[Propertalk] Christmas Eve & Day 2009

[Robert P Morrison]

I didn't preach on Advent 4 and got an idea and wrote this last Friday, for the two services, late on Christmas Eve and 10 am on Christmas Day. It may yet be tinkered with.

May the surprising Love of Christmas dwell in all our hearts!

Bob

THE EPISCOPAL PARISH OF ST. JAMES, LINCOLN CITY        CHRISTMAS EVE / DAY
ISAIAH 9:2-7 & 62:6-12                                     24 / 25th DECEMBER, 2009
TITUS 2:11-14 & 3:4-7			              PSALM 96 & 97
LUKE 2:1-20	

	The journey is always beginning.
	“In September of 2008, a woman with piercing green eyes named Nasreen Baig embarked on an arduous journey from her home in the tiny Pakistani village of Zuudkhan south of the Indus River and down the precipitous Karakoram Highway to the bustling city of Rawalpindi.”  1
	It was a “three day trip – first on foot, then on horseback, and later by jeep and bus – and it took Nasreen, her husband, and their three small children from the sparsely populated Chalpurson Valley, in the extreme northern part of Pakistan, directly into the heart of the Punjab …” They carried with them most of their worldly possessions, including a Koran.
	This journey had begun in 1984, when Nasreen was five. She went to one of the new coeducational schools, one of a handful of girls, gradually breaking through the gender education barrier. She fought social and familial pressure to stop – even from her step-mother who demanded that she turn to marriage, near-slavery, goat and sheep herding, potato farming and hauling water, eighty-pound bags of firewood and yak dung – all instead of continuing in school and going on to be maternal health-care provider.
	Finally, in 2007, her village’s council relaxed their ruling. “Today, Nasreen is a year away from completing her medical training program, but she has decided to continue with her schooling in order to complete a full OB-GYN nursing degree.” In two year’s time she hopes to move into an even more isolated area than her home village, actually across the international border from Pakistan into Afghanistan, to bring hope.
	“Allah,” she says, “ taught me the lesson of patience while also giving me the tools to truly understand what it means to live in poverty … I do not regret the wait.”  2
	Journeys – they’re fascinating while you make them IF you have faith. Otherwise, usually one has to wait until the journey is almost or completely over before one can begin to appreciate what they’re all about.
	Nasreen’s story isn’t finished, of course, at aged thirty. Anything can happen, even a day can make a difference: a mindless remark, a senseless piece of legislation; or, for that matter, a scholarship, a sympathetic listener, an encouraging companion.
	Nasreen’s story is true. So is Mary’s.
	In roughly the same part of the world, under circumstances that haven’t changed all that much, with similar skepticism and challenging, Mary struggled to come to an understanding of what to make of her life. She’d had dreams; she’d had slowly crystalising thoughts about how her particular gifts might be used not only to satisfy herself emotionally and spiritually, but might contribute to the well-being of others, might be able to lift others out of their feelings of frustration, and loneliness, and low-esteem.
	So she set out on her journey by saying yes and by birthing Hope and Light.
	There’s a curious echoing back and forth as these stories seem to mirror one another. People actually CARE about what happens to these women. Despite the distance set up by time and geography, children, women and men who have absolutely no connection with countries thousands of miles away find themselves transported in their hearts and imaginations and do what they can to honour not just these two women, but their descendents and relatives also.
	“Why do so many Americans seem to care so deeply about people who live in a place that is so far away? Despite everything that has happened, how can our anger and our fear be transcended so consistently by our decency? And what is it about the promise of educating children – especially girls – that so often, and with such fervor, seems to evoke what is best in all of us?” 3
	I think people have become involved because these two stories deal with particularities. You know the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”? Listening to either or both stories – about Mary and about Nasreen – I get an instant mind’s-eye picture. Maybe one or both pictures are completely wrong. It’s quite possible that no one would recognize either woman from any picture I might draw, and yet the pictures are lodged there in my mind, as proof to me that all of this is concrete, all this happened and is happening, all of this matters.
	Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote recently, “Incarnation is about something local and particular. It’s not a general principle about how God acts, but an affirmation that God has acted in a specific time and place – that God has spoken a particular language, met particular people, eaten particular food.” What we celebrate today is the bringing “home of that particularity, reminding us of the actual realities of the Middle East in the time of Jesus.” Through Scripture and music, familiar and less than familiar, we’re brought face to face with “God’s involvement with us all as we try to make the gift of Jesus real for ourselves and our human neighbors today.”  4
