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You are here: Home / Archives for Christmas

Christmas Eve 2022: Presents? No, presence…

December 24, 2022 by Cam Miller

A link to YouTube video version is available at the end of the text

Right here, right now
is the eye of the Christmas storm.
I love it when we get to Christmas Eve
and we get to be here.

Here’s what I mean.
According to Pew Research,
96% of Americans celebrate Christmas.
Not 96% of Christian,
but 96% of people whether or not
they feel any affinity with our religion
or any religion.
32% of Jews decorate a Christmas tree.
More than 75% of American Buddhists and Hindus celebrate Christmas.

So less than half of those who observe Christmas
see it as primarily a religious event,
or their religious event.

I love that there is still something
that so many of us share —
a common ritual of some kind.

I just wish I could tell everyone
that underneath this grand secularized holiday
there is a secret of sorts, that is hidden in plain sight.

And it isn’t even really about Jesus —
the Jesus Story
points to it
and reveals it even,
but it is about…God.

But I have gotten ahead of myself
so let me back up —
about 35 years to be exact.

When I was a new dad
I would marvel that my parents or Katy’s mom
would say they couldn’t remember something —
something we would ask them
about when we were small children —
perhaps to help fill in the gaps
of what we didn’t know as new parents.
But sometimes
about some things
they would say they couldn’t remember.
And I remember thinking,
”How could you forget something like that?”

Zoom thirty years ahead
and what I don’t remember
would fill the ocean.

But, there is something I do remember
and it is lodged in my brain
like a knot in wood.
In part, perhaps, because I had a refresher
with both my grandsons.

It is the experience
of rocking a baby in my arms,
her or him sleeping
as I peer down my chest
and watch that little puffy, puckered face
and hear that snuffly breathing
from a sleeping baby.

A baby’s presence is powerful,
whether quiet like that or screaming.
The presence of a baby
demands attention must be paid.

But in those afternoons
or late nights
of rocking a baby
back and forth
back and forth,
and softly singing sometimes too,
pretty soon that baby’s powerful presence
would pull me in.

You may remember what it feels like
when you become present
only to that moment
in that time
at that spot.
All else is obliterated,
even if only for a moment.

Being totally present in the moment.
There are many ways that can happen —
total presence.

Another, less idyllic version,
one I may have already mentioned before,
was when I was a chaplain intern
at New England Deaconess Hospital.
For several weeks that summer, I was called upon
to sit with a young man about my age
who had been burned over much of his body.
He was in some kind of hyperbaric oxygen treatment
and couldn’t talk well, only a few words here or there.

My job was to go sit with him for awhile every day –
just to be present.
He was in agony, of course,
and there was nothing I could do for him –
except sit there, be present.
”Is it okay if I sit for awhile,” I would ask.
He would gesture the best he could
in a way that welcomed me to do so.

While rocking a baby pulled me into
simple presence,
I had to work at simply being present
to the young man I sat with.
The baby too, if I’m honest.
It isn’t easy any time
to simply be with someone
and do nothing.

Random thoughts
will begin to cloud the brain,
call to us about things done
and left undone,
rain down emotions
that splatter
and wiggle
and writhe.

But learning to be simply present
in the presence of suffering
or even when we are just tired
or anxious
or otherwise distracted,
takes a lot of effort.

Simple presence,
being present with us,
is what Christmas is about.

If Christmas was a book title,
the subtitle would be, “God makes it in.”
”The Story of Christmas, God makes it in.”

Did you ever have the experience
of God slipping into your grief?
Did that ever happen to you?
Maybe it did
and you didn’t think of it as God?
And maybe it didn’t even feel good at the time
but you look back now and are grateful for it?

I’m talking about a dark moment of loss
or a shattering moment of powerlessness
or a moment so anxious
you wanted to jump out of your skin.
Those kinds of moments.

And in such moments,
when you don’t think you can take any more,
something or someone happens…and
you realize you can take it…and
you have taken it…and
there is some kind of way
forward.

That someone or something
that gave you a hand to hold
or a sliver of light to hope toward,
may have been mere serendipity or
may have been a gift.

