​Advent is the season in the church when we prepare for Christmas.
It is a season of hope and expectation,
            a time set aside in the church calendar for prayer and reflection.
It is a time to focus on what is to come with the birth of Christ into the world,
            and how Christ’s coming has and will impact our lives.
 
 
In the wider culture, the holiday season is very much the opposite.
It is the season of expectations – high expectations for ourselves and others,
            as we try to create a perfect Christmas for family and friends,
            as we are encouraged to buy more and do more,
                        so that all may be perfect when Christmas day comes.
But the perfection the culture looks for is superficial and sentimental –
            visions of sugar plums that dance in our heads,
            even when we know better.
The images all around us, the songs blaring from every radio,
            speak of family and romance and happiness and perfect white snow,
             and “the most wonderful time of the year.”
 
But for some of us, Christmas is just the opposite.
It is the season when grief rises, when depression deepens,
            when loneliness that we usually push to the backs of our minds
            comes to the forefront.
It is the season when our expectations of ourselves and others can become so inflated, that we are bound to end up disappointed.
 
.
The Gospel of John gives us a different idea of what it is we hope for at Christmas,      
             and speaks in a particular way to those of us who struggle with the season –
            whether from grief and sadness,
                        or from anxiety of too high expectations for ourselves and others.
 
John echoes the opening lines of Scripture – In the Beginning
Genesis says – In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth
John say –  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word with with God,
            and the Word was God.
 
John reminds us that this is the God who has always been involved in human history             – the God who created it all, who has spoken through the prophets,
            who has been in relationship with God’s people through law and covenant.
Yet now, God is getting more personally involved, as the very Word of God takes human flesh and dwells with us in our own human form.
 
This offers a new vision of hope for us.
That at Christmas God fulfills God’s promise to be Immanuel – God with us.
That God does not hold out expectations of perfection or performance,
            but rather comes to us with a promise –
            “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age”
 
And this promise was given and fulfilled not just ages ago – not just with the physical birth of Jesus, that one moment in history when God took on human flesh –
            but now, here in New Mexico in 2015,
God still promises to be Immanuel, God with us.
John focuses our attention not on a baby and a birth,
            but on the eternal Christ, who has always been in the world from its creation,
            who continues to be in the world as light shining in the darkness.
 
That phrase in verse five, The light shines in the darkness, can also be translated as:
The light shines on in the darkness
The light continues to shine in the darkness
            and the darkness cannot overcome it.
And that is the promise of Advent, and the gift of Christmas.
That no matter what has happened or has not happened in our lives,
no matter our griefs and disappointments, our mistakes and unmet expectations,
            the light of Jesus continues to shine in our darkness.
The light of Jesus is stronger than our darkness.
 
Seminary Professor David Lose writes about this lesson from John,
            Perhaps this is why John gives such scant attention to the details of Jesus'            birth. He is, ultimately, more interested in our new birth as children of God.    According to            John, Christmas is not really Jesus’s birthday at all; rather it is         ours. Christmas is the day we celebrate our birth as children of God, the keeping   of all God’s promises, and the beginning of the restoration of all creation.
 
John tells us that God has seen the darkness in the world,
            and has come into the world ready to shine light in that darkness.
Ready to struggle against that darkness.
Ready to wrestle with the darkness in our lives and in our world
            until new life is possible.
Re- birth is not easy.
New life doesn’t come easily, or quickly, or in quite the way we expect it.
But Jesus promises that his light does shine,
            that his light can penetrate even our darkest places,
and that if we are willing to stay in that light a new way will come clear.
 
 
So, however you spend Christmas this year,
I invite you to look at your expectations in the light of Christ,
            and let go of the ones that hold you in the darkness.
I invite you to remember, on Christmas morning, that you celebrate not only the birth of Jesus 2,000 years ago, but your own re-birth-day as a child of God.
 
The light shines on in the darkness,  and the darkness cannot overcome it.
Thanks be to God.
Amen

