Christmas 2016

A sermon by the Rev. Deacon Jacqueline Cherry

Christmas Eve, Year C, 2016

The birth we have been waiting for, preparing for, is happening, now.

Let heaven and nature sing!

Do you know what it sounds like when a baby is born? Birth mothers, and those who have witnessed the birth of a baby, know that it is anything but silent. The pain of labor obliterates any sense of decorum. In the hallways outside the delivery room, grunts, cries, heaves and four-letter words are easily heard. Like it or not, if we believe in the Incarnation, we must also believe that Jesus’ birth, too, was noisy and messy. Certainly there are differences - instead of the beeps and alarms of today’s medical equipment, Mary and Joseph were likely deafened by brays and bleats. Tempting as it is to marvel at the sudden appearance of the angel and heavenly host, Luke’s birth narrative begs us to remain grounded. On this holy night, all of heaven is focused on the birth of a baby boy. An ordinary birth like ours, and the births of our ancestors before us, and the births of our descendants to come.

Luke tells us that the glory of the Lord shone around the shepherds as an angel proclaimed, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.

Again, don’t focus on the angel, rather pay attention to whom the angel is speaking. It is the shepherds in the fields who are the first to be told that Jesus was born. If that holy birth had happened tonight, in 2016, the angel might appear to migrant workers, or perhaps to those living in the tent encampments right outside our church. Before all others, God wanted the lowly shepherds, the powerless and the displaced, to be the first to hear the good news of the Messiah’s birth.

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. While the Emperor was busy with the state census, a young unwed mother gave birth in a stable to the King of kings. God slipped into this world through the birth of a fragile infant. Indeed, it is good news of great joy for all the people. Except for the Emperor; to the powers that be, the birth of Jesus is treasonous.

With haste, the shepherds went to Bethlehem where they found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. And the news of the Savior’s birth spread rapidly, from one tent encampment to the next, through homeless shelters and soup kitchens, under the highways, across neighborhoods. Have you heard the good news? The one who will cast down the mighty from their thrones has been born.

The field dorms in Watsonville and the Central Valley buzzed. The one who will fill the hungry with good things has been born.

Drug addicts in dark doorways startled awake. The one who will lift up the lowly has been born.

En masse they marched - the unemployed, oppressed, undocumented, disabled, addicted - together they moved east to see this thing that had taken place.

Shoulder-to- shoulder the people assembled. With each arriving sojourner, the crowd parted just enough to welcome them in. All eyes were fixed on a newborn baby wrapped in bands of cloth. At first the whispers were barely audible. Then ever so softly these words could be heard repeated over and over again, each time in a different voice: To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.

Looking into the eyes of an old Nicaraguan woman, a man in torn clothes gently placed the baby in her arms; To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.

In turn, the old woman handed the infant to a 16-year- old runaway standing next to her; To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.

While I realize some among us are feeling grateful for a year full of blessings, there are many of us in despair. During these past four weeks of Advent, we knew exactly what to expect come Christmas Eve, and we have gathered to celebrate his birth. But looking forward, the future is full of uncertainty and fear.

As Michelle Obama recently explained, We are feeling what not having hope feels like.

Homeless or hungry, afraid or depressed, we are all shepherds tonight. We are the first to hear the good news of the Messiah’s birth, the good news that God has joined us in flesh. However, it is a disservice to Mary to proclaim this night silent and calm.

When an angel tells a shepherd; Or a prophet tells a slave; Or a community organizer tells a refugee, To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord, it is a call to action, not a time to go Christmas shopping.

Although the shepherds didn’t see what was coming, let alone understand what had already come to pass, Mary had birthed a revolution. Her song, The Magnificat, is our rallying cry to scatter the proud, cast down the mighty, and liberate the oppressed. The message is clear, Jesus has no tolerance for bullying tyrants – emperors, presidents, kings – rulers who are rich and arrogant are offensive to God. And as Christians they should be offensive to us too. Jesus always stands with the powerless and the poor.

Do you know what it sounds like when a baby is born? It sounds the same as the birth of a Messiah – it’s noisy and messy. There are grunts, cries, heaves and four-letter words. In fact, it sounds a lot like the corner of 15 th St. and Julian Ave. When a baby is born, it’s never silent. But as with all of God’s creation, it is always holy.

