New Years’ Day Prayer Stations
January 1, 2017The In-Between
January 15, 20178
Jan.
2017
Bringing Christmas With Us
“Bringing Christmas With Us”
In 1916, W.B. Yates penned a poem called The Magi. He wrote, “Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye, in their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky.
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.”
As we move into the New Year, the sometimes uncomfortable mystery of the manager stays with us. The magi could see it in their mind’s eye. They were there. Their witness, and the testimony of scripture, is that God is with us still.
In our first lesson, the obedient Magi followed a star. In our second, Mary and Joseph similarly follow the angels’ revelation, all with Herod looming in the background. Reading now from God’s holy word.
Let us pray. Loving God, may the light of your word help us see you with us always. Amen.
Are you moving on from Christmas? Are you going back to your routines of life the same person as before you celebrated Christ’s birth? Or are you bringing Jesus Christ along with you into the new year?
The readings for Epiphany Sunday usually focus on the “three kings from Orient are,” who followed the stars to look for the messiah.
They gave gifts to the baby Jesus. I’m not sure these were on Mary and Joseph’s gift registry nor what the baby Jesus did with those presents. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh were symbols of Christ’s royalty, priesthood and sacrifice, but I doubt they were on any child’s Christmas list.
Any parent grows accustomed to children’s disappointment when they don’t receive all the gifts on their Christmas list.
A most important role of the Magi in the story may be the part we don’t often focus on. Less about bringing gifts than identifying Jesus, and to Herod. That sets off a chain of events where Herod tries to get the child, Joseph is warned in a dream to flee and he takes his family from Bethlehem to Egypt.
As such the magi act as messengers. We are used to angels being messengers this time of year.
Advent starts with Zechariah being visited by an angel with good news.
In Matthew’s birth narrative, an angel comes to Joseph in a dream telling him of the coming birth. Luke tells us the angel Gabriel visits Mary in a dream with good news of a coming child.
In our lesson, an angel comes again, but this time the news isn’t as good. The angel tells Joseph to “take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.”
Matthew describes how when the magi see the child, they are filled with joy. Yet the Bethlehem story ends with Mary and Joseph fleeing to Egypt with baby Jesus.
On Christmas Eve we sung about a silent night, when all was peaceful. The last night for Jesus in Bethlehem was not peaceful. It’s not a silent night. All was not calm and bright when you are trying to flee capture at night.
Jesus’ early years were spent as a refugee in the middle east. It’s around 400 miles from Bethlehem to Aleppo, Syria. We can’t help but think of a young couple, Mary and Joseph, with their beloved son, fleeing Bethlehem for a foreign country, and not think about those fleeing Iraq or Syria today.
As we await now for news that our refugee family will arrive to Bradley Hills shortly, likely from the Middle East, we lift up the experience of Jesus and the ministry of hospitality.
In the end the baby is taken from Bethlehem. Jesus doesn’t stay in the manger. The Christmas hope of the world was on the run, cast into the terror of being chased by a tyrant. Jesus learned of the pain of this world at an early age. But our lesson ends with the Mary and Joseph finally settling in the ordinary town of Nazareth.
When we start the new year, we begin to leave Bethlehem too. We take off the ornaments. We put down the Christmas trees. Many presents may even be returned.
Christmas is not where we live most of our days. Its where we celebrate the incarnation, hear the gospel, experience the miracle of Christ. But we don’t stay in the manger. We return to the Nazareth of our lives. School has restarted. Work gets going. Regular programming resumes. We are going through our resolutions for the new year.
The question is, do we, like Mary and Joseph, bring the most important part of Christmas with us when we leave Bethlehem into this new year.
Bradley Hills member Dick Tustian has developed a framework for looking at some of these issues.
Dick distinguishes what he calls the “Eye at the Window,” our human observations and understanding of our world, from what he calls, the “Flame in the Box,” describing our personal experience of the divine, and the language we use to describe spiritual experiences.
I would suggest the magi did both. Yates wrote that the magi saw the mystery of the manger in their mind’s eyes. The eye of the window through the stars above. When the magi experienced Christmas they were overwhelmed with joy – a spiritual experience of the flames in the box. They were transformed and had to go home by a different road.
