Light in the Darkness (Luke 2:1-20)

Christmas Eve
Luke 2:1-20
December 24, 2010

Light in the Darkness

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

It’s a strange night. It’s among the darkest, longest nights of the year and instead of huddling in front of a fire or curling up beneath blankets, we have come here, for no more compelling reasons than to tell and to sing the Story again. We live in a culture that values the new above all else, but in spite of that we have come here for an old story, a story that we already know.

We have come and we encounter more strangeness: a finely appointed table set in the presence of barn doors, a suggestion of a feed trough, and enough candles to make us wonder whether there has been a power failure. Stranger still, we have that most ancient pagan symbol—a living tree, an evergreen—cut down and given a place of honor in a Christian holy place. And strangest of all, none of this seems wrong or out of place.

We turn to the story itself and we find emperors and peasants, frightened subjects and the rulers that order them around, shepherds and angels, good news given to the scorned and the poor, and darkness in the light.

There are two worlds set out in the story. On the one hand there is the world of the powerful and rich. They are people like the emperor, Gaius Julius Octavius, known to history as Augustus, the title given to him by the Roman Senate.

On the other hand there is the world of the weak and the poor. They are people like the tradesman Yosef and his peasant fiancée Miriam—Joseph and Mary. They are people like the shepherds, distrusted and scorned by folks who lived in the villages.

The two worlds rub against each other in our story. Augustus wanted to count the subjects of his empire. He wanted to know how many subjects he had so that he could better estimate just how much tax and tribute he could squeeze out of them. So he ordered a census. Everyone was to be counted in the city of their citizenship. So folks like Joseph and Mary dropped everything and scurried off to their hometowns. They knew better than to think they could defy the powerful rich.

If that were the end of the story, it certainly wouldn’t make the news. That peasants and shepherds don’t count for much, but emperors and kings do, would not surprise anyone.

But that isn’t the end of the story. There is another character in our story. God has crept in beside us. God has crept in beside us and everything has changed. The old structures are turned upside down. The old values are eclipsed. There is now the hope that old pains will be eased, old longings fulfilled, and old questions answered.

And look where it is that God has come! God could have chosen Rome, a city of power and dignity, an unanswerable arrangement of propaganda in marble and concrete. God could have visited the emperor, clothed in purple, honored as the Savior, the Son of God, the Prince of Peace. But God chose the peasant couple Yosef and Miriam and the backwater village of Bethlehem. The Prince of Peace, the Savior, the Son of God was born this night and the emperor in Rome never had a clue.

The angels could have made the announcement of Jesus’ birth to the nobility and the religious leaders. They could have appeared in Jerusalem and sung their glad news from the rooftop of the Temple. But the angels chose shepherds who were living with their flocks in the Judean hills. Shepherds were despised in those days as barely civilized, untrustworthy, sneaky and dangerous. People would have said that they lived like the animals they lived with. But it was not to the nobility that the shepherds appeared. It was the shepherds who had the chance to run to Bethlehem to see for themselves the signs that the angels had promised. The nobility slept through the night, unaware.

The significance of the story doesn’t just lie in these ironies, which I find delicious in themselves. God crept in beside us and everything changed. God came to Yosef and Miriam and from now on, peasants matter. God came to Bethlehem and from now on, backwater towns matter. The angels appeared to shepherds and from now on those who are despised and looked down on matter. God crept in beside us and from now on we matter.

There are, of course, those of us like me who already believe that we matter, that we matter a lot, actually. The truth is I do matter, but probably not in the way nor as much as I think. It was not to the holders of PhDs that the angels appeared. The learned and wise of Jesus’ day were more often than not found working against him and we who accounted today among the very best educated are warned in this way to be careful we are not still working against him.

But I’m not thinking so much of those who seem to matter as of those who seem not to. God has crept in beside us and things are no longer what they seem to be. Emperors and kings and capital cities seem to matter but they don’t. Peasants and shepherds and hick towns seem not to matter, but they do.

Nearly one in ten of our workforce is looking for work and cannot find it. The unemployed are scorned as lazy parasites for whom continued support becomes a “hammock” even though if every job in the United States were filled, our unemployment rate would still be 7.6%. When economists decide whether a recession is over, they don’t count unemployment. So those of us who are unemployed may not believe that we matter. But the story we tell and sing tonight says to us, “To us is born in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. God crept in beside us. We matter.”

