St Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church
Rev Kristin Schultz
Christmas Eve 2013

“While they were [in Bethlehem], the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”

It’s a story we all know.
A familiar story,
            layered with memories and meaning from all our Christmases past.
It brings to mind churches where we worshiped by candlelight
with loved ones who are gone.
Pageants with children dressed as shepherds and angels,
            singing Away in a Manger.
Caroling in neighborhoods or nursing homes,
            sharing well-loved songs with friends and neighbors.
I often hear in my head the voice of Linus from the Charlie Brown Christmas special, “In those days a decree went out . . .

It can be hard for us to hear this story,
            covered as it is by so many memories and expectations.
How do we open our ears to hear the story when it is so familiar?

Preacher and professor Fred Craddock put the question a different way,
“The first question is, how will we get to Bethlehem?
 The magi are directed by great leaning, by their ability to interpret the movements of stars and planets in the heavens, and by the learning of the sages in Jerusalem.
Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem as a family going about its business of life. The shepherds go to Bethlehem by dramatic, heavenly revelation.
By all these roads travelers can reach Bethlehem.
By whatever road we take, the story invites us all.”

The way to Bethlehem is different for each one of us.
Our way depends on who we are and our own circumstances.
Some of us are here tonight with loved ones we seldom see;
            some are missing loved ones who are far away or have died.
Some of us grew up in church and never left;
            for others the communtiy of faith is new,
or something rediscovered after years away.
Each of us has come to this place of worship tonight by a different path,
            yet we are here for the same reason -
            to hear again the story of the birth of Jesus Christ.
We come to hear of the birth of a baby in Bethlehem – 
            and to hear how that birth is a gift for us still, 2000 years later.

At our 5:00 service this evening, many children gathered to hear the story,
            and they helped me put the figures in the nativity scene
and hang the stars above Jesus’ bed.
Many of us set out nativity scenes at home.
At my house we have a nativity scene with a cardboard stable and plastic figures.
It is set out in the boys’ play area,
and over the years I’ve always been amused to see what or who has found its way into the in to stand beside the virgin and her baby.
For many years it was cars and trains.
A stuffed bear or penguin.
Now it’s more likely to be Star Wars LEGO figures.
At my Mom’s house, my almost-3-year-old nephew, Cedric, insists that his stuffed bear belongs in the stable next to baby Jesus.

It reminds me of a news story I heard years ago.
The story was about a small part of Italy,
and a special tradition they followed in setting up their nativity scenes.
In each household, extra objects were carefully placed in the scene
            beside the traditional figures.
I think the story made the news because it was the year Princess Diana died,
            and many households included a picture of Diana in their nativities.
Pictures of loved ones – mementos of past events –
            symbols of hopes and concerns for the future -
            all found their way into the stable with the shepherds.
The people in this region made their own memories and expectations,
their own grief and hope, part of their nativity scenes.
They literally laid their hopes and dreams and struggles
            at the feet of the baby Jesus.
In this way they brought their lives into the Christmas story.

How will we get to Bethlehem?
What will we bring to lay at the feet of the Christ?
As I reflect on these questions,
it occurs to me that maybe they aren’t the right questions to ask.
Christmas is about God’s decision to become human and come to live on earth. 
Christmas means that God chose to come to us,
            to become part of our world.
The baby born at Christmas is Emmanuel, God with us.
God is in the world, whether or not we see.
God is at work in our lives, whether or not we recognize it.

So perhaps the real question to ask at Christmas is,
How has God come into my life this year?
In what, or in whom, have I met God today?

This is the power of the Incarnation, God becoming human:
            Because God took on flesh in a particular time, in a particular place,
            God enters into the lives of believers in every time and place.

We come together tonight to catch a glimpse of Bethlehem,
            to hear again the story of a baby named Jesus, Savior.
We come to hear the proclamation of the angel:
            “I am bringing you glad tidings of great joy for all the people;
            to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior,
                        who is Christ the Lord.

We come to sing with the host of angels,
            “Glory to God in the highest!”
Because we know that this story is our story.
We know that this savior is our savior.
We know that this news is indeed good news of great joy.
Because we know the Savior lives not only 2000 years ago,
            but here and now, in our world
                          in our own lives.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.

