Sermons

Dec 30 - Deacon Jan Bales - First Sunday after Christmas

1st Sunday after Christmas – 2007

Merry Christmas! Just think today is only the 6th day of Christmas! Six down and six to go. Twelve glorious days of Christmas. Time to relax and really enjoy the season. For years I have waged an unsuccessful campaign to celebrate the full 12 days of Christmas. This campaign was initiated for selfish reasons. Long ago I worked in church offices without benefit of computers or speedy printers or e-mail, (sort of like now), so the weeks before Christmas were breathtaking and stressful. It was not until Midnight Mass was over that I felt I could breathe. The thought of having twelve wonderful days ahead to shop when everything was on sale, to write Christmas cards at leisure, to just savor the season was and still is a passion with me. However, these days of Christmastide continue to be a schizophrenic time for many of us. In spite of the promise of hope and peace and joy and love radiating out from the manger in light beams, too often we feel the darkness lingering around the edges and experience depression, a curious sense of loss or sadness, perhaps even fear. Light vs. darkness: we just can’t divorce ourselves from the world or ourselves, nor should we. Where is the balance? Where does today’s Gospel lead us?

As Christians celebrating a liturgical year, we had our Church’s New Year’s on the 1st Sunday of Advent, yet tomorrow night remains New Year’s Eve for most of us. The end of the old, beginning of the new is always a “bittersweet time, an occasion of grief for what has passed and of resolutions to do better.” (Portaro)

It is by a deliberate choice or a wonderful grace that today’s Gospel heard every year on the 1st Sunday after Christmas is the same Gospel appointed for New Year’s Eve in our Lesser Feasts and Fasts cycle. For these opening verses of the Gospel of John are exactly what we need, right this very minute. We need a boost. We need to start the calendar year with a crucial about our life in Christ and what it means to us and to the world. It is a time to assess our faith, take on anew the armor of light. It is a time to be sure we are, indeed, children of the light and not unwittingly children of the darkness. It is time to remember that our faith is based on the belief in wondrous love and hope summed up in these verses: “All that came to be was alive with his life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines on in the dark, and the darkness has never mastered it.”

I remember the first time I read this Gospel aloud to a congregation. I thought, “I don’t have a clue what I just read, but it is so beautiful.” Twenty-five years later this passage has lost none of its beauty and, frankly, I am still clueless, because I don’t pretend to understand the mystery of the incarnation. Somewhere in the intervening years I came to believe the words, and not because “the Bible says so.” I am comfortable living in the mystery of the incarnation and what that means for you and for me and for the world. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never mastered it.” These words, the core of my belief and faith and hope, are built on the experience of seeing God at work in the world. Encountering Jesus all the time.

As I typed these words Thursday morning, my husband came to tell me that Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated in Pakistan. As I walked into the room to look at the TV, I picked the up the NY Times from the kitchen counter. The largest photo was of Haitians crossing a bridge to the Dominican Republic where they were going to buy necessities and seek work. The headline read: “A Global Trek to Poor Nations, From Poorer Ones: The Overlooked Migration.” Think we have an immigration problem? According to the World Bank 74 million “south to south” migrants move from one developing country to another. A smaller photo showed the toothpick legs of a Sudanese refugee, the article headline reading: “Darfu sees rise in Malnutrition: More children Afflicted Despite Aid Efforts.” Closer to home, the front page headlines included: “Many Retirees May Lose Benefits From Employers: Coverage Can Be Cut When A Beneficiary Reaches 65.” How about: “Major Retailers Feel the Squeeze From Consumers: A Tightening Economy Touches Merchants Rarely Affected.” Perhaps that’s why people don’t pledge. Another read: “The $50 Ticket: A Lottery Boom Raises Concern.” Well, it was “gloom and doom” for the most part. The last photo on the front page revealed a happy and healthy looking Senator John McCain and his family. Part of on-going series on the presidential candidates, the headline reads: “A Large, Close Brood That Bridges 2 Marriages and 4 Decades.” While I am not putting the good Senator in the “gloom and doom” department, the story about the sometimes unhealthy aspects of presidential politics and effects on family life certainly are not the best part of our democratic system. Then Friday morning’s ALBQ Journal ran a half page photo of Ms Bhutto and an almost banner headline: “A Dangerous World is now more Dangerous.”

A bittersweet time of year, indeed. It is no surprise that much of what we see and read reminds us about the darkness out there. That has always been true and certainly will be so in the foreseeable future. “The light shines on in the dark and the darkness has never mastered it.” The old year is gone, the new year is about to begin. The Good News that begins the Gospel of John is that a story about fresh beginnings, of a new human race about to be unfolded.” As one commentator points out, “To preach John’s kind of faith it is as necessary to believe in a solid, sooty, sinful creation as it is to believe in a God who utters a creative Word.” (unquote,p. 18)

It is not just a matter of being a bloody Pollyanna. I am not blind to pain and suffering around us. However, it is easy to ignore the darkness for we live in a culture where artificial brightness lights our world. At a tremendous cost to the environment, I might add. But all the neon and glitz cannot, in the end, hide the darkness. But as children of the light with a mandate to serve others, we simply cannot pretend there is not darkness in the hearts of those who deliberately harm another, that there is not darkness in the countless numbers who will end this day in pain or hunger or homelessness. There is a dark side to our bright lives – a hunger that material wealth never seems to satisfy. Something made obvious by post-Christmas-present-opening depression.

To combat the darkness, we must be willing to sink into the mystery. We cannot pretend the darkness is not there, but embrace it in a loving sort of way, knowing at some core level that God is in all of life. At some point we need to stop seeing the opening verses of John’s Gospel as a beautiful idea and believe in our hearts that darkness will never overcome the light. Sometimes it does indeed feel as if we are a people whose numbers are diminishing in a world whose cynicism and pessimism seems to be gaining ground. Ah, but back to the mystery, the unfathomable love of God who choses to pitch his tent among us. Who becomes incarnate, enfleshed, in Jesus, loving us in a radical new way. Madeleine L’Engle writes: “This is the irrational season/when love blooms bright and wild./Had Mary been filled with reason/There’d have been no room for the child.”
Sometimes, in spite of the evidence around us, we have to say “yes” to mystery. We have to be doers of the word and not just thinkers of the Word and just start pitching those starfish back into the ocean. We have to get unstuck. We have to accept even if we do not understand the unquenchable power of love. We have to hear the words of the prophet Isaiah (9:2-7) about being the people who walked in darkness but have seen a great light. We must believe the light at the end of the dark tunnel is precisely that, a great light of hope and promise and not a train coming at us. Are we going to be exempt from pain and suffering and frustration and loss? Of course not. But we are never, ever going to be alone. That is what this community, this faith, this belief in the incarnation is all about even if we don’t fully comprehend it.

Today’s Gospel reminds us that we can argue and research all we want about the historical Jesus, we can pick at translations, we can argue about interpretation, but the only thing we really need to know is that Jesus Christ is God incarnate. Knowing that guarantees that we are children of the light and not children of darkness because knowing that means we will listen to the teachings of Jesus and act accordingly. Jesus says: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus says: Feed the hungry. Give water to the thirsty. Welcome the stranger. Clothe the naked. Care for the sick. Visit the prisoner. The light of Christ means something only when the attempt is made to dispel the prevailing darkness no matter where we are or with what resources we have. Only then can we turn on the morning news, pick up the daily paper and know in our hearts that “the light shines on in the dark and the darkness has never mastered it.” Amen