It’s Christmas Eve, but one in six children in Iowa will go to bed tonight without a sure source of food for tomorrow. Perhaps the real scandal of this little fact is that there are thirty-one states where children are at greater risk. Nationwide, the rate of food insecurity among children is about twenty percent, or one in five. Either way, when economists decide whether a recession is over, they don’t count food insecure children. So those of us who are children who live in a home where the food for tomorrow is not in our cupboard tonight, can’t really be blamed for thinking that we don’t matter. But the story we tell and sing tonight says to us, “To us is born in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. God crept in beside us. We matter.”

There are some of us look on the outside like we’re doing just fine. We have good jobs, nice homes, good marriages, beautiful children. But somehow it isn’t fine for us on the inside. In spite of all the things we’ve accomplished, we’re convinced that we’re not really worth anything. Some of us were abused or neglected, while others of us received no more than the usual sorts of bumps and bruises that come from being raised by people who, while they loved us and did the best they could, were human and therefore not perfect. From whatever cause, not matter how much or how well we do, it’s never quite enough to satisfy the tyrant in our heads. But the story we tell and sing tonight says to us, “To us is born in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. God crept in beside us. We matter.”

We celebrate this night and its news with joy. At the same time we mourn the hungry, the oppressed, and the victims of war and violence. We grieve for our world, where life and health are sold so cheap and wealth is bought so dear. We have thrown our weight into the struggle for peace and justice, but we are tired. And we wonder what difference our effort makes. We are surprised that we have lasted another year and wonder if we will last one more. But the story we tell and sing tonight says to us, “To us is born in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. From now on until forever, no matter what else happens or fails to happen, the world has changed and so have we. God has embraced this world in the most intimate way possible. From now the world matters. God has crept in beside us. From now on we matter.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

A Poetics of Hope (Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-1)

2nd Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-1
December 5, 2010

A Poetics of Hope

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

All of this sounds a little unlikely: wolves, lambs, leopard, kids, calves, lions, toddlers and poisonous snakes all sharing a peace-filled life. His images become even stranger when they are placed against the reality of life in Isaiah’s day. Judah, never a particularly strong kingdom, lived under the threat of invasion and domination from the empire du jour from the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys to the north and east. Perhaps it was the Assyrians, perhaps the Babylonians.

Isaiah saw tough times ahead and he wasn’t shy about making his opinions known. Judah was in deep trouble, he believed. Judah’s resources for withstanding such a threat were meager. The dynasty of King David the son of Jesse sure didn’t measure up to the way it used to be. The current king was no David son of Jesse. Jesse’s tree was rotten and hollow. It looked impressive enough, but it’s strength had long since dwindled. Any storm would blow it down. That’s what Isaiah saw.

His seeing didn’t stop with what his eyes could see, though. He saw with his heart as well. With his heart he saw what David’s dynasty could have looked like. He saw what the king should be. His vision was simple: kings would be great if they lived up to their own publicity. If the king judged by realities instead of appearances, if the king judged the poor with justice, if the king sided with the weak, if the king struck down the wicked strong, then there would be a peace worth having and living. If kings lived up to their own campaign promises, the peace would be so profound that prey and predator would live in peace. Bears and lions would even become vegans, if only the king did what kings were supposed to do.

But we could have told Isaiah that campaign promises are not kept.

I don’t know how you voted last month, but I can tell you that, even if your candidate won, when the 112^th Congress convenes in twenty-nine days, the headlines will not read: “Wolf Lives with Lamb.”

No, we’re going to wake up on January 3 and find that the world has not changed all that much. We long for peace and for justice, but we will not for that reason awaken to find that our electoral process has yielded our hearts’ desire. Isaiah’s words were brave: “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” But brave words don’t seem to have made the king a good king or dispelled the threat of conquest by foreign powers. Like Isaiah’s Jerusalem, we are stumped. All we have are Isaiah’s words. And they don’t seem to have changed much of anything at all.

Isaiah isn’t the only one who seems to think that human beings can take words and images and weave them together in speech and action and use them to change the world. Only John seems to use gesture as much as speech to face down the reality of his age. John wore garments made of camel’s hair (not to be confused with “camel hair”) and held them together with a leather belt. But get this: he ate locusts. Really?? Locusts?? Yep, grasshoppers. Now, that’s very odd. His rough clothing and his bizarre diet are gestures that are part of his message. Matthew’s Jesus tells us not to worry about what we are to wear or what we are to eat. John the Baptist acts out in unmistakable and unforgettable gestures what it would look to be Jesus’ disciples.

