Scripture: Matthew 2:13-23
Reading: from Howard Thurman, “The Spirit of Christmas”
As I said to someone on Christmas Eve…Well, here we are. I was at one time thinking that I would be on vacation today. It’s my usual practice to save a week of vacation to take off the week after Christmas. But when we decided to have worship in this space today, I decided to postpone vacation for a day. I wanted to be here for our first Sunday morning service in the new building. So I’ll be gone next Sunday instead, and Lee Walters will be leading the first worship service of 2005 back at JABA.
But today, here we are. In a way it’s a kind of a funny feeling. I didn’t expect to feel at home here today, and I don’t—quite—too early for that—but getting there.. The surroundings don’t feel familiar yet, this being our first Sunday here for worship. Your faces aren’t configured quite the way I’ve become accustomed. But of course I am glad to be here, though that somehow seems too superficial a thing to say. I am much more than glad to be here. And I find that I have a lot of thoughts that have passed through my mind as I thought about this occasion, some I have words for, some that I don’t. So what I have to offer in the way of a sermon is not so much a sermon as a collection of thoughts loosely tied together by our being here, and by the scripture you have heard.
I’ll come back to the scripture, but let me begin with some reflections based on where we are. And, of course, where we are in a literal, physical sense is here, though not completely here, since we will be back at JABA again next week and for a time after that. So we are neither here nor there, or maybe it would be better and more accurate to say both here and there, as we gradually live more and more of our life in this place, including now at least some of our worship life. We are clearly in transition. We are in a state of in-betweenness, and although I know many of us are hoping that won’t last forever, or even too much longer, in a certain sense I do hope it lasts forever. In a metaphorical and spiritual sense, I do hope this sense of being in an in-between state will last as long as Sojourners lasts.
This, of course, is not a new thought for Sojourners. Our name implies a sense of movement, implies the idea that wherever we are now is not where we might find ourselves in the future. Though we have certain core values, we are an evolving community, at our best always evolving, whether we are moving into a new building or not. And in that regard I want to take a moment to say to people who are relatively new to the congregation, who have been visiting with us over the last few weeks or months that you are, if you choose to be, part of this evolution. We will need you to help shape our worship life, our spiritual growth life, our outreach life, our justice-seeking life as a congregation. If it would help you to decide whether you want to be part of this evolving reality that is Sojourners (I’m not talking membership now, just being part of our constantly changing community)—if it would help you consider that process to meet with me, I’m available. That is, in a week I’m available, and I have my calendar with me this morning, and I’m ready to make appointments for the new year.
Our Christmas season this year has been flavored with a controversy over some ads the national United Church of Christ has put out. I’m not going to go back over the issues involved there… just to say that these ads are part of what the denomination refers to not as an ad campaign but a UCC identity campaign in which an effort is made to communicate and articulate a sense of who we are as a denomination both to the general public and to our own members. I bring this up today because the slogan that the UCC has adopted to go along with this identity campaign is “God Is Still Speaking”, which fits in with what I’m trying to say about Sojourners specifically. Our own interpretation of the name Sojourners says that it refers to people who want to be in a growing, changing relationship to God. God is still speaking and we live in a growing relationship to God. Some day soon we may be fully moved in and a little less in flux, in transition than we are now. But I hope at core our faith life keeps hold of the importance of this unsettledness, even after our circumstances have become a little more established.
I have said this before, and it’s pretty standard stuff for Sojourners, I think. But I do have just a few more thoughts along these lines that I want to say, variations on the theme you might say. I have been saying all along, and I have heard others express the same thought, that I’m hoping as we go through this time of transition that we not lose those things that are most important to us about Sojourners. Now granted, one of those things many of us don’t want to lose is this attitude of experimentation about what it means to be church, that we hope to avoid the tendency of falling into conventional notions of how to go about being church.
This issue surfaces even in our language. Someone was telling me that for some reason they had trouble saying the word sanctuary, and I confessed that I sometimes find myself pausing just slightly before I say it, and I’ve been in several conversations about what that area is when you come in the doors from the parking lot. “Is that a narthex?” people ask. For the record, my opinion on these issues is that sanctuary is a very good word that we should keep. It means safe place, and that is how we describe ourselves at the top of the bulletin every Sunday. Narthex is a church word we can do without, whatever it means. Hallways are just as good.
Then too, people talk, as I did at the beginning of the service, about feeling at home and looking on this building as a church home, all perfectly fine, and natural…as long as that way of thinking is combined with seeing this not only as a place that will be home for us and offered as a place for others to come to but that we will also keep that sense that has been forced upon us through the twelve years of our existence—the sense that much of our congregational life needs to be lived outside the place of worship, in homes, at C’ville Coffee (I ought to see if I can get a free lunch for plugging them) and in various public places throughout the community. We hope to feel truly at home here, yet not truly at home. We need to be always in a state of being in between, which it seems to me is a state Christians should always be in with regard to a church building or anything else. We are at home, yet cannot allow ourselves to feel at home in this building. At home, yet not at home, in Charlottesville. We are at home, yet not at home in this North American culture of ours. We are at home, yet not at home in the world.