We do not get to actually know for sure
but in those moments of despair
or shattering grief
or deep, dark depression —
when we felt overwhelmed
or powerless —
we were empowered.
We were given something
or felt something
or heard something
that moved us.
Something entered into the darkness
and empowered us.
And then we made it to Christmas Eve
to a nest of community
where we know people love us.

I am not saying we get rescued
or saved
from every and all hazardous situations.at
That would be pure fantasy.

In fact, there will come a time
when we no longer go forward.
We know that —
it is a condition we call “Life.”
It ends.
But I like to think
that death is the mirror image
of birth.
In that manger
God slipped into Life
and in the manger we call death,
we slip into God.

I like to trust my experience like that.
When someone asks me to believe something
I have never witnessed or experienced
I just can’t do it.

I don’t necessarily reject
what I have not experienced out of hand,
I mostly just remain agnostic about it — as in,
”I don’t know.”

But so far in my life
my experience is that God slips in
somehow
some time
some way
and some times I don’t even recognize it
until much latter, looking back.
That makes me trust God
and trust God unto death
and trust God unto birth.

God slips into life
and eventually, we all slip into God.

That is the Jesus story, it seems to me,
taken as a whole.
Christmas Eve
to the night before he died for us
to the afternoon of Good Friday
to Easter morning
is all one seamless story.

There is some Episcopal prayer about that:
from the hard wood of the manger
to the rough wood of the cross, it says.

Anyway, God slips into life to be present with us
even if there is nothing to be done
to change our situation.

And we know, as the saying goes,
the difference between pain and suffering
is that suffering is pain
endured in isolation.
When we endure pain all by ourselves
and let no one know
or have no one to know,
then the pain grows into suffering.

It is almost miraculous
what a difference it makes
to open the door of our pain
so that people who care about us
can come be with us in it.

Like I said, in the moment
it may not jump out at us
but over the length of days
or looking back,
we will see and know
what a difference it made.

I do not for a minute
think that God was absent
before Jesus was born and died.
But in this story that was given to us
we have it revealed.
Our eyes were opened to it in a new way
and we could see something
that was always true —
God is with us.

And God’s presence with us
is so pervasive in this life,
when we experience it and even when we don’t,
that I cannot imagine
there is a time
or a place
or a realm
or an orbit
or a dimension
or a Black Hole
or a death
where God is not also present.

God slips into Life
and we slip into God.
Merry Christmas.

 

 

 

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Christmas Eve & December 26: Who is with us…in the darkness

December 25, 2021 by Cam Miller

 

Scroll down for a video presentation if you prefer to watch

I spent some time
trying to think of
another historical figure —
or even someone personally known to us —
whose birth story
has such a robust narrative
that it travels over time
and across history and borders
in good times and bad.
I couldn’t think of any.

There are some historical figures with stories,
some even miraculous stories.
But none of them do we gather around
every year —
at great expense,
with celebratory preparation,
and these days,
at some personal risk.

There are of course,
solid, unmiraculous, and explicable reasons
that this birth is what it is for us —
historical reasons,
sociological reasons,
economic reasons,
theological reasons,
personal and family reasons.
But there is yet something else.

There is something more.

This story,
this birth narrative,
is our story.
And I do not mean merely a Christian story.
It is the human story
writ large and profoundly
upon the pages of our lives.

It’s a story that happens in darkness.

No matter how safe and secure
our affluence allows us to feel,
we know we are vulnerable
to forces beyond our control.
We begin to know that as early as three
or four years old.
Somehow the existential truth
of irreverability
gets known very early for us humans.

This year, once again,
a microorganism invisible to the human eye,
is a threat to all of us.
Covid is not unique, merely
another agent of hazard stalking the world
we share with hundreds of billions of them.

A baby, his anguished mother and father,
huddled in darkness
surrounded by agents of harm —
human and otherwise — is us.

Now we do not explicitly recognize this
when we hear the Christmas story,
nor hover over it
as if a detail central to its plot.
But deep down
we recognize it
because we live it
over and over and over again.

