Between noon and three

This sermon was preached on Christmas Eve, 2024, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: O God, you have caused this holy night to shine with the brightness of the true Light: Grant that we, who have known the mystery of that Light on earth, may also enjoy him perfectly in heaven; where with you and the Holy Spirit he lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Readings: Isaiah 62:6-12, Titus 3:4-7, Luke 2:1-20

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

If you were to draw or paint your own rendition of the Nativity scene, what would it look like? Probably something like the creche here at St. Mark’s, which we blessed at the beginning of tonight’s service: You would have Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus in a manger; an ox and ass nearby, shepherds with a few sheep; angels, wise men, maybe a few camels, the whole cast. 

How would you draw the stable itself? Probably you’d make some kind of lean-to shed, like what you see in the creche here, or in the stained glass window above it. Archaeologists tell us the stable might have been more like a cave, a hollow place in a hillside. Or, if the inn were a small one, maybe their stable was just the first floor of a two-story building, with rooms above to let out among the family’s own quarters.

If, however, you are a medieval or renaissance painter, your stable might look a little different. These artists did often depict the stable as a shed, a cave, or a house, all the above. But sometimes they depicted it as a ruin instead, a broken shell of some larger, older building: sometimes a ruined temple, sometimes a ruined castle, sometimes a ruined house. Sometimes the ruins are totally collapsed, just a jumble of broken stones and beams. Sometimes they are still partly inhabited. In one such painting, the ruin is of a colossal Roman triumphal arch, broken down and growing weeds. Archaeologists are quick to declare, no such triumphal arch was ever built in Bethlehem or was ever likely to be. And they’d say the same about all the glorious temples, castles, and manor houses that these painters ruined and turned into their stables for the Holy Family.

So, why did they depict it as a ruin? The point is a theological one. There may not have been an actual ruined triumphal arch in Bethlehem that an innkeeper used as a stable. But it is true nonetheless that the Christ child was born to “cast down the mighty from their thrones,” and “exalt the humble and meek,” to borrow from the text of his mother’s Magnificat. It is true that he would defeat and bind forever the ancient powers of sin and death, and that he would free the prisoners whom they had long held captive. It is true that this Child’s life and death would reveal the violence and injustice upon which every human kingdom depends, and open a better way to Paradise than so many towers of Babel. 

A ruin as a stable drives home the theological point: here is a child whose birth begins a new thing, opens a new path, heralds the dawn of a new day, in which all the works of every erstwhile power are thrown down. To see them ruined at the coming of this Prince of Peace is certainly cause for celebration, and for hope.

There are others, though, for whom the ruins make less a theological argument than a personal commentary, and for these people the ruins are not cause for celebration but rather for lament. No matter how corrupt or unjust it finally becomes, in human achievement there is still at least some spark of beauty, of creativity, of nobility, and sometimes quite a lot. Insofar as it is human at all, human achievement has its root in God’s own creative power. And therefore when it falls into ruin, it is only humane to lament.

For some, the lament is less for monuments and institutions than it is for personal griefs, failures, or losses. The ruins in these medieval and renaissance nativity scenes may as well be the tatters of the world I thought I knew, while suggesting that the world I live in now cannot possibly be even a shred of what I once enjoyed. These are people grieving a spouse, a parent, a child; people working through a divorce; experiencing an addiction; facing a cancer diagnosis or a bankruptcy. Perhaps they are staring down literal ruins after a wildfire or hurricane. 

For all of these, the ruins are too familiar for words, and they almost do not bear looking at. For these, the medieval and renaissance painters preach good news indeed: here, in the ruins, the Word is made flesh; God is born, the light shines in the darkness that the darkness comprehendeth not. Here, in the ruins — not somewhere else. Not in ivory palaces where everyone is well-off and well-adjusted. Right here, where it is cold and insecure and the ruins sigh only of failure, confusion, loss, and grief. Right here, this is where the Word is made flesh. 

And if I am here too, then I am not far from God after all. Rather, here in my ruins, I have a privileged position to behold how he works his love: in quiet, in gentleness, and among those who know heartbreak. So the painters offer consolation, too, in addition to commentary: for Christ to be born amongst the ruins makes them blessed who all likewise dwell in ruins, from now on and forever.

But of course the ruins are the setting, not the point, and this is the third insight these painters offer us: ruins do not have to stay ruins. Recorded history is full of significant restoration projects, from the walls of Jerusalem to the Houses of Parliament to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, which reopened just a few weeks ago. 

Sometimes such a restoration is more a re-construction, even sometimes a redemption of sorts. Maybe you know about our Anglican cathedral in Zanzibar, on the coast of Tanzania. Begun in 1873 to celebrate the end of the slave trade, the cathedral was built directly over what had been the city’s largest slave market. The high altar was placed directly over what had been the market’s principal whipping post. The message is clear: here in a place where people were removed from human fellowship and bought and sold as livestock, we now partake of the sacrament of divine love; we are restored to one another as brothers and sisters, bearers of the image of God and members of one another.

