Words for Meditation

December 21, 2003
John Auer, Pastor

Scripture

        Micah 5:2-5a, Luke 1:39-45, Luke 1:46b-53

"Magnify This! Heir Apparent, E’er a Parent"

We learned just last Friday that next Friday evening, 9 pm, on PBS, channel 5, "NOW with Bill Moyers," the whole hour will be spent talking with Rev. Jim Forbes of Riverside Church, whom many of us met in the video series last summer. May we please hear it for all the preparers, all the performers of "the greatest Christmas pageant ever!" And for the faithful witness of Evelyn de la Rosa! This Sunday and next, we want to take a moment to greet college students and others at study or work in elsewhere now with us for Christmas.

Baptismal families, thank you! These children are your "heir apparents!" You are "e’er parents" to them. We seem never to outgrow our need for parenting. Nor even for being parents, as Jesus’ mother learns perhaps the hardest ways of all. The reflection for this Sunday in our Advent devotional booklet begins, "The term Magnificat refers to: (A) Mighty Mouse’s arch enemy, (B) The lens in the Hubble Space Telescope, (C) the heroine in the Broadway musical Cats, (D) Mary’s song of praise in the gospel of Luke." Mary is of the house and the lineage of David. She is the heir apparent – following in the tradition, according to Matthew, of generations of men, and of a distinct and select few very strong women –

Not whom we might expect. "Not a mention of Sarah or Rebekah or Rachel, the upstanding patriarchal wives of Israel," says biblical scholar Raymond Brown. "Instead Tamar, a Cananite, who disguised herself as a prostitute and seduced her father-in-law Judah to get a son out of him. And Rahab, another Cananite and a real prostitute this time. And Ruth the Moabite, another outsider. And Bathsheba, mother of Solomon, is named only as the wife of Uriah, whom David had killed so he could marry her himself. Every one of these women used as God’s instrument had scandal or aspersion attached to her --", Brown concludes, "as does the fifth and final woman named in the genealogy: Mary, the mother of Jesus, with her unconventional pregnancy."

Nor is God done making wonders of women, -- so old, as Elizabeth, so young, as Mary, -- Blessed are they, among women! And blessed are the fruits of all wombs. -- in Bethlehem to this day. I read, in part, a Christmas letter from Susan Atallah, Palestinian Catholic, teacher of English at St. Joseph’s School for girls in Bethlehem, city whom Micah here calls "one of the little clans of Judah" –

Dear Friends, It hurts us Christian Palestinians when people don’t acknowledge our presence in the Holy Land. Some people forget or pretend that Christianity was born in Bethlehem more than 2,000 years ago. . . . We Christians are dwindling in numbers because of emigration, but we are still here. We forget sometimes the meaning of joy, security and justice because they are denied us, but we make every effort to adjust ourselves to each and every situation we are exposed to. It’s true that we live in a big prison with checkpoints and barbed wires around the little town of Bethlehem, but we manage to go to work, deal with job-related problems, traffic, family matters, and so on – just like everybody else, except that we don’t lead a life like everybody else.

Every New Year we pray that the situation gets better, and every year it deteriorates. What I am talking about in not a matter of Christmas decorations; it’s a matter of feeling alive and free in body and spirit! We want to feel the spirit of Christmas and the message that Jesus came to spread: love, peace and reconciliation. We’ve had enough of violence.

Both the Israelis and the Palestinians deserve a better life, based on peace and justice. Will peace come without justice, or will security come without peace? Those are questions yet to be answered, but who has the answers? And who has the courage to implement them on the ground. I wonder. I wonder.

These baptismal mothers and fathers and families, all the way back, of these infants baptized this morning -- not to mention these other seasoned adults joining in membership, -- will attest that we all get here the best way we can! Surely, as we gaze upon these children, and others, and every child, we share the awe of Mary. James Agee reminds us among our "Words for Meditation," "In every child who is born / under no matter what circumstances, / and of no matter what parents, / the potentiality of the human race / is born again." (We are so lucky to be "the Church with the Child in the Office!" Madeline greets us each day in behalf of every child!) From now on all generations will call us blessed! The Mighty One has done great things for us, and holy is God’s name! God’s mercy is for those who fear God, who respect and reverence the peaceful yet powerful promise of God from generation to generation!

For God, even now, is showing strength with God’s arm. God, even now, is scattering the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. God, even now, let us dare count the ways, is bringing down the powerful from their thrones, all the powerful from their thrones, and lifting up the lowly! God, even now, and even though the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization reports the insidious increase of five million chronically hungry in the past year, bringing us as a world to 842 million malnourished this very day, so many of them children, --

God, even now, for the promise of God will not be mocked by our stubborn failures, is filling the hungry with good things, and sending the rich away empty. God, even now, is helping God’s servant Israel, by whom we understand as well all of the promised peoples of God to the ends of the earth, in remembrance of God’s mercy, according to the promise God made to all our strange, wondrous ancestors, to Abraham, to Sarah, to the descendants, as many as sands in the sea, as many as stars in the sky, -- descendants now, AnnaBelle Zane, Benjamin Todd, -- and descendants forever! Amen!!