What is with us in this darkness?
Who is with us in this darkness?
Who and what can we always count on
to be with us — to be present
no matter how this story unfolds?

We know, or intuit, or fear
the hazards that inhabit our darkness,
but who or what else
is present — to be
with us?

That is what matters to us,
what really matters.
Who is present with us?
Not to protect us — we understand
our vulnerability
and come to terms with it
somehow.
But who is present with us?

In this story that we tell every year,
the Christmas story,
that presence is symbolized by light.
Whether it is the star
or brilliance of angels —
depending upon whether we are reading
Matthew or luke —
light is the metaphor for presence.

It points to that presence within us
that allows us to hold the darkness
when we cannot see our hand in front of our face
or know what is in the next moment.
Presence.
Simple presence.
The power of simple presence
that turns out to be enough to hold the darkness.

My words are limited this year
to keep our time together briefer than usual —
because our vulnerability this year
is clearer than in most years.

So this is as far as I can go with you,
but it is far enough.
It is the whole story in brief.

We understand the darkness
we sojourn —
it is composed of our vulnerabilities.

The Christmas story
reminds us
of what we also know:
that there is a presence with us,
some say a power greater than ourselves,
that is with us
in every moment and in every darkness.
A simple presence
that travels with us
and turns out to be enormously powerful.
Powerful enough to staunch our fear
and pierce our anxiety
and calm our tremors
with something
we cannot quite name.

We know there are COVIDS
and Deltas and Omicrons
and lions and tigers and bears, oh my,
that make up a constellation of hazards
which darken the skies within us.
But we also know
there is a presence.
And even though we more often than not
want protection more than anything,
we also know,
can also feel,
that somehow
that simple presence is enough.

In this beautiful moment,
present to one another
and together
holding the darkness,

I wish you a blessed, healing,
and hope-filled Christmas.

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Christmas Eve 2019: Merry Christmas

December 24, 2019 by Cam Miller

Merry Christmas.

On one level
Christmas has been hidden
in the Miller house this year.

That is because we are moving
and we expected to be in our new home
before Christmas.
So we packed away all our emotion-laden Christmas stuff
with everything else that was taken into storage
where we cannot retrieve it
until it is all delivered
when we finally move in.
But that has all been delayed
and so our usual Christmas decorations are in hiding.
And by emotion-laden Christmas things,
I suspect you know what I mean:
The ornaments given to celebrate the birth
of each child.
The children’s books that we always read,
the fake and cracking red apples from my mom
that only I want to hang on the tree.

That kind of stuff.

They are the outer layer of Christmas –
the wrapping that is paper thin
but still holds so many memories
that it becomes the skin of Christmas.
When it is taken it away it can hurt.

But still, all that stuff is just an outer layer.

Somewhere in storage
there is a wooden babushka doll.
It is actually a babushka Santa
with one Santa inside another
and another inside that one,
and down to a little peanut of a Santa –
which, I think, is actually missing after all these years.
Babushka Santa
is a pretty good metaphor for Christmas.
First of all, there is Santa –
something in and of itself
that has absolutely nothing to do
with the nativity of Jesus.

As I wrote in the Finger Lakes Times last week,
according to Pew Research,
96% of Americans celebrate Christmas
whether or not they feel any affinity with the nativity.
32% of Jews decorate a Christmas tree.
More than three-quarters of American Buddhists and Hindus
celebrate Christmas.

Meanwhile, only 46% of those who observe Christmas
see it as primarily a religious event.
So Santa represents
that big babushka of a holiday
which anyone and everyone can celebrate…just cause.

By the way, if you are sitting there
predicting that I am going to get down to the baby Jesus
as the final, small babushka,
you will be disappointed.
So, don’t get too complacent
and think you know where this is headed.
 

The next babushka inside the big one,
the Santa one,
is family.

Family is the centrifugal force
holding everything in place
inside the Christmas whirlwind.
It is also
one of the things that can make Christmas
a dark time for some folks.

