Openness and Optimism
(This message is in continuation with the Children's Time)
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!
Every year, Epiphany falls on January 6th; on the church calendar today is marked as Epiphany Sunday, the last day of Christmas. It seems a little strange - it`s 2014, almost a week past New Year’s day, and Christmas was all of 11 days ago. It feels like Christmas is completed. But it`s not. It is never really completed. The celebration of Epiphany, so many days after Christmas, reminds us that Christmas is never really completed. Christmas is all about the work of making room for others – not just on one day, but every day. The story we hear and remember today, on Epiphany, is, again, the Christmas story - the Wise Men coming from the far East to honour the Baby Jesus.
The Wise Men were Gentiles, meaning ‘Those who are not from our own folk, our own culture, our own nation.’ They were outsiders. They were foreigners. They were the people least expected to be chosen as part of the New Israel. They were the least people, the last people. The Jewish people of Jesus’ time had no expectations about the Gentiles because they never thought about the possibility that the Gentiles would be included into the family of God - not the ones who lived close to them, and certainly not the ones who came from very far away. That spiritual and cultural barrier didn’t keep the wise men away, however. The star shed its light on them, they followed the light, and they became part of this holy story of divine birth.
I believe that the stories of Christmas and Epiphany remind us of our church’s vision – being a welcoming church at the crossroads of our community – here in downtown to our neighbours on Penelukat Island, from youth to seniors, from here to Kenya and other parts of the world. These stories encourage us to celebrate the holy, share the joy of the good news at the crossroads, with more people, together.
What excites me about the Christmas story is that God resorted to a quiet incarnation to change the world, not a dramatic and great intervention with invitations and announcements to emperors and kings. God was born into a silent night. God was “born” as a baby into a human world of struggle and groaning, in a country that was aching for freedom. God did not make a dramatic kind of intervention. Oppressive rulers were not struck down like a wheatfield in a hailstorm when Christ was born; instead, God took the mild and meek way, by simply being born to us and growing like us, like a seed, like a grain, like the leaven in bread.
God does not fix the brokenness in our lives like a mechanic fixing a broken machine with shiny new parts. Instead, God mends the brokenness in our hearts, like a mother’s touch, and makes us trust the goodness of Her. … (and, God teaches us that changing the world may sometimes be messy work like changing a baby’s dirty diaper!)
The stories of Christmas and Epiphany tell us that we must know, we must expect that God is grace, God is living power, God is the transforming power of love and God will never lose sight of us, especially when we find ourselves broken. Change is often frightening. Disorder entering our lives is stressful, it wears us down. But God is here with us, not to restore the established, familiar order, but to restore us, restore ourselves, restore our hearts. God’s grace is greater than our fears. God does not intervene in our lives like a repairman fixing a broken clock; God ‘incarnates’ into our lives. God is ‘born’ into our lives, changing our perspectives, changing how we respond to different challenging situations.
One day my family went to Woodgrove Centre in Nanaimo. We all hopped out of our car in the big, big parking lot, then we saw that everyone was looking at something with amazement in their eyes. I followed people’s gazes, hoping to see what their eyes were fixed upon. Even those who were talking to each other, sitting on a bench, had stopped their chatter and were looking at… whatever it was. They were staring straight at it, without any effort to pretend that they were looking at something else. After looking around, I found what they were looking at: it was not ‘something.’ - it was two people and a guide dog. The two people, a woman and a man, were standing where a crosswalk started. The woman had a white cane, and the man held the guide dog’s harness. Both of them were blind. It was a small crosswalk before them, but dangerous enough, as cars were coming and going at a steady pace. But the people didn’t shy away or cringe; they stood straight. They were very sure and clear about what they needed to do and how they should go about it. The woman used the cane to figure out exactly where they should stand – the last line before the crosswalk started. The man with the guide dog let her know when it was safe to walk across. After all the cars passed, they walked across the crosswalk safely. There was a kind of mathematical exactness to their movements.
It was an epiphany for me. We find in the Bible the passage where Jesus asks “Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit?” But on that day in the parking lot I saw two blind people work together to walk across a dangerous road safely. They could do it because they knew other ways besides sight to figure out the distance, the traffic flow, and to read the signs of the road that we don’t pay attention to. And they communicated with one another with clear guidance, knowledge, and trust, with the help of the guide dog. I think that’s a good analogy for how faith works.
Faith is a kind of new language, a new rule, a new way of communication that we need to learn in order to to walk an unfamiliar, unseen path. Faith’s lessons are trust, discernment, courage, humbleness, openness, and optimism, believing that God sustains us with love, and that “All will be well, and all manner of things will be well” in God’s goodness (Julian of Norwich). The optimism bred from faith is the assurance that God is in charge of this world. God is good; we can trust God. God’s compassion permeates to every corner of this world and to the very centre of our lives. In faith, we learn a deep sense of assurance that even in the darkest, most difficult circumstances where we only sense God’s absence, God’s silence, God is still with us. God is in charge - but God’s way would probably not be a dramatic intervention; it would be like the incarnation of Christ - a small thing that, in time, grows to change everything.
The Christmas story is never ended. In the Christmas story, in the story of Epiphany, there is always room for more and always more room for us. A new light shines upon us with a new language of faith – openness and optimism. May we find the light in the grace of God, in the peace of Christ, in the companionship of the Holy Spirit who guides us, inspires us, comforts us, and challenges us. Amen.
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