UPC Advent series

Below is a sermon from Andi Saccoccio at UPC two weeks ago. I emailed her to ask her for the text because I wanted to share it with you. I think you will find some things that resonate here as they did for me... I put a few parts in bold that stood out to me. 

George opened this series last week talking about how Jesus is the word: logos, the meaning behind all things. And today we’ll stop to consider Jesus as light and life.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Like many people, I love the idea of the Christmas season: twinkling lights, hot drinks by a warm fire, gift-giving, and nostalgic if not eclectic--even tacky--decorations fill our house with clutter which seems strangely permissible during this time of year as does the wearing of some really weird sweaters.

I say I like the idea, because more often than not, it seems like the winter months have smuggled not only the sunlight off to the Southern Hemisphere, but they’ve also taken a few hours of the day with them. During the holiday season we scramble to get everything done—decorate, shop, bake, get to the post office, get a Christmas card together…

And then it all seems to spiral into a series of relational, financial and emotional clusterbombs:  should we go their house or have them here ? I never know what to get my sister. Why we always have to fight about money? Why is he drinking so much? Aww… Look at *their* Christmas cards, they all look so put together… Why do all my friend’s marriages look so much happier than mine? Why do I eat so much?

What the church calendar tells us is the season for hope and expectation has become a season of frenzy and disappointment. Christmas hope has become as artificial as the lights we string up in our desperate attempt to regain some of the light that the shortened winter days have taken from us. And sadly our lives can feel most empty during the very season when we celebrate God’s desire to fill them..

What came into existence was Life,
    and the Life was Light to live by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;
    the darkness couldn’t wrap its hands around it.

John’s gospel story for this season is really different. And I hope that it sort of jolts us out of fuzzy warm images of scenes on Christmas cards to a more real sense of what Advent and Christmas are really all about. God longs to be with us, God is with us, are we making room? Are we paying attention? Are we letting God’s light bring us life or are we settling for artificial ones?

It has been said that the Gospel of John is a pool in which a child can wade and an elephant can swim. One of my seminary professors added ‘and one in which scholars and pastors can drown.’ Its ideas are so simple but yet they’re rich with meaning and complexity.

So it’s no surprise that John’s Gospel gives us a very different perspective on the Incarnation. John was a teenager when Jesus invited him to follow him and it is believed he lived into his 90’s, so John had decades to preach and teach and reflect before he penned this, the last of the gospels. As a result, it is rich with the complex thinking that his long life and ministry afforded him. You may recall that Jesus, while on the cross, entrusted his mother into John’s care and it is believed that Mary lived out her days in Ephesus with him. Surely John and Mary talked about the miraculous story behind Jesus’ birth. You’d think he’d tell that story here. And yet John chooses to tell a really different story:  No manger, no angels, no wise men, no travel weary couple looking for a place to deliver a baby.

Instead we get Word. Light. Life. Rich and simple words, pregnant with potential and looking for a place to settle deep within us, but they’re not without their challenges and nuances.

Take the word Light for instance. We tend to think of light as the opposite of darkness and often conclude that all light is good and all dark is bad, and that they constantly battle with one another for space.

But I’m beginning to think differently. I’ve been reading a book by Barbara Brown Taylor called, Learning to Walk in the Dark, and in it, Taylor challenges long held notions of how we interact with the many polarities that the scriptures and our tradition tends to offer us: life/death, good/evil, light/darkness.

She writes, “On a theological level, this language creates all sorts of problems. It divides every day neatly in two: pitting the light part against the dark part. It tucks the sinister stuff into the dark part, identifying God with the sunny part and leaving you to deal with the rest on your own. It implies things about dark skinned people and sight-impaired people that simply are not true. Worst of all, it offers people of faith a giant closet in which they can store everything that threatens or frightens them without thinking too much about those things.”

Taylor goes on to talk about the goodness of what we commonly refer to as dark places in our lives—that God often uses the darkness of pain and doubt and even our own failure to teach us more about life and grace. While light gives us a sense of security and peace, darkness also has a role in the life of faith, for what is courage and faith when all things are clear and obvious, and who hasn’t encountered a dark night of the soul and wrestled with God as we faced our great doubts and fears? Most of us would point to the dimly lit seasons in our lives as those which have taught us how to hope and trust in the midst of deep doubt, fear and pain.

She rightly reminds us that at our core, it’s just part of the human condition to be afraid of being afraid, and because we are, we tend to take our frightening fears and hide them. It goes all the way back to Adam and Eve, who donned fig leaves and hid, as if God wouldn’t see. And Genesis goes on to tell us that their attempts to hide themselves were inadequate, and that in their fallen state, God graciously clothed them in animals skins, a foreshadowing of the reality that mere human attempts would never be adequate to cover the consequences of human fear—and that blood would be shed to do so. But we are much more sophisticated these days and we hide our fears behind a uniform or a weapon, a degree or a title or a brand, a privileged upbringing--but maybe the psalmist was onto something when he declared, “even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.” We just can’t hide our nakedness. Not from God.

I was talking to a friend recently and we laughed about how every single one of us engages the Christmas season just a little off kilter. We indulge too much, we worry too much, we do too much, we spend too much, and we get too sentimental and nostalgic—and yet what’s behind it all are what he referred to as ‘holy instincts,’ they reveal a human hunger to be known and loved, a longing for meaning. We long to feel deeply and to live lives that make a difference and to create a world of peace and joy.  It’s part of what it means to be made in the image of the Light and Life in the person of Jesus. But we are broken people, and our hunger gets distorted and damaged because we live in a fallen world where hunger and fear have a troubling relationship.

