Did you have a good Thanksgiving? Yes? Most of you?
I hope you all found a welcome table. I hope you all were also able to get to gratitude…at least a little…and to give thanks.
Our world moves so fast. Already the dominant culture has moved us through the shopping extravaganza of Black Friday, tomorrow will be cyber-Monday…then Giving Tuesday…it feels like a rush toward the Solstice, and Christmas and the New Year.
Cynthia Frado, whose words I used in our Call to Worship, writes:
“I am always in a bit of shock when December 1 arrives on the calendar. I feel like there should be at least another week beyond Thanksgiving before I can even contemplate the next holiday…the hardest part to [deal with] is that the heart is not always in sync with [the season].”
Not in sync with the season.
In the Christian liturgical calendar, this is the first Sunday of Advent, the period leading up to Christmas. It is a time of waiting…waiting for “the coming”…that is what Advent means…”the coming.”
What are we waiting for?
In the Christian tradition it is the coming celebration of Jesus’ birth that is awaited…that embodiment of the holy made human in that child. It is that embodied presence that is celebrated and the return of that embodied presence that is awaited.
For us and for many Christian congregations, that birth is described as the rebirth of hope and of love and of light within us and in our world.
It is made into metaphor.
But the story is about the birth of a baby.
Birth is our spiritual theme this month, and it won’t have escaped many of you that we selected the birth theme to follow our focus on death last month. We have paired the two because they are the two mysteries between which we live our lives. And it somehow makes sense to consider them together…as part of one movement of life…as part of one story that helps us live through joy and sorrow, satisfaction and loss.
Mandie McGlynn shared this story, entitled, The Story of My Birth.
Mandie’s child identifies as a-gender now and uses they/them pronouns, as Mandie does here.
“When my eldest child, ‘Q’, was three, they had almost no control over their emotions, and those emotions were fueled by anything from hunger to noise to too much fun.
One day near the end of a holiday [spent]…with family, they started sobbing over getting the wrong breakfast, and within minutes (during which their Dad and I tried to calm and soothe them, they were insisting to us that we were not their real parents, that their real parents had been abducted by aliens and the aliens had replaced those real parents with us, cruel replicas.
You might be temped to chuckle at this story—we often do now, ten years after the distress of the experience finally wore off. But in the moment, it wasn’t remotely funny. Q wouldn’t let us comfort them. Wouldn’t look at us. Wouldn’t stop screaming. We felt so helpless; our baby was obviously in pain, and felt abandoned and alone…with malicious strangers to boot.
Eventually, as we tried to convince Q that we really were their parents, they demanded we prove our identities by reciting the story of the day they were born. It is a story we have told before, many times, full of anticipation, drama, love, hope and joy. We had always told the story because we wanted them to know how loved they were…and how we were changed the instant we heard their cry. In that moment after Q’s birth, we wanted nothing more than to protect them from everything painful in the world.
Yet, here we were, three years later, unable to help. We could tell the story, though—and the story did the trick. Slowly, warily, Q began to relent. Perhaps some primal part of their three-year-old brain recognized us through not only the familiar details of that story, but also the feelings inside of it. All of our efforts that morning at kindness, tenderness, and compassion had failed, but in the heart of a well-worn story, our love finally got through.”
Q’s reaction was very dramatic, but it is not at all uncommon for children to question whether they were born into the right family or if there hasn’t been some sort of cosmic mistake. The introverted child in the family of over-the-top extroverts. The bookish kid in the family of athletes. The kid who follows all the norms in the family living the counter culture dream. And I haven’t mentioned the stories of rebellion that are so common in adolescence…the child raised in a conservative religious tradition who proclaims atheism…there are some of them here this morning…or the child raised by liberal religious parents who chooses a conservative religious path. Some of those parents are here too.
It is a question of welcome, I think, and wondering whether we fit, whether we are valued…whether we can be who we really are. At heart, it is a question of whether we are truly loved.
Our theology is simple here, but these questions are all too real.
For me, it was age 8, after my Dad died. I was born in California where my mother and father both light skinned African Americans, had moved to try to escape the racism back east. They were part of a smaller second wave of the Great Migration, still searching for freedom. We had lived as white, passing…or as one of the many varietes of folks who were just “off-white” in some multi-cultural, multi-hued communities of California. But when Dad died, my mother moved us back to Detroit to be with my uncle’s family.
And I looked around at my extended family and the circle of their friends and the circle of kids I was introduced to…I looked around and realized that they had dark skin…darker than mine…almost all of them.
And I remember wondering whether I was ever going to fit in that world. There must have been some kind of mistake made. Until I finally realized that there had been no mistake. That was my world.
What I didn’t know was whether I would ever find a place for myself in it.
I didn’t throw a fit…at least not that I remember. But I do remember wondering whether I was ever going to be “home,” ever going to find hope and wholeness, when I seemed to be required to live in two worlds. Was I a fraud in one? …or perhaps in both? Not black enough in one. Not white enough in the other.
I didn’t use the language of wholeness back then…not at age 8. But I remember wanting to feel “of a piece” …of one piece…and feeling that it was so unfair that I would have to choose or be forced into one or the other world.