When we think of the story of Jesus’ birth, we think of the story in Luke’s gospel,
            complete with manger, shepherds, and a choir of angels.
Matthew's account is simpler, more to the point –
–      just a simple story of two vulnerable  people
and a relationship that almost ends before it begins.
Matthew lacks the details and romance of Luke,
            but his account tells us something about how he sees Jesus
and what the birth of this baby means to the world.

At the start of the story, Mary and Joseph are betrothed –
which means more than just engaged.
In Hebrew culture at that time, there were two different steps to becoming married.
The first step was the contract that bound the couple legally.
Mary and Joseph had already completed that step,
which means they they were legally married,
and ending the relationship would require a divorce.
The second step in the marriage usually followed some months after the legal contract.
It was the time of the marriage feast,
and when the husband took his bride into his home.

When Joseph finds out Mary is pregnant before she comes into his home,
he is sure she has committed adultery.
Adultery is certain cause for divorce – and possibly for stoning the offender.
So Matthew says Joseph is righteous – showing kindness and mercy - because he seeks to protect Mary as best he can by divorcing her quietly.
But there is not much future for Mary as a divorced, pregnant young woman.

And this is where God intervenes in an unexpected way.
Joseph dreams of an angel, who tells him to stay with Mary,
and raise her baby as his own.
Essentially, the angel says to him:
            “This is not what you had planned. You may be confused and hurting ,
but it is going to be okay. God is doing something new and wonderful –
and you are a part of it.
The angel tells Joseph that the child Mary will have is from the Holy Spirit

I love that Matthew uses those words:  from the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is the breath of life and renewal;
the Lord, the giver of life, the bringer of unexpected blessing.
What God is doing in Jesus, through the lives of Joseph and Mary and the power of the Holy Spirit,
is a radically new beginning.

It is interesting that in Matthew’s gospel it is Joseph, not Mary, who is visited by an angel, and who makes the amazing choice to trust and follow God’s plan.
Luke’s Mary gets the stirring response “Here I am, the servant of the Lord”
and the poetic song of praise.
Joseph says nothing –
            he simply awakens, gets up, and goes out to do what God has asked.
Still, his choice to go against societal expectations,
to look past his own hurt and confusion, is just as amazing.
Mary and Joseph both choose to trust.
They embark on a completely unexpected adventure-
richer and more challenging than they could possibly expect or imagine.
It is easy to think of Mary and Joseph as somehow super-human.
But I don’t think that’s the picture Matthew wants us to have.
Matthew’s Mary and Joseph are profoundly human figures,
            who find themselves in a difficult and messy situation.
Seminary professor David Lose writes,
“We’re not used to this. We’re accustomed to thinking about the beauty and wonder of the birth of Jesus, and that’s appropriate. But let’s not forget the distress, sense of betrayal, disappointment, and a host of other emotions that Joseph must have experienced, or the fear and hurt that Mary would likely have also felt as they sorted out their divinely complex relationship.

Why might that be helpful? Because Mary and Joseph aren’t merely characters from a stained-glass window, but flesh and blood people. And the more we can imagine them as people like us -- with ups and downs to their relationships, for instance -- the more we might imagine ourselves to be people like them -- that is, people who go through all kinds of things, some quite damaging, and yet whom God uses nevertheless to accomplish God’s purposes.”

Or, as another writer put is, God comes through ordinary mixed up people
in order to save ordinary mixed up people.
People just like us.

And that is how Matthew describes the birth of Christ.
Jesus comes as one of us, born not into Hallmark card family,
but into a family that experiences struggle and love,
heartache and celebration – just like ours.
The angel tells Joseph to name the baby Jesus – which means, Yahweh saves.
This baby brings God’s salvation into the world in a new way.
This baby is Emmanuel, God-with-us.
God saves us by coming to be with us – coming to be one of us.

      

Today is a hard day at St Michael and All Angels.
Our preparations for Christmas, our celebrations and special devotions,
            are interrupted today by a particular grief.
We have been blessed by Sue’s ministry and her very special presence among us
these past two years.
We are not ready to say goodbye,
            yet we are grateful to Sue for all she has meant to us.
We send her on today with our love, our blessings and our certain knowledge
that her great gifts for ministry and passion for God’s people will bless another congregation.

