12-23-18 Readings & Sermon

A reading from Micah.

You, O Bethlehem of Ephratha, who are the one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from old, from ancient days.

Therefore he shall give them up until the time when she is who is in labor has brought forth, then rest of his kindred shall return, and the people of Israel.

And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord is his God, and they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth, and he shall be the one of peace.

The word of the Lord.

From this day, all generations will call me blessed.

He has mercy on those who fear him.

He has shown the strength of his arm.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones.

He has filled the hungry with good things.

He has come to the help of his servant Israel.

The promise he made to our fathers.

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

A reading from Hebrews.

When Christ came into the world, he said, sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me.

In burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.

Then I said, See, God, I have come to do your will, O God.

When he said above, You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings, and burnt offerings and sin offerings.

These are offered according to the law.

Then he added, See, I have come to do your will.

He abolished the first in order to establish the second.

And it is by God's will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ, once and for all, the word of the Lord.

The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to Luke.

In those days Mary sat down and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.

When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leapt in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud joy, Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.

And why has this happened to me that the mother of my Lord comes to me?

For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy.

And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.

The Gospel of the Lord.

So reminder the trajectory was for us to hop, frankly, for greater things than we normally settle for.

For us not to just think about having peace, but being possessed by peace and making peace in the world, something not to be confused with quiet.

For us to cultivate joy, which is able to bear with weighty things like sorrow and repentance.

And now for us to try and cultivate love and preparation for the advent of our Lord.

And if you don't mind me saying, because as also an adoptive parent myself, there is something really remarkably joyful about adoption if we think about it seriously, in the sense there is all this excitement and exuberance about having arrived with this new family member.

And I know this because I've read some of Amanda's posts about this.

There is also, of course, sorrow.

Because adoption usually comes at the price of another relationship.

Only joy can hold both of those carefully.

I don't think happiness can.

That kind of joy.

And in the middle of that, I would tell you we're also meant to cultivate the practice of love.

I'd celebrate about five weddings a year.

Usually I do one in this church and four other places.

And quite honestly, um the couple.

This is a kind of a cool thing about priestly ministry is celebrating what I call cold weddings, where a friend of a friend needs a priest, and maybe I'll do.

So usually what I try to do is, and I tell a couple when I meet them, I am not going to officiate your wedding.

And it becomes really important for me that I have something to celebrate.

And if I don't, I won't do it.

I'll just let you know.

And interestingly enough, I've never had to say no.

One couple said no for me.

That was great.

Um there really wasn't a lot to celebrate there.

Um anyway, so so I no, I mean, really, uh, and I don't think they ended up getting married, and that was right.

So um so I celebrate these relationships at at marriage.

Um and uh, you know, up until about two years ago, I really chose not to do much well, homiletics, because after all, um it's supposed to be a celebration, and some long homily like you put up with me every Sunday is gonna make it less celebratory.

So, in general, I would make remarks if I knew the couple well about what I appreciated about their relationship.

And if I'd done premarital counseling with them, I'd throw in a couple of bits, but really quite short.

About a year and a half ago or two years ago, I decided, hey, I'm gonna try to actually say something here.

Usually still very short, because remember, it's a celebration.

It's not penance that I'm imposing on people.

So um, I tell you, not invariably, but in general, when people pick a reading for a wedding, they so often pick this verse from the Song of Solomon, which says, Many waters cannot quench love.

Maybe you've heard this before.

Um, maybe it was at your own wedding.

It's really a fantastic uh springboard into what practicing love is looked like.

Because I'll tell you, and I tell couples this too, if love is cultural and ordinary, if it's about how we feel, many waters will quench it quickly, like within two years.

I believe that if your marriage is based on feeling, you got two years max.

You may live longer than that together, you may live parallel lives in the same home.

But interestingly enough, you know, our verse today, our scripture today in Hebrews talked about the sacrifice.

If you love people because it feels good, that's no sacrifice.

That gives you endorphins.

It's great.

I don't think Advent love is about that.

I didn't want to harangue you with Brene Brown, but I will tell you, Brene Brown says, and I think this is quite right, particularly as I grow a little bit in my um maturity, particularly in my marriage, that love is really not about feeling, love is a set of practices.

My wife got this really early on, and I've told this before, when we went to premarital counseling, um, the counselor said, Tell us your number one image for marriage.

And, you know, I was so idealistic and priestly, and I said, Marriage is a mystical union of two people into one.

