Speaker: Caleb Schrock-Hurst
Bible Passages: Luke 2
Summary: Christmas is such a commercialized holiday that every year we should bring things back to their roots — during Advent and Christmas, we practice waiting. As we wait, we need to trust God, embrace the mystery of the incarnation, and resist fear, for God is with us.
Good morning everyone! Happy to be with you all for a second sermon here during advent — but, since it is Christmas eve, this will definitely be a mix of both a meditation on waiting and on the celebration of Jesus birth.
In my family we have the tradition of typically opening one present, or at least the stockings, on Christmas eve, — so, maybe this sermon will be a bit like stocking stuffers; still primarily about the anticipation of Christmas, but also clearly the beginning of its celebration.
Anyhow, this morning, as we round out advent and begin our celebration of Christmas, I want to highlight three things.
First, I want to focus on not being afraid — because throughout the biblical story, we are told not to be afraid. Three times in two chapters angels in the Christmas story tell God’s people not to fear: Mary, Zachariah, and the Shepherds are all told this. We are not to be afraid — of mystery, of God’s calling in our sinful lives, or of God. May we ponder a lack of fear.
Second, we need to be willing to embrace mystery. Christmas, and the incarnation — incarnation meaning God’s willingness to take on flesh — will always be mysteries that we cannot fully understand — and embracing mystery, rather than seeking to reduce it, is part of following our God. May we ponder God’s mystery.
Finally, at advent, and always, we need to trust God. Our God consistently surprises us, by picking the poor, the lowly, and the excluded to be his servants in the world. May we ponder our trust in God, and God’s trust in us.
So — let’s start with not being afraid — and to do that, we also need to talk about fear itself.
Maybe that’s a good place to begin — with President FDR’s quote from his first inauguration, in the height the the depression: “that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Why, we may ask, did FDR choose speaking against fear to be his priority for this first major address to a fearful and hurting nation?
I think FDR got it right — often, the fear of something is far worse than the thing itself. And we know intuitively that when we are afraid, we are not at our best, both individually and collectively. In FDR’s case, he was primarily addressing economic challenges — but it’s also true much more generally, including social and spiritual challenges.
And this message not to be afraid is present throughout the bible. From the very beginning of scripture, God is consistently telling his people not to be afraid. The Old Testament — the Bible of Jesus and Mary — is full of stories where God is in control, where creation is good, and where God’s followers are called to work for the preservation of life while being unafraid — remembering that God is in control.
Scripture points us towards being unafraid — and being unafraid has huge positive consequences, not only in our faith lives but also in our general lives and in society.
In The Righteous Mind, contemporary author and social psychologist Jonothan Haidt reminds us that fear is one of the most important influences on how our brains operate in certain spaces. Research indicates that when we are afraid, we cannot tolerate disagreement of any kind. When we as humans are afraid of something, even if that fear is caused by something completely unrelated to what is at hand, we push against dissenting opinions among those around us. Even if fear isn’t caused by those in our groups, if we are afraid we cannot tolerate differing opinions within our groups. For this reason, fear is a, if not the, driver of polarization in the church and society. Thus, one of the best things we can do to prevent polarization is combat our own fears — and help those around us be less afraid.
So — what does God’s message — do not be afraid — both at Christmastime and always, mean in a country, and a world, dominated by fear? Can we overcome fear so that we can see people we disagree with not as threats, but as fellow humans created in God’s image?
Of course, overcoming fear isn’t easy, and the angel’s call to Mary to not be afraid is so prescient because of how pervasive fear is in our world. As Tig shared last week, one of the main solutions to fear is trust — which we’ll return to later.
But we can be sure Mary was still afraid even after the angel’s exhortation; I’m sure during her pregnancy she had plenty of fears around what this child would mean for her future — her new marriage, her economic status, her family relationships. None of those challenges evaporated — but she was willing to face those fears anyway, and operate out of hope that God would bring about good work through her. Mary, it is obvious, was brave enough to face her fears so that God’s will could be done in her.
Bravery, however, does not mean ignoring or dispelling our fear. There’s a wonderful exchange in one of the first scenes of the fantasy series Game of Thrones — perhaps a bit out of place to quote GoT in a sermon, but it’s too good not to! — but anyhow, in this scene, a son asks his father: “Can a man be brave even when he is afraid?” The father responds: “That is the only time one can be brave.”
Throughout the bible, from Genesis to Mary, we would do well to heed this call not to be afraid — not to ignore our fears, but seek to overcome them, through bravery, hope, and trust. This Christmas, can we seek to be less afraid — of others, of ourselves, of the future, and of the state of the world? This may be mysterious, but we are called to it.
