Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

One of the important ways of separating the wheat from the chaff this time of year is to quiz one’s friends and relations on what is the best Christmas movie. Some will choose a classic like It’s a Wonderful Life or The Bishop’s Wife. Some in my generation will provide a defense of Home Alone or the best adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol–namely, the one starring the Muppets. Some will breathlessly argue that Die Hard is, indeed, a Christmas movie, and some poor souls will stake their reputations on one of the literally hundreds of Hallmark original Christmas movies.

Well, friends, I am here to tell you that there is an objectively true answer in this seemingly purely subjective question. 1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas is the greatest of all time. Don’t “@ me.” It has become harder to watch this in recent years; sic transit gloria mundi. It aired for one night this year on public television, but otherwise one needs an Apple+ subscription. I have a “hack” though! I own this relic of a bygone Christmas on something called VHS. For the youngsters here, this is a plastic cassette with a magnetic tape inside, which one places into something called a videocassette recorder (or VCR), which we also own. Thus we can watch it without having cable television or installing an unsightly antenna on the roof of the rectory or giving Apple any money!

Anyway, I hope you’ve all seen it at some point, so I won’t give you a plot rundown. The salient point is that Charlie Brown bemoans the conspicuous consumption which defined mid-century Christmas celebrations (and which still does in the Year of Our Lord 2021) and starts to wonder what Christmas is even all about. Finally, Charlie’s best friend, Linus (the one who always sucked his thumb and carried around his security blanket) stands up and recites the Christmas story from Luke that we just heard. If you’re paying close attention you’ll notice he actually tosses his security blanket down when the angel tells the shepherds “be not afraid.” And he concludes by saying, “that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

What a lot of people don’t realize is that the executives at CBS, which initially aired the special, pressured it writer, Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, to omit the scene. It was deemed “too religious.” These days some folks look back to post-war America as a golden age for mainstream Christianity; sorry if this bursts anybody’s bubble, but while church membership and attendance were indeed at all time highs during the fifties and sixties, this doesn’t mean that the culture had been succesfully Christianized or catechized or transformed into the Kingdom of God, and being too outwardly religious might have been even more outré in some spheres than it is today. So the execs wanted him to take the bible out of it. Schulz basically said “it’s in or it’s not happening,” and good on him! It’s not only the climax of the special, it is, as Linus said, what Christmas is all about.

I’ve been a priest for over twelve years now. Early on it my vocation I would fret about what to preach on Christmas Eve and Easter Day. What can I possibly say that will be new and interesting? How can I say something that will intrigue the visitor or the semi-annual communicant so that they leave inspired or impressed or whatever. I think I’ve finally come to the point where I realize that this is precisely the wrong way to think about it (and not a little self-important to boot). There’s nothing I could say which could possibly make this story any more compelling, because it is already the most compelling story ever told.

Here is the Creator of the universe, who has come to us as a little baby. Here is the one whom we spurned, to whom we must be reconciled if there is any hope for us, and instead of permitting himself his rightful vengeance, he has come to save us all as one of us. Here is he who governs all of history through his Almighty Providence, and he has come to be subjected to all the changes and chances of a world which seems so often not to make much sense.

The story speaks for itself, and the preacher might be better served taking the Linus approach. That’s what Christmas is all about. Right there. “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of Grace and truth.”

I wish you all a happy Christmas. I hope your celebrations are are as fulsome and joyous as they can possibly be during this peculiar pandemic-time. Most of all, I pray that you and I might once again invite the Christ Child into our hearts: to be born there just as he was born in Bethlehem, to take up residence in our sin-sick souls just as he took up residence in our broken world, to bring us at last to his heavenly home where we might dwell with him eternally.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

I want to start with two questions in the field of epistemology, in fact, with the two chief questions of epistemology:

How do we know what we know?, and

What is truth?

I think one of the most problematic aspects of Christianity as far as the secular culture is concerned is the religious understanding of knowledge and Truth. [If you had my manuscript in hand, you’d see that that was “Truth” with a capital “T”; another strange habit some religious people have is capitalizing things that don’t need capitalization… even pronouns for god’s sake.] You may have heard me lament before about how narrow our definition of truth has become over the last five centuries or so. Modernity (the context in which most of us find ourselves unless we hang out with very hip, post-modern types) more or less holds that the only true propositions are facts, which are either empirically verifiable or logically deductible. So, “John has ten fingers” or “five and five make ten” are truths. If you’re a fan of Kant, those are synthetic aposteriori and analitic apriori propositions. If you’re not a fan of Kant, that’s observation and logic (or science and math).

