The link for the Zoom gatherings is available in our weekly E-news, in our Facebook group St. Dunstan’s MadCity, or by emailing Rev. Miranda: .
THREE WAYS TO USE AN ONLINE BULLETIN…1
1. Print it out!
2. Open the bulletin on one device (smartphone or tablet) while joining Zoom worship on another device (tablet or computer).
3. On a computer, open the bulletin in a separate browser window or download and open separately, and view it next to your Zoom window
The link for the Zoom gatherings is available in our weekly E-news, in our Facebook group St. Dunstan’s MadCity, or by emailing Rev. Miranda: .
THREE WAYS TO USE AN ONLINE BULLETIN…1
1. Print it out!
2. Open the bulletin on one device (smartphone or tablet) while joining Zoom worship on another device (tablet or computer).
3. On a computer, open the bulletin in a separate browser window or download and open separately, and view it next to your Zoom window
When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day.
In our calendar of Sunday scripture readings, we’re in the year of Matthew’s Gospel. But this is one of the Sundays when we get a little chunk of John’s Gospel for some reason.
Next week we’ll hear Matthew’s version of the calling of Jesus’ first disciples. That might be more familiar: Jesus walks along the shore of the sea of Galilee and calls these young men away from their nets and their boats.
John’s version of the calling of the first disciples isn’t really a calling at all. It’s more of a sending.
Andrew is a disciple of John the Baptist. He’s already left home and work and family to follow a rabbi, a teacher.
But then his rabbi, John the Baptist, tells him that Jesus is the real deal. The Lamb of God.
So Andrew and another guy go follow Jesus.
And Jesus, naturally enough, sees them following him and asks, What’s up?
Actually, he asks: What are you looking for?
This question makes a lot of sense when we realize Jesus surely knew that these men – who may have been quite young, teenagers even – have literally just walked away from John the Baptist to start following him.
This rabbi-hopping suggests that they were seekers, looking for someone to offer them meaning, purpose, hope, a way to spend their days.
So he asks: What are you looking for?
And they don’t know how to answer.
I love that; it’s so real. I wouldn’t have an answer ready either.
I’ve had those moments, when somebody asks an unexpectedly profound or intense question, and I just stare at them and say, “Um. Huh.”
And then maybe I say something like, “So where are you staying while you’re in town?”
Which is what Andrew and the other guy do.
And Jesus says, Come and see.
So they go with him to where he is staying. Some cheap first-century AirBnB or hotel room in a nearby village, probably.
It’s clear that the where isn’t really that important.
The who is what’s important.
The text notes that it was about four o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe that means it was coming up on dinnertime by the time they arrived, so they decided to stick around.
Some commentators think we’re meant to assume it was a Friday, so sunset and the Sabbath were approaching, and that these disciples ended up spending the Sabbath with Jesus – Friday evening and all day Saturday.
I wonder what happened, during those hours. Was Jesus preaching or teaching? Were they just sitting together over some simple food and a little wine and talking, talking, talking about the world?
Were they doing ordinary everyday things? Was Jesus, whom Mark describes as a carpenter, doing little woodwork to earn his keep? Maybe building a bench, or a storage box, or a cradle?
Who knows? Just being around him, being near him, listening to him, awakened something in Andrew.
Curiosity. Hope. Love. Loyalty.
We meet someone like that, now and then, in life… Someone who earns our esteem or our devotion very quickly, for reasons it’s hard to put a finger on.
And sometimes it turns out that our first instincts were wrong. Sometimes charisma misleads us; sometimes people who are compelling, who draw others to them, turn out not to have much substance, or worse, to be selfish, exploitative, abusive.
But other times, when you keep abiding with that person, you find that they are what they seem to be, and more. Not perfect, but true. Not perhaps always nice, but good.
A person who looks at you and you can see in their eyes that they really do love you just the way you are, but also, they’re not going to leave you that way. And you want to step up to being the person they know you could be.
A person who you just want to hang around because they are going to make something happen, something that matters, and you want to be there to see it.
