Stir Up Your Power, O Lord
/Sermon Advent 3 A All Saints 12-13-20
Isaiah 35: 1 – 10 Psalm 146: 4 – 9 James 5: 7 – 10 Matthew 11: 2 – 11
Stir Up Your Power, O Lord…..
Christmas music is high on my list of favorite things – whatever the season. I love the carols, the Nutcracker, and all sorts of serious and silly Christmas songs. Of course, I also love the lights, the sparkly trees, the angels and the manger scenes. That makes me a poor candidate for a patient Advent, I fear.
This year one popular Christmas song has followed me everywhere. You know it – Have yourself a merry little Christmas – from “Mame”, I think. Here is how I have been hearing it:
Someday soon we all will be together
if the virus allows.
Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow.
So hang a shining star upon the highest bough,
and have yourself a merry LITTLE Christmas now.
A merry LITTLE Christmas. It does feel as if Christmas will be especially small this year. No chance of children or friends visiting. No parties to give or attend. It is still shocking to look at our calendar and seeing mostly blank spaces. Believe it or not, this day marks nine months – NINE MONTHS!! – since we have worshipped inside our building!
But a LITTLE Christmas…... We are celebrating the act of the Creator and Ruler of the universe taking on human form. God coming to live among us as one like us. I say these words and I hear them, but the reality of that is beyond me. It is like thinking a gallon of water can be poured into a thimble. I cannot rationally understand nor explain the Incarnation even as I know in my heart Jesus coming to earth is true. How can this marvelous, unexplainable, shattering gift from Holy God be called “little”?
My circle of experience, of friends, of imagination is little. I am one little person living on a little Island with little wealth or power. A regular person, little known or marked outside my household. Yet even I am not content with a LITTLE Christmas. I want a big stars and angels Christmas! How do I extend my boundaries, move from a “little” mind set to a God expansive mind set?
Start with seriously considering the Incarnation – the all of God growing as a baby inside Mary for nine months and then emerging into our world. A human male – fully human and fully divine with no loss in either nature.
My mind does not find a satisfactory way of explaining that truth. Frankly, I cannot even come up with a good metaphorical explanation. But neither can I accept that God is limited by my mind and my grasp of language. I look at satellite images of the earth from space and know that these are true photographs of how the earth exists in the universe, but I cannot comprehend endless space. The endless vacuum of space. Millions of stars and suns and other planets and black holes and traveling at light year speed. It is too much! I can affirm that this Man-God, Jesus Christ, changed my life. Not explain – affirm. I know to be true what I cannot clearly or prove.
Because I am one barely noticeable human being on one small planet in a vast universe, why would this universe-creating, star-flinging, planet-shaping, “whole-world-in-His-hands” God bother with me? I understand even less about that. Remember Jesus telling Satan in the wilderness that God could raise up God’s people out of the stones scattered around them? Remember Jesus telling His listeners that God distinguishes one sparrow from another? That God counts every hair on my head? I know by my own experience as well as by the testimony of others that God does know me that intimately. God chose to love me without my asking.
When John the Baptist sent word to Jesus questioning whether Jesus was the one promised by God for the salvation of the world, John was not just idly questioning. John knew that he was unlikely to be released by Herod – you do not publicly rebuke the king for killing his brother and taking his brother’s wife for his own and walk around free and easy for long. John knew his days were numbered. But more than that, John wanted to be sure that he could send his own disciples to follow Jesus. Was Jesus really the One? When John baptized Jesus was that really God’s voice declaring that Jesus was God’s own beloved Son? John had to know. So, John asked! John asked simply and clearly with no apology.
Jesus answered John the same way God has answered me by saying, John, look at what I have done, what I am doing. I can testify to what God has done and is doing in life and that is also my answer.
Advent is about waiting and searching and reaching and examining. Pregnancy is always about the knowing without knowing. The waiting for fulfillment of deep desires but with fears and uncertainty that all will be well. The fully present but not yet.
In these days of Covid-19, we are witnessing the deaths of a 9/11 World Tower crash every day. And young girls are being trafficked in and out of the Atlanta Airport every day. Adults and children are being evicted every day from their homes because the adults lost their jobs in the Pandemic. Children in Savannah are losing a whole school year because their family cannot afford a laptop or Wi-Fi – or simply cannot provide a household where a child can study and learn at home. Standing in the light of a glorious gracious God who loves me even as I am only one person in all this, my choices seem stark. I can close my eyes and soak up God’s love within my little Christmas. Or I can open my eyes to events around me and share as much of God’s love as is possible with others with a challenging, stretching, uncomfortable big Christmas. A 365-day observance of Christmas.
I am one person – one small unremarkable person. The needs in this world are vast and unremitting. Do you remember the anecdote that floated around the internet a while back? Someone passed a man on a beach who was picking up starfish stranded by a huge high tide and tossing them back into the water. The passer-by asked why he bothered, there were so many, and he could save so few. The man answered: True, but for this starfish that is the whole world.
My Job – our job – is to look for a starfish at hand, pick that one up and toss it back into the sea. The beach belongs to God and God will call others to come. But God expects that I will always pick up the starfish lying in my path. For that one starfish, I can change the whole world. With that one starfish my big Christmas begins – and that is the fruit of a well-spent, well-invested Advent. Amen.