Even where John is serves as a gesture. He’s out by the River Jordan. John knew and so did his audience and so do we that the River Jordan was the place where the dream of the land of promise began to become a reality. The ancient Israelites—ancient even in John’s day—entered the land of promise by crossing the Jordan, by, in a manner of speaking, being baptized in its waters. For the ancient Israelites crossing the Jordan meant freedom from oppression by empires like Egypt where they had been slaves, it meant the chance to live in a community that was just, humane and neighborly, it meant leaving in a peaceable covenant with each other and with God. In a later day and against a later empire, John the Baptist gestured toward freedom, community and peace.

There is something peculiar about this idea that words have power, that images have the power to resist an empire, that gestures are not futile as we have been taught.

Come to think of it, how have we come to believe that gestures are futile, and speech is empty? Who has taught us these things? To whose advantage is it? If we believe that gestures are futile, we won’t make them. We won’t stand with John the Baptist with his odd clothing and even odder diet and make the gestures that make kings shake with fear. If we believe that words are empty, we won’t cry out the need and space for changing our ways as individuals and as a culture.

So we in the mainline churches have come to be silent. What have we gained from our silence? Whatever we have gained has come at a very high price. With very few exceptions we have no twenty-somethings. If you ask their generation why that is they will tell you that while they are fascinated by Jesus they want nothing to do with the church. “Why is that?” we ask. Because they grew up watching churches condemning people in the name of Jesus, dressing up intolerance as piety, and rejecting people who are different from them in the name of the gospel of love. They watched as some churches searched the Scriptures to justify their homophobia, their sexism, and their disdain for the poor.

“But we’re not like that,” we say. No we are not, but we were silent. And that is all that it took.

It turns out that words and gestures are important, far more important than we have come to believe. Tyrants go out of their way to make sure that there are no words but theirs, no gestures but theirs. Tyrants are afraid of many things. They are afraid of massed armies and lone assassins. But most of all I think they are afraid of poets. Tyrants want everyone to believe that the reality of their rule is the only possible reality. Poets won’t accept only one possible reality.

Freedom begins in poetic imagination. Imagination gets its life from words and gestures. Isaiah was a poet who imagined a world freed from empire. Isaiah was a poet who imagined a king who lived up to his own press releases. Isaiah was a poet who imagined a world in which the most basic distinction—the distinction between prey and predator—is set aside in favor of life in the beloved community. John the Baptist was a poet, too, a performance poet. He acted out the oddness of a life grounded in trusting God without deference to empire.

John saw how high the stakes were. He raved to the crowds who came to him that they were like trees about to be chopped down: “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees,” he howled. “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” Every fruitless tree is stumped. That’s what the poet John the Baptist says.

“But that’s not the end,” says the poet Isaiah. “Yes, David’s dynasty is stumped. Judah is stumped. Jerusalem is stumped. Even I am stumped,” says the poet. “But that’s not the end.”

Unlike John, who always seems to shout, Isaiah whispers, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse.” Being stumped is not the end. “A shoot shall come out.” There can always be new life. Being silenced is not the end. “A shoot shall come out.” There is always the possibility that we may find our voice. There is always the possibility that we may find our gestures with meaning once again.

Take the gesture of this common meal. Jesus gave it to us and told us to observe it forever. So, we’ve done that even if we’re not sure why. For many years, centuries even, we have restricted it to a private transaction between us and God. It has become a stump. But we are rediscovering something. We are too aware that out there many people have far too little food, while many people have far too much. We are too aware that many live in great need and others in great plenty.

We find that our lives have been increasingly privatized. A generation or two ago we counted on and trusted each other to help us raise our children. We bought them bicycles and they rode all over town. We knew our children couldn’t go anywhere where someone wouldn’t know who they were. Now we no longer trust each other. Our children are under house arrest. Their worlds are smaller. Someone taught us to mistrust each other. And we believed that bad news. So now we’re on our own.

Our lives have become increasingly monetized. United Methodist pastors used to get a pension based solely on how many years they had served. Now it’s based on our salaries over the course of our careers. Pastors are no longer supported in retirement based on their faithful service. They are now rewarded in retirement based on the “success” of their ministry measured in dollars. Even we pastors have walked away from covenant community.

