On Tuesday, forty days after Christmas, we celebrated the Feast of the Presentation: the day, forty days after Jesus’ birth, when, following Jewish law, Mary and Joseph brought Jesus up to the Temple to give thanks for the safe and healthy birth of their child.
If you’ve ever been with a six-week-old baby, you know that there’s a lot to give thanks for. But you also know that it’s a difficult time, and that it will continue to be difficult for years into the future—well into that baby’s adulthood! There are many sleepless nights and much heartbreak ahead. And yet they paused, at that moment, to give thanks for the good things that had already happened.
For me, there’s a lesson in that for this year. We are still in a difficult time, but we don’t need to wait for things to be perfect to give thanks for what’s good. Tuesday night, we had the last meeting of this Vestry before we elect new members at our Annual Meeting, and we gave thanks for their ministry. On Sunday, we’ll have our Annual Meeting, and we’ll look at the year that is past. We’ll recognize the difficulty, but we’ll also celebrate what has been good and give thanks to God for keeping us together this year, because we don’t need to wait for everything to be perfect before we can give thanks for what is good.
That’s as true in our own lives as it is in the church. So give thanks today for whatever is good, even if there’s plenty that’s bad, as well.
When I was in elementary school, I bought one of those rock tumbling kits from a gift shop at the Museum of Science. You might be able to picture it: it’s a plastic tube that’s attached to a motor that spins it around, and you put in some of these dull and boring rocks and this powder and some water, and you plug it in. We put ours down in the basement, because it was really loud as it spun around and around and the rocks banged around inside. After some amount of time—I don’t even know how long—you opened it up and looked inside, and rinsed off the stones, and they’d turned from dull, jagged rocks into smooth, beautiful gems.
This Monday, in our church calendar, is the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. (That may seem like it has nothing to do with rock tumblers.) You may remember the famous story of the conversion of Paul; Paul, who’d been persecuting and hunting out the early Christians, is riding down the road to Damascus to look for even more of them, and suddenly there’s a bright light, and he falls from his horse, and the voice of God speaks to him out of the heavens—and he’s suddenly, in that instance, converted, and becomes the greatest apostle in the early church.
Some people have a conversion story like Paul. Many more have a conversion like a rock tumbler: all of us, jammed together in the church or in our households or in our families, not suddenly blinded by a flash of light that changes our lives but slowly rolling and rolling, smoothing one another out and polishing one another.
You can come up with all sorts of parts of this extended metaphor. Maybe we’re the stones, and the church is the tumbler, and the Holy Spirit is the powder, the soapy liquid that helps polish us—whatever it is! But I think it’s good to remember, at the beginning of a new year, at the end of a long and difficult year—that it’s difficult times that grind us down, that polish us, that turn us into the people we were meant to be. It’s not the easiest moments of life, the ones that we enjoy most, that turn us into the people we are. It’s the crises. It’s the difficulties. It’s the struggle. And it’s the way we bump up against one another in those moments, whether in conflict or in love.
It is by the power of the Holy Spirit, it is by the grace of God that these moments turn us into the people we really were underneath. So I pray, this year, as we begin 2021, as we head toward Lent, that you may find the grace and the strength to become the person you were meant to be, in community with one another—in your family, in your church, in our world.
I think it’s natural for us as Christians to become invested in politics. We’re people to whom values and ethics are important, to whom relationships and communities are important; and those things come together in our national and local political lives as much as they do in our church life. This is a good thing! There’s nothing wrong with it. But I do think that it’s important to set it at the right level.
On the one hand, we don’t want to invest too much faith in our leaders. It is just not true that Joe Biden is a savior who will fix every problem, or that Donald Trump was some kind of demon bent on evil. Nor was it true that Donald Trump as a savior who would fix every problem and Barack Obama was a demon bent on evil. This just isn’t how human beings work. There is a bigger cosmic struggle happening between good and evil, but human beings are never black-and-white like that.
On the other hand, we don’t want to become too uninvested from politics, as if it didn’t matter, as if one side was the same as the other and both were in line with Christian values of love and peace. It’s important for us to act in our political lives, to care about our political lives, because the decisions we make do have real effects on our neighbors and the most vulnerable living among us.
