Plymouth Congregational Church, UCC
The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson
 
Here at Plymouth our Christmas Eve service is always such a beautiful, mystical collage of carols, candle-light and communion swirling around the miraculous story of the birth of Jesus – Yeshua in the Hebrew, meaning “deliverer.” What it mean this Christmas after this horrendously unique year to hear the story and receive the gift of Jesus, Deliverer?

As in years past, we heard the call of the prophet …”the people who walk in darkness have seen a great light!” We heard the story of the miraculous birth …”she brought forth her firstborn child and laid him in a manger”… and at this point I always think to myself … really, isn’t every birth miraculous because every birth is a risk!

We sang joyfully together with the angels and the shepherds the good news of God’s presence among us in the tiny child. Soon we will marvel once at the gifts brought by exotic strangers who followed a star of hope to find this particular babe. Then the gospel writer John will proclaim, ”In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God” – HE – not a concept or a philosophical idea this revelation, the Word of God, but a person. A human person of flesh and blood who is God’s light and life and love, the Holy Incarnate, God-with-us, for all people. And this revealing Word in human flesh is light shining in the darkness “and the darkness cannot overcome it.”

What does the promise of this delivering light of God-with-us mean in the midst of this horrendously unique year?

In December of 1973, the late novelist, spiritual writer and poet, Madeleine L’Engle wrote a Christmas poem reflecting on the past year and the story of the Incarnation. Some of you may remember the news of that year. For others its part of the history book narrations of the Vietnam war, the Cold War, the Space Race, the Watergate scandal and a national energy crisis. Listen with me to L’Engle’s reflections in her poem, “The Risk of Birth, Christmas, 1973.”

This is no time for a child to be born,
With earth betrayed by war & hate
And a comet slashing the sky to warn
That time runs out & the sun burns late
 
That was no time for a child to be born,
In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;
Honour & truth were trampled by scorn–
Yet here did the Saviour [the Deliverer] make his home.
 
When is the time for love to be born?
The inn is full on the planet earth,
And by a comet the sky is torn–
Yet Love still takes the risk of birth. [i]

Here in December 2020, we might say with L’Engle, This is no time for a child to be born! And I don’t need to enumerate why…we have all lived through this horrendously, uniquely hard year. We each hold our private and collective fears and griefs and heartaches.

Yet my friends, I say to you this night….it is always time for The Child to be born…the child sung to by angels and shepherds, the child who was blessed and hailed as born for greatness by elders in the temple; the child who grew to be the boy of twelve astonishing rabbis with his wisdom; the child who grew into the young man who was called away from an obscure peasant life into a path of mystical, revolutionary and revelatory ministry with the Living God that changed his times and has changed the world. The child who became the innocent man beaten and unjustly condemned by the powers of oppressive empire to carry his own execution cross, the dying man praying for the world and the dead man laid secretly in a tomb by his loved ones. The Child who as God-with-us is the Risen One, the Deliverer, proclaiming and embodying Love that conquers Death.

It is always a good time….the best of times….for Love to risk birth in the story of the Child, God-with-us! Every time we dare to tell his stories, to live into the ways of the realm of God that Jesus taught, to follow in hope the star of God’s dream for a peaceful, just, and compassionate world, to act on that dream, we are participating in the Incarnation, the Word made flesh among us.

A friend of mine and a friend of Plymouth’s, the Rev. Dr. Linda Privitera, who led our Lenten art retreat two years ago, recently sent me a wonderful prose poem she wrote this Advent in the voice of the angel, Gabriel. It seems that Gabriel is complaining to God, saying….
 
“I have tried – really, I have - to deliver Your message.
If I may say so I am wondering why once wasn’t enough –
You know we had such an excellent response to your invitation to bear the Holy One,
Blessed be he, into an unlikely geography where holiness is not always a given.
But…this repeating of your desire for incarnation in every generation has resulted, lately,
In some disappointment on my part.”[ii]
 
Gabriel goes on to wonder if he needs an updated wardrobe to get people’s attention, confessing that he has worn those special shoes with the swhoosh on the side to see if that works. Still, he says, it seems that most of the folks God has sent him ask to be God-bearers, are too distracted by their phones and Zoom meetings and Gabriel is mightily confused about what digital platform to use to get their attention. He can’t keep all the passwords straight in his brain. Then, he up and questions this new list of God-bearers that God has given him. He says to the Holy One….
 