Speaking of remembrance, God’s and ours, let us take a moment to look together at both sides of the bulletin insert entitled "Christmas Flowers." First, all those "in honor of," on one side, -- witness to so many still-living gifts and givers to our lives and our life together, in this season of our affirmation that "Life is for living!" Then all those "in memory of," on the other side, some as yet more painful than others to remember, for in such profound ways we await this week not only Christmas present, and Christmas future, but also Christmas past.

That is both the ecstasy and the agony of these holy days. Let us pray to live them fully, and to the glory of the one who is Promise and Presence, Passion and Power to all generations. How many stories of Christmas are born, and born again, by all these names? Tennyson says in our "Words" this morning, We are part of all that we have met! They are a part, and now a party, of us as well. Anna Kamienska laments, in a poem about Mary’s meeting with the angel, what some sense in our hearts: "No one can know / how lonely it is / when an angel departs . . . From now on even an eternity / would be too short for expectation."

Our souls, and our soul together, magnify the Lord! Our spirit rejoices in God our Savior! The one who comes to rescue, to ransom every captive Israel mourning in lonely exile here! For God has looked with favor, with Jubilee, as in the acceptable year of the Lord, the year of God’s favor, on the lowliness, the poorness, the weakness, the youngness, the oldness, the nearness to earth of all of God’s servants, all of God’s children, all of God’s creatures – Amen again!

At Christmas we find, God seems to have this fetish for flesh, -- our flesh! The choir just sang of it: "And all flesh will see it [the glory!] together!" God has a fetish for nearness, for closeness, to us in every condition, -- specially our most humble and lowly ones. Sr. Joan Chittister goes so far as to say, "Christianity is based on the goodness of flesh!" How doubly assuring to some of us. "If human flesh was good enough for Jesus," asks Sister Joan, "who of us can afford to reject it? To be human is to be flesh. To be holy is to glory in it!" Gloria, Gloria!

"In the Christmas story we see God become helpless, become like us, become subject to the tensions of growth, become flesh so we might recognize that we have the stuff it takes to become like God." Say what?! We have the stuff it takes to become like God! "The flesh, in other words," says Sister Joan, "is all we have. It is our glory. It is our power. It is sweet. It is beautiful. And it is the clay out of which we shape a better tomorrow." The babies this morning, each one of us here, -- the clay out of which may be shaped a better tomorrow.

Julie and I are so happy today to be in the presence in church again of the first bundle of squirming flesh we as parents carried to baptism some 30-plus years ago! We give thanks for how big, how healthy, that bundle so lightly named "John Jeffery Auer IV" has become! "Heir apparent" to us, and to whom we remain "e’er a parent!" We remember how, as seminary students about to go to our first appointment, we could not get enough support. We called upon eight godparents and two preachers! My father, John Jeffery Auer II, evoked hopes for the worthiness of the name and the contribution little Jeff might make to the world. The homilist then assured little Jeff all he ever had to be was, and still is, himself. His own flesh, his own blood, his own mind, his own spirit.

Our Advent muse Sister Joan reflects on Jesus’ birth, recalling Paul in Philippians: "The Jesus ‘who did not cling to being God,’ but is like us in all things, models what most of us take the greater part of our lives to learn: how to ‘be ourselves.’" How to be just ourselves. The best possible selves, to be sure, but just ourselves. That’s Christmas! Being ourselves, -- how God knows us and comes to us. "The divinity who comes to us as an infant is the paradigm of what it means to learn from life as we grow into who and what we are meant to be. The God who comes without retinue or riches is the metaphor of a humility that requires us to remember how really small we are in the universe – and to come to the point where that is enough for us." That is enough! That’s Christmas, too.

"Advent," sees Sister Joan, "is about the power of emptiness and the spiritual meaning of smallness." The power of emptiness, the spiritual meaning of smallness. "Finally, when Advent seeps into our souls, we come to understand that small is not nothing and empty is not bereft." Small is not nothing, empty is not bereft. "To be small is to need, to depend on the other. Smallness bonds us to the rest of the human race and frees us from the arrogant isolation that kills both the body and the soul." And that is Christmas as well.

It is Christmas to celebrate fleshliness, nearness, lowliness, closeness, poorness, weakness, youngness, oldness, emptiness, smallness, neediness. The sights, the sounds, the smells, the touches, the tastes of neediness everywhere! Sandra Cisneros names our neediness in her new novel Carmelo –

Everybody needs a lot. The whole world needs a lot.
Everyone, the women frying lunch putting warm coins in your hand.
The market sellers asking – What else?
The taxi drivers racing to make the light.
The baby purring on a mother’s fat shoulder.
Welders, firemen, grandmothers, bank tellers, shoeshine boys, and diplomats.
Everybody, every single one needs a lot.
The planet swings on its axis, a drunk trying to do a pirouette.
Me, me, me! Every fist with an empty glass in the air.
The earth throbbing like a field ready to burst into dandelion.

It’s Christmas: The earth throbbing like a field ready to burst into dandelion!
Amen.

John Auer, Pastor

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