This brings us to our second main point — we need to get more comfortable with the mystery of God.
Those of you who were here two weeks ago might recall that I focused a lot on how I think we live in a culture and time that is uniquely uncomfortable with waiting. Another part of our culture we need to name and be aware of is just how uncomfortable we are with mystery.
A few generations ago, there were millions of natural and human processes that were a complete mystery to us as humans. In the past, mystery was a part of life. It was a mystery why the seasons changed, why seeds grew, why the sun rose every morning, how spiders made their webs, how food turned into energy — to name only a mere few things.
Today, I think our instinct, if there is truly a mystery in our lives, is to view that mystery with fear — as a problem that must be solved. For example, we still don’t quite understand how the brain works, and that’s an honestly frightening thing to many, and thousands of researchers worldwide devote themselves to trying to unravel that mystery.
In the modern Western mindset, we devote a great deal of our time and energy to finding rational and detailed explanations for every single phenomenon. We have sought to banish mystery. Mystery, in the modern west, is seen as bad, or to be feared.
Now, I used modern and western pretty intentionally — because this instinct to fully describe everything has caused some of the biggest theological splits in the history of the church, and is still one of the defining questions of worldview within and outside Christianity.
Mystery was and is one of the central issues behind the so-called Great Schism — the split between what became the Roman Catholic church and the Orthodox communion of the east, based in Constantinople, all the way back in 1054. Of course, there were linguistic and geographic tensions at play in this schism too, but one of the central theological tensions of the Great schism was over how much and how accurately we can describe God.
As Anabaptists and Protestants, though we often don’t identify with our roots within the Catholic church, we are deeply, deeply shaped by the Western and Catholic side of this division. We don’t tend to be mystery people — we typically approach God incredibly descriptively — the seminary word for this desire to describe and categorize God is called kataphatic theology. The seminary word for the Eastern approach is called apophatic theology — stating that the theologian, or priest’s, job is not to explain God, but rather to name the unexplainable mysteries of God, to help others sit with and be transformed by the mysteries of God, rather than seeking to dispel those mysteries.
I think we can and should take a big page out of this book of mysterious thinking, and it’s worthwhile to do this at Christmas, as well as year-round. Rather than fighting to perfectly explain the atonement, or the resurrection, or — as we contemplate at Christmas — the incarnation, God taking on flesh, we should simply name these things as mysteries and point to them as mysteries.
Again — the fact that there is so much we won’t understand this side of heaven about how God became human could be approached with fear — or it can be approached with wonder. We can ponder, more, the nature of the Christ-child, Jesus, the creator of the universe taking on the body of a baby. God entered the world as a child — this was, and is, a holy mystery.
A quote on this point. Stephanie and I have been working through an advent collection of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffers’ writings, many of them from sermons he gave during advent and Christmas. In one such reflection, he shares this about theology and mystery:
“All Christian theology has its origin in the wonder of all wonders: that God became human. Holy theology arises from knees bent before the mystery of the divine child in the stable…How we fail to understand when we think that the task of theology is to solve the mystery of God, to drag it down to the flat, ordinary wisdom of human experience and reason! [Theology’s] sole office is to preserve the miracle as miracle, to comprehend, defend, and glorify God’s mystery precisely as mystery.”
What a wonderful and strange thought that I don’t completely agree with — but there is certainly something to be learned. To think that the point of theology is merely to preserve mystery! If we remember that mystery, particularly the mystery of the incarnation at Christmas, is at the center of our faith, we should stay grounded in humility — holding the mysteries of God as transformative for us rather than as tools to hurt other people with. We can trust and be transformed by the mysteries of God.
This brings us to our final point. What can we do to overcome our fears? What can enable us to ponder divine mysteries? The answer, I think, is trust. If we truly put our trust in God, believing the long arc of scripture and history that shows us over and over that God is at work in the world, then we do not need to be afraid, and we can see the mysteries of God as gifts rather than puzzles to be solved. We must trust that God is with us.
But trust is hard! Particularly when God so often has plans that seem so strange!
Why should we trust that God is at work in the world, when homelessness, drug addiction, racism, wars in Gaza and Ukraine, environmental destruction, and so many other evils seem to run rampant in the world, and seem to be getting worse, not better?
We might not say it out loud, but we often — or at least I often — think: If I were in charge of the world like God is, I would do things differently.
To put this humorously, in the words of one of my all time favorite authors, Douglas Adams, to open a chapter in one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books: “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
At the end of the day, however, we should trust that God, the creator and sustainer, is more knowledgeable and kind and imaginative than we are — thank goodness!
