“Not on Christmas!” she pleads.

Posted by Priest on December 24, 2009 under Sermons |

Do you remember Dawn’s Christmas?

Oh come on! This is the West End. Of course you remember! We are all old enough, even though some of us just celebrated our 20th birthday – for the 20th time – but enough about me!

Dawn’s Christmas is recorded by John Waters in his infamous movie Female Troubles, a movie I am not sure I can recommend. Anyhow, let me fill you in: Dawn, played by the glamorous Divine, is a derelict youngster, who, shall we say, causes a lot of trouble. She constantly gets into fights and her parents just do not know what to do anymore. It all escalades one Christmas. Dawn’s mother tries to make it all perfect and implores her husband not to get into another fight.

“Not on Christmas!” she pleads with him. “Not on Christmas.”

Of course, it doesn’t work. When Dawn doesn’t get the desired cha-cha heels, she throws a fit! In the ensuing commotion, mom ends up in the Christmas tree, which then falls over, burying mom. From underneath the tree, she whimpers: “Not on Christmas! Not on Christmas!”

I know many of us share Dawn’s mother’s sentiment. “Not on Christmas!” Please don’t fight. Please get along. Please do things right. Don’t screw up. Let’s just stick to the plan! We try so hard to make it perfect, only to see it all go so perfectly wrong. We organise, scheme, and feel so in control, and cannot see how much we aren’t. And trust me, I can relate…

A few weeks ago, I visited the Kingdom of Lesotho in Southern Africa. Lesotho is a beautiful, but barren land. The people are wonderful, but they are also incredibly poor. Sadly, the poverty breeds violence and makes proper education and adequate medical care only available for a very few, with catastrophic consequences: Some estimate that 20-30% of the population of Lesotho are HIV+, which in Lesotho is a death sentence.

I arrived in Lesotho to pursue personal interests, but also to discern professional goals: Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, is home to an Anglican religious order for men that ministers among the rural population with HIV-testing and sex-education, and by distributing free condoms. I came to see if this religious order could be a partner for St. Paul’s as we start to incorporate the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals into own our vision. And what a perfect fit this would be for St. Paul’s, which for decades has been home to many living with, and, unfortunately, also dying from AIDS.

My trip to Lesotho started out according to plan. In hindsight, I realise, though, that I arrived in Lesotho with more than a few preconceptions. I had it all worked out perfectly in advance. And I wanted to do it the right way. I want to make it perfect – not unlike our oh-so-well conceived plans for Christmas.

And then it happened. On my last day in Lesotho.

It was just a few hours before I left, when there was a knock on the door of the priory. One of the brothers opened and invited in the young European who stood outside. I had seen the man before…

He had knocked on the door looking for his luggage that he had dropped off at the priory a few weeks before. While the brother, who had opened the door, fetched the luggage, I struck up a conversation with the man, who had come from Ireland to work at a local AIDS-orphanage. I was very impressed by his commitment. And he did not even seem religious! In fact, throughout the conversation he was very matter-of-fact, very worldly.

And then I asked the question that seemed oh-so-obvious to me: “So, how long are you going to stay here?” He smiled and said: “I hope for ever. We moved here.”

I was flabbergasted. Believe it or not, I actually was speechless. His answer totally threw me off guard. While there has always been a part of me that expects these kinds of radical steps from religious professionals, I had not anticipated it coming from somebody who seemed so “secular.” I could not understand why anybody would give up life in comfortable Europe for ever. For him, though, it was the most natural thing to do. My planning and scheming, though, had all been blown apart. I realised how much I had tried to control my experience in Lesotho, how I had forced things – only to realize that I had been an arrogant Western idiot, riding into Lesotho on my high horse, assuming that I knew exactly what to do and how to deal with the “situation.” But my planning and scheming had prevented me from connecting with people and embracing them as sisters and brothers. My planning and scheming had blinded me to the image of God in the people around me. I had not been open to really encounter them.

I believe the Irishman’s answer was an early Christmas present.

It was an early Christmas present, because it took me by surprise. It was out of the ordinary. And it remains a mystery.

Yes, we are a people who plan and scheme. And there is a lot of good in having schedules and organisation. Furthermore, I really do not believe we should all just pack up and move to Africa. That is only viable for a select few.

But I do believe that far too often, in our planning and scheming, we nail things down that cannot and should not be nailed down. Far too often in our planning and scheming, we no longer expect surprises and miss extraordinary encounters.

Too often we, the church, for example, create all kinds of norms and sets of laws, trying to regulate exactly the matter of our faith. Libraries have been filled with books that describe and define to a “t” what we celebrate today. Yet, can we really explain and understand what happened in Bethlehem some 2000 years ago? The virgin birth really isn’t like a mathematical equation! It is a mystery. And the church should stop obsessing about the dogmatic purity or doctrinal correctness of fellow travellers on the journey, and the church should stop condemning and alienating those who question, wonder, and doubt. Rather, particularly today, we should celebrate with gusto that God, who can never be fully explained, through the open arms of the baby born of our sister Mary, reaches out to us, seeking to embrace us, yearning to bring God’s endless love and light into our darkness, whatever the darkness might be. The events we celebrate today affirm that we are all, without exception, beloved of God and that God can and will surprise us, because God’s compassion knows no boundaries and wishes each and every one of us to be whole in body, mind, and soul.

God’s compassion for each one of us and God’s willingness to give it all for us, is often hard to accept – even for religious professionals whose struggle with this radical message of God’s abundant, surprising and mysterious love isn’t a new one. Remember the religious elite at the time of Jesus’ birth? They thought they had it all figured out. The Messiah would be born in Bethlehem: They got that right! But they also believed that there would be pomp and circumstances, fanfares galore. In their mind, God had to come among the powerful, live with the mighty, and affirm those on the in. The religious experts did not expect the Saviour of the world to be born of an unwed woman, among ox and donkey. They did not anticipate for the King of kings, for God-incarnate to come among us in such a lowly way. None of them in their wildest dreams thought that God would surprise them. In fact, they tried to control God instead.

But God cannot be controlled, not by the powerful, nor by those in the know, nor by those who seek to run the show. God chose a young woman on the margins, because often, this is where God can be found.

In the end, this surprise reveals something fundamental about God. God is not about scheming and planning, not about existing power-structures, not about rules and regulations. God is about relationships: our relationship with God, our relationship with our beautiful selves, and our relationship with those around us, whoever they are and wherever we find them. And sometimes, as seen in Lesotho, I need to be reminded of this too…!

As we continue to celebrate this surprising mystery that cannot be boxed in and that often dwells on the sidelines of our world, I would like to leave you words from a poem by Sister Sue, an Anglican nun from Toronto with the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine and I quote:

He was born in a stable
behind the inn,
homeless,
Prince of Peace, Wonderful Counsellor
God with Us.

Like the men who sleep huddled
on subway grates,
the women living in cardboard huts,
the children shivering in
gasless cars
He was born,
Prince of Peace, Emmanuel,
homeless.

Feed the hungry, clothe the naked,
He said to us.
Heal the sick, visit the prisoners
said the
Wonderful Counsellor, Son of Man,
God with Us;
house the homeless, He says to us.

House the homeless, free the slaves,
feed the children,
comfort the dying;
and somewhere
deep within
find a home in our hearts
for
Him.

[The Reverend Markus Duenzkofer delivered this sermon on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2009.]