Andrew finds something like that, in his hours abiding with Jesus.
Something that makes him give Jesus a particular name, when he describes him to his brother Simon: We have found the Messiah.
John offers us a translation of Messiah, a Hebrew word. It means, the Anointed. (In Greek, that’s Christos – the source of the word Christ, which is a title we give Jesus, not part of his name.)
What would that word have meant to Simon – to Andrew? To say that Jesus was the Messiah?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg wrote a piece just this week about the history of the idea of the Messiah. The practice of anointing someone with oil as a sign of their taking on a new special, sacred role begins in the time of Moses, during the wilderness journey, with the ordination of Aaron and his sons as priests to serve God in the tabernacle, the sacred tent.
Anointing as a mark of a new status came to extend to kings as well as priests, in the following centuries.
After the time of King David, the peak of Israel’s political and economic power, expectations that God would send an Anointed One focused on a King, a political leader who would bring back the good old days. Ruttenberg writes, “The hope for a Messiah was a hope to get back to how things should be soon in the current timeline.”
But as first the Northern Kingdom, then Judea, are conquered by the great empires of the time, hopes for an earthly king start to feel more and more distant.
The Messiah becomes e a more otherworldly figure. Someone who will bring in the World-to-come, the coming Age.
Our Isaiah text this morning hints at that turn: extending the vision for God’s Holy One beyond restoring Judah to its pre-conquest state, to bringing Light and Salvation to all nations of the earth.
That’s the vision of Messiah that would have been circulating in Jesus’ time – someone sent by God to transform the world.
That’s the name Andrew puts to what he is hearing and seeing and experiencing as he spends time with Jesus.
That’s what motivates him to bring Simon along – Simon Peter, who will become one of Jesus’ closest friends and, later, the central leader of early Christianity.
I want to turn back to Jesus’ words in this Gospel passage.
What are you looking for?
Come and see.
I think John kind of means for Jesus to break the fourth wall, in theater terms, when he asks: What are you looking for? When he says: Come and see.
I think John’s Jesus is looking directly into the camera when he says these lines.
The Gospel writer we know as John is well aware that the readers of his Gospel will not have a chance to abide with the earthly Jesus. That’s why he’s writing a Gospel: to try to pass on something he finds so important, so compelling, so transformational, that he urgently wants to share it, to pass it on.
He wants his readers to be drawn into this scene. To hear Jesus speaking to them. To us.
And both of the things Jesus says – the question, the invitation – point towards an important word that’s hiding in today’s Gospel.
The word is Abide.
Well: In New Testament Greek, it’s meno.
In reading about this passage, I saw somebody say that it’s a very Johannine word – a word typical of John’s Gospel.
Well, I didn’t take their word for it – I looked it up. There are tools for this kind of thing!
That word is used three times in Matthew’s Gospel.
Twice in Mark’s. Six times in Luke’s.
And somewhere in the ballpark of forty, in John.
So. Okay. Fair to say this word matters to John.
In John’s often poetic and mystical writing style, there are lots of words that mean more than they mean.
(That’s one of the reasons I wish we had a John year in the lectionary is that we could really explore that and follow through!)
So Meno means remain. Also translated as dwell, stay, and abide.
It’s an important term for John, somehow.
I wonder if John chapter 15 is the key text for understanding what “abide” means. This is part of Jesus’ long speech at his last supper with his friends.
Jesus tells them, Abide in me as I abide in you.
I am the vine, you are the branches; the branches can only be sustained by the vine if they abide in the vine.
As the Father has loved me, so I love you; abide in my love.
I like that the NRSV, the Bible translation we usually use, chooses the word Abide here.
It’s not an everyday word and it makes us pause and perhaps think about how abiding is different from just staying or remaining.
“Remain in my love” just doesn’t have the same feel.
But I wish that our translation used abide other places too, to make it clearer that this is a core word for John. In fact, by the time we get to the disciples staying with Jesus in chapter 1, verse 39, John has used meno three times already.