What are theological truths, though? Well, the most modern of Christians (though we don’t think of them as being modern at all), the fundamentalists, will claim that theological truths are just science and math. Observe the facts, study them, and they will prove that Jesus was born of a virgin and that he rose from the dead. Take the states of water for an analogy and it will prove the Trinity. Consider how cause and effect are linked (and don’t think about quantum mechanics) and it will prove the existence of an ultimate cause, namely God. The problem is that this just doesn’t work. We might convince ourselves that these are compelling arguments, but that’s because we’re already inclined to believe the theological truth supposedly being proved.

So, we’re left with a problem. Can we know anything about God? Obviously, the answer I want to give is “yes” because I am in the business of making God known. I think I can pretty confidently claim that we can know theological truths, but Truth (again with that capital “T”) ends up being a lot more complex than facts. Such knowledge begins neither with observation nor with reason but with conviction. And when we come upon Truth, it can sometimes seem internally inconsistent, which is to say that the claims of religion seem (at least to our pea-brains) as being in contradiction with each other.

All of this, believe it or not, has something to do with the Prophet Micah:

But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. Therefore will he give them up, until the time that she which travaileth hath brought forth: then the remnant of his brethren shall return unto the children of Israel. And he shall stand and feed in the strength of the Lord in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God; and they shall abide: for now shall he be great unto the ends of the earth.

Are you ready for this? Micah wasn’t talking about Jesus. But, Micah was talking about Jesus. I’m not using figures of speech here, nor am I vacillating. Nor am I saying that the prophet was unintentionally writing about Jesus when he just thought he was doing something else. Micah was both foretelling the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem, and he was doing nothing of the sort. Both true. Not “truthy”. True.

Confused yet? Let’s try to dig ourselves out. Micah was prophesying during the second half of the Eighth Century BC, around the same time as Isaiah and Amos and Hosea. Tiglath-Pileser III had been king of Assyria for eighteen years and had conquered and made himself king of Babylon two years before his death. In 729 BC, upon the king’s death, the people of Israel believed the time was ripe for a rebellion against Assyria, of which it had become a vassal state. The rebellion was ruthlessly suppressed by the new king, Shalmanesar V, who laid waste to Samaria, the capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and sent the ten tribes of that kingdom into exile.

What Micah was prophesying in this morning’s reading was a successful uprising from the remaining two tribes in the Southern Kingdom of Judah who would defeat the Assyrians, bring the lost tribes home, and reëstablish an independent, reunited state under a Davidic king. This never happened. The Southern Kingdom was eventually defeated by the Neo-Babylonian Empire (themselves having just regained independence from Assyria), and they were sent into exile, too, staying there until King Cyrus of Persia defeated the Babylonians and let the Jews go back home and rebuild their temple. By the way, they still weren’t permitted to have their own king, and even when they finally did reëstablish the monarchy, after the Maccabean Revolt, they never got anybody from David’s line onto the throne.

So, Micah was making a prediction which ended up not happening. That’s the truth.

But there’s a funny thing about Scripture, which the Church Fathers told us, and which was lost in the epistemological project of Modernity. There are many correct ways to read Scripture. Here we need to be careful. I am not saying that there are as many ways to read scripture as there are readers and that scripture can be whatever we want it to be. It’s a book about the perfect love of God which has been used to justify slavery and misogyny and violence against racial, religious, and sexual minorities. It is a book about justice which has been used to keep the poor in their place. There are some ways of reading scripture which are just plain wrong.

There is, however, a wealth of meaning in Scripture. Historical criticism, the hermeneutical circle, the finer points of figuring out which are the best ancient manuscripts, and everything else that modern scholarship has given us are important, but we also believe that the Holy Spirit had something to do with this book we call “holy.” This means that whatever the author’s intent or the historic context in which some piece of biblical literature should be placed, there is still room for spiritual truths and moral truths and theological truths which have nothing in the world to do with things like intent and context. Micah was preaching a hopeful if mistaken message about the future of the Jewish state. For us, we see the promise of a savior. Isaiah (or really the later additions to Isaiah) talk about a Persian King named Cyrus who let the Jews go back home. We see Jesus in the story. The Song of Solomon is nothing more than mildly cheeky love poetry. We see in it the most beautiful account of the love Christ has for his Church.