But today we gather around a table. Money buys no special access here. Rich and poor alike come to this table and are received in the same way. The poor get not one bit less than they need. And the rich get not one bit more. This meal is a gesture toward the beloved community.
In a world where we’re supposed to parcel up and sell out our communities so that a few people can make a lot of money, I have to say that this gesture has its work cut out for it.

But the poets teach us that this gesture is not meaningless. As we gather at the table we act if only for a few minutes out of a world differently imagined. There is a little play, there is a little wiggle room, there is a little imaginative space for us to dream a better dream. We may be stumped now, but that’s okay. We know what comes next.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

A Dream of Peace

1st Sunday of Advent - C
Isaiah 2:1-5
November 28, 2010

A Dream of Peace

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

It’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving and the “holiday” shopping season is in full swing. Serious shoppers spent the early hours of Friday morning queued up in lines outside of electronics stores. They didn’t sleep, of course, but if they had they would have dreamed of the latest devices at bargain prices. Christmas musak is playing in the stores and malls. Once again Bing Crosby is “Dreaming of a White Christmas.” According to Clement Moore in his poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” sleeping children dream of “sugar plums.” (My suspicion is that Moore didn’t know any actual children. At least I don’t know of any who even know what a sugar plum might be.) Parents dream of successfully steering between failing to please their children on one side and financial ruin on the other. We all dream of finding ten minutes to call our own, a chance to breathe a little, and maybe, just maybe a moment for the kind of spiritual attention we seem to believe the season deserves but seldom gets.

A whole series of industries—retailing, consumer credit, advertising, and manufacturing—is dominated by those who dream of consumers who spend to their limits and beyond. If this year does not exceed the last, their dreams will be dashed and it will all be our fault.

In the meantime the Church has a different dream, a dream as old as the Bible, a dream often-delayed and long-deferred. It is a difficult dream, a demanding dream. But it will not go away. It has haunted us all our lives. It has haunted us for centuries since the days of Jesus, since the days of the prophets.

We shy away from the dream because we believe that it is too hard for us. And besides, we say, it’s Christmas! We have visitors or long-time members whom we have not seen for months—maybe since last Easter—but who have wandered back in. We don’t want to make it harder for them to visit or come back than it already is. It will be hard enough. First-time visitors will have to make their anxious way through the doors, past the greeters and ushers, to find their ways to a seat that doesn’t already “belong” to someone else. This is hard because we don’t label them.

The others, the twenty-year members who are back after long absences, will have to endure greetings from newer members who ask, “Oh, are you new here?”

We’re concerned about these folks. We imagine that they will be put off by a serious dream that comes with a serious demand for serious discipleship. We’re more than a little put off by it ourselves. We imagine that they come to see the baby Jesus, so they can say, “Aw, look how sweet!” We’d like to see the sweet baby Jesus ourselves. We imagine that the fewer demands our message makes, the more winsome it will be.

I think we are mistaken in our imagination. I think that the folks who stop by are prompted by the Church’s dream. I think that our visitors are hoping against hope that they will see a bit of the dream realized, a glimpse at least of the dream come true. I think that we hope to get a glimpse ourselves.

They are looking for more than a dose of Christmas feel-good. They want to know if there is something here that is worthy of their devotion, their passion, their energy. If the answer turns out to be yes, then they’ll be back. If not, then we’ll not see them again until next year, maybe, when their disappointment has faded and they are willing to try again.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, I think that Advent and Christmas are indeed times for a serious call to serious discipleship in the service of a serious dream. And I think that the texts that we read during Advent and Christmas present just such a compelling vision.

At first glance, the Isaiah text is all sweetness and light. In this reading we have the gentile nations coming to Judah in order to discover the ways of God. We have justice done among the nations in such a way as to render preparation for war unnecessary, so that the nations may turn their energies from the production of weapons and preparation for war to the peaceful activities of planting fields and tending orchards.

Of course, as usually happens with the prophets, there is more to it than that. These five verses come as a rather surprising interruption between the first two chapters of Isaiah. Before our text, Isaiah complains on God’s behalf that Judah has forsaken its God. Its sacrifices are all in order, but they are unacceptable to God. Justice has been trampled in the courts. The vulnerable are being exploited. No one rescues the oppressed. No one defends the orphan. No one pleads a case on the widow’s behalf. God rejects worship without justice. Therefore the people are called to repentance otherwise their society will lose its vitality: "[Y]ou shall be like an oak whose leaf withers, and like a garden without water.”¹

Following our text there is more of the same: Judah is warned that a day of judgment comes when Judah will be held accountable for its failures.

