[Propertalk] 1 Christmas c

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

The editors are coming, the editors are coming!

I hope you continue to have a wild Christmas celebration!!

Bob


EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY 
THE FIRST SUNDAY OF CHRISTMAS (c)
ISAIAH  61:10 – 62:3                         					                      		 
30th DECEMBER, 2012
GALATIANS 3:23-25; 4:4-7			                            	 
PSALM 147
JOHN 1:1-18

	OK, now that the impossible has happened, what’s left?

	Believing it, I suppose. Actually when I typed this, I made a mistake. 
I missed out the second “e”, so that it read “Be-Living it”. “Believing” 
means making what we believe what and how we live. It means digging 
deeply into those philosophical words from our Gospel reading, trying to 
discover nuances from the text and bringing them to life, not only for 
the first century, but for the twenty-first century. Now that the 
impossible has happened, that the Creator of everything took human flesh 
and blood and walked on the dirt of this world, ate the food grown in 
this world, talked to others on the streets and in the homes and worship 
places on earth; now that the Creator has become a human Being, the 
Gospel writer invites us to be drawn into such a relationship with God 
that we become guardians of that Light, that it may never go out. At one 
and the same time we have to keep it safe and to shine it into every 
situation in the world to demonstrate the immensity of what God’s love 
and involvement means for us.

	Tuesday’s New York Times, the issue on Christmas Day, contained a photo 
journalist’s essay entitled “When Streets Are Darkest, Christmas Still 
Comes”. 1

	It was about the recovery effort after Hurricane Sandy. House after 
house in street after street is uninhabitable. Only isolated houses are 
homes, with their owners and renters living inside them, trying to make 
the best of a terrible situation. What struck me were the captions on 
two of the photos. The first told the story in simple terms: 
“Decorations illuminate a home in Breezy Point, Queens. Many of the 
houses in this area, which was devastated by Hurricane Sandy, are dark 
and uninhabited.” The second read, “An inspected house in Breezy Point 
has the green light, meaning it has been declared habitable, and is 
decorated for Christmas.”

	We all know for ourselves, light makes the difference. We feel safer if 
we have light in every room in the house, and a light outside at the 
front and back door. When we cook, when we eat, when we entertain, when 
we clean up – anything that’s part of our normal life – we work better 
in light, whether it be the glaring lights at a sports arena or the soft 
candlelight while we sang “Silent Night” here on Monday evening.

	Somehow, darkness makes us uneasy. Maybe it’s because our imaginations 
are too good. We have frightening pictures there of what can happen in 
this world. Tornadoes ripping through the South on Tuesday and 
Wednesday. Trinity Episcopal Church in Mobile, Alabama, in the Diocese 
of the Central Gulf Coast was torn apart on Christmas Day.  This isn’t 
the first time that congregation’s had to face a crisis like this. “The 
church was badly damaged during 1979’s Hurricane Frederick. There was a 
hole in the roof, bashed-in windows, and the spire needed repair. 
Trinity Episcopal just underwent major renovations in 2010, including a 
new roof and brick work.

	“(On Christmas Day evening), members of the church were saddened by the 
destruction. But they were thankful that no one was injured.

	“Just 24 hours earlier than when the tornado struck, Trinity was 
preparing to hold its Holy Eucharist for Christmas Eve, (and the 
building had been full).” 2

	Who slept through Tuesday night in Mobile, I wonder? And that’s just 
one town, one congregation.

	Our imaginations here have us wonder when we’re in the dark. What can 
happen to those we love? How will the latest change in our lives affect 
us?

	Darkness isn’t necessarily, pace Simon and Garfunkel, “My old friend”, 
unless, of course, we’re trying to hide.

However, the Light of Christmas, the Light which came into the world and 
continues to come into the world, is the fulfillment of the psalmists’ 
dream in which came the revelation that “Darkness is not dark to you: (O 
God) the night is as bright as the day; darkness and light to you are 
both alike.” 3

	The gift of Christmas, as the Gospel writer saw so poetically, is that 
God’s warming, freeing, comforting, enriching light is now part of our 
make-up. The light came, once, at creation, but humans managed to 
pervert it, to fill it with shadows. Now, as hard as people and nature 
try, the darkness will never again overwhelm everything. That we have to 
hold on to with all of our hearts, with all of our imaginations. Love 
will never be quenched from our lives now. It will be the one thing on 
to which we can hold with certainty, no matter who or what tries to 
abuse or quench it.

	After the Second World War was brought to an end, and various cities 
and buildings liberated and rehabilitated, a poem was discovered written 
on the wall of a cell in a Gestapo concentration camp in Koln. The first 
verse has stuck with me since I first read it many years ago:

		"I believe in the sun
		even when it is not shining
		And I believe in love,
		even when there's no one there.
		And I believe in God,
		even when he is silent.”  4

	Imagine what that person – believed to be a teen-aged Jewish girl – 
must have been experiencing. Think of what we know of how people so 
abused one another. I’m struck with wonder that this girl’s faith was so 
strong that not only could she survive, to that point in time, the 
torture to which she was subjected, but also that she was able to write 
so freely that God was still watching over her.

	Sometimes we seem to be locked into such intense periods of silence in 
our lives. We’re separated from love; we receive a diagnosis we were 
neither expecting nor wanting; flood waters cover fields and buildings, 
making them barely usable; people won’t talk to one another, they talk 
at each other, and make up the others’ minds for them. We seem to have 
the knack of spreading darkness so readily, and the worst of it is that 
often we’re quite unaware of how we’re damaging another human being, or 
the possibility of a solution to problems, and so on.

