A Sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas II

 

O LORD of hosts, happy are they who put their trust in you!

 

In the past week, I’ve found myself trying to get lots of things in order.  I worked with Amy, Cynthia and Waring to tie up some year-end parish financial issues.  I’ve cleared off my desk many – though not all – of the odds and ends that have been patiently waiting for me to find the time to attend to them; I’ve begun to make lists of important tasks to be tackled in the New Year.  At home, Judith and I have been putting our home back in order after the chaos that is an inevitable part of Christmas with an energetic child and out of town guests.  

 

I imagine many of you have been similarly engaged with year-end/new year order-making:  tying up loose ends from the old year, making plans and resolutions for the new; trying to corral the disorder that seems at times to overwhelm us.  Especially at times of endings and beginnings the desire to make order that is deeply embedded in the human psyche comes to the fore.  As things around us change, we seek order to hold us steady.  

 

Our Judeo-Christian heritage confirms this experience in many ways. The Creation account in the first chapter of Genesis is the story of God ordering the disordered chaos of the abyss over which the Spirit brooded -- day by ordered day, light and darkness, sky and water, sun, moon and stars, plants, animals and finally we humans are given their place in the cosmic structure.  

 

In today’s reading from Jeremiah, we find God calling the people of Israel home from exile in Babylon, restoring to their lives the order that had been destroyed when they been taken into captivity.

 

Psalm 84 celebrates the joy pilgrims to Jerusalem find in the worshipful order of God’s Temple.  The Psalmist speaks of the happiness that those who trust in the Lord find --  a phrase that speaks volumes about what we seek in coming to God to find order in our lives.  God, we hope, will give us that stability and safety we crave in the face of the destructiveness that chaos so often wreaks.  

 

As another Psalm so wonderfully puts it:

 

God is our refuge and strength;

A very present help in trouble;

Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved;

And though the mountains be toppled into the depths of the sea.  [1]

As the world changes around us, we look to God to guarantee the order that will make us feel safe.

 

And then Jesus shows up.  Jesus shows up – and creates disorder in the lives of those around him.  Mary and Joseph have a kink put in their wedding preparations and are sent on an unplanned journey.  Wise men from the East leave their homes and travel a great distance to see this new born King.  Herod, the chief priests and all Jerusalem are frightened by the news that the Messiah has been born --  so frightened that Herod sends soldiers to kill all the newborns in the Bethlehem area.  Warned by an angel, Jesus, Mary and Joseph have fled to Egypt.

 

The disorder Jesus causes in his birth won’t stop when he grows up.  He will preach about the coming of God’s Kingdom –nothing less than the disruption of everything everyone has always taken for granted:  As Mary sang in the Magnificat, Jesus will speak of a God who casts down the mighty from their thrones, and lifts up the lowly; who fills hungry with good things, and sends the rich away empty.  He will heal on the Sabbath; eat with tax-collectors and challenge the powers that be.  Like many of the prophets before him, Jesus will prove such a threat to the good order of the community that its leaders will decide he must die.  And once dead, he won’t have the decency to stay in the grave.  He will rise and will send his followers out to spread the same disordering good news that he himself had preached – so much so that in one Greek city St. Paul and his companions are dragged before the authorities and accused of being those people who have been turning the world upside down.  [2]

 

Jesus’ life from birth to death and beyond makes clear that God is as much in the disorder  business as the ordering business; that God often comes not as the One who provides stability, but the One who disrupts the status quo; the One who brings change, the One who does something new.

 

This truth about God that Jesus reveals has always been a problem for the Church.  Like most human beings and most human institutions, we usually prefer order to disorder; stability to change, and we want our God to give us the security we desire.  In the midst of a rapidly changing world, the God of order, the God who is the same yesterday, today and forever to whom we can go for refuge from the chaos around us is the God we usually want.  The God of disorder, the God who turns the world upside down and who is doing something new is usually less welcome.  

 

This is one reason why some of the most common words in the Church are:  “But we’ve never done it that way before.”  And it is why, when something changes in the church – whether it is the placement of the altar, a new prayer book or hymnal, the opening of ordination to those who had previously been excluded – many find it very unsettling.  We want the Church to be a bastion of stability in a changing world; a place where we can find refuge with the unchanging God of order who will keep us safe – and one strand of the biblical tradition affirms the desire we have.

 

The problem is, our founder revealed the other way God comes into the world – as an agent of disruptive change.  Even as a baby, Jesus disrupted the world around him, a sign that in him, the God of disorder was coming to do a new thing.  And if we are to be faithful followers of the one whose disruptive birth we are in the midst of celebrating, we will need to ready to change; to have our world, maybe our church, turned upside down in ways we don’t expect and may not find comfortable.

 

What that may mean for us at St. Francis in the coming year, I don’t know – except that we all need to be ready for whatever newness God will call us to.  Truth is, as Judith will gladly tell you, by temperament I am not a big fan of change.  In reminding you that in Jesus, God comes as the One who does something new, I’m also reminding myself to be open to the change God so often brings.

 

Order is a blessing, and the refuge that God gives amidst life’s challenges is a grace.  But there is blessing, too, in the newness God brings; in the change God calls us to.  In the coming year, may God bless us with refuge and stability when we need them; and may God give us the courage to welcome Jesus when he comes to turn our worlds upside down.