Speechless: A sermon on December 16, 2012

Advent 3 C                                                                                         December 16, 2012

Luke 2:28-39                                                                                       St. Alban’s, Austin

There are times I don’t know what to think. Let alone what to say. I have to tell you that it is daunting to stand up here before you on a Sunday morning and feel responsible for helping you to make sense of something that makes no sense.

Imagine you were with me yesterday morning at Torchy’s Tacos grabbing a quick breakfast with my sister. The man at the next table, who was sitting with a darling little boy about seven years old, stood up to put his trash in the bin, and I saw that he was wearing a black T shirt with a white assault rifle on it. It took my breath away. I didn’t know what to think. My jaw dropped, and I was speechless. I’m glad we didn’t actually have eye contact because anybody who would wear such a T shirt on the day after twenty children the same age as his were slaughtered was clearly looking for someone to pick a fight, and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. He could even have had such a weapon in his car. But the sight of him haunted me all day long. I don’t like believing that there are people so utterly insensitive in the world, let alone people who would actually murder first graders and their teachers. If you need me to make sense of Sandy Hook for you, I am sorry, but I will let you down.

If I had kept with the lectionary this week we would be talking about John the Baptist again,

and he would be calling people a brood of vipers. But I just spent the fall in Florence and while I was there I spent a great deal of my time and attention on images of the Annunciation to Mary, and that was not one of the offerings for this year, so I snuck it in. Apparently when I played fast and loose with the lectionary a couple of weeks ago and joked that the liturgical police were coming to get me, just that minute a couple of helicopters flew over the church, which caused some degree of hilarity in the choir. Trust me, it is legal to do this.

And so today we read the story of the Angel Gabriel coming to an unsuspecting young girl and, without giving her ample time to think about it, announcing that God has decided that she will bear his son. Mary is startled and confused, but she quickly accepts the invitation. The angel departs, and that is that. The world is changed forever

It is a scene we can easily get all sappy and sentimental about, and some artists over the years have done exactly that. The angel can look like a belign fairy godmother,

and Mary can look so sweet it will make your fillings ache, but those paintings don’t take into account the world into which the angel is bursting forth. They don’t consider the cost of this consent to Mary. And they don’t stop to think about the power of the Incarnation, that even though this precious little baby is Jesus, this is in fact God incarnate coming to live among us

as innocent and helpless and vulnerable and hopeful as those twenty first graders who got on their school buses on Friday with their Hello Kitty lunchboxes looking forward to playing with their best friends and running around in PE and pleasing their teachers and coming home to a weekend to houses magically decorated for Christmas or Hannukah.

There are many stories still to be told. Much is still not clear at all, and I’ll have to admit to you

that I have not spent every hour since it happened glued to the TV or even to Facebook, so you may well know things I don’t know. One story, though, is about one of the teachers, Kaitlyn Roig, who had fifteen children in her room when she heard the shooting begin. She shoved a bookcase against her door and got all the children into the bathroom and told them they had to be quiet so the bad guys wouldn’t know they were there. She told them that there were bad guys out there right then and that they had to wait for the good guys to come. (See interview with Diane Sawyer: http://now.msn.com/kaitlin-roig-sandy-hook-teacher-recounts-saving-her-students-during-shooting)

You’ve probably heard the wonderful quote from Mr. Rogers: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers.  You will always find people who are helping.’ Ms. Roig was assuring the children that there are helpers.

She told them that she loved them, which she does, because she thought they were all going to die, and she wanted the last thing they ever heard to be that they were loved. And the children said that they wanted to go home, that they wanted Christmas.  She told them they would have Christmas and Hannukah and that if their family believed in prayer to pray, and if they didn’t believe in prayer to think happy thoughts. The police came,  but she refused to open the door, thinking it might be a trick, and she said that if they were really the police they would be able to get the key. What an amazing young woman.

Little children, six and seven years old, facing trauma they could not comprehend but which will haunt their lives from here on out expressed that what they wanted in that moment of terror and darkness was Christmas.

I remember being six and feeling like Christmas would never come. Looking back, we had pretty average Christmases. We didn’t go to church. My parents always went to a party on Christmas Eve and we were left at home to hang our stockings with the babysitter, who might or might not read us The Night before Christmas, but definitely not Luke’s gospel.

In the morning my father would be the first one downstairs and without fail, as he got his movie camera ready, he would announce that Santa had forgotten to come. We’d get our presents, which were rarely over the top, we’d go to dinner at my grandparents’ apartment, and we’d go home to bed, but it was all magical. That’s what the children held onto when they were afraid. That’s what their teacher promised them when she honestly believed they were all about to die.

In John’s gospel we read, The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

That is the gospel. That is what we hang onto today even as we continue to hear this horrific story unfold. Yes, evil has invaded our beloved season of holiday cheer, but evil will not overcome it. This is the gospel. This is why God sent the angel to Mary. This is why God broke into time and history. This is why God came to live in this broken world, to show us, to prove to us, as St. Paul writes, that neither death nor life nor rulers, nor things present,  nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

There are a lot of songs we love to sing at Christmas, and if you stop to listen, you will hear that quite a number of them are the songs of people whose situation is not all holly jolly. “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” implies that the singer’s Christmas will fall short of his dreams. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is the song of someone who is lonely and stuck far, far away.

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” was sung by a tearful Judy Garland to her even sadder little sister when their world seemed to be falling apart. But the song I remembered on Friday

was from the musical Mame:

So climb down the chimney;
Put up the brightest string of lights I've ever seen.
Slice up the fruitcake;
It's time we hung some tinsel on that evergreen bough.