This is not what we have in mind neither for us nor for our visitors in Advent. It’s a shock. William Willimon, formerly the Dean of Duke University Chapel, now the Resident Bishop of our North Alabama Conference compares the shock of this to getting a Christmas card, not from the infant, but from the adult Jesus: “Go, sell all that you have and give it to the poor, then follow me. Merry Christmas.” Or “Whoever takes up the sword dies by the sword. Happy Holidays.”²

But Isaiah’s dream comes in a context and it comes with a commission: the offer of a plowshares and pruning hooks vision comes to a world of swords and spears. And the vision demands a response: “O house of Jacob,” Isaiah says, speaking on his own behalf this time, “come let us walk in the light of God.”

There is a certain genius at work here. Whoever has assembled and arranged Isaiah in its final form knows something: Being God’s people is never easy. There are demands that go against the grain of our nature and of contemporary culture (no matter where or when we live). It will take a dream of great power, a dream sufficiently compelling to motivate the kind of action that God is asking. I think Isaiah’s vision has that kind of power. I think that Isaiah’s dream is sufficiently compelling.

For we, too live in swords and spears world, a world that is violent enough and unjust enough that a dream of peaceful justice resonates with our deepest longings and highest aspirations.

What couldn’t we do if we beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks? According to one account, the nations of the world spent $1.5 trillion last year on making or preparing for war.³ The United States’ share of that was $661 billion, or 43% of the total.⁴ That’s a lot of plowshares and pruning hooks!

Let’s dream of other uses for that money.

In 2006, the United Nations set a goal for efforts to treat and prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. It set a number of benchmarks to be reached this year. We’ve fallen behind. The world has been spending about $16 billion a year to fight HIV/AIDS. To meet the UN’s goals we need to spend another $10 billion.⁵ That’s $26 billion dollars all together. That’s a lot of money to you and me, but to the world’s militaries, it represents a mere 6 days, 4 hours and 45 minutes.

Or how about feeding the estimated 35 million people in the United States who live in food insecurity? That’s 35 million who may not actually be hungry right now, but who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. It would only cost $12 billion to eliminate hunger and food insecurity in the United States, problems that actually cost us $90 billion a year.⁶ That’s 2 days, 20 hours and 39 minutes worth of the United States’ military expenditures to makes sure that no child goes to bed hungry and no senior citizen has to choose between eating and paying the rent.

Isaiah’s words not only provide a vision, they provide a strategy as well. The vision is a vision of peace. But it is a peace that comes from justice, rather than dropping from the sky or coming about by magic. And we can do justice, or at least we can live in that direction. We can live more justly. We can treat our own bodies with justice. We can treat each other with justice. We can treat with justice the people who make the things that we use. We can treat with justice the earth and the creatures who live on it and in its seas and in its skies.

This is the Advent vision according to Isaiah. We can commit ourselves to journeying toward God’s peace by working for God’s justice. We can summon others to join us in this journey and this work. We can live within the vision of Isaiah and invite others to live within it with us.

Advent is a time for a serious call to serious discipleship. I am convinced that people hope for such a call. That’s our own deepest hope. We and they are looking for a cause that we can embrace passionately, something to which we can give ourselves, a vision worthy of our lives.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1Isa. 1:30.

2I found this citation in old notes, but I have no information as to its source other than it is attributed to William Willimon. I don’t doubt that it is his, though. It certainly sounds like him!

3Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “Military Expenditure,” in SIPRI Yearbook 2010 (Stockholm: SIPRI, 2010), 177.

4Ibid., 198.

5Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, “At least 56 countries have either stabilized or achieved significant declines in rates of new HIV infectionsUNAIDSTODAY | UNAIDSTODAY,” November 23, 2010, http://unaidstoday.org/?p=1673#more-1673.

6Dr. J. Larry Brown et al., “The Economic Cost of Domestic Hunger: Estimated Annual Burden to the United States” (Sodexho Foundation, June 5, 2007), 4, http://www.sodexofoundation.org/hunger_us/Images/Cost%20of%20Domestic%20Hunger%20Report%20_tcm150-155150.pdf.