Finding wholeness…finding hope in a world that is so insistent on dividing us, a world that is so unwelcoming to the many truths and the particularities of who we are…
Is it any wonder that so many take the path to conform to the norms…or try to…even when those norms do damage to the spirit…
Our world seems to just not be set up to support real lived experience…experience that crosses borders, changes expectations, moves into new territory…
We know this. Don’t we? Haven’t we learned at least this much from the harm that these divisions of the human family have done?
What are we waiting for? We who embrace a theology of love?
It was James Baldwin in the Fire Next Time who wrote: “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
“I use the word Love here,” Baldwin goes on, “not in the personal sense but as a state of being or an act of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
What are we waiting for?
Are there things we need to give up in order to find wholeness in which we can be healed and held…a wholeness that will empower us to hold others and, in some way beyond our current knowing, to hold our world?
Is our unwillingness to relinquish some things the problem?
This season, the best answer I am finding is in the choice to live in abundance…not in scarcity. It is our commitment to living in scarcity that feels most problematic. Scarcity requires hierarchies of needs and hierarchies of worth.
But our theology tells us that is all wrong. Out theology tells us we are all worthy…already.
Our culture…and that culture still lives in us…our culture tells us to question whether we are worthy and whether we are even enough.
To live not questioning whether I am enough…whether you are enough…by some standard about which we were never consulted…some standard of perfection that we will likely never meet…
To live not questioning whether we are enough. Is that the hope we wait for in this season?…the birth of trust or faith that we are enough…more than enough…perfect as we are…even in our imperfections…even in our failures…even in our brokenness?
Faith in our faith. Is that what we wait for?
The birth of a faith that can convince us that we are enough already…already lovable and already loved.
The theology here, unlike some other places we search for meaning, the theology here is completely simple. It is clear.
The spark of divinity is within us. Within each of us. Within every one of us.
That is the message I take from the Christian story, the Christmas story…that God became human in the person of that human baby…just like every human baby…
We don’t have to wait…that is the heart of the Universalist message…God within…love within…is already present…there is nothing YOU have to do. There is nothing you have to DO. Its done. Complete. Check that one off your list.
The theology is simple.
What we need to discover are ways to know that, and to trust that and to live out of that trust into a world that we might actually want to inhabit.
But we so often underestimate the power of the message of scarcity and inadequacy that we have been given.
Wholeness turns out to be not that easy a goal.
“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” writes Toni Cade Bambara in The Salt Eaters. “…just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight [on you] when you’re well.”
What are we waiting for? We are waiting for something…we must be. Because we know that the way we are told to live, the way we are still living…is not a path toward hope.
We know that. If all of our work on racism hasn’t convinced some of us, then the floods and the fires from a climate we are changing might. The greed…the violence…the life expectancy in the US started to drop in 2014 and has dropped each year since…we are killing ourselves…is there anyone here who would argue that we have this figured out?
What are we waiting for?
Is it courage? Are we waiting for courage to come?
There must be some loss we fear…some grieving that we do not want to do…some habits…some patterns that we find parting with too painful…
It think it is about scarcity and the hierarchies of values that scarcity demands. We’ve scratched our way up or been lifted above the lowest rung of those ladders and we are afraid to give up our privileged place? Is that it?
Hierarchies even of oppressions…hierarchies of grief? That someone else has been pushed down because of who they are does not diminish the fact that you’ve been pushed down because of who you are. Do we fear that someone else’s pain might invalidate our own?
We need to trust abundance. Brene Brown writes: “Empathy is not finite, and compassion is not a pizza with [only] eight slices. When you practice empathy and compassion with someone, there is not less of these qualities to go around. There’s more. Love is the last thing we need to ration in this world.”
Rev. Erika Hewitt writes: “Sorrow is an invitation to recalibrate our hearts so that we can view one another with both more gentleness and a sense of recognition: You too? Me too! Its like a homing device, pinging out our longing for connection.”
Our longing for connection.
Gil Rendle in his new book, Quietly Courageous, speaks to this. The book is about church life but it speaks to human living too.
Rendle argues that we need courage in the face of nostalgia…because there is no Eden to return to…there never was.
Courage in the face of empathy…because paying attention only to our wounds will prevent us from remembering our strengths.
And courage in the face of divisiveness…because the heart of our work is not the quest for unity and agreement, but the building of connection.
“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? …that you’re ready to be healed? Lot of weight [on you] when you’re well.”
As we move into Advent, I do not believe I have ever felt so much in process…so much at work within me…
The world, it feels, is calling our a deeper response…a clearer sounding of what matters…of what we choose to treat as true…what we choose to try to make real…
Buddhist Lama Rod Owens writes:
“Perhaps what I have come to understand, finally, is that somehow I have become the one I have always wanted [and waited for]. This is why I do the things I do. There is a fierce love that wakes me up every morning, that makes me tell my stories, refuses to let me apologies for my being here…You have to understand that this is what I mean when I say healing.”
Somehow, I have become the one I have always waited for.
The baby whose birth we await in the Advent season grew into a preacher who tried to convince us that the Kingdom could be here, could be now. Tried to convince us that we had it within us to be healed and whole and holy.
In this time of waiting, may we do the work to remember that message and to find a way to trust it.
And whether we wait for Christmas Eve, or the Solstice, or if we simply wait through the long night for spring to come,
May we find the courage and the confidence to claim compassion as our way, abundance as our our way of being…and to choose healing as our hope.
May that we do. Amen.
Topics: Birth