And my wife said, contract.

This is when she was a divinity school student.

I should have known we were headed for the law practice.

My second image was something else very fruit-fruit.

Her second was commitment.

And um, I will tell you quite interestingly, I mean, not that she's won me over, but I think there becomes this really critical part of love that we often forget culturally.

Love is what we practice, especially when we don't feel like it.

Convinced that's right.

And I want to tell you, I'm convinced that's what Hebrews is talking about, with what sacrifices God desires.

Honestly, I internalized that God wants me to show how much I love God by making myself miserable.

And I want to tell you, not only is that heretical, that's perverse.

There's nothing loving about that desire.

No, Jesus didn't suffer just to suffer, he suffered to give other people life.

And practicing love when you don't feel like it, it's suffering.

You know this if you've ever loved somebody.

You know this if you've ever been loved by somebody.

And I'm convinced we're called to that kind of deepening of practice.

At least for a day and a half.

And just one more thought.

Renee Brown says, Can you feel in love with somebody that can have an affair maybe, but you cannot practice love if you can do that.

And I think that's part of the difference.

You know, sometimes in my significant relationships I sure feel like dispensing some really good advice.

And if I would just practice love, I might just not say anything unless I had something positive to say at all.

And I want to suggest to you that one way we might hear the practice of love in the story today is about Elizabeth, who we know is old, past childbearing age.

She has become miraculously pregnant with a baby that will be John the Baptist.

Before that pregnancy, she was culturally degraded because a woman's job was to produce a male heir, which she hitherto had been unable to do.

This baby was sort of like Sarah having a baby.

It was full of laughter.

Abraham named the baby Isaac, which means laughter because people will laugh with him at how God has overcome his poor fortune.

That's Elizabeth's pregnancy.

And then there's Mary, who tradition says is young, like 16-ish.

I don't really know what it's like to be a high school girl, but I knew for sure the worst thing that could happen to you in my high school was that you became pregnant.

And in Mary's case, she's pregnant out of wedlock.

Not only would she face possible derision and censure, her life was in jeopardy.

Most scholars would tell you the reason Mary goes to visit Elizabeth leaves.

The reason Mary goes with Joseph to Bethlehem, which is not where she lives.

Dangerous journey for a pregnant lady.

The reason she goes is not to support her husband.

It's because without him there'd be no one to protect her from being stoned.

And Elizabeth, interestingly enough, has that kind of advent joy.

Knowing, knowing the danger to Mary, is also to find some rejoicing.

Mary in the Magnificat, knowing her own life is in peril, really is able to extol God, to magnify God.

And the practice that happens here, interestingly enough, and one that I'll tell you that I continue to struggle with, is the choice between sympathy and empathy.

And you may say those are the same thing.

They're close, but I think the difference is really about as far as the East is from the West.

So just thinking through the words.

Pathos is the root of both of those words, which we know is really about sharing a significant feeling, so much so that we call it passion.

It doesn't just mean suffering, it also can mean joy.

Pathos.

Sem pathos is having a like pathos, and impathos is having it with somebody.

After all, when someone dies, you send a sympathy card.

But if you've ever received sympathy, I would tell you it is probably the most destructive thing in your own life and in your own relationship, because sympathy is about somebody knowing how it feels to be you.

Do they know?

At the end of the day, really, sympathy is about somebody competing with you for who's been hurt worse.

You know you're hearing sympathy when somebody uses the words at least.

Oh, you're having a different difficult pregnancy?

At least you could get pregnant.

You're dealing with your aging parents having you know aging issues.

At least you still have your parents.

That's sympathy.

At least.

And the author really just couldn't figure out why that was so bothersome.

After all, she had tried to identify with the pain.

I do this.

So I had to keep reading to figure out why that was so bad.

And of course, you realize that I've already introduced it, right?

Instead of making space for someone to share their own story, the listener introduced their own.

Instead of being a therapy giver, they they turned the grieving person into a therapy.

I just said that wrong.

Instead of giving somebody therapy and grief, they expected it from a grieving person by retreating into their own story.

So what is empathy like?

Well, obviously, it's not doing that.

Empathy is not assuming that I need to know how your loss feels for you.

Interestingly enough, empathy doesn't even really take a lot of training.

The truth is everybody who pretty much can talk has the tools they need.

You ever been happy before in your life?

Then you know how happiness feels.

You ever been sad before?

Probably everybody could raise their hand.