Amen.

Are you the one who is to come?

Third Sunday of Advent, Year A 

December 11, 2016

Richard Smith

When John the Baptist had announced the coming of God’s kingdom and proclaimed Jesus as God’s anointed, he expected the world to change.

But nothing seemed to change; in fact, things had gotten worse. Rome continued its oppressive occupation of their lands, and religious leaders continued their policies of appeasement while getting rich off of their own people. Crowds no longer listened to John's powerful call for change at the Jordan River. Now, John was in prison, and, in fact, whether he knew it or not, on death row.

So, from the brink of despair for himself and the people he loved, John sends his disciple to ask Jesus, a question: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

We had desperately hoped you might be, but now we’re not so sure.

Words of anxiety and quiet desperation…

Words echoed in our own hearts and our own world today.

I recall talking to an old woman in a nursing home years ago. She knew her death was not far off. She said, “You know, I’ve been a believer all my life. Always had a deep faith in God. But now my time is getting close, and, well, I just can’t help but wonder…”

Quiet desperation about the very meaning of her own life.

And the other night I was at a meeting in the neighborhood. The mother of Mario Woods was there. Mario was the young man killed by police a year ago in the Bayview. At that meeting, his mother, with tears in her eyes, was pleading with the District Attorney for justice in her son’s case. She told him,

There are days I say, "I had a son. I had a baby son." I have to say his name out loud. He used to be here. And he mattered.
There are so many mothers you have to pray for, so many sleepless nights, so many dragging themselves out of bed.

Quiet desperation.

Just after the long night of the last election, the rapper Macklemore wrote these lyrics:

Mad world, mad world, that's what the TV said
Imagine tryna keep your head
While your daughter sleeps in bed
And when she wakes up, will the world be the same?
Will my girl be afraid in the home of the brave?
See I hope, I hope, that it's gon' be alright
But what a hell of a night.

Quiet desperation.

And when Jesus hears John’s question of quiet desperation--“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”--he does not answer him directly. Instead, he points to what he’s doing, as if to say, "Here's what I do. You can decide for yourself whether I am the one you're waiting for."

What Jesus is doing is restoring things that were missing.

The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

What he’s doing in his own ministry is playing out what the prophet Isaiah had dreamed in today’s first reading. It’s a dream of restoration: That which was missing is found: sight, mobility, hearing, life, the sparkle in one’s eyes.

It’s a longing deep inside our fragile human hearts--this desire to be restored to wholeness.

Because in this world we lose things: sometimes we lose our car keys or cell phones, sometimes it’s a job or a dear friend; aging bodies can lose their looks and their lustiness; mothers can lose their sons.

And sometimes just to get along in the world we can lose parts of ourselves. The poet Robert Bly personally describes these lost parts of ourselves as “a long bag we drag behind us.”

When we were one or two years old we had what we might call a 360-degree personality...but one day we noticed that our parents didn’t like certain parts...They said things like: “Can’t you be still?” Or “It isn’t nice to try and kill your brother.” Behind us we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parents’ love, put in the bag. By the time we go to school our bag is quite large. Then our teachers have their say: “Good children don’t get angry over such little things.” So we take our anger and put it in the bag. By the time my brother and I were twelve in Madison, Wisconsin, we were known as “the nice Bly boys.” Our bags were already a mile long.

Of course, these lost parts of ourselves do not stay in the bag forever. Eventually they demand to be heard and integrated in a more life-giving way. The longing to be whole again runs very deep in us and must have its say.

This restored wholeness--whether the finding of lost keys or a lost son, or a society restored to its own best values after a divisive and corrupt election, or a self fully alive and at peace with itself--this wholeness, the ancient prophet tells us, is our future; it is our destiny, what God made us for.

This dream of restoration is what we are to hold onto in these Advent days.

And this future we dream of is already on the way. In fact, it already shapes how we are right now.

We know from psychologists how the past shapes our present. Past experiences, pleasures, traumas, even from the time we’re still in our mothers’ wombs, shape who we have become and how we understand and respond to our present moment.

But our present is shaped not only by our past but also by our future. The future we perceive shapes how we stand and what we do right now.