We continue on our transition time – grown even more complex and challenging.
We at St Michael’s are in an extended Advent time,
            waiting to see how God will show up among us
            in new and unexpected ways.
Some of us will continue in vial tasks which serve and bless the community;
            others will take on new roles to fill new opportunities.
We will go forward together in trust,
            not knowing where our journey will take us,
but knowing our God is Emmanuel – with us now,
and ready to be with us in new and exciting ways.

Aaron Klink, a Fellow in the Duke University Program in Theology and Medicine, wrote:
“Amid all our less-than-perfect Christmases, the Christmas trees that are not quite as perfect as we want them to be, the lives that are not quite as perfect as we want them to be, God does something new.”

O Come, Emmanuel, and help us to be your Advent people in this time.
O come, Emmanuel, and help us to be ready to see you in new ways.
O come, Emmanuel, and help us to be ready to awaken, to get up and to follow you.

The Feast of Guadalupe                     St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church
Zechariah 2:  10-11                             Albuquerque, New Mexico
Dec. 15, 2013

Guadalupe, Mandela and the Grinch Who Tried to Steal Christmas:
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Susan Allison-Hatch

Each year, on the 12th of December, people throughout the Americas rise early and make their way to church where they greet  La Virgen de Guadalupe with songs and flowers and a retelling of her story.  Each year they spend the day in celebration.

This year, I spent much of the day reflecting on her story, our story, and the crowds of people—black and white, South Africans and Afrikaners together—I’d been watching dancing and singing in the streets of South Africa as they celebrated the life and mourned the death of Nelson Mandela—the one they call Madiba. 

Late in the day, I took a break. I went off in search of a Christmas tree.  Every year we get our tree on December 12 and every year we return to the same lot to get our Christmas tree.  They have a nice selection of reasonably sized, reasonably priced, reasonably fresh trees.  And every year I ask the Anglo who escorts me through the lot the same question.  “Are you Swedish?”  It’s a reasonable question to be asking.  He looks like a Swede.  He talks like a Swede.  And, coming as I do from a part of the country where Swedes and Christmas seem to go hand-in-hand, I always hope he’s Swedish.  Every year I ask, and every year he deflects my question. 

Until Thursday, the Feast day of La Virgen.  We were looking at a Blue Spruce he pulled out for me to inspect.  Again I asked, “Are you Swedish?”  This time he answered, “No.  I’m South African.”  How could I not have asked him about Mandela?  So I did.  His reply knocked me cold.  “He was a terrible man.  I hated him.  I was one of four soldiers tracking him down.  He should have been eliminated, but the world got in the way.”

“What,” I said to myself, “What am I hearing?”  I wondered as I walked away to the other side of the lot, “Was it the world that got in the way or was it God—God dwelling in Apartheid South Africa?”  I had to get away.  I couldn’t stay with that question.  I couldn’t stay in that place.  I grabbed a tree—maybe one of the ugliest trees on that lot—and said, “I’ll take this one.” 

As I was getting ready to drive off, the man who runs the lot came up to me.  He put his weathered brown Juan Diego hand on my car door and held it open.  He had a story to tell, and he wasn’t going to let me go until he told it. 

The year before, one of his long-time customers came to the lot to get her tree.  She drove an old white pick-up that was in mint-condition.  As she was paying for the tree, he slipped her a note with his phone number on it and said, “If you ever decide to sell the truck, call me.”  On Thursday, the Feast Day of La Virgen de Guadalupe, her husband returned to the lot to get his tree.  As he was paying for the tree, he said to the owner of the lot, “My wife died last year.  She left you something in her will—that old truck of hers.”

I have no idea why he told me that story.  I like to think he told it as a counterpoint to the vitriol I’d just heard.  A Guadalupano moment of healing and wholeness and new life.  God dwelling in the here and now.

I don’t know the historicity of the Guadalupe we celebrate today.  I don’t know if there ever was a Juan Diego who encountered a brown virgin on the Tepeyac Hill.  I don’t know if, on that winter day almost five hundred years ago, the hill was covered with roses in bloom and the air filled with song.  There’s no documentary evidence to support those claims.  And yet there’s a truth to the story.