Have you ever suffered from a case of Funky Brain?1 Funky brain is a not-very-scientific term for that state of mind into which you fall when your thoughts become so preoccupied with concern or anxiety that you lose the ability to think clearly and objectively about what it is that you should do. Funky brain can be brought on by worry, or by grief, or by anger—and it is as if your brain, like an overloaded computer—crashes from the sheer volume of thoughts pouring through its circuits. The result is that you end up making bad choices, bad decisions, and reaching false conclusions.
Most insidious is the fact that the phenomenon of funky brain is not limited to individuals, but can afflict whole communities, and even nations and entire cultures. Indeed, we seem as a nation to be experiencing just such a case of collective funky brain right now, tied in knots as we are about threats—either real or imaginary—that we perceive to be all around us. And as you would expect, it limits our collective capacity to think dispassionately about what real choices there are in front of us—just listen to the volume of the political rhetoric in the press.
Fear is one of the most prevalent causes of funky brain. When we are afraid, our minds become preoccupied with guarding against that of which we are afraid, and so our mental focus becomes narrowed and our capacity to take a longer view becomes limited. We become tempted to say and to do things that, were we in our right frame of mind, we would know to be wrong and contrary to our most deeply held values: we know this lesson all too clearly from history.
How interesting, then, that fear should figure so prominently during this season of Advent and Christmas in the story of Jesus and his birth. In fact, the phrase “Fear not” becomes something of a leitmotiv for this season: when Gabriel first announces to Mary that she shall conceive and bear a son, what does he say? “Fear not.” When an angel appears to Joseph in a dream, encouraging him to accept the condition of his pregnant young betrothed, what does she say? “Fear not.” When the angels appear to the shepherds on the night of Jesus’ birth, bringing glad tidings of great joy, what do they say? “Fear not.” And these admonitions not to be afraid are something more, I think, that just words of reassurance and encouragement: they have the deeper meaning of being a warning against falling through fear into the condition of funky brain, wherein neither Mary nor Joseph nor even the shepherds would be able to fulfill the role they had each been given to play in the world’s redemption.
Take Mary, for instance. More than anyone, she had every reason to be afraid—what with the mysterious angelic visitor, an unexpected pregnancy, the challenge of an arduous journey to Bethlehem, the experience of homelessness on the night of her delivery, and then the urgent flight into Egypt to escape the terror of Herod’s jealousy. One can easily imagine that Mary might have become consumed with a level of worry and anxiety that would push her into funky brain, closing her spirit off from the mystery of what God had called her to be and to do. Yet throughout, she remains poised, focused, and resolutely unafraid—choosing instead to ponder these things carefully in her heart so that she would be able to rise above the moment and persevere in what lay before her.
In today’s gospel, we catch a glimpse of one such episode in Mary’s odyssey: her visit to her cousin Elizabeth, who is herself pregnant with the future John the Baptist. Elizabeth was an elderly woman whose desire for a child—seemingly a futile dream—had now been fulfilled through the promise of God. Perhaps because she too is the recipient of God’s grace, she quickly perceives Mary’s own confidence and quiet dignity in her situation, saying to Mary, “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” Together, Mary and Elizabeth share an intimate moment of acceptance and mutual reassurance, which enables Mary to respond that her soul  “magnifies” the Lord, that is, it extols and lauds God’s graciousness to her. Moving through her fear to a place of quiet confidence, Mary is remarkable for her embodiment of self-confidence and determination.
In rather sharp contrast, the gospels also offer examples of other people close to Jesus who let their fear get the better of them. The disciple Peter is chief among them. Peter, you remember, is notorious for his impetuosity, and that impulsiveness might often be understood as a sign of an underlying case of funky brain. As Jesus is arrested in the garden, for example, Peter’s unthinking fear causes him to react with rather silly violence, reaching for a sword to cut off the ear of the high priest’s slave (an action for which Jesus quickly rebukes him). Then when Jesus most needs Peter’s loyalty as he is tried before Pilate, Peter’s fear causes him instead to deny Jesus three times—a decision he later comes to regret bitterly. Funky brain makes Peter violent, it makes him untrustworthy, it causes him to betray not only Jesus, but his own integrity.
And that is the great danger of fear: it causes us to behave in ways that are not true to ourselves. It causes us to react before thinking. It causes us to find scapegoats, to rationalize injustices, to turn away from the stranger. That’s why when Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the American people in his first inaugural in 1933, during the darkest days of the Great Depression, that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he was not simply trying to evoke their confidence and courage. He was also warning against the fact that if we let ourselves be afraid, that very fear can cause us to lose sight in a time of crisis of what we value most as a nation—namely our commitment to freedom and the common good—and therefore to turn against one another, to lose our sense of compassion, to ostracize the stranger, and to erects walls and barriers rather than to extend a helping hand. Fear, in other words, can be a greater threat to our common life, than that of which we are afraid, for fear attacks us from within, and the resulting mental confusion makes us powerless to guard against it. That is why fear is the ultimate aim of the terrorist: it is a far more effective weapon for undermining an enemy than any bomb or gunfire: as FDR warned, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
This then is the lesson that Advent and Christmas hold for us this year: faced with violence that has the potential to evoke our fear, it would be good instead to take time (like Mary pondering things in her heart) to step back and ask the harder questions, to take time to do the hard work of thinking more carefully about what is at play in the world around us, and to take the time to let the clarity and insight which come from such thoughtful deliberation ward off the debilitating consequences of fear. It would be good, in other words, for us as a people and a nation to head this season’s refrain of “Fear not,” and to realize that it is addressed not just to the actors at Jesus’ birth, but to us as well. That is the message that we as Christian people have to offer to our community in this season of watching and waiting: “Fear not.” As Psalm 37 so astutely warns us, “Do not fret yourself because of evildoers … [but] put your trust in the Lord and do good. … Refrain from anger, leave rage alone; [but] do not fret yourself; [for that] leads only to evil.” Amen.