Here’s a metaphor. Pretend I’m about to toss you an orange. Imagine how you stand physically, how you hold your hands in order to catch it. Now imagine I’m tossing you a dish towel. How do you stand, how do you hold your hands to catch it? How about if I throw you a chair?

You get the point. The way we stand, our posture and what we do is shaped by what we see coming toward us.

Similarly, how we live our lives right now, what we do, how we spend our time and energy is shaped by the future we perceive coming toward us.

If, for example, you imagine with George Orwell that “the future is a boot stamping on a human face -- forever”, this will shape how you are in the present--perhaps causing you to cower, or defiantly clench your fist and your jaws, or anxiously hoard what little you have in a universe that you perceive to be brutal and cruel.

But if, with the ancient prophet and with Jesus, you imagine the future to be a world restored, where broken relationships are healed, where our fragmented selves and world are made whole again, then this vision will likewise shape how you are now.

• If in the world to come there will be no more tears, then we wipe the tears from each other’s eyes now.
• If in the world to come, there will be no more wars, no more violence, then we let the weapons fall from our hands now.
• If in the world to come, everyone will be welcomed, with enough to eat, a safe place to sleep, then we resist the building of walls and the violence against people of color and of other religions, and we throw open our doors to welcome the homeless and immigrants, trans people and Muslims.

This prophetic dream of restoration has work for us to do right now. It asks us to resist going numb when the world within or beyond us is falling apart and fragmented.

In the height of despair, in the deepest darkness, this ancient prophetic dream calls us to open our hearts, our eyes, our hands, to engage the world when it breaks our hearts. This dream, passed to us from our spiritual ancestors and now part of our spiritual DNA, this dream goes with us, step by step, providing the sustenance we most need.

This is the dream that can, if we let it, carry us through these harsh, wintry Advent days.

Let me close with a poem by Jan Richardson.

So may we know
the hope
that is not just
for someday
but for this day—
here, now,
in this moment
that opens to us:

hope not made
of wishes
but of substance,

hope made of sinew
and muscle
and bone,

hope that has breath
and a beating heart,

hope that will not
keep quiet
and be polite,

hope that knows
how to holler
when it is called for,

hope that knows
how to sing
when there seems
little cause,

hope that raises us
from the dead—

not someday
but this day,
every day,
again and
again and
again.

How The Light Gets In

Sara Warfield, 2nd Week of Advent

Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist December 4, 2016

I love Advent. After an almost interminable Ordinary Time, we suddenly but quietly, it seems to me, pull out the blues and purples, and we enter into the darkness. With intention. With quiet anticipation.

In this part of the world, Advent comes as we approach literally our shortest days of the year, and I know a lot of us have felt as though a different kind of darkness has descended since November 8 th . It feels like the beginning of a very long night indeed. I’ve been stumbling through these weeks, not sure how to find my bearings. Groping around, wondering how to move forward. I feel so lost. So like a child lost at the grocery store, I’ve just stopped, stayed in the same place, and watched for someone I recognize.

In stopping, though, I’ve started to notice something about this long night. In this long night, it’s hard to really see one another. When it’s dark, we can only make out the obvious features. We hear a Spanish accent, or an Evangelical quoting scripture from the King James Bible. We notice the woman in a hijab, or the man under a blanket on the sidewalk. We see black skin, or a red cap that reads Make America Great Again.

When it’s dark, we use this limited information instinctively to do one thing: to determine if that person is a threat. And I say that with no judgment. That’s just how we were built. The oldest part of our brain, the part of our brain that evolved first, just wants us to survive and so constantly scans the environment for threats. It’s sensitive. It’s reactive. It’s fight or flight. Like a wild animal.

There were some animals in our readings today. The prophet Isaiah imagines an ideal world, or in our tradition’s language, a kingdom come, where:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
   the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
   and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
   their young shall lie down together;
   and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

Isaiah lived in a time of a long night. His land was under attack. The Assyrians had become the dominant power in the region, wolves who posed a constant threat to Israel’s survival. Those who could fight had a weapon by their side. And for those who couldn’t fight, I imagine a sort of restless fear. The two options were aggression or suspicion. Everyone was afraid, lambs bunkered down, hoping somehow to withstand the stronger force.

