“Focus”
Isaiah 52:7-10
Psalm 98
Hebrews 1:1-4, (5-12)
St. John 1:1-14
INI
A good friend of mine, a former member at The Lutheran Church of St. Ambrose in Pennsville, New Jersey, and now a pastor at a church in suburban Philadelphia, sent me a text on FaceBook, revealing that this Christmas Eve she was beside herself, not knowing what to do – having a day off but not really. I wrote back, “Isn’t it strange when you miss anxiety.” I could identify – a time of the year when there was pressure and multiple demands was suddenly empty. It is, I think a blessing, the quietness of this Pandemic Advent and Christmas. It has allowed somethings for us that we might not have seen.
I am reminded of an experience that I had once in Philadelphia. (I may have already told you this story, and if so, forgive me.) I wandered the galleries, by myself – the good way to visit any museum. As I meandered, pausing by things that really caught my eye, I noticed a large door that opened into a darkened room. When I entered, I saw the single object that was displayed there. It was a large standing Buddha with a beautifully woven piece of purple fabric at his back. It was stunning, and it demanded my silence. Slowly I realized what the import of this object was for me. It was a manifestation of what Christmas should be like – a single object of focus that stands out in the darkness, in silence.
I have spent the several years since then trying to understand and enable that realization on my part, and what it either really meant or how it could really be realized. There are moments in the liturgy when we are urged to be silent, pensive, almost caught up in ourselves. I remember approaching the altar on Good Friday several years ago with Lizette Larson-Miller. When we reached the predella, we dropped to our knees, and then prostrated ourselves before the stripped altar. There was a silence then, within me, that I wished could have gone on forever. It was being totally alone but being totally alone with God. It was the dark room with the Buddha.
Perhaps we have been given a gift in these last weeks and months. It may have been a gift that we haven’t noticed in our despair, and yet it must be a gift to be acknowledge as we realize the One who is standing next to us – the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, the one who gives voice to our muddled prayers. The authentic reality of the Word-made-flesh is sometimes lost the preparations and celebration of the feast, and we need an opportunity to bow down and to listen to the Word.
Some years ago, my sisters and I along with my daughter Anna, drove back to Colorado for a family reunion in Estes Park. On the way we had a surprise meeting with my father in his birthplace, Alamosa, Colorado. We drove around the town, and showed us the places he had lived, worshiped, and was schooled. Finally, at the airport, he got out of his car, and walked up to fence to observe the grandeur of the Sangre de Christo mountains that were splayed out in front of him. My sister mad motions to go and join him, and I said, “No.” “Let him be with himself and his memories.”
Perhaps that is what we need to do at times when we celebrate the church’s year. Perhaps we, on occasion, need to be alone (but with the Paraclete). The author of the Book of the Hebrews has an amazing insight. “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways, but in these last days (God) has spoken to us by a Son.” God, through this Son, has spoken to you, to me. Sometimes in my rejection of the altar calls and the “personal Savior” language of Evangelical Christianity, I really do rely on the reality of the Eucharistic Assembly, I forget that sometimes I really need to accompany Jesus to the desert – to the wilderness. In John’s prologue, which is the Gospel reading for this day, I think I see John’s vision of the Anointed Word present in the nothingness before Creation. Alone.
However, “in many and various ways” God has spoken to us individually, in our histories, in our sadness, in our joys, God has spoken to us. Emanuel – God with us! My invitation to you in the Christmas of 2020 is that you give up the despair of this time, the loneliness born of not being able to be with friends and family, the isolation of only being able to attend to your own altar, give all of this up and be with God. Perhaps we need to be like the prophet, who expecting God to manifest Godself to him in wind, fire, and noise, realizes God’s presence in (as the New American Bible puts it) “a light silent sound.” Or Robert Alter’s translation, “a minute stillness.”
Perhaps God calls us to a stillness, a darkness, a remote place so that we can both see and hear God’s light, and God’s word. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. We are called from time to time to a world of prayer, our prayer, our words, our concerns, our thanksgivings, and that ought to be the ultimate Christmas response. Alan Jones, former Dean at Grace Cathedral wrote this is his book, Common Prayer on Common Ground: A Vision of Anglican Orthodoxy: “Anglican orthodoxy, therefore, begins and ends in prayer, in silence before the mystery. It is not anti-intellectual but insists on the joining of intellect with emotion, of praying, as the Eastern tradition has it, with the mind in the heart.”[1] The mind in the heart – there it is, a clue for us in our living. Both of these elements we always have with us, a wilderness for our regeneration, an altar for our communication with God.
I hope you enjoy all the secondary pleasures of this season, the relationships, the memories, the food! But I also hope that you will retreat (as our times have forced us to do) and to listen and hope not only for God, but in God. For God is with us – Emmanuel.
SDG
[1] Jones, A. (2006). Common Prayer on Common Ground: A Vision of Anglican Orthodoxy, Church Publishing Inc., New York, Kindle Edition, page 77.