What is Truth? It’s a lot less simple than the modern person might think. It’s also a great deal more beautiful and comforting and exciting.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

I have an icon of St. John the Baptist which I keep in a spot in my office where I can always see it from my desk (though today I’ve set it on the stand in the back of the church, in case you’re interested in looking at it). It was an ordination gift from a dear friend who is a parishioner at the church in Brooklyn where I did my internship during seminary. It is in almost every way different from the painting on the cover of our bulletin this week by Mattia Preti, Il Cavalier Calabrese (the Calabrian Knight, which I think is a pretty cool nickname).

The icon shows a decidedly hirsute, disheveled Baptist, while the painting strikes one as depicting what must have been the 17^th Century equivalent of the contemporary men’s fashion trend of having intentionally slightly messy hair (sometimes very ill-advisedly- see, Johnny Depp or Boris Johnson). The icon shows John alone, while the painting shows the horrified crowd at the bottom and a cherub in the upper-right corner. (You can’t have a renaissance painting of a biblical figure without a superfluous angel or two, after all.) The icon sticks to the biblical description, dressing John in a simple camel’s-hair garment, while the painting drapes a red cloth or cape over him, which Preti often put on his subjects as an allusion to the red tabard of the Knights of Malta, of which the artist was a member, hence his cool nickname.

One thing which the two pieces have in common, though–and which most depictions of John the Baptist do–is that he is pointing away from himself. Capable artists have made a point (pun very much intended) over the centuries of drawing the viewer’s eye away from the Baptist and to the hand and the usually empty space to which it gestures. I think both the Greek icon and Preti’s painting succeed in this, and you might have noticed the same thing in Da Vinci’s famous painting or in Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece.

Anyway, the reason I keep that icon where I can see it is not because I like it, though I do. It’s because when I’m meeting with parishioners or writing sermons or making decisions that affect the life of the parish or whatever else I do in that office, I need the reminder that I need to point away from myself toward Jesus in all those tasks and interactions. I need John the Baptist to remind me that it’s not about me, just as he knew it wasn’t about him. It’s all about Jesus.

There’s an old often misquoted saying that the preacher’s job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The quote was actually about what newspapers ought to be doing, not clergypeople. One of our prayers in the section of additional prayers and thanksgiving towards the back of the prayerbook gets close to the sentiment–“strenghten the faithful, arouse the careless, restore the penitent”–though it is unmistakably God who is being asked to do those things, not some little vicar with a “John the Baptist” complex. Even so, we are all of us called to point away from ourselves, toward Jesus, and sometimes this will mean either speaking or living into hard truths which may not be popular.

I doubt many of us will be in a situation where we must call a crowd a “generation of vipers” or lecture tax collectors and soldiers about how to do their jobs or get thrown in prison for disturbing the peace, as indeed John does right after this morning’s gospel lesson closed. Nevertheless, pointing to Jesus and to what he stands for rather than exalting ourselves (or even just going along to get along) can be an uncomfortable proposition. Maybe it’s forgoing that brand new luxury item, the flat screen television or whatever, because the old one works fine, and giving the money one would have spent on that to the poor, knowing that those in poverty are in a very real spiritual sense, Christ to us. Maybe it’s as simple as checking our tongues, interrogating our motives before we speak, and asking “is what I’m about to say meant to impress people or is it meant to speak a word of grace and truth and love?” Maybe it’s pushing back when Uncle Jimmy makes a racist joke at Christmas dinner after he’s had one too many seven-and-sevens, remembering again that Christ is known to us in the abused and marginalized.

Today, despite the rather tough words from the Baptist in our Gospel, we are invited to take a small break from the penitence of the season and remember there is still joy in the midst of our lives of longing and expectation for Christ to come to us again. (That’s the point of the rose-colored vestments on the Third Sunday of Advent; it literally lightens things up a bit.) I truly believe that when we succeed in following John’s example, pointing away from ourselves toward Jesus, we find our best shot at achieving that joy in this life. When we practice that approach, often failing but sometimes succeeding despite ourselves, we find the words of Saint Paul to the Philippians has become a palpable reality in our lives, that “the peace of God which passeth all understanding [is] keeping [our] hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.