THe One-of-a-Kind Glory 12-23-12

The Reading—Isaiah 2: 1-5 The Message Isaiah got regarding Judah and Jerusalem: There’s a day coming when the mountain of GOD’s House Will be The Mountain— solid, towering over all mountains. All nations will river toward it, people from all over set out for it. They’ll say, “Come, let’s climb GOD’s Mountain, go to the House of the God of Jacob. He’ll show us the way he works so we can live the way we’re made.” Zion’s the source of the revelation. GOD’s Message comes from Jerusalem. He’ll settle things fairly between nations. He’ll make things right between many peoples. They’ll turn their swords into shovels, their spears into hoes. No more will nation fight nation; they won’t play war anymore. Come, family of Jacob, let’s live in the light of GOD. The Middle Reading--from “How the Light Comes” by Jan Richardson I cannot tell you how the light comes. What I know is that it is more ancient than imagining. That it travels across an astounding expanse to reach us. That it loves searching out what is hidden, what is lost, What is forgotten, or in peril, or in pain. … I cannot tell you how the light comes, but that it does. That it will. That it works its way into the deepest dark that enfolds you, though it may seem long ages in coming or arrive in a shape you did not foresee. And so may we this day turn ourselves toward it. May we lift our faces to let it find us. May we bend our bodies to follow the arc it makes. May we open and open more and open still to the blessed light that comes. The Gospel—John 1:1-18 The Word was first, the Word present to God, God present to the Word. The Word was God, in readiness for God from day one. Everything was created through him; nothing—not one thing! came into being without him. What came into existence was Life, and the Life was Light to live by. The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness: the darkness couldn’t put it out. There once was a man, his name John, sent by God to point out the way to the Life-Light. He came to show everyone where to look, who to believe in. John was not himself the Light; he was there to show the way to the Light. The Life-Light was the real thing: Every person entering Life he brings into Light. He was in the world, the world was there through him, and yet the world didn’t even notice. He came to his own people, but they didn’t want him. But whoever did want him, who believed he was who he claimed and would do what he said, He made to be their true selves, their child-of-God selves. These are the God-begotten, not blood-begotten, not flesh-begotten, not sex-begotten. The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of- a-kind glory, like Parent, like Son, generous inside and out, true from start to finish. John pointed him out and called, “This is the One! The One I told you was coming after me but in fact was ahead of me. He has always been ahead of me, has always had the first word.” We all live off his generous bounty, gift after gift after gift. We got the basics from Moses, and then this exuberant giving and receiving, this endless knowing and understanding—all this came through Jesus, the Messiah. No one has ever seen God, not so much as a glimpse. This one-of-a-kind God- Expression, who exists at the very heart of the Creator, has made God plain as day. The One-of-a-Kind Glory 12-23-12 God, Source of all Light and life, call us to sit up and watch for the coming of the Life-Light anew in our hearts. It’s almost Christmas, and we’re not sure we’re ready for all you have in store for us. Open our hearts wide that we may receive every blessing you for us. May the words of my mouth be inspired by your Holy Spirit and may our listening be an upturning of our faces to greet your light this day. Amen Do you know the first recorded words of Biblical history? I’ll give you a moment---“Let there be light!” That’s what God said upon seeing the creation of the world. And there was light! And we, the people of God, have been searching ever since for ways to experience that light which God called into being before life itself. You’d think it would be easy for us to understand—why look around “light” is everywhere. And, if the day is gray or night has fallen, we simply flip a switch and light abounds. And yet, we struggle and struggle and struggle some more to know how to make that same light alive in our spirits, our minds, and yes, even our bodies. Isaiah tells us that to live in the light is to live in the way we were made. Living in God’s light, in tune with the plans of our Creator, produces change in the world—right and fair relationships between all nations and peoples, swords changed into shovels and spears into hoes, war a thing of the past. Christ has come again at almost 2000 Christmases and, still, we fail to comprehend the radical righting of relationships when we live as God called us to be as people of the Light. The verses in the Gospel of John that were read today are called the Prologue. There are no pretty angels here, rugged shepherds or well-heeled sages—nothing to get in the way of understanding that which John would have us understand. Poet that John was—he speaks in words that call us to have to try hard to grasp their meaning. But grasp we must if we are to participate in this Life-Light that blazes out of the darkness in John’s interpretation of the coming of Jesus into the world. Jesus and God, intimately linked from the beginning of time, waiting for the right time to be revealed to the world. And when this divine Life-Light was revealed in the coming of Jesus to earth, it could not be extinguished. Building on the basics from Moses, Jesus gives us an in flesh expression of God that we can all understand. In fact, this Jesus has made God plain as day. Most of us may say today, “Really? God plain as day?” We’ve been asking a lot of questions in the last two weeks or so about where God is. Several of you asked me the question all preachers fear. “Why does God let