all in a few well chosen words. It is more that God is present in all the images, thoughts, fragments and pieces of prayers. And somehow in the midst of whatever disarray there may be in our inner lives, there is something stirring, something new, something holy waiting to be born. May we, like Mary, ponder that possibility in our hearts and also like Mary, offer ourselves in some way to be vehicles of that something new and holy coming to life. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 21, 2003