John Buchanan wrote that “To see the Christ child is to be transformed.” That is why we celebrate Christmas each year. To re-experience God’s love for us in the Christ child, and to be renewed and transformed by the love of God coming near to us.
Or as Peter Gomes puts it, “At Christmas we see God . . . and our faces shine with the encounter.”
This is the flame Dick talks about. The Christmas light. The question is, do we put our flame in the box of life of thoughts and feelings which we carry with us throughout our lives and take it with us.
Do we have the strength to be Christmas people all year long? Friends, your life is different because in Christ God has forgiven you, offered you salvation, made a new path between you and God. God has come in the incarnation to be with us in the terrible times and the ordinary circumstances.
We have been there in the pageant at the manger. Our faces have shined with the encounter of the light of the Christmas candles. Because of what God has done in Jesus Christ we are different; like the candles, our present and future are bright too.
On Christmas Eve, after all the candles are blown out, after the final hymn is sung, after the peace has been passed and the final handshake at the door and wish of Merry Christmas is offered, I am often alone in the sanctuary. As they sing in Hamilton, I’m in the room where it happens. Where Christ’s birth is revealed. Where the presence of God in Christmas is celebrated.
This year at the end I took a picture on my phone. A picture with the stars, the red poinsettias, the chancel with its white banner and paraments. And right in the middle, the manger where the baby was born.
I took that picture home on Christmas Eve, my voice mostly gone if you remember. Bridget was still up, putting together an old fashion train I had gotten at Strosneiders. Trains remind me of the old train around my grandmother’s tree on 440 Shafor Blvd. In 1952 my grandmother’s church in Ohio, South Park United Methodist, started making little caramels. My grandmother, in her early 40’s then, joined the team making caramels. They made delicious caramels each year around Christmas and for every year growing up we would enjoy them. One family member had figured out that 11.2 seconds in a microwave was the right temperate at which to melt them.
Well, last September, South Park church closed. No more caramels. Many of the members of south park church joined Christ United Methodist church, where I went to Nursery School.
When I was back visiting my parents in October we went to that church. I went to the receptionist and said I’m a 1974 graduate of your nursery school and would like to buy 36 boxes of caramels please. They almost called security. Well they weren’t selling them. Maybe someday.
But when my parents visited here at Christmas my mom brought a bag of 3 of the last batch of the original caramels she had frozen from last year’s batch. And that evening, after we looked to the train, I ate one.
This week I sat by the train in our living room, and opened my phone and looked at the picture of our sanctuary with the manger in the middle. And I ate another caramel.
I was transported to our worship celebration last week before, and to many Christmases over the years with you in this room where it happens and to the many Christmases over the years in Ohio.
And in that moment was my epiphany. We can bring Christmas with us. In every lap, in every bite, in every image we hold, make life a special season.
Christmas is a beginning not an end.
Jesus doesn’t stay in Bethlehem for a reason. In our lesson, Christ, the center of Christmas, goes into the harshest realities and into the most ordinary situations. He can come with us through each moment, each day. Our world can change because we have changed.
God cared so much as to come into to our world with forgiveness and power for living and with grace to transform you into God’s disciple, partner, and friend, and to live that reality all year.
Two days after Christmas this year we saw Dickens’ A Christmas Carol at Ford’s Theater. I used to love seeing the play in New Haven, Cincinnati and DC. It was the first time we had taken our family.
As you may recall, Ebenezer Scrooge is a rich but misery fellow and he is visited by three ghosts, really angels you might say, who give him visions of past, present and future. They convince Scrooge to change his ways. Rather than being humbug he is now positive about Christmas.
But his change doesn’t end on Christmas Day. The pivotal moment in a Christmas Carol, the statement that shows his transformation, that frees Scrooge and transports him from being with the Ghost of Christmas Future to being back safe in his bed, is when he says,
“I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The child who was born in Bethlehem will rule in my heart every day! And then he repeats, as if in hearing himself say it, as if in going over it again, as if in making a statement of faith, Scrooge has an Epiphany, “The child who was born in Bethlehem will rule in my heart every day!”
Friends, bring Christmas with you. May the child born in Bethlehem rule in your heart every day, now and forever.
Let us pray. Loving God, be with us each day of this new year. To inspire us with your unending love. Amen.