So perhaps those painters were onto something, to paint the Christmas stable as a ruin, a shell. A ruin serves as a marker of something that was and is no longer. But more than that, such a stable suggests what is yet finally coming, by the will and power of the One who is born there. It is a sign of potential, of future fulfillment: the Christ child’s kingdom is new, certainly, but it is not destructive. In ways too mysterious even to guess, He takes what we have ruined, what we have destroyed, corrupted, poisoned, consumed for our own pleasure at others’ expense; He is born to take all of these things and make them good, make them whole; to restore them to us far more completely than we could ever desire or deserve.

So the ruin is not the end point of a long, sad story. Rather it is a chapter break, even a starting point — ruin is a harbinger of reunion and restoration, which purpose will be taken up by this Child as surely as Mary draws him to her breast. Ruin is where he is born. But he is born to make the desert bloom, to make cities rise from waste places, to make water flow from the rock, to make dry bones take flesh and live. For this Child is God-with-us, and where he is, there can be no more alienation, no more death, no more crying or pain or hurt. For his mercy, his forgiveness holds sway over every mere justice, and in his heart our hearts are finally at home.

This Christmas I invite you to draw near with faith to the Lord’s crib: to behold here the ruin of our world, perhaps even the ruin of your own soul; and to see in it not the end of all things, but the beginning of God’s work in you. Be assured, by the gentle touch of his grace, that work will be brought to completion, till the whole world be called “the redeemed of the Lord; a people sought out, a city not forsaken.”

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.

This sermon was preached at St. Mark’s, Berkeley, on the Third Sunday of Advent, December 15, 2024.

Collect: Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings: Zephaniah 3:14-20, Ecce Deus (Canticle 9), Philippians 4:4-7, Luke 3:7-18

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

“Sing aloud, O daughter, Zion, rejoice and exult with all your heart!” “Therefore you shall draw water with rejoicing from the springs of salvation.” “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, rejoice.” Except for the Gospel, our readings today all sound the clear note of rejoicing. They are full of so much joy that when we heard the Gospel just now, I started to suspect that John the Baptist must not have gotten the memo. 

“Rejoice greatly, Rejoice, Rejoice always;” and John says, “You brood of vipers!” He urges the people to turn away from their besetting sins: tax collectors from greed, soldiers from extortion, the rich from hoarding. And he goes on, with images about axes lying at the root of trees, the unfruitful being thrown in the fire, the Messiah coming who will baptize not with water but with the Holy Spirit and fire. It comes as almost a bit of comic relief to hear St. Luke conclude, “So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.” Good News? Really?

On the face of it, our lessons stand in stark contrast to one another. But on further examination, they’re really not so far apart after all. For John, the good news is that a new life is in fact possible, that turning away from greed, extortion, hoarding, and other sins does not lead to a diminishment of human life but to an enlargement. For Paul and for Zephaniah, the same is true: that despite our many sins, God has chosen for us not justice but mercy; and in his mercy,  created a new society, a new humanity.

In many ways, explicit and implicit, the season of Advent makes it clear to us that all the good news, all the prophecies, all the exhortations to joy and hope, all coalesce in the person of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God — so his coming birth is an occasion of great significance, a feast of high celebration and thanksgiving, that opens our eyes, opens doors of possibility beyond whatever confines or constraints we currently experience. This is the reason for so much happiness and joy in our readings and in the Christian celebration of Christmas.

But if you’re like most other reasonably normal human beings, all this is frequently more difficult than it sounds. Despite the great theological depth and nuance of what Christmas celebrates, our wider culture seems to take the holiday as an excuse to tell us all how to feel: How many seasonal paper coffee mugs are plastered with words like “joy!” and “peace on earth!”? And how much incessant jangling muzak everywhere you go implicitly demands that we put on a smile and look the very picture of holiday cheer as the price of admission to polite society? 

Newspaper editorials, political speeches, and advertisements are all full of mysterious references to “this time of year,” as if we all just understand that this is a time to pretend that serious disagreement doesn’t define our public life, that long histories of abuse and neglect simply take a vacation right about now, that the hospitals aren’t full and mom isn’t an alcoholic, and dad isn’t dying, and I can get away with neglecting my health for a little bit longer. All this just gets swept under the rug in a collective decision to go stark raving mad, fa la lalling all the way — and if we don’t consent to the madness, or happen to face some inconveniently timed personal crisis, then the implication is we “just haven’t really gotten into the spirit of the season yet,” and well-meaning friends think all we need is a peppermint spice latte to cheer us up.