	Yet, despite this, God is still present; God’s Light will NEVER go out. 
The same acquaintance who wrote about the destruction of the Church 
building in Mobile added, “And I ask additional prayers for my dear wife 
Nancy, our parish nurse, who suffered a stroke last Thursday and remains 
in the neuro intensive care unit at the Mobile Infirmary, which also got 
hit by the tornado tonight, but is safely operating off generators.

	“With power out, we are having our Christmas night in candlelight, in 
circumstances we never could have imagined.” 5

	Some of you may have read Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times 
on Wednesday morning. She was asked by a friend why darkness persisted. 
Her response was to quote a priest friend who is very close to her and 
her family. He wrote, “Implicit here is the question of how we look to 
God to act and to enter our lives.

  	“For whatever reason, certainly foreign to most of us, God has chosen 
to enter the world today through others, through us. We have stories of 
miraculous interventions, lightning-bolt moments, but far more often the 
God of unconditional love comes to us in human form, just as God did 
over 2,000 years ago.”

	Then the priest wrote something I find both sad and helpful.

	“I believe differently now than 30 years ago. First, I do not expect to 
have all the answers, nor do I believe that people are really looking 
for them. Second, I don’t look for the hand of God to stop evil. I don’t 
expect comfort to come from afar. I really do believe that God enters 
the world through us. And even though I still have the “Why?” questions, 
they are not so much “Why, God?” questions. We are human and mortal. We 
will suffer and die. But how we are with one another in that suffering 
and dying makes all the difference as to whether God’s presence is felt 
or not and whether we are comforted or not.

	“One true thing is this: Faith is lived in family and community, and 
God is experienced in family and community. We need one another to be 
God’s presence.  …

	“A contemporary theologian has described mercy as ‘entering into the 
chaos of another.’ Christmas is really a celebration of the mercy of God 
who entered the chaos of our world in the person of Jesus, mercy 
incarnate. I have never found it easy to be with people who suffer, to 
enter into the chaos of others. Yet, every time I have done so, it has 
been a gift to me, better than the wrapped and ribboned packages. I am 
pulled out of myself to be love’s presence to someone else, even as they 
are love’s presence to me.

	“I will never satisfactorily answer the question ‘Why?’ because no 
matter what response I give, it will always fall

short. What I do know is that an unconditionally loving presence soothes 
broken hearts, binds up wounds, and renews us in life. This is a gift 
that we can all give, particularly to the suffering. When this gift is 
given, God’s love is present and Christmas happens daily.”

	This reminder is what brings the Light alive for me, and helps me not 
to accept, or be glad for disasters, not to rejoice in the pain of 
others – or myself, for that matter – but it reminds me of my belief 
that God’s Light IS unquenchable, that God loves me, no matter what, and 
that my experience of this comes through other people – those who sit 
with me, not necessarily talking, just sitting; those people who tell me 
about a movie, or a piece of music, or something else which might enrich 
my life; those whose texts, or e-mails seem to arrive at the most 
opportune moment, to bring a smile into a draggy or dark day, perhaps to 
enable me to do the same thing for someone else.

	I can’t help but equate that young Jewish woman who wrote the poem with 
another young Jewish woman of two thousand years ago, not necessarily 
going through torture at the hands of other supposed human beings, yet 
still, no doubt, frightened.

	And I wonder who’s isolated today; who’s frightened today; whom I or 
any other follower of Jesus may have hurt today. No matter who’s going 
through dark nights of the soul, it is the call of Jesus, through the 
evangelist, to take the good news about the Light of the World to any 
and every dark place, to let its warm glow comfort, enrich and bring the 
message of salvation and understanding, just as has been done for us on 
countless occasions, and is repeated once again this morning.

	David, the husband Nancy in Mobile, wrote about that priest’s comments, 
“this means especially much to me as I sit in ICU with a wife who says 
her ring belongs on her hand and not in a bag and my 17 and 22 year olds 
have just walked by our church (more than a 2d home) and called to say 
it's in ruins.
Oh my.”

	No matter how difficult it may seem, no matter how long it may take to 
shine into the farthest corners of our imaginations, the Light IS here 
to stay. And it DOES appear to be green!

	The poem concludes:

		I believe through any trial,
		there is always a way
		But sometimes in this suffering
		and hopeless despair
		My heart cries for shelter,
		to know someone's there
		But a voice rises within me, saying hold on
		my child, I'll give you strength,
		I'll give you hope. Just stay a little while.

		I believe in the sun
		even when it is not shining
		And I believe in love
		even when there's no one there
		But I believe in God
		even when he is silent
		I believe through any trial
		there is always a way.

		May there someday be sunshine
		May there someday be happiness
		May there someday be love
		May there someday be peace...."

NOTES:

1 	“Where Streets Are Darkest, Christmas Still comes” by Ruth Swenson 
for The New York Times, 25th December, 2012.

2	“Historic Trinity Episcopal ‘likely a total loss,’ after tonight's 
tornado”  By Rena Havner Philips | rphilips at al.com  on December 25, 2012 
at 10:10 PM, updated December 26, 2012 at 12:40 PM 
http://blog.al.com/live/2012/12/historic_trinity_episcopal_lik.html

3	Psalm 149:11    See Evening Prayer in the BCP page 116, et al.

4	See 
http://www.revelife.com/695590737/a-poem-of-belief-by-a-jewish-prisoner-in-a-nazi-concentration-camp/

5	 David Quittmeyer, L4 Central Gulf Coast, PB&F 
centralgulfcoast at yahoo.com


Robert P Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban
PO Box 1556
Albany OR  97321   541-921-1076 (cell)