But Isaiah imagines a different way of being. A kingdom to come where lambs can be lambs and wolves can be wolves, and they can live together in peace.

But as we sit in our own long night, we wonder, how? How is this possible? In all of our differences, in all of the ways we feel threatened by one another, in all of the ways we seek to dominate each other. How?

Most mornings, I listen to music on my bart ride to the city. I’ve been listening to a contemporary Advent song, a millennial hymn, you might say. The song, by The Brilliance, is called “May You Find a Light” and the verse that has stuck with me says:

There are weary travelers
Searching everywhere you go
Strangers who are searching
Longing deeply to be known

Who of us is not longing deeply to be known? Who of us has not sought out our tribe? People who look like us. Love like us. Create like us. Believe like us. We look for similarities, for affinities, points of connection to join us together in community. I think it’s why a lot of us are here this morning. These communities help us to feel like we are known, like we are seen, and they make us feel safe. We find our wolf groups, our lamb groups, our lion groups, our bear groups, our ox groups. And in those groups, we can rest. I’m glad we have these places to go.

I want you to love the lamb you are. The wolf you are. The bear you are. The ox you are. But becoming who we are, and loving who we are, only gets us part of the way to Isaiah’s vision of peace, or what we call the kingdom to come.

The one we wait for during this season of Advent calls us to widen our field of knowing, to expand who we see as our neighbors, who we deem worthy of our love and care. There is only one thing I know of that connects every single one of us. One thing that every one of us shares. We have all suffered. To have this flesh, this human experience, means to suffer.

Isn’t that the power of this season? God comes down to inhabit this flesh. This earth. This mess. Emmanuel, God with us, God inhabiting our brokenness. Through Jesus, God suffers with us. Through Jesus, we are known.

Most of you know that I spend my days serving as a street chaplain. I spend much of that time with the men and women who come for sacred sleep through the Gubbio Project, both here and at St. Boniface Catholic Church in the Tenderloin. Most of what I do is check in on folks. “How are you doing today?” When I’m here, I hang out in the courtyard and shoot the breeze with the regulars out there.

There’s one man I see most times I’m here. He’s always well dressed. He always smiles and gives me a hug and tells me that his favorite aunt’s name is Sara. I always ask him how he’s doing, and he always says he’s doing well. This past week, though, when I asked him how he’s doing, he looked down. I smelled alcohol on his breath, and he said with a sad smile, “they took me to detox last night, but…” and he trailed off. From there, a story poured out. How he hasn’t talked to his children in five years. How he missed their graduation because of his drinking. How he was clean for ten years but then he wasn’t. I drink by myself, he kept saying. I just need to go somewhere and get clean by myself.

I put my arm around him and felt something right here in my chest. I recognized his desire to be alone, how I don’t want anyone to see me when I’m falling apart. And I named that suffering out loud. “I know when I want to hide that I’m feeling ashamed,” I said. His head dropped, and he started to cry. I held him and tried to keep back the tears in my eyes.

To be a chaplain means to encounter people in their suffering, and to be willing to know them in all the ways that life has cracked them open. But in order to do that, I have to open myself to the ways my life has cracked me open. How I grew up with a pastor who told me that if I just had enough faith, I wouldn’t have asthma attacks. Who preached that gay people are going to hell, and so I always thought of myself as a condemned outsider.

I know that these cracks cause me to lash out in fear sometimes. To see others as threats. To retreat to the comfort of my tribe and never leave. I also know that the ways I have been broken have helped me connect to others who also think of themselves as condemned outsiders.

And together we have experienced healing.

I don’t know how life has cracked you open. I don’t know the loss you’ve experienced. I don’t know who has caused you harm or how. I don’t know your addictions, your fears. And I don’t know how you try to cover up those cracks. Maybe you avoid conflict. Or maybe you create it. Maybe you hide the cracks by always putting on a smile. Maybe you give, give, give until you have nothing left for yourself.

What I do know is that we all have brokenness of some sort, and it gives us a shared language through which we might connect, a way to be with one another through all of our differences.

An awesome man named Leonard once sung, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. In this Advent season, we wait for Jesus to break in through the cracks of this

world, and the cracks in us, to bring light.