It may be because we are not with our family for Christmas;
or we do not have strong family ties to begin with;
or maybe we just don’t have much family;
or maybe the family we do have is toxic.
A big, national party
that everyone everywhere seems to be celebrating
can burn
when the element of family is missing or painful.

But that said, for many of us, getting family together
may be the very best part of Christmas.
Jesus is okay, by if you want to know who I love most,

it is my family: our children, and their partners,
and that rascally little grandson in the back rows.
For me, as for some of you too,
Christmas would be just fine
if all it ever was,
was sitting around with family eating tacos.

Even so, there is another little babushka
inside the family one.
The smaller Christmas babushka inside family
is harder to recognize on its own or to isolate
independent of everything else.
It has something to do with a yearning.
For many of us, it is a yearning
we have learned to detach from or to numb.

I want to call it a…yearning for peace
but that sounds too abstract or corny.
Yet it is something like that –
a desire to feel harmony
and that things that were out of order
are somehow coming into sync.
It is a desire to know “the kids will be alright;”
to know the relationship between
those of us who have and those who have not
is coming into some kind of better balance.

It is a peace
we have never actually known before
and that we understand
has never actually been before
in our tortured and bloody human history.
And yet, somehow,
from somewhere or someone
an ember still glows
quietly within us
that keeps a small desire for it alive.
So I will call it a
little peace-babushka
that gets a small breath blown on it
for some of us
by the Christmas season.

Then there is another one
inside the that one.

Like the peace-babushka,
this still smaller Christmas one
lives inside us too –
and it has little to do
with the big national holiday.
It may have some tangential connection to family
but it also is a seed inside all of that bigger,
more obvious stuff.

I dare say it is a dream.

Coming from where I am coming from,
I want to call it God’s best dream for us –
God’s best dream for you, and for me.
But that may be going too far
for some folks.

So, I will just name it “dream” –
whosever dream it is
it somehow got deposited in us.

By dream,
I do not mean fantasy
or make believe
or pretend.
I mean a real part of who we are
that has been
and is
trying to bloom.

I can tell you for a fact,
that it has nothing to do with age
because mine still keeps taking me places
I had no idea or intention of going.
Yours too, however old you are,
can and is, still blooming.
You know, and I do too,
that we are either blooming or we are dying
and there is no reason to die
before we actually die.

This dream,
the one inside you and me
that blooms slowly
and sometimes suddenly,
can get nurtured at Christmas
without us even noticing.

In my experience,
there is often a quiet moment
inside the big Christmas who-ha
that can give us an inkling of its presence
and our relationship to it.
It is usually a moment
that comes without notice,
all of a sudden,
when things get quiet inside us
even if we are surrounded by others.

The dream, remember,
is not necessarily about our identity –
or how others perceive us
or what we are known for.
The dream is something about
understanding our relationship with the world
and how we are connected to the greater web of life
and seeing our small part in it;
and it’s about understanding how
what we do
ripples the web
and strengthens it,
or makes it more vulnerable.

When we get a little vision of that,
even the smallest of inklings,
it usually points us in a direction.
The dream is that kind of feeling or vision or inkling.

When we find ourselves in the presence of ‘the dream,’
we understand we are not alone,
and we understand that we are not truly an individual,
and that what we do
really and truly matters,
even in a small but outsized way.
‘The dream’ has all that connected to it.
In my experience,
brushing into the dream
is also an experience of hope,
and THAT is the smallest little babushka of Christmas.

Hope is the hunger that nourishes us.

Hope is the one thing
a human being
cannot live without.

When we travel to our core,
or fall into it as the case may be,
hope is the thing
that leads us back out.

If we cannot fathom hope
inside where we live
then that basic, essential hunger
that pools at the center of our being
will take us places
where human beings cannot dwell
in safety or wellness.

Hope is a flame
gently, quietly flickering
in the darkness.
It need not be very big at all
because, as we know,
even the smallest flame
enlightens even the deepest darkness.
That tiniest babushka of Christmas
hidden within all the surrounding ones,
is hope.