If this is you this year, or if this has ever been you, then I’m delighted to tell you, the Church, anyway, is not here to tell you how to feel, at Christmas or at any other time. Well that’s a relief, you might say, but then why go to so much trouble telling me to rejoice all the time? Or, for that matter, telling me to repent? It sounds like you want me to feel good and then bad, or maybe it’s bad and then good — either way all the back-ing and forth-ing makes me seasick.

And the Church replies, Yes! This is exactly the problem: as human beings we are captive to our emotions, desires, wants, and fears; captive to the up and down rollercoaster of our hearts, our material needs, and the attention economy by which modern capitalism runs. The Gospel we preach is a Gospel of freedom: freedom to move and be shaped according to the goodness of God, and not according to the myriad ways we have learned to shame, manipulate, or coerce certain responses out of ourselves and our neighbors.

That may not sound like much of a difference, but it’s really critical and quite profound. The Church’s exhortation to rejoice at the coming of the Savior is not a command to put on a happy face, no matter your present pains or anxieties. Rather it is to suggest that the Kingdom of God is built of deeper, more lasting architecture than my own condition at any given moment. And, further, that in this deeper, more lasting architecture, even my present pains and anxieties, by some great mystery, have some coherence: they are not detractors, not evidence to the contrary, rather they sing in harmony with God’s peace. And whether I feel like singing or not, that this is cause for joy. If I cannot now take up the song, then it will be waiting for me when I am ready, And when I do finally open my mouth, I will discover that I have indeed been singing all along.

Because — and this is a yet deeper mystery — as human beings, as the world was created, our natural state is not the neutral posture of dispassionate observation so beloved by scientists, judges, and journalists alike. Our natural state is rather one of continual joy and wonder at all that God has made, at the heights of beauty of which creation is capable and the dazzling complexity of human personality and ingenuity; to rest in a loving thankfulness offered in praise back to God. 

The Gospel we preach, the Gospel Christmas celebrates, makes it possible to affirm that even grief and loss have been visited by Emmanuel, God-with-us, and that by his touch they blossom and grow in ways we cannot begin to guess or control. Freedom in Christ means, among other things, a restoration to this natural state of rest, where wonder and love comes as easily as breathing, and peace is deep enough to hold and encompass every pain and anxiety.

So, on this third Sunday of Advent, whether you welcome or resist today’s many exhortations to rejoice, I pray that at some point in this coming Christmas season, a door opens for you, from whatever your present circumstances may be to the wide world of grace and love which God has placed at the root of each soul and every created thing. That in whatever narrow place you find yourself, the horizon begins to grow and new possibilities emerge of forgiveness and faith, just as the one born in the manger will rise from the dead and break every chain. And, that something of your self will be restored to you, which perhaps you did not know that you had lost.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.

This sermon was preached at St. Mark’s, Berkeley, on November 24, 2024, the feast of Christ the King (Last Sunday after Pentecost/Proper 29). Today’s feast, following so shortly our national elections a few weeks ago, provided a natural occasion to reflect on power, vulnerability, and the Gospel.

Collect: Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings: Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14, Revelation 1:4b-8, John 18:33-37

__________

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

Today’s readings present probably the highest contrast of any set of readings in the lectionary: the Old Testament, the Psalm, the passage from Revelation, are all highly exalted in tone, with royal imagery and language of great power and dominion. Reading these lessons, one is in no doubt about the ultimate authority of God or of his chosen. “His throne was fiery flames, a thousand thousands served him, the court sat in judgement and the books were opened. The Lord is King, he has put on splendid apparel. Lo, he comes with clouds descending; to him be glory and dominion, for ever and ever.” 

And then we get to the Gospel, which takes place mere hours before Jesus is crucified. Yes, he and Pilate are discussing kingship, and what sort of king Jesus might be. But it’s impossible for the context to fade into the background. This is not a meeting of two equals. Pilate is a citizen of Rome, the governor of Judea, appointed by Emperor Tiberius Caesar himself to rule in Caesar’s name. And Jesus is the son of a provincial carpenter turned itinerant rabbi, arrested and condemned. He appears before Pilate a prisoner, whose life hangs on a word.

Today is the feast of Christ the king. The whole force of the other lessons, certainly the collect, our hymns, the choir’s anthems, all of them drive us to see that here in Pilate’s chambers, the prisoner is the one who is lord of all; while the chosen deputy of the most powerful man on earth we are meant to think merely a mid-level bureaucrat at best.

No starker contrast exists in all the church’s calendar of Sundays, feast days, or readings. There’s no way around it, this level of contrast is hard to understand. Sure, we can acknowledge it with our minds, but what on earth does it mean?

