From the Pulpit:

It will probably sound like a no-brainer to you, but today I want to think about gifts. We still have some wrapped packages under our tree as two of our sons will be arriving from their far away homes for a late Christmas tomorrow. I’ve probably told you before that the week between Christmas and New Year’s is my favorite time of the year. Yes, I know I have a number of favorite times of the year, but let me get away with this one right now. All the preparation for Christmas is done. The stress level is ratcheted way down. And we’ll get together and do things we really ought to make time for the rest of the year. We’ll linger at the dinner table for conversation and play games and maybe curl up with a book I’m excited about the gifts I am giving Clay, Colin and his wife Amanda. It will be fun to watch them open them, and I hope they’ll like them. For many of us part of the delight of Christmas is watching little children on Christmas morning discover the treasures Santa has brought. Our granddaughters Talbot and Annie B are still trying to figure out how Santa got a whole trampoline on his sleigh. My question is how he got the darned thing put together so fast and in the dark of night at that. If you’ve ever put together a trampoline you know it’s a challenge in broad daylight and even if you have all the time in the world. Today our children are going to bring one toy  up to the altar to be blessed. We didn’t all bring a toy today, but I’d like to bless all our playtime, and to hope that we all make time for play. That is what Sabbath is about, and as I’ve reminded you before –  actually again and again, and here you’ll remember that what I preach to you is what I most need to hear – Sabbath is a commandment right there in the big list next to the prohibitions against murder, adultery, and thievery. Sabbath is above all a gift, and all we have to do is accept it, but how sad it is that most of us do it so rarely and so poorly.  Note to self – play this week. Accept the gift.

Today’s gospel is the stunningly rich and poetic prologue to the Gospel according to  John. As I said about the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke that we read during  Advent, it is an overture that contains the themes of the entire gospel. It is not by chance that it begins with the exact same words that open the Book of Genesis. John is offering us his version of the New Testament in the words that open the Old Testament, and if we listen closely  we’ll hear that same spirit who hovered over the waters of chaos when God said Let there be light, only now it is the word, and the word was with God and the word was God. That says it all about the Christ. He was with God and he was God, and thereon hangs all the theological thinking and writing on the meaning of the Holy Trinity over the last two thousand years. I saw a picture on Facebook this week of a priest friend of mine standing outside an ancient church in Jerusalem pointing at a sign that read, No explanations inside church. Apparently they wanted the tour guides to do their instruction outdoors so that once inside pilgrims could appreciate the holy place in silence, not the babble of different languages competing with each other. What would you think if you arrived next Sunday and we had that sign posted on the glass doors? I think it is a fine thought. No explanations inside church. We don’t come to church to explain. We come to wonder. We come to celebrate. We come to receive the gift of love. We come to stand in the light of Christ’s presence, not to parse it out like a diagrammed sentence. We can do all the attempts at explanation we want in Bible study and EFM, but let’s leave the explanations at the door of the sanctuary and come together with hearts open to the joy of presence.  

If I were to search for a picture to represent this prologue I think I’d have to choose one of the photographs taken by the Hubble telescope. They leave me silent with awe, swirling bodies of gases farther away than I can compute, and of such odd symmetry and stunning beauty that for me they can only point to the mind of a creator beyond my  ability to imagine. And that is what this gift is, the gift that comes in the form of a little baby, born a long, long time ago in a very foreign place. No effort to explain can even approach what it means that God came to us as a human being, that he lived a life of ordinariness in a body that had all the human needs that we do, many of them just not things we think it is appropriate to talk about in church. And on the other hand, it was a most extraordinary life which he lived in order to show us first hand –  and I mean us, here in a first world country in the technological tsunami of the twenty-first century, not just the other Palestinian peasants, Jewish clergy and Roman soldiers – to show us first hand that we haven’t got a clue as to what this gift is that we’ve been given. How do we comprehend this gift of forgiveness?  

A couple of years ago John Bennet gave me a Mac laptop for Christmas. I really wanted it, and I really like it a lot, but I can tell you for certain that I haven’t in three years even begun to use all that it is capable of doing. I’m a reader and a writer and an occasional  watcher of videos, so that’s what I use it for, but John Bennet makes slide shows of our  vacation photos set to music, and he has used it to edit wedding videos, and my son Michael uses his to record and edit musicians’ performance and to create CD’s and mp3 files. I really appreciate my laptop, but I’m pretty clueless about all that is possible with it. 

And the gift of the Christ is way more breathtaking than we imagine. No amount of explaining it will help. But then Jesus did not explain when he was teaching and trying to get into human beings’ thick heads what God had given them. We only know of him writing anything one time, and that was in the sand to a crowd chomping at the bit to stone a woman to death, and after they dispersed nobody took the trouble to write it down. No, Jesus gave people stories, the story of his own life and the stories he told. He told them that they had been given the Kingdom of God. Well, that’s nice. But I can explain to you the Kingdom of God just about as well as I can explain to you the Papillon Nebula which is 170,000 light years away from earth, but whose beauty speaks to my soul. So Jesus told stories. The Kingdom of God is like a man with two sons…The Kingdom of God is like a compassionate and generous terrorist…The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, a treasure hidden in a field, a pearl of great price. And all these stories build upon each other, and sometimes, when we are very wise and open, we can stop and simply say aaaaaaaaah.  

And so I close with a story I read this week. Not a story about Jesus, but a story about the graduation ceremony at Azusa Pacific University, which I’d never heard of before.  You’ve all seen college graduations so you know what to expect from this one. There was the procession of graduates and faculty all gussied up in their medieval finery, there were introductions of the high muckety mucks, there were speeches, and the degrees were  awarded to great applause. But then “university president Jon Wallace pulled three seniors into the center of the room and told [the audience] they were going to be serving under-resourced people in impoverished areas after graduation. Then [he] turned his back to the rest [of the audience] faced the three students, and said, “Somebody you do not know has heard about what you’re doing. He wants you to be able to serve without any impediment, so he’s giving you a gift.” Then he turned to the first student and looked her in the eye. “You have been forgiven your school debt of $105,000.”  

It took her a few moments for the words to sink in. The student shook her head, then  began to cry. [He] turned to the next student, “You have been forgiven your debt of $70,000,” then to the third student, “You have been forgiven your debt of $130,000.” (1) 

My dear ones. We have been given the gift of the Kingdom –  a gift whose implications we cannot fathom --  so that we may be able to serve without any impediment. How do we begin to comprehend this gift of forgiveness, born as a child willing to die for us?  How do we recognize this embodiment of unconditional love? I don’t think for one moment that we can begin to understand the meaning of this gift, but we can accept the blessing in order  to accept our call to be instruments of God’s peace.  

Amen.