You ever been angry or anxious or lost something?

Then you have the beginning in which to enter into a hole that somebody else is in.

Empathy is not where we just hop down in the hole and we die down there together.

No, empathy, honestly, is when we have a rope tied to ourselves and we go down there and we let the other person share what the hole is like for them.

So if you're ever wondering, how do I approach somebody who's grieving with empathy, you might say, as a strategy, before you say a word, you might in your head think, what have I really lost that hurt?

How did that hurt feel for me?

Okay, I'm going before I say anything, I'm going to attach myself to my own hurt and then make space for them to tell me about theirs.

So quite honestly, you might say, I don't know how you're experiencing this loss, but I'd love for you to tell me.

And then, of course, you see, instead of controlling the conversation with our own experience, we've now just made room for them to be in control.

Empathy really is about giving up our control so that somebody else can be present.

And listen, it's not just about grief.

We talk about this with our kids.

When it's somebody's birthday, you can choose to be jealous or you can choose to be empathetic.

You can be happy not for them, you can be happy with them.

Not telling our story when we're encountered with somebody else's grief.

Not being in control, I want to tell you is painful.

And that's why it's a sacrifice.

And the thing that we often miss, and I think this becomes really, really important.

By the way, if somebody is like hemorrhaging emotionally, and you're also hemorrhaging, you're probably not in a good situation to give them empathy.

Does that make sense what I'm saying?

Um but to tell you how this is a little bit different, you know, when the wound has stopped bleeding, you may have a scar, it could still be raw, but you're not actively just bleeding out aortically from your life.

Um the truth is you go down to that hole with a rope because the thing is you can leave when you want.

30 years ago at my seminary, uh, you had to have a homeless experience.

You had to go on the street with$15, and you were out there.

For three days, so you could know what it's like to be homeless.

They don't do it anymore because, well, it's dangerous and people got hurt.

But you know, um, interestingly enough, it didn't really quite give you empathy.

Because I could leave when I wanted to.

I had people I could call, it would pick me up.

I may not have had money for a phone, but somebody would have let me make a call.

By the way, that's not a bad thing.

We just need to call it what it is, right?

And so for us to engage in empathy, I want to tell you, if you don't have someone you can call to get you out of that hole, you may not want to go down in it with somebody else.

Does that make sense what I'm saying?

You can leave when you want.

Empathy's like that.

But hopefully, we, knowing we have an out, we can choose to sit with somebody else in this moment of rollness, whether it's joy or anxiety or anger or grief, we can make some room for them.

I don't know that I'm going to solve this in the next day and a half.

And if this sounds very riddling to you, then I'll just tell you in my own adoption story, something I might think my son would tell you just as well.

Have to practice empathy for the parents that lost their kid.

It has not come easy.

We look at the problems that our children have, the rejection, the abandonment.

Of course, what we want to do is be angry about it.

Because it is much easier, at least as a man, for me to carry anger than it is sorrow.

In fact, I'm culturally expected to express grief through anger, not through sadness.

What does my anger do for a child who probably will feel like he was abandoned?

Does it make room for that?

Or does it confirm his feeling?

This is hard business, this practice.

This is well, it's sacrificial love, isn't it?

And don't you see?

We do it whether we feel like it or not, because we trust that the doing of it is enough for God, even if we don't see it worked out.

This is what we learned in adulthood.

There were moments in which we did not feel loved by our parents, but as we grew up, we realized they were loving us the best that they could.

Well, I hope we realize that.

As broken as it was, they were loving us as they could, even when they could not keep us.

And that's where the love God asks us to cultivate is extraordinary and so different from ordinary love.

Ordinary love is vengeful and angry when it is hurt.

And this love God asks from us is patient and kind, not self-serving, not rude, forgiving.

And friends, it's not just that God asks us to do this for other people.

God knows if we can cultivate these practices, we are also serving ourselves.

We are ushering in a way of life for ourselves that will lead us to real joy, not just happiness, that will lead us to peacemaking, not just quiet.

Is that you will find one way, even just one time, to practice love.

Maybe with somebody you've already practiced with, maybe in a new relationship.

And do remember, of course, that if we practice the wrong way, we just feel better about doing it worse.

My prayer is one.

One practice.

And listen, friends, we'll be back here next year.

You'll get another shot at this.

You'll get another shot at this.

Practice love.

And the Christ child will find a ready welcome in you and in the one you love.