The story of a people defeated and a land conquered.  The story of a people dying from foreign diseases.  The story of a people whose very identity was quashed as their relationship with their gods was severed.  The story of a people confused, fearful, facing change they couldn’t understand and surely did not welcome.

The story of a people visited by a brown virgin giving them comfort, giving them hope, calling on them to work together with their conquerors to build her a shrine where she could listen to their cries of woe and alleviate their sufferings.

I know the truth of that story.  I’ve seen it at work in the power of her image—the image we see today. Whenever I look at that image, I’m reminded of the day I walked in her wake.  A May Day in San Francisco.  At the time, I didn’t really get what was going on.  I was just taken up in the moment.  Thousands and thousands of people crowded between the buildings lining Market Street in San Francisco.  Chants of “Si! Se Puede!” echoing through the crowd.  Helping my Jesuit friend Eddie Fernandez from El Paso hold up his weathered banner of Guadalupe.  People waving from second story windows, pointing to the banner and smiling.  Others coming up to the banner, kissing their fingers and then touching the image of Guadalupe.  A crowd of people—brown and black and white—marching in her wake.  There, standing out amidst all the signs and banners, the image of Guadalupe drawing people in, giving people life,  giving people hope.  Assuring a suffering people that a loving God is present with them, sharing their burdens, bringing them hope.  God dwelling with them.

To a people returning from exile, to a people filled with memories of life in a foreign land and tales of the war and siege and capture that brought them there, the prophet Zechariah offers a vision—a vision of God dwelling with them.  Twice the prophet assures the people of Israel—both those returning from exile and those who stayed behind—that  God will dwell in the midst of them.  That theme of God dwelling in the midst of God’s people and its variant—God’s people dwelling with God—is a theme that runs throughout the scriptures. A promise fueling the song Mary sings. A promise fundamental to life with God. And yet the very frequency with which that promise appears suggests that it’s a hard one for folks to grasp. 

So often when things are tough, when things don’t turn out the way we hoped—times of confusion and fear—we forget that God dwells with us.  We forget that the Spirit of God, as Paul puts it, working in us and through us can do far more that we ourselves can ever do.   And yet as the prophet Isaiah assures a people living in darkness, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Those who lived in the land of the shadow of death, on them the light has shined.”  That’s a truth Nelson Mandela knew.  That’s a truth the people dancing and singing and chanting Madiba knew from the center of their being. That’s a truth they have lived. That’s a truth that man with a brown weathered Juan Diego hand knew.  That’s a truth he too has lived.

You and I, we—the part of the Body of Christ we call St. Michael’s—are living in a time of change and confusion and uncertainty.  Things aren’t now as they have been—for us as individuals and for us as a community.  We’re living in the bowl of a question mark and the sides of that bowl sometimes seem awfully steep.  And yet there’s something to be said for resting in the bowl of a question mark.  It gives us time to pause, to rest, to let God work in us and through us.  For God is at work in us just as God was at work in South Africa at the height of apartheid—at work birthing something new. 

Whenever I find myself falling into the frantic mode, I return to a canticle from the New Zealand Book of Common Prayer—a poem by Edward Carpenter.  Please pray with me:

Let your mind be quiet, realising the beauty of the world,
  and the immense, the boundless treasures that it holds in store.
All that you have within you, all that your heart desires,
  all that your Nature so specially fits you for – that or the
  counterpart of it waits embedded in the great Whole, for you.
  It will surely come to you.

Yet equally surely not one moment before its appointed time
  will it come.  All your crying and fever and reaching out of
  hands will make no difference.
Therefore do not begin that game at all.
Do not recklessly spill the waters of your mind
  in this direction and in that,
  lest  you become like a spring lost and
  dissipated in the desert.

But draw them together into a little compass, and hold them
  still, so still;
 And let them become clear, so clear –so limpid, so mirror-like;
 at last the mountains and the sky shall glass themselves in
   peaceful beauty,
 and the antelope shall descend to drink and to gaze at her
   reflected image, and the lion to quench his thirst,
 and Love himself shall come and bend over and catch his
   own likeness in you.1

1Edward Carpenter, "The Lake of Beauty" in The New Zealand Book of Common Prayer, 157.

We're sorry, the full text for this sermon is not available. Please enjoy listening to the audio version!

We're sorry, the full text for this sermon is not available. Please enjoy listening to the audio version!