John the Baptist twice says that he saw the Holy Sprit abide on Jesus at his baptism. And the disciples’ question uses meno too – Where are you abiding?
I find Abide to be a beautiful and evocative word.
“Abide” is related to “abode”, a place where you live; “dwell” also captures this sense of really settling in somewhere with intention, not just hanging around between other things.
For me “abide” – as opposed to “stay” or “remain” – has overtones of slowing down, being present, belonging, putting down roots.
And even though John’s Jesus won’t talk about the deeper meanings of abiding until much later, his words in this Gospel text invite abiding.
What are you looking for?
The question takes our outward-bound energy and turns it inward: what’s this really about? What feels unfulfilled or insufficient in you, that’s driving your busy-ness, your seeking and striving?
What do you really need? What do you want, deep down inside?
I don’t think it bothers Jesus at all that they can’t answer.
That I can’t answer.
It’s a question to sit with – to abide with.
But in the meantime, while we’re asking ourselves, What am I looking for?… in the meantime, John’s Jesus says, Come and see.
Next week we’ll hear the call of Simon and Andrew again.
In Matthew’s version, Jesus’ first words to them are: Follow me.
Follow me. A command, an invitation? A little of both?
Here, instead, John’s Jesus says: Come and see.
It is a command, grammatically speaking.
But it’s an interesting contrast with Follow me.
Follow me calls for movement: get up and go.
Come and see invites arrival followed by attentive presence.
Follow me means decide, commit, NOW. Immediately.
Come and see calls the disciples closer – calls us closer – but leaves the next step in our hands.
In Greek as in English, the meaning of “see” spreads out beyond literal sight to mean understand, comprehend, experience, know.
If we come and see – if we abide a while with Jesus – will we find something there that deepens our love, our loyalty, our curiosity? Our hope?
There’s a lot to wonder and a lot to say about what it means to abide with Jesus when we can’t sit down for a meal or watch the sunset with the living breathing man, as Andrew could.
But I’m grateful to know John’s Jesus.
I do strive to follow Jesus, with all the energy and direction that implies.
But it is a balm to my soul to be reminded that movement and activity isn’t the only thing – or in John, even the primary thing – that Jesus asks of us.
I’m grateful for Jesus’ invitation, here, to abide with my own deep self, to wonder what I am really looking for.
And I’m grateful to be reminded that in my life with Christ, when I’m not sure where to go, it is sometimes okay to just be.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on the Messiah idea:
The link for the Zoom gatherings is available in our weekly E-news, in our Facebook group St. Dunstan’s MadCity, or by emailing Rev. Miranda: .
THREE WAYS TO USE AN ONLINE BULLETIN…1
1. Print it out!
2. Open the bulletin on one device (smartphone or tablet) while joining Zoom worship on another device (tablet or computer).
3. On a computer, open the bulletin in a separate browser window or download and open separately, and view it next to your Zoom window
The link for the Zoom gatherings is available in our weekly E-news, in our Facebook group St. Dunstan’s MadCity, or by emailing Rev. Miranda: .
THREE WAYS TO USE AN ONLINE BULLETIN…1
1. Print it out!
2. Open the bulletin on one device (smartphone or tablet) while joining Zoom worship on another device (tablet or computer).
3. On a computer, open the bulletin in a separate browser window or download and open separately, and view it next to your Zoom window
The link for the Zoom gatherings is available in our weekly E-news, in our Facebook group St. Dunstan’s MadCity, or by emailing Rev. Miranda: .
THREE WAYS TO USE AN ONLINE BULLETIN…1
1. Print it out!
2. Open the bulletin on one device (smartphone or tablet) while joining Zoom worship on another device (tablet or computer).
3. On a computer, open the bulletin in a separate browser window or download and open separately, and view it next to your Zoom window
Prepared by the Rev. Thomas McAlpine.
Good morning, and Merry Christmas!