In her book The Spirit in Trauma, theologian Shelly Rambo talks about fear and woundedness and how we understand them. She writes, “We tend to think of the past as behind, the future as ahead, and the present as the viewpoint from which we relate to both…but the challenge for those who have experienced (darkness) is that the past does not stay in the past. Instead it invades the present, returning in such a way that the present becomes a reenactment about what was not fully known or grasped in the past.”  Essentially, all the fears and insecurities we try to mask are with us all the time. They haunt us from our pasts and hinder us from going forward, and we’re generally unaware of them in the present and when we are, we’re often afraid to face them.

So we sing:  “Come, thou long expected Jesus, come and set our spirits free. From our sins and fears release us, let us find our rest in thee”

Rambo believes that when we grasp the reality that Jesus illumines the places of our deepest pain and hunger, and that he remains with us, that we are set free from the endless pursuit of artificial security. Light floods our darkness and life flows out of us in all directions.

That’s really what Advent is all about—making room for God’s light and life to fill us so that fear has no room to grow.

“In him was life, and the life was the light of all people…”

__

I have a few personal traditions for Christmas. Usually Christmas Eve, no matter how late, before I go to bed that night I watch It’s a Wonderful Life all the way through. It’s one of my favorites for sure and I bet I’m not alone in that. The film starts in the present with George Bailey, a desperate man seized by circumstances beyond his abilities. Overwhelmed by a sense of personal failure and the belief that he’s ruined his and everyone else’s life, he’s certain that his entire life has been worth nothing. In that dark place Bailey utters a prayer and ultimately wishes he’d never been born.

The movie, like John’s prologue, takes us back in time to see a reality behind the reality of Bailey’s present. We are taken back to all the parts of George Bailey’s life where he can’t see anything redemptive but through the efforts of Bailey’s unlikely angelic guide Clarence, the true grace of Bailey’s story is brought to light. What cost him his hearing as a child served to save many lives in the present even as his willingness to be gracious to Mr. Gower, honored the old pharmacist’s dignity and saved him from ruin.

It used to bother me that none of this awareness of grace actually changes Bailey’s circumstances at all: he’s still out $8K because Mr. Potter stole it and Zuzu’s teacher still wants to knock his teeth out, but with the greater grace and joy of his life brought to light and friends to celebrate the gift of his life woven with their own, these shadows are rearranged and put in their right places, no longer dominating the landscape of his reality.

I love this story because the older I get the more I understand how that the darkness inside me can rob me of life even more than the darkness around me. There’s a little George Bailey in each of us.

Earlier this week I sat with one of my neighbors at dinner as she told her story. She grew up in a Christian home with very loving parents. She said that she had always believed that they were really a perfect family, that is, until her parents very suddenly went through a period of separation shortly after her grandmother died. Some sort of infidelity on her dad’s part was really all she could put together. She shared that for years, even after her parents reunited, she seethed with anger at her father. How could he have done that? Why? Anger and pain took root in her life and put a wall between her and her dad. It shaded the past, it clouded the present, and it darkened the future of their relationship.

It was only years later, when her dad asked her to tell him what that period of time was like for her, that he told her the larger story: that his whole adult life he had struggled with his sexuality and that he was a gay man who for some 20 years had been trying to live a heterosexual life. He said that he and her mother loved each other very much, that he loved her and her brothers , and that he daily struggled to marry his faith with his reality, living in fear that if others knew he would be rejected by his family and friends, and cast out of the church he loved.

As she told it, this was a really hard conversation, and not without tears and anger and more tears. But she said it made all the difference, that it was so good to finally have an honest conversation with her dad and that she loved him all the more for his honesty. She shared that it allowed her to rearrange much of her childhood in light of this larger piece of her family story and that it helped her understand some other fears and hurts she was facing then. She was forced to dig deep into where she had stored her anger and disappointment, allowing God to rearrange hard pieces of her family story to expose the grace and love that ran deeper still.

Was that painfully truthful conversation about hurts and fears dark? Was that exploration into the shadows of hidden wounds and struggles bad?  Maybe Barbara Brown Taylor is onto something.

It’s been said that conversion is not the result of the introduction of new elements into our lives as much as the rearrangement of that which is already present. God’s light shines in the places we would rather not see, but as it does, the Spirit of God heals and moves and rearranges our longings so that we are set free to live the lives we were meant to live: known and loved. My neighbor’s father feared he would be rejected by his beloved daughter, but she loved him more for the truth come to light.

My neighbor’s father has since died, but her love for him and grief for the pain he bore his whole life continues to bring healing and hope as she revisits the true story, perhaps even more profoundly since she and her husband are now expecting their first child.

What remained with me after dinner that night was how incredibly life giving knowing the story behind the story was for her. I wonder if we were more honest, more real about our own hurts and longings, if we might more fully know the light and life of God.

George has been reminding us that in many ways John’s prologue is a sort of backstory to the stories we usually associate with Christmas. What a good backstory does is set the present in light of a greater past, and just as it did my neighbor, it affords all who hear it to rearrange what is in light of what gets revealed.

If you’re an honest human, I’m guessing you have some fears and dark spaces that could use a little of God’s life giving light. I want to invite you to silent reflection, for you to bring your fears before the God who already knows and can see them, and who desperately longs to help you understand their place in light of the life we have in Jesus.

You may have to rearrange a few things in order to make space for that light and life to come: to birth something new and utterly beyond our wildest imagination. Salvation. Rescue. Life. Hope. Peace.

Let’s pray: Come, Holy Spirit, come, Lord Jesus:

O Holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray

Cast out our sin, and enter in Be born in us today

We hear the Christmas angels

The great glad tidings tell

O come to us, abide with us

Our Lord, Emmanuel!