	I found myself wondering, the other day, what post-it notes God might have on the refrigerator. I mean, there IS a plan; there ARE things to be done, aren’t there? How DOES God remember? Somehow, one of the other pictures in my mind was of this little dog-eared post-it, its sticky back mixed with fuzz from having dropped several times on creation’s floor, but carefully placed back with all the other reminders. This one that I can see says, simply, “Get Jesus to Israel in time for Christmas.”
	What I see and hear tonight, so far removed from Israel, so long-past that first night show, is the personal care that God lavishes on the world, just for me – probably for you also, but we’re excused, we’re allowed some personal time right now.
	If I may be having a tough time with something, then Mary’s story which involves presenting God to us speaks to my worries, and my discomfort, and my pain. And then, beyond that, the stories from God speak to us about noticing that everyone else’s struggle is being named and addressed at the same time.
	In other words, what we’re hearing about today is the connectedness that exists – between God and us as individuals, and between each one of us. We’re all related because of this Act of God.
	Maybe that’s why, when there’s danger or disaster, we find ourselves, for the most part, responding – whether with money, or with letters and cards making a personal statement of concern, or with our physical presence. Whatever it is, we’re drawn to make a response for God, for others, for ourselves.
	The other day I came across a letter from an inmate in a Federal Penitentiary in Florida. The inmate began his note by saying, “Greetings with a hug filled with the love of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.
	“In June you opened an account for me with a free subscription to your daily devotional Forward Day by Day, for I have been incarcerated for the past 22 years and am indigent.
	“I recently received a few dollars in my account and immediately through to pay for this subscription. Enclosed is an $18.00 check. I ask you to credit my account. Thank you and peace be with you.”
	This in itself spoke to me loudly. But then the inmate quoted Oswald Chambers, a theologian from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The quote was, “We look for visions of heaven and we never dream that all the time God is in the commonplace things and people around us.”  5
	What incredible faith that man has. After twenty two years in such an institution I think I might be half crazy, or, at least very bitter. But here is someone who has discovered what Chambers meant. Here is someone who knows what the Incarnation means. Here is someone both willing and able, in the midst of what must be an intensely difficult life, who’s able to see that God became – and continues to become – vitally energetic and wonderfully encouraging. Just think of all the things that an inmate in a penitentiary is NOT able to have or to use, because of safety restrictions. So, in all the simple, safe things, in the midst of ridicule from those who may feel too hardened to risk opening up to anything mystical, in the tiniest details in the corridors and barren cells, maybe even a shaft of light at a particular time of day; in the chill dirt, God comes amidst us in human form and draws us into an intimate embrace.
	This show God caring. This is why Mary journeyed. This is why folk like Cory can journey, at least in his spiritual imagination, and why Nasreen’s hope stayed present until she was able to make her journey. This caring God enables us to take OUR journeys, no matter when and where we hear the call.
	Nasreen’s story is only half-told. Mary’s, in a sense isn’t complete either. Until her last descendent on earth finds hope, and love, and power, her story, her journey, will continue too.
	What we hear tonight/today is a living word from God which says – “This is real. I AM present. And I will NEVER leave till the last ounce of fear, and rejection, and abuse is banished on earth. And for this, God says, I need ALL of you. You too must be on your journey. Look at Me as I present myself in history; and then return, rejoicing, praising, witnessing, bringing hope to the farthest, most dangerous, dimly lit, corners of Lincoln City, and Lincoln County, and so on, until the Light shines everywhere and the singing is heard by the most deaf, most hard-of-heart person in the world.”
	That’s the hope which breaks into our lives once again this night/day as we engage in our journey. Thanks be to God!


NOTES:
1	“Stones into Schools” by Greg Mortenson.  © Viking Penguin, 2009. Page 1. 
2	Mortenson, Op. cit. page 6. 
3	Mortensen, Ibid. pp 10-11. 
4	The Most Rev’d. Rowan Williams, Advertising credit on the back cover of the book “Songs in Waiting: Spiritual Reflections on Christ’s Birth” by Paul-Gordon Chandler. © Morehouse Publishing, 2009
5	Cory Skinter, Hendry Corrections Institution, Immokalee, Florida. Quoted in Odyssey, Forward Day By Day News, Number 9, Advent 2009. Page 2.



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Robert P. Morrison
The Episcopal Parish of St James,
PO Box 789
Lincoln City, Oregon, 97367

541-994-2426 (Church)