The puzzle in today’s Gospel reading: why does light need a witness (and how does that work)? I’m going to wonder about that in this sermon slot, but since at best I’ll only scratch the surface, I’d encourage you to take the bulletin home to wonder about it yourselves.
Why does light need a witness? That light [pointing] is on. If that’s my shtick, I’d better have a day job. Light doesn’t need a witness—unless we’re visually impaired. And that theme, it turns out, shows up elsewhere in John’s Gospel. In the arguments after Jesus heals the man born blind: “Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see,” your sin remains’” (9:40-41).
So even if we’re talking about “the light of all people,” or—as our epistle puts it—”the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being,” we need witnesses—like John the Baptist.
If we wonder how to unpack this metaphor there’s this aphorism: “We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.” “We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.”
Chew on that, and it’s not hard to despair. We like to assume our vision is 20/20. But we see things as we are, so why do I assume that I’m seeing things clearly, that I’m reading situations correctly, that I have a reliable idea of who I am or what I need? We can spend a lifetime observing the visual problems others have without it registering that we’re vulnerable.
It’s not that we’re totally blind. John’s Gospel explores the ambiguities. Sometimes the obscurity is elective. From early in the Gospel: “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil” (3:19). Sometimes it’s a strange combination of prophetic clarity and blindness. From later in the Gospel: “But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, ‘You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.’” (11:49-50). From one angle Caiaphas sees more than any of the disciples, but is blind to Jesus having anything useful to show him.
The good news of the Gospel: God can deal even with our lousy vision, as evidenced repeatedly in the Gospels, whether with James and John (“sons of thunder”), who are all for calling down fire on a village that doesn’t receive them (Lk 9:54), or Thomas, the resident Eeyore, who greets the upcoming trip to Bethany with “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (Jn. 11:16).
How does God deal with it? By sending folk like John the Baptist that nudge us towards Jesus, and then putting us together with others who are fumbling towards Jesus.
It’s not that John the Baptist gets everything right; he has his doubts about Jesus (Matt 11:3), but he points folk to Jesus, and that’s enough. The folk God sends to play John the Baptist’s role in our lives don’t get everything right, but that doesn’t mean they can’t nudge us towards Jesus.
And God puts us together with others who are fumbling towards Jesus. I like how Paul puts it: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). And that’s on our good days.
As you may recall, this comes toward the end of Paul’s description of “a still more excellent way” (love). The description is often read at weddings, but what Paul wrote it for was to help the Corinthians get through their thick heads the sort of practices needed to not self-destruct as a church: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful” (1 Cor. 13:4-5 NRS). We might hear those verses as a sort of warning label: churches—marriages, for that matter—can be difficult, and flourish only with liberal amounts of patience and humility. As the African proverb has it, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
My favorite example of what God achieves in putting us together comes toward the end of John’s Gospel. One week after the resurrection the disciples don’t even agree on whether Jesus is dead or alive. But there’s enough patience and humility—enough love —that they stay together, and together meet the risen Lord.
It’s John’s Gospel that has that memorable “God so loved the world.” The word ‘love’ doesn’t appear in today’s reading, but it’s the motor for the action. God loves, and the Word reaches out to us. God loves humbly, and the Word takes on human flesh. God loves humbly, and sends John the Baptist to nudge us towards Jesus. And as the text lays it out, we need some corresponding humility to engage the story: humility to recognize our need for various versions of John the Baptist, however off-putting we may find them, humility to hang with others fumbling towards Jesus. We’re not alone. The Holy Spirit who came upon Mary has come upon us. As Spufford puts it “Far more can be mended than you know.” One day we will see face to face.
Merry Christmas.
A few months ago I stumbled on a book called “A Church Year-Book of Social Justice,” for the year 1919 to 1920. It was compiled by the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, a spiritual community of lay and ordained women in the Episcopal Church.
The book has a short reading for each day of the church year, exploring Christian thinking over the centuries and how it relates to “the great principles of social justice which preoccupy our own time.”
