Sermon

December 13, 2009

A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen’s on December 13, 2009, by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

Christianity’s understanding of the holy is incarnational. The central notion of our faith is that God is not inaccessible or off in the blue beyond human life. Instead our belief is that God is to be found intimately involved in the messiness of real life. One mark of that belief is the present season when we celebrate God entering the world through an unwed teenage girl and the birth of her child in Bethlehem. Poets and hymn writers often give in to the temptation to clean up the scene: the birth happens “silently” and the child doesn’t even cry. We believe them to the peril of our souls. Real human birth is messy and difficult—and pretty dangerous. I recently read a first-person story of giving birth that sounds pretty typical to me. The writer said that the breathing exercises they taught her in birthing class helped make labor easier—but only to a point. They stopped helping when she reached “that thing called transition (the most intense phase of labor when even the strongest women momentarily lose faith in their ability to bring new life into the world.)” At that point, after six hours of labor, she recalled, “I grabbed my husband by the collar of his shirt and exclaimed, ‘I can’t do this anymore!’ Then I grabbed the midwife. ‘It’s too hard. I can’t do it.’”

I can’t claim to have any idea what it is like to give birth, but this mother’s account is more believable to me than “how silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given!” Furthermore it sounds to me a lot like other human endeavors where great effort is required. Surely marathoners hit a similar place at which continuing to run seems impossible. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had plenty of things to do that I wanted to walk away from. My first week as a parish priest almost thirty years ago was one: I had a sermon to write, a bulletin to produce and someone dying in the hospital and nothing I did seemed to work. If I’d had a midwife to grab, I’d have said, “It’s too hard. I can’t do it.”

The Gospel appointed for this Sunday seems designed to tell us how hard it is to lead a good life. John the Baptist pulls no punches when he speaks. He doesn’t ask us nicely to change our lives; he demands it. He calls us snakes and weeds worthy to be thrown on the fire. When people ask what kind of changes they should make in their behavior, John calls for radical reform. Everybody is to share: if you’ve got something to eat, invite street people in to share it. Tax collectors, who made extra cash by assessing more taxes than they sent into the government, and soldiers who provided for their old age by extortion were told to live on the minimum wage they made. This is tough stuff. It is the equivalent of suggesting that we give up our favorite addictions, or something outrageous like actually giving a big chunk of our income to the church. It is like asking us to find a way to stop losing our tempers or to spend time with our kids. I can imagine people’s response to John being something like that mother’s cry as she prepares to give birth, “It’s too hard. I can’t do it.”

The mother’s childbirth story doesn’t end with her refusal, however, and neither does John’s message to us. And we could do worse in those moments when life is too hard for us than to pay attention to what comes next. That mother who told about the birth of her first child remembers that as she gripped the midwife in panic, the midwife looked at her with a clear and steady gaze and said, “Liz, you are doing it. Right now. This is what you were created to do—and you are doing it. Keep breathing. Keep pushing!” And of course, that’s what she did… and the rest is family history.

Plenty of marathoners stop running. Plenty of us walk away from jobs. Plenty of us find excuses to stay at work instead of coming home to work on homework with a troubled kid. Plenty of us give up on “one day at a time” and decide “just for now to have one little drink.” Plenty of us decide that we really do need that vacation more than the church needs our pledge. Giving up is easy. It just doesn’t bring new life into the world.

John’s final message is worth paying attention to when we think it is too hard to keep going. He said, “You won’t have to do this alone. One is coming who is more powerful than I am. I can dunk you in water as a token symbol of a changed life. The one who is coming can actually change your hearts and minds and fill you with the spirit of God.” I don’t think it is much of a stretch to hear John the Baptist saying to people as they came up out of the mud of the Jordan when he baptized them: “See, you are doing it. Right now. You have made a start. Keep breathing. Keep pushing. Keep trying. And even when you slip, keep coming back.”

That, I think, is the messiness of the incarnation: the holy is bound up in the mud and pain of human life. From time to time, we all need the voice of the midwife. And here it is, on this Third Sunday in Advent. You have heard me preach this same message in one form or another for 17 years. I like to think that the words and stories I have shared with you have made a difference in your daily lives and over the long haul. But I don’t expect any of us to be perfect, not now, not ever. We are still far from the generous, loving, compassionate people we need to become. Sometimes we would like to give up. But we are doing it. We’re here. It wasn’t easy to get up this morning and there are other places we could have been. But we’re here. We’ve made a start. We’re doing it. And by the grace of God, we’ll grow into more loving people yet, perhaps in spite of ourselves. Martin Luther King Junior once quoted a preacher who was born into slavery who offered what I think is the message of the day: “Lord, we ain’t what we wanna be; we ain’t what we oughtta be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain’t what we was.” Keep breathing. Keep pushing. Keep trying.

AMEN