What I have just described
can also be applied to the story in Luke
with its outer events winnowing down
to its essential ah-ha!
But that babushka pattern
can be applied to you and me too,
with each element of Luke’s story
reflected in our lives.

I won’t annotate the Gospel story for you,
that is your work; and,
I cannot annotate your story,
the one that takes you down
to that dream…
with its hope.
That is your work too.

All I can do
is tell you that I know it is there –
that everything in my own experience
and the privilege I have had
to accompany others along their experiences,
affirms over and over and over again,
the presence of the dream
and a hope
at the center of Christmas…
at the center of life – yours and mine.

So my hope for you,
is that you bump into peace
and brush up against that dream
with its nascent hope,
and that both things happen for you
soon.

Merry Christmas.

 

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4 Advent 2019: A Dirty Sermon – as in earthen

December 22, 2019 by Cam Miller

This sermon is kind of dirty.
I don’t mean obscene,
I mean muddy – as in, earthen.
You will be happy to know
it is kind of short too’

I am looking forward to Christmas Eve this year,
when I can just kind embrace the readings
instead of feeling as though
I need to reach in and unpack them.
But then, that is the difference
between Advent and Christmas.

What we just heard from Isaiah
is not about a virgin
nor is it about Jesus.
On the other hand,
we do not know exactly what it is all about.

Here is the historical context
down and dirty.

After King Solomon there was a civil war
in which Israel went one way
and Judah another.
Israel was the northern section of what we
think of as Israel today,
and it had all the good stuff:
farm land,
water,
pastures
and a fairly strong military.

Judah was the southern end
and it had Jerusalem,
and deserts and wild places
where no one could survive,
as well as the Dead Sea
in which nothing much lives.

Israel never stopped wanting to take Judah back.

Time pressed on after the split
until Israel made a pact
with neighboring Aram,
which had its capital in Damascus.
Aram was also a vassal state
of the growing Assyrian empire.
Together Israel and Aram agreed to attack Judah
and then divide it up between themselves.

Ahaz was the king of Judah
and understandably, he was freaking out.
Isaiah was the prophet-poet
who tried to assure Ahaz
to stay the course.
Isaiah promised Ahaz
he would live to see the day
when God proved faithful to Jerusalem.

Isaiah tells the king to ask for a sign,
any sign, for God to show Ahaz
that God will protect Judah.

For some reason the king won’t do it.

So, Isaiah GIVES him a sign:
A woman, who shall remain nameless –
as most women of the bible and history have been –
will have a child, also nameless.

That child will be a peasant child
indicated by his diet of honey and curds.
By the time the child is old enough
to judge between right from wrong –
6 to 10 years old, maybe –
Ahaz will be able to see
that the kings of Israel and Aram
rule over an empty bunch of nothingness,
while Judah will be okay.

Oddly, that is a long time to wait for a sign
when you have two armies at your door.
That is what I mean that we don’t really understand
this passage –
other than its context.

Unlike scientists and engineers,
prophets and poets, like mystics,
are allowed to be cryptic
when they want to be.

But what we can be sure about,
is that this passage from Isaiah,
which was written 700 years
before Jesus was born,
is not about Jesus.

Rather, it was about something
that had to do with Ahaz
and the crisis he was facing.

Even so, Matthew comes along
almost eight centuries after the fact,
and tries to use Isaiah
as evidence or proof that Jesus is
the long-expected messiah.

Matthew constantly uses Hebrew scripture
written three-to-eight-hundred years before Jesus
as if it were written about Jesus.
It was his attempt to “prove” his Gospel claims.

I have no doubt
that Matthew believed what he was writing,
but it is also clear the vast majority
of first century Jews took no stock in it.
Especially the learned Jews
of Matthew’s generation
who understood how far-fetched
Matthew’s use of their text was.

The truth is, we get no proof for things like messiahs.

Heck, we don’t even get proof for love,
so the whole idea
that there is textual or historical evidence
or any kind of proof about things like messiahs,
is just absurd.
It is not our business anyway.
And actually, that is the larger point
of Isaiah’s big poetic prophecy to Ahaz:
trust God because you do not get to know.