For I've grown a little leaner,
Grown a little colder,
Grown a little sadder,
Grown a little older,
For we need a little Christmas
Right this very minute,
Candles in the window,
Carols at the spinet.
For we need a little music,
Need a little laughter,
Need a little singing
Ringing through the rafter,
And we need a little snappy
"Happy ever after,"
Need a little Christmas now.

I know it’s secular, but it is the truth. We do need a little Christmas now, not just because of the tragedy yesterday, but because we live in a world in which that tragedy is possible. We live in a world where hearts are broken every day, where people with mental illness can get multiple assault rifles, where families are broken and jobs are lost, where people suffer from depression and betray each other’s trust, where good people and not so good people get ill, where wars continue and refugees are cooped up in camps for years at a time. This is the world that needs Christmas. This is the world into which God sent an angel to a young girl in Nazareth, where God’s own self broke into time and said, “I’m on my way.”

We get our hearts broken again and again. And we get Christmas. And the Christmas we get is way more than the stockings hanging on the mantel, the turkey roasting, the presents we give and receive, or the songs we sing. The Christmas we get, which is the Christmas we need and the Christmas that the angels announce is the redemption of this world  begun with the unexpected arrival of Gabriel and the unimaginable acceptance of Mary.

It is the song of angels, and it is the blessing of angels.

Let us pray:

May the angels in their beauty bless you.

May they turn toward you streams of blessing.

May the angel of awakening stir your heart

to come alive to the eternal within you,

to all the invitations that quietly surround you.

May the angel of healing turn your wounds into sources of refreshment.

May the angel of the imagination enable you

to stand on the true thresholds,

at ease with your ambivalence

and drawn in new directions

through the glow of your contradictions.

May the angel of compassion open your eyes

to the unseen suffering around you.

May the angel of wildness disturb the places

where your life is domesticated and safe,

take you to the territories of true otherness

May the angel of justice disturb you

to take the side of the poor and the wronged.

May the angel of encouragement confirm you

in worth and self respect

that you may live with the dignity

that presides in your soul.

May the angel of death arrive only

when your life is complete

and you have brought every given gift

to the threshold where its in its infinity can shine.

May all the angels be your sheltering

and joyful guardians.

Amen

(Prayer adapted from John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us)

Bridge Time

I guess you could say I've been back at work for a week now, but this is just the beginning of my fourth day in the office. So far I'm managing to retain the peaceful energy of my sabbatical. It helps to keep revisiting the images on my iPhone and iPad. They open my memory to the sights and sounds and smells of a place that is still very real to me. I've seen pictures of the Duomo Piazza with its big Christmas tree and narrow streets with Christmas lights and store windows. Oh, how I would love to be at Mercato Centrale right now.

In my imagination I can be there in an instant and tell myself that I'll be going back to Florence again and again. I hope that proves to be true. But when I go back, even if I make a bee line to Osteria Giovanni or to the convent at San Marco or to the little bar where we stood for our morning cappucino, it will be a new day and a new experience. That is as it should be. As Herclitus said, you can't step in the same river twice. Time remains such a mystery to me.

There were three bridges in Florence that I crossed on a fairly regular basis. The one in the picture is Ponte Vecchio. Until the time of the Medicis the shops were butchers and fishmongers and greengrocers. The river, in addition to being a source of fish and a means of delivery, was their waste disposal system. The shopkeepers would toss their scraps and trimmings overboard to hungry creatures below and the currents that carried them away.

But when the Medicis built the Vasari Corridor -- those are the little windows along the top of the bridge -- their 'secret' passageway from the Palazzo Vecchio to the Pitti Palace, they were offended by the smell of the shops and used their muscle to displace the food market in lieu of the silver and goldsmiths who have their shops there to this day. Some of the jewelry was nice, but it was all so glitzy and much of it tacky and ostentatious that it wasn't very tempting.

And of course now there are artists selling 'original' watercolors of the Florence streetscapes, Nigerian boys with their knock-off Guccis and Pradas spread out on blankets so they can swoop them up and run when the caribinieri show up, and throngs of tourists being informed by guides holding furled umbrellas overhead. And everybody on the bridge is either eating gelato or smoking a cigarette. At night musicians play there and their music floats up the river.

The bridges of Florence have been destroyed a number of times by floods, which are not all that infrequent, and by war. The Santa Trinita Bridge was designed by Michelangelo, blown up by the Germans, and rebuilt from the pieces they found in the river.
I'm thinking about bridges today, the beautiful, magical bridges of Florence and the utilitarian highway bridges of Austin that take me to and from work every day. My father's family were literally bridge builders. I have a photograph of my great grandfather and my very young grandfather at the ribbon cutting of the Arlington Bridge in Washington, DC, which they built. But I'm not an engineer, so my call to bridges is more poetic and theological.

I'm aware of being in a bridge time. The very sacred gift of sabbatical is on the other shore of the river now that I am back at home and at church, but I hope I can keep the access open, that I can travel back to the realities I experienced on both banks of the Arno, the little wine bar right at the stoop of the Church of Santa Felicita, the sandwich shop where we ate and balanced our wine in the street as motorcycles and cars wove among the crowd, the steps of the Convent of San Marco, where I conversed for hours with Fra Angelico's Annunciation, the window of our flat, where I'd watch the bells of Santa Croce swing as they rang the Angelus. I don't know how to keep it all alive until I go back, but I'm clinging to the bridges right now to be my help and my access.