As an Advent practice this year, I started posting the readings for each day on Facebook. That drew me into pondering what our siblings in faith were thinking and talking about, just over a century ago.
1919 was a tough year.
World War I had just ended – a shocking, brutal disruption.
A deadly influenza pandemic closely followed the war, killing many children, healthy young adults and elders.
And then there were the ongoing struggles of poverty and unregulated industrial development.
Upton Sinclair published his expose of the meat industry, The Jungle, in 1906.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which killed 146 garment workers, was in 1911.
The West Virginia Mine Wars, a series of violent clashes as mine workers struggled to organize for safer working conditions, began in 1912.
There were big reasons that social justice was on the hearts and minds of people of faith and conscience in 1919.
As I’ve posted readings from the Yearbook day by day for the past month, I’ve noticed that some don’t resonate – don’t “hold up.” But other passages have given me a vivid sense of standing with these siblings in faith a century ago.
W. E. Orchard wrote: “In the anguish of the hour, when kingdoms are rocking to their base, the social structure of modern civilization is strained to the breaking point, and all hearts are full of fear…”
Who’s felt like that at some moment in the past few years?…
In this era of climate change and the overwhelm of capitalism’s excesses, I feel like this text may be MORE relevant to us than it was when John Ruskin first wrote it in 1917:
“Think you that judgment waits till the doors of the grave are opened? … The insects that we crush are our judges, the moments we fret away are our judges, the elements that feed us judge as they minister, and the pleasures that deceive us judge as they indulge.”
And then there’s this, from the great preacher Phillips Brooks:
“The real question everywhere is whether the world, distracted and confused as everybody sees that it is, is going to be patched up and restored to what it used to be – or whether it is going forward into a quite new and different kind of life, whose exact nature nobody can pretend to foretell, but which is to be distinctly new, unlike the life of any age which the world has seen already… It is impossible that the old conditions, so shaken and broken, can ever be repaired and stand just as they stood before. The time has come when something more than mere repair and restoration of the old is necessary. The old must die and a new must come forth out of its tomb.”
I resonate with every word of that passage.
One day, when I posted some particularly salient snippet to Facebook, I asked: Is it comforting or disconcerting to know that people living a century ago also felt like civilization was strained to the breaking point?
And some wise soul replied: Both.
It’s comforting not to be alone with these feelings, to have the bold and hopeful and urgent words of these siblings in faith to encourage us.
It’s comforting to know that humanity survived another century despite it all, and that some of the great challenges they faced are actually better now, thanks in part to the efforts of bold reformers who worked and fought for change.
But it’s also disconcerting, the resonance of these texts with our present moment.
The 20th century is hardly a consoling tale.
We know some of the costs and struggles to come.
The Depression. Another world war, atomic weapons, the Holocaust.
The bitter social strife, as well as the important legislative strides, of the 1960s.
The recognition of environmental degradation in the 1970s.
The rapid increase in economic inequality and incarceration in the 1980s and 1990s.
Knowing that companions in faith a century ago also felt like their whole way of life was coming apart at the seams is no reassurance that our way of life is not coming apart at the seams.
Dwelling with the 1919 Yearbook has made me think about time.
We tend to think of time as a line that we’re moving along, in one direction.
For example, we would draw the events I just named as tick marks along an arrow from 1900 towards 2000 and beyond.
The Church brings another way of thinking about time alongside linear, historical time.
Church time is all circles and cycles. Turning and returning.
In the church’s time, it isn’t Christmas again; it’s just Christmas.
This Feast of the Incarnation is every Feast of the Incarnation.
[The Eucharist we will celebrate tonight is every Eucharist.]
We’re not recreating or re-enacting something.
We’re returning to something that has always been waiting for us.
These are moments when we step into holy time, and meet the Divine present in our world in immediate and tangible ways.
Thinking about the Yearbook from that perspective: It’s not just that people 100 years ago felt and thought similar things to what we might be feeling and thinking.
It’s that we’re all living Advent together.
Brooks and Ruskin and the others are not just forebears but companions in this season of holy anticipation.