Maybe D.H. Lawrence was onto something
when he wrote,
“Jesus was never Jesus
till he was born from a womb, and ate soup and bread
and grew up, and became, in the wonder of creation, Jesus, with a body and with needs,
and a lovely spirit.”

Incarnation,
which is actually what the Christmas story is about,
has to do with body-ness.
Everything we can know
can only be known from inside a body.
No body? Then no mind –
no-thing without a body.
Even an atom has a body – an electron shell.

We are embodied creatures
and everything we know about
is embodied in some way, somehow.
And what we are really saying
with Christmas
is that God is embodied too.
God is embodied in creation.
God finds a way to be embodied, somehow,
even in human flesh.

That is a big idea
that can’t be proven, of course,
except for those
who have experienced
the embodiment of God’s presence.

But those folks can’t prove it to anyone else,
any more than you and I
can actually prove we love someone –
no matter how deeply
or passionately we love them.

But then, that is what
our hands and feet are for – for embodying love
so that others can see and feel
what is otherwise not seen.
Our love requires embodiment
in order to be experienced.
Without embodying our love
it would just be an idea,
or something we say
but which has no real-world imprint.

Christmas,
when we take off all the baubles and wrapping,
is earthen, simple,
and practical.
For all the religious talk
about spirit
and Pentecost
and other-worldly mystical-stuff,
our religion is really quite earthy.

It is dirt-bound
gravity-held
and physically embodied
in flesh and blood.
It is then delivered with hands and feet –
and occasionally
with words that make a difference.

Using our bodies to make a difference,
to literally, get down in the mud
and create a new world
that looks
and acts
and feels like one rooted in love,
is our religion.
That is what we are, or are supposed to be.

The rhetoric of creeds and hymns is,
well just rhetoric
until the moment
we embody some of it.

So, like I said, it is not too complicated
or even spooky
in any kind of religious way.
Rather, it is about what we do
with our hands and feet.

I wish I could tell you something more elegant
or spectacularly mystical
and spiritual,
but honestly,
our religion is dirty
just like our hands and feet
are supposed to be.

Christmas too,
is not all that elegant.
It has all the dirty, smelly, joyful things
that bodies do.

Thanks be to God for that!

 

 

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Christmas Eve 2017: Darkness is not all dark…

December 24, 2017 by Cam Miller

TEXTS for CHRISTMAS EVE
Isaiah 2-7
Luke 2:1-7
“Nativity” by Li-young Lee

“In the dark, a child might ask, What is the world?
just to hear his sister
promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,
just to hear his brother say,
A house inside a house,
but most of all to hear his mother answer,
One more song, then you go to sleep.

How could anyone in that bed guess
the question finds its beginning
in the answer long growing
inside the one who asked, that restless boy,
the night’s darling?

Later, a man lying awake,
he might ask it again,
just to hear the silence
charge him, This night
arching over your sleepless wondering,

this night, the near ground
every reaching-out-to overreaches,

just to remind himself
out of what little earth and duration,
out of what immense good-bye,

each must make a safe place of his heart,
before so strange and wild a guest
as God approaches.”

SERMON

Darkness is not all dark,
the light not all radiant.

There are some moments that throb,
stuck like a heartbeat
in the gray tissue of the hippocampus
where memory is stored.

They are not always big moments either,
not always the ones
we think we should remember.
Sometimes they are moments
that linger beyond their significance.

Christmas Eve 1977.

It was the first time I knew
emotional pain could be physical.
It happened in an instant.
We finished singing a Christmas carol
before the sermon, just like tonight.
Nothing unusual.
The music stopped,
the lights were low,
aisle candles glimmering,
small spot light on the pulpit.
The preacher, a man of few and terse words always,
said it so simply.
The first words out of his mouth,
with utter ordinariness,
“Not every Christmas arrives on time.”

Then he told us
that our bishop had just died in a car accident.

I was struck by a fierce and immediate pain
on the lower right side of my back.
It was an intensely psychosomatic response
to grief, an emotion
with which I had little experience at that time.