things like that happen?” It doesn’t matter what the “that” is in the sentence, it’s all the same question. Who is this God, anyway? And, if omnipotent and all powerful, why did this (whatever the this may be) happen?” I’m going to give you an answer that is horribly unsatisfying and dangerously honest. “I don’t know.” But, I do know where God is in the seconds after the evil (wherever it is—in Connecticut, Tucson, the Pentagon, New York City or Uganda) is perpetrated. God is in the teachers who shielded children with their own bodies, God is in the first responders at every single scene where evil has played out its torturous renunciation of all things holy, God is in the words of the pastors called upon to preach in circumstances that no one can prepare for. God is in the songs of the Children’s Christmas pageants that continue to take place in every church determined to let God’s light shine for all to see, and God is in the prayers of the broken-hearted and desolate. The world comes dangerously close to extinguishing the Light in my opinion. Wars, wounded soldiers, murdered children, abused women and men, and people dying by the thousands of AIDS—a disease we should have been able to eradicate decades ago—all cause us to ask “why?” We, much like Mary, ponder all these things in our hearts as we watch the unfolding of the Christmas story again this year. But, John calls us back to reality—the Light shines in this darkness because the darkness has not overcome it. Everyone is invited to experience this one-of-a-kind glory. That’s a close as John gets to celestial beings or magical messages in dreams and visions. This glory is for all, that is, all who participate in this Reign of Light and Life. Here, we encounter more than a little resistance. How does this work, this experiencing of glory? Many of us will say, I can’t identify with this. My religion is practical, none of this mystical, soul-shifting stuff for me. Here’s where “Glory” gets a bad name. We convince ourselves that this interior, life-altering experience of God is just for monks, nuns, preachers or others who devote their lives to walking with God. Not so. If Jesus came to make God known for all of us, then we can truly understand God by looking to the incarnation of God. I believe that God intends for the experience of God’s presence to be universally available. But we must want it, we must want to experience God’s fullest fullness. Fr. Henri Nouwen describes it like this: “We must be attentive and interiorly alert. For some people the experience of the fullness of time comes in a spectacular way, as it did to St. Paul when he fell to the ground on his way to Damascus (Acts 9:3-4). But for some of us it comes like a murmuring sound or a gentle breeze touching our backs (1 Kings 19:13). God loves us all and wants us all to know this in a most personal way.” What does it mean for us to know that God loves us in a “personal way”? This, I think, is the crux of the Christmas story, at least for John. We know that, later in life, the teacher and prophet, Jesus, turned the world order upside down when he called the humble to the front of the line, the meek to rule the earth, and told the hungry that they would never be hungry again. Are these just stories? You must know, by now, that I would not have dedicated myself to the telling of mere stories over and over. No, I believe with everything in me, and I know that there are others here, too, who believe that the story of this Christ child can and will change our lives if we are fully open to hearing, digesting, pondering and interacting with the Divine in our inner, sacred lives. So when, we find ourselves craving something more this Christmas time, we are called by John to experience this glory for ourselves. Ah, this may be it—we have told the story so many times, or heard the story so many times, that it is something we rarely stop and take inside our hearts. We may plan, each time Advent or Christmas rolls around to spend more time in preparation for our encounter with Christ anew. But, rarely, do we actually manage to do so. And, so today, I call us to the quiet, to that sacred alone place where we can hear the call of God. It is in this quiet space, this open, humble space where God can be heard above all that clamors for our attention. And when, we are in the manger of our hearts, God is born again, clothed in humble clothes and worshipped by poor and probably dirty shepherds. Friend to our troubled hearts, this Baby calls to us in soft infant smiles and troubled infant tears. And we reach out to lift and love this baby into our hearts—those hearts made tender and whole by our encounter with this divine infant—this Light in the world. And we, in turn, will light the world for all to see. Marianne Williamson reminds us: “Christ is born into the world through each of us. As we open our hearts, he is born into the world. As we choose to forgive, he is born into the world. As we rise to the occasion, he is born into the world. As we make our hearts true conduits for love, and our minds true conduits for higher thoughts, then absolutely a divine birth takes place. Who we're capable of being emerges into the world…” And, so, today, we wait. We wait for the holiest of nights to unfold tomorrow. And, as we wait, God waits to show us all that we were planned to be. God loves us and has a plan for our lives—and that plan involves growing and becoming, recognizing and reclaiming. We are, in many cases, a wounded people, but God calls us to wholeness—a divine wholeness that comes in God’s time, filling us with the unmistakable knowledge that God shines the Light so that we would come to love ourselves, each other and the world with the passion and power of sacred servanthood to God. And to God we say, we are open to your calling, your words, and your silence. Perhaps this is what Mary, epitome of sacred servanthood, pondered as she encountered God in Jesus in the manger right where he lay. Amen and amen.