© Joseph Britton 2015

1 I borrow this phrase from Rob Voyle of the Clergy Leadership Institute and his courses on “Appreciative Inquiry.”

​“In the name of God who brings light to the darkness.”
Today we hear two stories.  One we know well..  A story set in the distant reaches of the Roman Empire.  A story set in a time of oppression—both civil and religious.  A story set in a time when violence stalked the land.
 
The other story we hear today is one most of us don’t know as well.  It’s not part of our ordinary repertoire.  It doesn’t appear in the Revised Common Lectionary.  It, too, is a story set against a backdrop of violence.  A story of conquest and obliteration.   A story etched in hues of humiliation and disruption, illness, enslavement and death. 
 
You and I,  we hear these stories against the backdrop of our own stories set in a world not so different from the worlds that have preceded ours.  We hear these stories amidst a clattering cacophony of voices playing to and exploiting our fears of the darkness in our own world, in our own lives. 
 
We can all—everyone of us gathered here today—see and catalogue the darkness that enshrouds us, the darkness that sometimes overwhelms us .  We scan our Facebook page, turn on the radio, watch the news, catch a glimpse of the newsfeeds that pop up on our smart phones and we see  the arrogance, the meanness, the fear and the terror that seem to mark our days.  We see the Herods of our day (both ours and theirs), the thugs and the bullies, bosses that intimidate, the powerful who abuse their power.  We note the spate of gun violence and mass murders, the vituperativeness in social discourse, the rise of bad boys and bad girls on our national stage.  In sadness we record our fear, our apprehension, our worry about what the future holds  for our children.
 
And yet…
 
In the midst of the darkness, in the midst of all our fear and anxiety and weariness, we hear the voice of Mary singing, “My sprit rejoices in God my savior for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.  From this day on all generations will call me blessed:  the almighty has done great things for me and Holy is his name.
 
In the midst of all the hype and xenophobia that mark our public discourse, we hear La Virgen de Guadalupe say, “I will hear their weeping and their sorrows and will remedy and alleviate their sufferings, necessities and misfortunes.”
 
In this world of noise and bombast, terror and fear and the killing of the innocent, we witness Juan Diego called by Guadalupe to pick roses sprung up on a wintry hillside.  We see him walk tentatively into the halls of power, unfurl his cloak, and spread those roses at the Bishop’s feet.  And as he does, we hear the ground beneath the Bishop’s feet shift.
 
In the midst of all the meanness and bombasity, the chorus of “no’s” and “anti’s”, the clanging and clattering and clamoring of bellicose voices that poison our airwaves, we hear those stories and we remember that “seemingly ordinary lives can be imbued with the extraordinary spirit of God to transform the world.”1
 
So often folks look at all the bleakness, at the enormity of it all and wonder, “Will this ever change?” “What’s a person to do?” “Where is God?”
 
And we forget.
 
We forget that young woman from a backwater village in the distant reaches of the Roman Empire.  We forget that peasant farmer sent off with a cloak full of roses.  We forget that “ordinary lives can be imbued with the extraordinary spirit of God to transform the world.”
 
But it’s not always about extraordinary game-changing acts that change the course of history writ large.  God is at work in ordinary moments in the ordinary lives of ordinary people like you and me. 
 
Not long ago a friend told me about a story his mother often tells.  A story of a time when she was hovering between life and death.  A story set in the early days of World War Two.  She had contracted a virulent case of tuberculosis.  Eighteen months into her three-year stay in the TB ward, she was at her lowest point.  Despairing of seeing another spring, she said to the nurse caring for her,  “I wonder if there is green grass hidden under all that snow.”  The nurse replied, “Hmm….” and went on about her work. 
 
Thirty minutes later the nurse was back.  Her cheeks red from the cold.  Her hands dripping with melting snow.  “You asked about the grass,” she said as she opened her hands.  There in those cold wet hands was a clump of green grass.  To this day, my friend’s mother claims that that clump of green grass made all the difference in the world.  To this day, my friend’s mother attributes her recovery to the hope she found in that grass.  The spirit of God transforming the world through the hands of a nurse willing to root through the snow in search of a clump of green grass.  An ordinary moment in the ordinary life of an ordinary person.
 
And yet we are schooled to look at and for the extraordinary.   Sometimes I wonder if in our focus on the extraordinary, in our focus on Christ coming again in glory, in our focus  on the reign of God that is to come, we miss the possibility of the kingdom of God right here in our midst.   And then again sometimes I wonder if  in holding tight to God in the here and now—God in the already—we miss out on the promise that one day wolves really will lie down with lambs and swords  really will be turned to ploughshares and justice really will roll down like water and righteousness like an every-flowing stream and peace really will prevail on earth.
 
May this then be our prayer from the darkness in our world and the darkness in our day:
 
Christ Jesus, come in glory.  Christ Jesus, be born in us today.   Christ Jesus, be our light in the darkness.
 

1"Ordinary Acts of Grace," 
Eric D. Barreto,  ON Scripture, Odyssey Networks, 2015