That bishop, John P. Craine,
embodied everything I thought I knew
about the church I would spend my lifetime in.
I had just finished my first semester of seminary,
and John P. Craine was as much as anyone,
the reason I was on the path I was on.

It was Christmas Eve,
everything looked right – my family all there
in the pew,
red bows,
white candles,
same old faces in the choir,
same old families in their same old pews,
same old musty book scent
amidst the seasonal fragrance of pine boughs.
But the darkness suddenly enshrouded
all the twinkling beauty
that had just been there a minute ago.

The light is not always radiant.
But…darkness is not always dark.
Zoom ahead nearly a decade, to 1987.

Katy and I took the trip of a lifetime,
our lifetime anyway.
We went to Africa,
to Tanzania in East Africa.
We left as soon after Christmas as we could get away.

We planned the trip ourselves,
reading guidebooks
and making reservations at places –
all without the internet!
Imagine that, if you can.
It was a long and arduous process
and we left for parts unknown
with far less assurance
of who or what would greet us
than today, when it is possible to see live-cam
video footage of the places you will stay.

Anyway, the crescendo of our three-week trip
was to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Three nights up
and two nights down –
an extra night on the ascent
to acclimate to thin air.
We were warned there is no way to predict
how the altitude might affect us:
19,300 feet at the summit.
Astronaut, Neil Armstrong,
was overcome while the older man,
former President Jimmy Carter, did just fine.
I was close to being a chain-smoker and overweight,
Katy a svelte runner and former athlete.
Irony won the day.

At the final camp at 15,500 feet,
you bed down to sleep a few hours
before arising at midnight
to complete the trek to the top –
thus watching the sunrise over Africa.
We had two local guides,
David and Asir.
They woke us from our fitful sleep
only to discover that Katy’s heart was racing,
she was coughing, and struggling to breathe.

Grim-faced, David and Asir
warned that instead of climbing to the top
we needed to descend to a lower altitude immediately.
They attended to Katy
as I hurriedly collected our gear.
With David on one arm, and Asir on her other,
holding the only light among us –
a candle-powered lantern –
we began a return to the camp at 12,200 feet,
which had just taken the entire day for us to ascend.

“The dark is not dark to you,
the light and the dark to you are both alike,”
wrote the ancient poet of Psalm 139.
It has been a mantra of mine ever since.
The darkness is not always dark.

Down we trekked through the night,
Katy coughing but buoyed by two gentle spirits.
I was behind, left to keep up
at the border of a dim radiance
from the candle.
But I can tell you that the old phrase
is absolutely true: one small candle
is enough to enlighten the darkness.

Even more than that,
the darkness is not an enemy.
The darkness is an envelope of mystery
and wonder.

My eyes adjusted
and soon the canopy of heavenly brilliance
was a dome-light of magnificence.

Trusting the savvy of David and Asir,
who knew their way even in the dark,
the strange and elegant beauty of night
was like the loving voice of a grandmother.

Obviously we made it,
Katy is still here and subsequently,
the mother of four children.

But I tell you those stories as images of that paradox:
Darkness is not all dark,
and the light not all radiant.

“The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness –
on them light has shined.”

That is from Isaiah,
whose words were a light-trail of hope
across the darkness
for the 99.9%
of the population that was oppressed.
In prophecy and poems of hope after hope,
Isaiah gilded God’s insistence on justice and peace,
with signs of hope for the future.

Likewise, the humble ordinariness
of Li-young Lee’s imagined bedtime moment.

“In the dark, a child might ask, What is this world?
just to hear his sister
promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,
just to hear his brother say,
A house inside a house…

Darkness is not dark to you,
the darkness and light to you are both alike.

Normally we use light and dark
as the dichotomy between good and bad,
and such binary metaphors
can diminish our perspective.

So many times we traverse the radiance of brightness
but see very little;
while in the darkness we may be afraid of,
we discover the presence of love –
the presence of a power
so much greater than ourselves.

The Christmas story is like that also.

We imagine the substance and resonance
will be found in glimmers of light
and sugarplum sweetness,
when in fact, the light resides in the shadowed
and mysterious darkness.