“And I am wondering too about your newest lists. They are a little long and are now peopled with women of a certain age – not young – and there are men here too. That’s new … I am [still] looking for Woke. …. I see where you are coming from; does the shape for the home for the holy really have to be as it was in the past? Haven’t we seen an impressive bunch of folks who were amazing shelters for the Holy, bearing it into the world in diverse ways?”[iii]
 
Finally, Gabriel realizes all this God work takes more patience and he cheerfully agrees to try again and again. He ends his complaint saying, “Thanks for hearing me out. I love you, Gabe.”[iv]

My friends, we are the diverse and impressive, amazing shelters for the Holy Gabriel is being sent to find. We are the ones invited to risk birthing Love in the world. This is my image of hope on this Christmas Eve in 2020 when the earth is still betrayed by war & hate & pandemic. I leave it with you…Be delivered this year by the story of Jesus, the Deliverer, God-with-us…so that you may risk birthing, delivering, life-changing Love to the world.

Merry Christmas and Amen.

©The Reverend Jane Anne Ferguson, 2020 and beyond. May be reprinted with permission only.

[i] Madeleine L’Engle, “The Risk of Birth, Christmas, 1973”, The Weather of the Heart, (Harold Shaw Publishers, Wheaton, IL: 1978, 47.)
[ii] The Rev. Dr. Linda Privitera, ”Gabriel’s Complaints”, unpublished poem, all rights reserved.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.

Luke 1.46-55
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado

In last Thursday’s Washington Post, there was a smallish article in the national news section. It was not considered front-page news and didn’t even make it into the New York Times. Yet, I found the headline is shocking: “Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer” and the subhead reads, “Nation’s poverty rate has risen at the fastest pace ever this year after aid for the unemployed declined.” Now, I may be alone in finding this unacceptable…clearly Congress has not yet extended unemployment benefits set to expire after Christmas or sent stimulus checks to people who really need them. In the spirit of Dickens’s “Christmas Carol,” I hope that on this day they are visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Accepting a rapidly growing poverty rate is fundamentally a moral issue.

Something closer to home happened last week. I got an email from a clergy colleague here in Fort Collins, letting me know that the city and county were finally opening an isolation shelter for people experiencing homelessness and who have tested positive for Covid. There had been an outbreak at the temporary shelter on Blue Spruce Drive with 53 homeless folks and 8 staff members testing positive, so getting the isolation shelter in place was critical. Larimer County and the city, however, aren’t covering the cost of food for these people who are living in isolation. Instead, they are counting on a local nonprofit, Homeward Alliance, to raise between $30,000 and $60,000 to cover food costs. I’ve written to every member of city council, as well as to the county board of supervisors. While council members were concerned, the city manager’s office confirmed that Homeward Alliance will cover the food costs. I hope they are visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Our congregation, led by our teens, raised about $20,000 this month for homelessness prevention. We are doing our part, but we cannot do it alone.

If I was a bit jaded, I might be led to believe that many people in our country, especially political types, don’t care that much about the poor. Would I be wrong in that assumption? And yet, we certainly hear some politicians crow loudly about America being a Christian nation and the perceived threat to the free practice of Christian religion in this nation. 

But shouldn’t Christians care about what Jesus said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled"? [Luke 6.20-21] Personally, I don’t consider it very faithful to ignore the poor and the hungry and the conditions that allow poverty to flourish.

It all makes me wonder whether our nominally Christian politicians have ever heard Mary’s song, the Magnificat, which is today’s text. Any Episcopalians among them hear it as part of Evensong, but sometimes its radical message gets disguised by beautiful choral settings. Listening to some of these ethereal canticles, you would never know that Mary’s words are an anti-imperial manifesto. 

Her words are powerful and raw: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” This is a subversive song of the kingdom of God that Mary sings and that her son proclaims. This is about socioeconomic jujitsu, throwing the norms of the world on their head. This is anything but the so-called prosperity gospel…it’s not the rich and the well-fed who are blessed, it’s the poor and hungry. 
I wonder how many Christians this year will hear the nativity stories and wonder why God sent Jesus not to a palace in Rome, but to a Judean peasant household…not to well-educated, well-off parents, but to an unmarried young woman. And if they do wonder about such things, do they go one step further and ponder what it means for them as people of faith? What does it mean for you? What does it mean for us at Plymouth?