As Ephesians 3:20 says, “God is able to do far more than we could ever ask for or imagine. He does everything by his power that is working in us,” and I would add with us. The part of the advent story we read today does just this — highlight that God is always working in the far extremes of society, even in the broken places and the places of pain, far past the bounds of what even the faithful think is possible.
Our creative and loving and humble God often breaks expectations. Part of what makes Jesus such a radical and beautiful messiah is how he breaks our expectations — part of what allows him to be the root of Jesse that will reign forever is his rejection of the unhealthy expectations of power that we’ve been taught by the world! God could have entered the world as a conqueror — instead, he came as a baby, born of a real, humble, marginalized woman.
Now, we can often miss how creative God is, particularly in stories we know well — and what story do we know better than Jesus’s birth?
In our focus for today, the annunciation, we can miss how incredible it is that an angel is visiting two women at the extreme social fringes of Jewish society having babies at surprising times in their lives. Elizabeth, wife of a priest, is part of the urban Jewish elite, but she’s never been fully a part because she has been barren — but her prayers have been answered, and her husband — the man who has conferred her status up until now — is literally silenced by God!
With Mary, we do a slightly better job in remembering her tenuous position as an unwed mother — but similarly, we shouldn’t forget the trust that Mary is putting in God’s plan here!
I know we’re pretty deep into the sermon, but hang with me for my at-minimum once-a-sermon mention of Greek grammar! Mary’s response at the end of this passage — “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” — has a really interesting verbal ‘mood’ for the verb we translate ‘let it be with me.’ We don’t make too much use of verbal ‘moods’ in English — compared to languages like Spanish, that use the subjunctive mood — but moods combine locating a verb in time — like conjugating for past or present — and also giving an opinion about that verb being used.
So, here, the mood is called “optative” — you don’t need to remember that. But optative is usually, but not always, translated passively — in the NRSV, it’s ‘let it be with me’. But it can also be translated more actively and with hope — closer to, “I’m ready” — or, “I want this to happen” The NRSV also drops the introjection, or exclamation, from earlier in this sentence, Ἰδοὺ, usually translated ‘Behold.’
So — two other possible translations of Mary’s response, then, could be: Behold, I’m God’s servant; I hope it happens to me like you say. “Or, “Hey, I’m God’s woman; bring it on.”
I think we get Mary all wrong when we see her as a passive person — judging from this story and the magnificat we focused on last week, she seems to be filled with joy and excitement and energy — enabled by her trust in God, Mary knows that God’s work in her life was going to transform the world.
Mary is quite bold in her conversation with the angel here, asking direct questions about God’s plan to the angel Gabriel.
We can take a page out of Mary’s book and remember that it is not inappropriate at all to ask questions about God’s plans in our lives. When God calls us to something and we feel we’re missing a prerequisite, we shouldn’t be afraid to ask God — and God may work a miracle to answer our prayers.
As Jesus says in the sermon on the mount — “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” Mary is not only modeling a willingness to trust God’s plan but also a willingness to ask how God’s plan will be accomplished through her. We shouldn’t be afraid to ask either. I believe that when we ask the right questions, God will give us the right answers.
So: What are the questions we are asking, as individuals and as a church, this Christmas? Are we asking:
How can I help others, when I need so much help myself?
Is it right, or just, for me to have so much, when so many others have so little?
How can I be a peacemaker in my family this Christmas, when we always fight when we’re together?
How can we help bring peace to places like Gaza, or Ukraine, when we’re just one small church?
When we ask, we can trust that God will offer answers — this brings me to one final thought on trust.
We can, and need to, trust God — but God also trusts us. God trusts humans to be his hands and feet in the world today. God trusted Mary to carry him in baby form, first in utero, and then as an infant and toddler. God trusted the prophets to share his messages throughout history. And God entrusts each of us with our lives — trusts us to love one another, trusts us to share the good news of the mysterious incarnation near and far, trusts us to figure out what following Jesus means in our time in place. This, too, is a mystery to ponder.
So, as we go from this place to celebrate Christmas, with gifts, with singing, with food, may we remember: We don’t need to be afraid — this is one of the Bible’s central messages, and God has already redeemed us through the life of Jesus; we don’t need to figure out all the mysteries of God — God’s mysteries are an important part of who God is; and we can overcome our fears by trusting God — remembering, also, that God trusts us. Pray with me.
God, as we remember and celebrate your coming among us in the helpless form of a child, fully human and fully divine, help us to truly live into the core message of Christmas — that we need not be afraid, for you love the world enough to enter it as we do. Help us ponder these divine mysteries — your love for the world, your love for us, and your trust in us. May we put our trust in you. Amen.