Luke’s one paragraph we just read,
is a spare description of what has become
an elaborate romanticized narrative.
He spent more time describing the birth
of John the Baptist and, later,
the activities of the shepherds that night,
than he did the manger scene.

Look at what we know from what he writes.

The arch of the story,
is a pall stretched over a quarter of the earth,
in which an emperor far, far way,
in what may seem like another galaxy from Galilee,
insists on the first century version of identity papers.
Everyone must have a photo I.D.
and be registered in the system, and taxed.
The unmarried pregnant woman and her boyfriend
had to travel one-hundred and eight miles on foot.
Even if Mary rode a donkey,
in her condition it would have taken five days.
At their destination, they slept in a cattle shed
and used an animal drinking trough
as the infant’s first crib.

That is what we know from that one, small paragraph
that has become a mammoth commercial holiday
upon which the largest retail economy in the world, ever, is dependent.

Here is what we also know from sources
outside the gospel narrative.

Infant mortality in those days, was 60%.
Think about that: 6 in 10 babies died.
It says later in the story,
an almost throw-away line,
that Mary “pondered all these things.”
We know that poverty does damage to pondering.

The brutality of poverty limits pondering,
which may be one of its cruelest dimensions.
Poverty urges concentration on the moment
more than fostering a wide-open wonderment.
Then, as now, poverty meant
meager food,
horrendous vulnerability to arbitrary violence,
and near constant uncertainty about the next day.

The poverty in which Joseph and Mary lived
was a life-defining deprivation
of food, shelter, clothing,
and basic human rights
on a scale that you and I can hardly imagine.

So all of that and more
fills the darkness surrounding the cattle shed,
where a baby that probably won’t make it
out of infancy, is born.

That is some dark, darkness.

Beyond any brief moment of pondering
that may have occurred,
Mary and Joseph were likely filled
with anxiety.
More than certainly they were
dirty and hungry,
and frantic about keeping their baby alive.

I am painting this dire scene
because we have otherwise turned it into
an astoundingly radiant night
replete with twinkling colored lights,
romantic notions of a cozy and miraculous evening
out under the stars.
Uh ah, didn’t happen like that,
nor does it ever.

But still, and even so,
such darkness does not condemn its denizens
to impotence and hopelessness.

Darkness is not all dark,
the light not all radiant.

Now look, I have no idea why this is true,
but I do know that it is true – and so do you.
Darkness is not all dark,
the light not all radiant.

If we go about our lives
fearing the darkness
and refusing to enter into it,
we will be diminished.
We will be impoverished
no matter how much stuff we have,
or how soft our nest.

I promise you,
when we refuse to enter the shadow
for fear of the dark,
we will be lesser, shriveled people.

What might have happened
had Katy and I resisted being led down
that massive mountain through the night?
Or conversely, what happens when
we refuse to turn off the lights,
never enter darkness;
refuse to acknowledge or confront
the grief and pain of our lives?
We grow brittle and fragile.

The light is not all radiant,
darkness not all dark.

This Christmas story we tell every year,
has wisdom waiting for us inside
if we are willing to enter the darkness of the tale
instead of begging for the angels to arrive.

This Christmas story
has wisdom and hope inside
if we will turn off the Christmas tree lights
and sit in its very darkest moments
and listen to the narrative.

It is not for me to tell you what you will hear,
but hear it you will, if you are willing to listen.

I invite us to enter into the shadow
of the Christmas story –
its very center where light does not shine –
and hear the anxious children
who suddenly are parents
with no social safety net,
no citizenship,
no savings account,
no presents under the tree, and
nothing but one another
and their community of family and friends
between them and an indifferent regime.

Sitting with them there, in that darkness,
is where we will see a great light.
Isaiah promises it:
the people who walk in their darkness
will see a great light
, he said.

That is what the Christmas story
is really about –
entering the darkness in confidence
that we will encounter and hear
the love of God waiting for us there.

May your Christmas be blessed,
and the love of family and friends
be near to your heart.

Amen.

 

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