We can look at Mary’s song and say, “Yeah…Caesar and Herod were really awful people and oppressed the poor.” And we can do that without ever wondering who the Caesars and Herods are in today’s setting. Imperialism has not died off over the last 2,000 years. If anything, it has flourished, especially among the nominally Christian nations of Europe and the supposedly Christian United States.
This is not a very cheery conversation to have on the final Sunday of Advent, but it is an important part of the Christmas message that we hear Mary’s words of justice and that we don’t domesticate Jesus into baby who is perpetually “meek and mild.” 

We are given a choice about the path we will follow. We can follow the mainstream American path that invites us into a dog-eat-dog world of competition and survival of the fittest, where people are allowed to fall into poverty by the millions, where humans who are ill with Covid are sheltered but not fed by our government. They have made room at the inn…they just haven’t fed the hungry.
You and I are invited down a different path. It is the way of Jesus, the way of Mary, the way of God’s realm, where the poor are blessed and the hungry are fed. As Christians we are called not just to acknowledge such parts of our faith, but to put them into practice and to encourage others to do the same. So, if you are looking for something to do this afternoon, call Senators Bennet and Gardner and Congressman Neguse or Ken Buck, if you’re in his district, and encourage them to restore unemployment benefits set to expire after Christmas and to get an economic relief act passed now. Consider taking action not only as a Christmas gift to people who really need it, but as an act of faith.
Part of what Mary calls us to join her in doing is to magnify the Lord. The Greek word literally means to enlarge or amplify, so what might it mean for you as an ordinary everyday follower of Jesus to amplify his message? How might you turn up the volume a bit this week and act from a sense of costly love? 

I wonder whether any of us sometimes get caught up in a current or in an eddy tainted with the bitterness of Ebenezer Scrooge and if we need a brief visit from a spirit who shows us what the world would be like if we learned to open our hearts to one another and truly act from love and abundance. Maybe that spirit isn’t a ghost imagined by Charles Dickens. Perhaps it is the spirit of Mary, calling to us across the millennia to amplify God’s liberating realm and to rejoice in God’s presence.

It has been a difficult year with the pandemic, the fires in our foothills, and political discord. And for some of us, it’s been even harder as we struggle to make ends meet and keep a roof over our heads or to find someplace warm and safe to sleep at night. And in the years ahead, this congregation will have a role to play in influencing the moral issues that we as a wider community face. 

Our celebration of Christmas will be different in this pandemic year. We may not be surrounded by extended family. We won’t be gathering in this sanctuary together. But we can still unite our hearts and hands and voices and sing Mary’s radical refrain. We can still worship together remotely and safely. We can look forward with hope at getting the pandemic under control. We can know that even if we are in solitude, that we are never alone. Christmas will be different, but my hope for you is that you find new meanings in God’s unique entry onto the scene of human history and that you will become part of the story.

I leave you with the word of a great 20th century theologian, Karl Rahner: “Christmas tells you in your solitude: Trust your surroundings, they are not emptiness; Let go and you will find; Renounce and you will be rich.

May it be so. Amen.

© 2020 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact [email protected] for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.

Luke 1.39-45
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado

Have you ever noticed that there are more than a few occasions in biblical literature when women are not the center of action or remain unnamed? We hear the story of Jephthah’s daughter, an unnamed young woman who got into the cross-hairs of her father’s promise to God that he would slay the first member of his household he saw upon going home. (Spoiler alert: While Isaac was fortunate in Genesis when God provided a ram for Abraham to slaughter, Jephthah’s daughter was not so lucky.) But it isn’t just in the Old Testament that this occurs…do you recall the anonymous woman at the well who asks Jesus for living water? …or the unnamed Syro-Phoenician woman who asks Jesus to heal her daughter? …or the unidentified widow who shows her faith by offering her last two coins at the Temple? The Bible is not alone in downplaying or sometimes ignoring the role of women. It was typical in ancient literature and it reflected social norms.

But today’s text provides a startling contrast. Not only are Mary and Elizabeth named, their pregnancies are described! It doesn’t get much more feminine that. In the lead-up to this story, Luke recounts that Elizabeth conceived in her old age and said, “This is what the Lord has done for me when he looked favorably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people,” that is for not bearing children. (And let’s just get rid of that shame right here and now.) And the baby who leaps in her womb is none other than Jesus’ cousin, John, who will be known as the Baptizer. So, when John gives his mom a good, strong kick in utero, it is a sign that John would be the precursor to Jesus in charting a new spiritual course.

And the backstory with Mary also happens just before today’s passage: “In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a own in Galilee called Nazareth to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph” and when the angel appears, he says, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God…” and you know the rest of that piece of the story.  