Let me take this one step further.
There’s everyday historical linear time and there’s the church’s cyclical time that returns and returns again.
And then there’s God’s time.
Jesus, the baby we welcome tonight, when he grows up, will talk a lot about time.
He will talk about two Ages, or Aeons, or Epochs, or Dispensations, or whatever fancy word you want to use for something we aren’t really equipped to comprehend.
There’s the present Age, this messy ordinary world with all its problems; and then there’s the Age to Come, the Age of the Kingdom of God.
The Age to Come is mysterious, distant, not yet fulfilled; and yet it’s not so far away that it’s irrelevant.
It is, somehow, already dawning, already unfolding, within reach in small shimmering moments, in hopeful possibilities, in the thin places where grace breaks through.
This kind of time isn’t linear time and it isn’t cyclical time.
It’s more like, I don’t know, the before and after of a really good dream home makeover show: The way things are and the way things could be, transformed towards beauty and joy and wholeness.
In terms of the Present Age and the Age to Come, we are in the exact same Before situation not only as our early 20th century siblings from the Yearbook, but as Jesus’ first followers.
We’re all watching and waiting and working for the coming of the Kingdom of God.
We’re all yearning for God’s great intervention in the confusion, struggle and suffering of our times.
Advent – the four-week church season that ended when the Feast of the Incarnation began at sunset this evening – Advent is a season of double anticipation.
We anticipate Christmas; but we also anticipate the fulfillment of God’s purposes for the world.
That holy After when Christ will return to earth and that new Age we have been taught to hope for will come to fruition.
The theologian Fleming Rutledge writes, “In Advent, we don’t [just] pretend, as I once thought, that we are in the darkness before the birth of Christ. Rather, we take a good hard look at the darkness we are in now, facing and defining it honestly, so that we will understand with utmost clarity that our great and only hope is in Jesus’s final victorious coming.”
In Advent we pray, again and again, for the dawning of that new Age. It’s woven through our liturgies and hymns: our longing for God’s rescue, restoration, renewal.
When we cry Come, Lord Jesus! in Advent we’re not just talking about the baby in the manger, although he is very nice indeed.
We are praying for the end of the world, friends.
At least, the end of the world as it is, and the beginning, in Brooks’ words, of a “quite new and different kind of life.”
For something more than mere repair and restoration;
For the old to die, and the new to rise up from the tomb.
And yet when we arrive at Christmas – when we enter holy time to gather in wonder around the manger, gazing at that surprising, ordinary, luminescent child – when Christmas comes, we tend to let that second layer of our anticipation drop away.
We act like what we were waiting for, has arrived.
And then – even if we have a really good, lovely Christmas – there will be a moment, tomorrow or Tuesday or next week, when we think, “Well, Christmas came, but we still have all the same problems. I guess all that praying and hoping and expecting didn’t really amount to anything.”
Instead of faithful, joyful and triumphant, we may feel uncertain, weary and discouraged.
What I need from Christmas this year, and therefore what I’m offering you – because preachers are always preaching first to themselves, beloveds – is the reminder that God coming among us in love and mercy and fury is not a once-long-ago thing, friends.
It is always and it is already and it is not yet.
It is still and it is someday and it is surrounding us right now.
We live in the world’s time, the relentless onward march of history, dates and events, wars and elections and pandemics, birthdays and graduations and deaths.
We live in the church’s time, holy rhythms that circle and cycle and always bring us back to sacred moments and pivot points.
And we live in God’s time, as people of expectation, who know that things are not as they are meant to be.
As people whose hopes and imaginations reach beyond the satisfactions and struggles of our present moment.
People who believe that another world is not just possible, she is on her way. (Arundhati Roy)
And that our purposeful acts of mercy, courage, justice and generosity can help pave the path for her arrival.
And sometimes our biggest fight is with the powers and principalities of the world as it is, and sometimes our biggest fight is within ourselves: with our own inner resignation to the broken reality around us, our honest skepticism that better is possible.