I’m also thinking that I have been having the mindset of trying to make sure we don’t lose important pieces of ourselves in the course of this transition. I will continue to think about that. But there is another mindset that I think we may need to have, that we think about not just what we don’t want to lose but what we hope to gain—and I don’t mean just more members or more space or storage space. At some deeper level, how do we want Sojourners to be different 6 months, a year, 3 years from now? I think most of us probably with not too much thought could name some things about Sojourners we don’t want to lose, that we want to stay the same. I bet that many of us would have a harder time naming things we want to be different or that we want to be added.
And here is another thing along these lines. Several times during Advent this year I have suggested that we might think of ourselves as being collectively pregnant, waiting, preparing, anticipating, about to give birth to a new reality as we make this transition. It occurs to me today that this is a typically humano-centric way of looking at things. I’ve been thinking in terms of what we are doing or will do or want to do as we take up residence here. I’ve been thinking of this whole process we are engaged in as a kind of birth-giving process. And that’s an ok and probably necessary way to think, but it’s not the only way to think. Maybe I need to think not only of what we will be doing but of what God is doing. Maybe it’s not just what we are up to but what God is up to.
In all honesty, this is not language I use very often or that I am completely comfortable with. Quite often when I hear people talk about what God is doing it sounds a lot like it’s what they are doing but it’s being given God’s endorsement or authority. It also quite often has a tone of certainty, as though people know and understand what God is doing. I want to sound hesitant and unsure when I talk about what God is doing, but I do want to talk about it. I want to talk about it in the sense of the importance of our feeling engaged with God in what we do, whatever it is, and out of that engagement, something comes into being. We don’t do it all by ourselves. We don’t just think about what we’re going to do here. If it doesn’t have God in it, it won’t be worth doing. And whatever it is that we think we’re doing, God I think is at work on us. And God has a lot more work to do. It’s only been twelve years, and God surely isn’t finished with us. In fact she has just begun. It’s not that we have just begun. It’s that God has just begun his work in us, through us, with us. It’s an important difference, I think, in how we think about things.
And now let me at last get back to the scripture. Many of you may know that there is a magazine and a faith community based in Washington D.C. called Sojourners. Sometimes when people first encounter us, either local people or from other parts of the country, they assume because of our name that we are an outpost of the Sojourners Magazine community. I have to explain to people sometimes that not only is there no institutional connection but there was no conscious connection to these other Sojourners even in the choice of our name. Just a coincidence…except that as it turns out we are similar in a number of ways beyond the fact that the name Sojourners appealed to us.
In the most recent issue of Sojourners Magazine there was an article entitled something like, “Let’s Put Herod Back in Christmas.” The author’s point was that it’s too easy just to say that we ought to put Christ back in Christmas. That has been said so often it’s almost trite. And although hardly anyone could object to putting Christ back in Christmas, it is important to know what we mean when we say that. If putting Christ back in Christmas means focusing just on the feel-good parts of the story and of our faith, then we need to say to ourselves that that is not enough. It’s important to put Herod back in Christmas too. It’s important that the faith which is centered on Christ, that the faith of those who seek to follow Christ be prepared to take account of a world in which babies are unjustly put to death, whether it is by tyrants, by war, by the lack of food, clean drinking water, or adequate health care.
No time to bask in the glow of a Christmas filled with angels and alleluias. If you keep reading in Matthew’s version of the Christmas story, the very next verse leads you into the story of Herod’s paranoid frenzy and the slaughter of children, where instead of angels’ songs being heard in the heavens, the voice of Rachel, representing the ancestors, is heard weeping for her children. In the Bible that story comes right after the Christmas story. This year that reading comes up in the lectionary the very day after Christmas, a reminder to me that we do not live, cannot allow ourselves to live wholly in one place or the other. We balance ourselves delicately somehow in between. Just as we do every Sunday during prayer time when as we share joys and concerns we move back and forth between deeply felt worries and griefs and the sharing of things that call for gladness and celebration.
Or maybe it is not quite right to say that we live in between these two kinds of realities. Maybe what we need to do is to try to live at precisely that point where they come together, where weeping and rejoicing live side by side, where laughter mingles with tears, where the harsh realities of our world are touched by the love of God, and by our own love, however imperfect that love may be. That’s not an easy thing to do, and so we have a lot of work to do. God has a lot of work to do. And so far as we’re concerned, God has only just begun. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 26, 2004
“The Work of Christmas” by Howard Thurman
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
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 the people of the earth,
To make music in the heart.