Even if you are someone who doesn’t believe it all happened in exactly the way Luke recounts it, please understand that there is a more-than-literal meaning. There is a message in this wonderful piece of Luke’s gospel that goes beyond whose sperm met whose ovum to result in the birth of Jesus. 
We know that Mary was faithful…she responds to Gabriel saying, “Here am I [which is how prophets respond when God calls], the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Here’s another contrast in ancient literature: The Roman historian Livy describes a foundational story of early Rome in an episode of abduction of Etruscan women that we know as “The Rape of the Sabine Women.” Unlike Livy’s tale, Luke’s story is not about violence or force or coercion: it’s about faith in the very core of a woman that engenders a response.

Mary is venerated in the Christian Orthodox traditions as the “Theotokos,” or the one who brings forth God. And even if Protestants basically threw out the mother — instead of the baby — with the bathwater during the Reformation, there is much to hold dear of this faithful young woman. Our first hymn this morning speaks of her as woman of the promise, song of holy wisdom, model of compassion, and morning star of justice. You’ll hear a lot more about that next week as we explore the Magnificat. 

As I was thinking about Mary as the Theotokos, it occurred to me that she is not alone. And it reminded me of a story about my sons, Cameron and Christopher. When Cam was five, he was absolutely thrilled to have a new younger brother arrive on the scene. He was (and is) an amazing big brother. But being the curious and word-loving boy he was (and is), Cam asked me, “What does Christopher mean?” And I told him that in Greek it means “Christ bearer,” and he thought that was pretty cool. And then he asked, “Well, what does Cameron mean?” And I told him the truth, that in Gaelic it means “crooked nose,” at which point, he burst into tears of both anger and sadness, and said, “You named him Christ-bearer and you named me Crooked Nose!” At which point I tried to reassure him by saying, “Yes, but you have a Clan!” And when the three of us visited the battlefield at Culloden in Scotland on my first sabbatical, we were very emphatic about visiting the Clan Cameron memorial.

The point is not so much about what we name our children is that you can be male or female to be one who bears Christ in the world today. None of us is likely to become pregnant by miraculous means, but that isn’t what I’m talking about. Rather, here are three ways to think about being a Christ-bearer.

Theresa of Avila wrote that “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.” So, what is God calling you to do with your hands, your eyes, your feet in the world today? What blessing can you bring to others in the midst of pandemic and political strife?

Here is a second way to think about being a Christ-bearer. One of the well-loved hymns this congregation is “Won’t you let me be your servant?” and it offers these words: “I will hold the Christ-light for you in the shadow of your fear; I will hold my hand out to you, speak the peace you long to hear.” There is some light in each person listening to this service today, whether you consider yourself to hold a tiny flicker of an LED candle or a great beacon atop a lighthouse. Each of us has the light of love, the light of Christ, that we can shine into the shadowy corners we encounter. And it isn’t just our light, but the Christ-light, which we can reflect like a mirror, casting a beam into places that need more light. Where can you shine the Christ-light this week?

A third way to be a Christ-bearer comes from Sister Ilia Delio in Richard Rohr’s daily meditation. She writes, “Those who follow Jesus are to become whole-makers, uniting what is scattered, creating a deeper unity in love. Christian life is a commitment to love, to give birth to God in one’s own life and to become midwives of divinity in this evolving cosmos. We are to be whole-makers of love in a world of change.”  You can help make this world whole by working with a bite-sized piece of it. Maybe that means sleeping out in the cold to raise money for homeless prevention. Maybe that means supporting a kindergarten in Ethiopia. Maybe it means shoveling your elderly neighbor’s walk and bringing them a loaf of cinnamon bread. What whole-making can you help bring about before Christmas?

Mary provides such a dramatic example of what a Christ-bearing life looks like, from her encounter with Gabriel and hearing his miraculous news to holding the lifeless, crucified body of her son. It may seem to you that her example is one that is impossible to follow.

Last week, Richard Rohr wrote, “Our task too is to give birth to Christ. Mary is the paradigm for doing that. From her we get the pattern: Let the word of God take root and make you pregnant; gestate that by giving it the nourishing sustenance of your own life; submit to the pain that is demanded for it to be born to the outside; then spend years coaxing it from infancy to adulthood; and finally, during and after all of this, do some pondering, accept the pain of not understanding and of letting go.” 

Our future is pregnant with possibility…if we let God’s presence take root in our lives, not only will we be Christ-bearers for others, we ourselves will experience deep joy. May it be so in your life and in mine. Amen.

© 2020 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal at plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.