What I want from Christmas this year as its gift to all of us is a profound sense of sacred incompleteness.
The knowledge that what we’ve been waiting and yearning for is not here yet, and that it’s safe to say that out loud, to name that a lot of stuff still seems real bad, even on Christmas Eve.
And the knowledge, planted deep in our hearts, that the gulf between this Age and the Age to Come, between our long Before and God’s After, is itself a holy space, a space of promise.
A space of darkness and unknowing and possibility.
A space of birth.
May it be so.
Amen.
This is a story about big and small.
God is big.
Not big like a whale or a tall building or the ocean.
Big like you can’t even find the edges, where God begins and ends.
Big like you can’t find the beginning when God wasn’t yet.
Big like everywhere, like always.
God is so big that nobody is more or less important to God.
God can know and love each star and every dog.
God knows how many hairs are on your head, and still has time to be present with a parent grieving in Ukraine and an elephant giving birth in Botswana.
God is big.
But a baby is small.
Who’s seen a newborn baby?
Who has held one? …
They’re pretty small, right?
Small and floppy and helpless.
The heart of this story, the story we tell today, the reason it’s important, is this:
God who is big, SO big, became as small as a newborn baby. And why? To come close to us.
It’s a big mystery, a strange thing to think about!
It’s the kind of thing that is easier to talk about with poems and music and art, than to explain it like a lesson at school.
Let’s talk a little more about big and little. Let’s do a quiz.
Is an elephant big or little?
Is a chipmunk big or little?
Is an ocean big or little?
Is a puddle big or little?
Is ice cream big or little?
Is a star big or little?
Is dawn big or little?
Is a sprouting seed big or little?…
Has anybody ever grown a seed & watched it sprout?
I learned something interesting a couple of weeks ago.
The Bible wasn’t written in English. English didn’t exist yet!
Parts of it were written in a language called Hebrew, and parts of it were written in a language called Greek.
And in Greek, there’s a word that can mean two things:
It can mean dawn, sunrise. When the sun comes over the horizon and starts to light up the whole sky and everything under the sky.
Did we decide dawn is little or big?
That Greek word can also mean a seed sprouting, breaking through the ground to stick up a tiny green sprout.
Did we decide that a sprouting seed is little or big? …
It says in the Bible that Jesus’ birth is like a kind of dawn.
Like the sun rising on people who have been sitting and waiting in the dark for so, so long.
And maybe Jesus’ birth is also like a sprouting seed. Like life springing up where you couldn’t see anything alive, before…
Dawn is big and a sprouting seed is tiny, but they can both be held in the same word. Pretty cool!
The thing about dawn and a sprouting seed is that they both make you think things are going to keep happening, right?
Dawn is just the very very beginning of morning, of a new day.
And a sprouting seed is the very, very beginning of a plant. Maybe of a field, or a garden, or a forest. Who knows?
There are so many things a sprouting seed could become.
You have to keep watching and pay attention and find out.
In the Christmas story, when God is born as a human baby, God comes to us as something very small.
But that’s not the only way God shows up in the little things.
When we read the Bible and listen to the Spirit and learn from the saints and wise ones of the faith, we learn about God’s purposes, God’s intentions, how God means things to be.
Things like kindness and peace, justice and making things right, healing what hurts, building better ways and worlds, helping people have enough, helping people be their real true selves.
When we watch and pay attention, we might notice the small ways God is nudging those things along.
And we might notice the little ways we have a chance to join in and help move the world towards kindness and justice.
Like putting out food for the birds when it’s snowy.
Or listening to someone who’s struggling.
Or sharing with people who don’t have enough.
Or writing a letter to a leader to ask them to do the right thing.
We need some big changes, too; we all now that.
But it’s important to tend to the little things.
Little things can be beginnings.
Little things can add up.
Little things can matter in big ways.
I like to give people a gift on Christmas Eve. My gift this year is to help you remember to tend to little things.
It’s a little box, and inside is an even littler baby Jesus. …