Part of the challenge, I think, is that at this point in our history, it’s hard to imagine a king of any sort; at least, a king like the ancient world would have known. In the Year of our Lord 2024, almost every monarch we’re aware of is figurehead of a limited, constitutional monarchy: useful for raising awareness of charitable causes, and of course endless fodder for tabloids and talk shows, but not usually much else. Meanwhile in this country we have famously done away with monarchs altogether. Every schoolchild grows up learning about the American Revolution: when effigies of King George were burned, many of his officials and sympathizers were tarred and feathered, and the new nation established itself on principles from the Roman republic, not the Roman empire. 

So we can perhaps be forgiven some confusion when it comes to the feast of Christ the King: not only is the contrast between ancient almighty royalty and a condemned prisoner too much for our brains to hold, the whole idea of a king is foreign to us in the first place.

Maybe it’s worth digressing at this point, to say that no form of government is explicitly or implicitly endorsed by God, not in the Christian religion at any rate; you might say Christianity is “governmentally agnostic.” And indeed, across history it is frequently the case that Christianity spreads most quickly and roots most deeply in places with oppressive governments rather than in those with benevolent ones. Which is not to endorse oppressive regimes, only to observe that the Christian Gospel resonates with people there in a way that it frequently doesn’t elsewhere, or not to the same degree. 

As Americans, no matter where we locate ourselves on the political spectrum, it is often difficult to remember that we have not perfected the art of civilization, that our ideas are not necessarily the best, that God is not reading the New York Times taking notes on how better to run the universe (though sometimes I wish he would). 

It’s worth keeping all this in mind, especially at times when we feel the stakes are particularly high, when our choices as a nation have real consequences for good or ill across the globe. They do, of course: I am not suggesting that our choices for good or ill do not matter. Only that we worship a God who is quite capable of making good from evil, of snatching life from the jaws of death, of affirming that a prisoner awaiting his death sentence is actually King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

And perhaps this is exactly the point, or at least for us, here in Berkeley, on this year’s feast of Christ the King at any rate: we cannot imagine a king, yet we own this one as high above all earthly authority. We cannot hold the contrast between Caesar’s prisoner and the lord of all creation, yet we worship him as God and nourish our souls with his flesh and blood. The impossibility of all this, the necessity of affirming it all anyway, must finally break something in us: our assumptions, our expectations, even perhaps something of our aspirations. 

The Gospel of Jesus Christ and the quest for political power and influence do not and can never go hand in hand. Because the Christ of the Gospel does not pull the levers of earthly power; rather he is crushed by those who do. And if you and I would worship him truly, we must first ask, whom have I crushed, and how might I turn and serve them? And then, who else is crushed by the powers that be? Can I find it in myself not just to serve them, but to adore them as those in whom Christ is especially visible? If I can adore the refugee, can I adore the fentanyl addict? If I can adore the addict, can I adore the unpleasant uncle whose mind is rotted with social media and memes? Maybe, but I suspect most of us have work to do. I certainly do.

It is true that in this life, in this world, especially perhaps in Berkeley, California, we find ourselves in possession of a certain amount of power, whether we asked for it or not. We try to do good with this power, we seek to wield it for the benefit of others. But power is a double-edged sword, and the tighter we grip it, the longer we wield it, the more damage it does to ourselves. 

Christ the King teaches us, the only thing power is finally good for is for giving away: for casting down our crown before the only one who can wear it without being corrupted by it: the One who humbled himself to become a servant, even to death on a cross.

This is a beautiful vision, I think, and offers an important alternative to the world we live in. Today there seem to be two prevailing responses to woundedness, vulnerability (well, three, if you count denial): First, we can insist that we ought not be vulnerable, that it is beneath our dignity, and then rise up in anger at those we perceive have wounded us. Or, second, we can wear our victimhood as a badge of honor, and thereby turn it into its own source of power and corruption. But this is really the same as the first, and both mean we are finally consumed: whether consumed by anger or by pride, the result is the same.

Christ before Pilate, Christ the King offers a third way: refusing on the one hand to take vengeance for our wounds, refusing on the other hand to justify ourselves by them, we can instead just stop, and behold them. They are wounds, they are injuries, to be sure. But as the wound in Christ’s side made his heart visible, even, as early commentators put it, opening passage to the heart of God, so our wounds put us in touch with what is truest and best about ourselves, and in the process make our hearts open to the presence of God and to our fellow human beings. 

The mystery is, that while this makes us vulnerable to attack, abuse, misunderstanding, and all sorts of villainy, yet it is the only way to be faithful to the example of our Lord. And, as the cross is his eternal and glorious throne throughout all worlds, so wherever you feel most vulnerable, most afraid, is the place his glory abides in you, is the beachhead of his kingdom on earth. 

Do not leave that shore, do not seal it up, do not make it your brand, do not charge admission, for heaven’s sake do not muster an army there or declare yourself king. Instead let it be the place where you continually draw water from the well of life, where the sun breaks across the sea and the wilderness blossoms as the rose.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.