I do believe that Christians can, in good faith, disagree about their political beliefs. If they’re acting out of a sincere love of their neighbor, out of a sincere concern for the poor and the vulnerable, they can disagree on the best policy means to achieve those goals.
Not everyone is acting with those goals in mind, of course, and it’s okay to recognize that as well. It’s okay to recognize when people are acting with their own interests in mind, and not those of the poor and the refugee.
At times like these, I find the prayer book helpful, not just because it gives us words to pray, but because it contains prayers that were as relevant 50 years ago as they are today. Many of the prayers we have in our prayer book were written in the ’60s and ’70s, times as turbulent as these, as the Civil Rights Movement continued, and I wanted to share this morning a prayer that our bishops shared for the inauguration. It’s the “Prayer for the Human Family”:
O God, you made us in your own image and redeemed us through Jesus your Son: Look with compassion on the whole human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us; unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; that, in your good time, all nations and races may serve you in harmony around your heavenly throne; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP p. 815)
We do need compassion from God. We do need the arrogance and hatred that infect our hearts to be taken away. We do need the walls that divide us to be broken down.
And more than anything, we do need God to work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish God’s purposes on earth.
It won’t be a quick process. It won’t happen when we want it. It won’t necessarily happen the way that we want it. But I have faith that, as the prayer says, “in [God’s] good time,” these things will be done. So let us pray for God’s love to grow in all of us, and let us work to make God’s love a reality in our lives. Amen.
We tend to think of “epiphanies” as something that we have, “Eureka!” moments, sudden flashes of inspiration that lead us to realize something we never knew before. The Three Wise Men, after all must have had an epiphany when they saw the star shining in the East, pointing them toward Bethlehem; and when they arrived, they must have had another epiphany, realizing that this baby in front of them was the Son of God. Not many of us have these star-shining-in-the-sky moments, although sometimes we do. And so, it can be easy to wonder: “Have I ever had an epiphany?”
But the season of Epiphany is not so much about our sudden flashes of inspiration. It’s more about God’s sudden flashes of revelation. The stories that we’ll read in the gospels during the season of Epiphany are all about Jesus revealing himself in strange and mysterious ways. Largely, the disciples and the people around him don’t realize what he’s saying. We hear the stories of Jesus’ baptism, of calling his disciples, of doing strange things like leaving town when people ask him to heal them. It’s only in retrospect that the disciples can make sense of any of this. Jesus’ Epiphany is not so much a star shining in the East leading them toward Bethlehem as it is a dim light shining in their past that illuminates the path they’ve already walked.
I think more of us have this kind of epiphany, and that’s all right! That’s exactly the way it tends to go in the Bible. We aren’t, after all the wise ones who have studied astrology for years. We’re more like those disciples: not really understanding what’s going, on a little hapless, sometimes failing, but trying, always trying, to follow Jesus and—when we look back—seeing all the ways that he’s revealed himself to us.
If you’ve ever cared for a small child, you’ve probably learned that love is more than a feeling. You can’t simply “love” an infant or a newborn and have that be enough. Our love for children, instead, is a series of actions: small ones, and big ones, diapers changed and meals fed, plans laid for the future and gentle rocking in the night; and it’s all of these actions that add up to love, that help grow our love for them and their love for us.
It’s the same when God commands us to love God and love our neighbor. God commands us even to love our enemies. How can we do this? Surely we don’t like our enemies. Surely we don’t feel love for them. But the principle is the same. To love someone is to work for their good. Not necessarily for what they think is good for them, but for what is really, truly good for them; to care for them as if they were our own.
These relationships need tending. We can’t just say we love God and say we love our neighbor. We need to love them, actively; we need to commit small acts of love.
Christmas and Advent are an opportunity to reflect on these relationships, to reflect on the many ways that God has loved us, and the many ways that we can love one another. So I invite you, as Advent ends and Christmas begins, to choose one thing, one way that you can love God, one act of care in your relationship with God that you can commit; and to do it each day. Choose one way you can love your neighbor as yourself, and do it each day.
