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Sunday, December 25, 2011

“Birthing Christ, Birthing Ourselves”


John 1: 1-14
December 25, 2011
Christmas Day
First United Church – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

I don’t know if it’s just babies that I grow in my belly or if it’s all babies everywhere, but the two times I’ve been pregnant, I’ve been amazed that they never seem to want to kick and move when I want them to. I’ll feel a series of big movements and call my husband and toddler to “come quick!” so they can feel the baby move….but the second someone else’s hand touches my belly, the baby goes still. I sit there for a moment willing the baby to move, sometimes even talking to my belly, “Come on, baby, give another kick for Daddy.” But it never works.

One of the strangest things about being pregnant is being constantly reminded that you are sharing your body with another, separate human being. It seems that I should be able to will my belly to move because it’s my belly. But the creature that’s inside of me is not me. The baby is his own person, even in this not-yet-born state. There is nothing I can do to control him. I just have to share my space.

My two pregnancies have been very similar, physically. The same aches and quirks. The babies have been positioned the same way so the movements even feel the same to me. But emotionally and psychologically, I have experienced these pregnancies very differently. With my first pregnancy, I was constantly excited and filled with awe and I felt very strong as I pondered my body’s ability to create new life.

With this second pregnancy, I have often felt irritated at the inconveniences of being pregnant. I’ve been more exhausted – not in a “I’m sleepy and want a nap” way, but in a “I don’t want to be pregnant anymore. I don’t want to share my body anymore” way. I am weary of sharing myself. I am tired of devoting so much space and energy to someone else. I’m not proud that I feel this way and, ultimately, I’d do it all over again – don’t get me wrong. But this time around I just find myself wishing that my body were my own again.

Our almost-two-year-old son is learning about his body these days. He’s learning how to respect other people’s bodies – or trying to. David and I sound like broken records, saying, “M, I don’t like it when you hit my body. Please give me a hug instead,” all day long. He’s also learning that he can draw boundaries around his own body. The other day I heard him playing with his dad and laughing hysterically in the other room. Then his little toddler voice said, “No! I need a little space!” and David immediately stopped tickling him and said, “Okay, you need a little space. Thanks for telling me.”

I’m pretty sure that M knows the phrase, “I need a little space” because he hears me say it so often these days. The closer I come to this upcoming birth, the more I feel that there is so little of me to go around. I find myself wanting to retreat – to claim space for myself and for this baby.

I need a little space to reconnect with myself, to connect with the Divine, to prepare for the difficult work of birth.

As aspect of birth that is frequently overlooked in our society is that birth matters not just to the baby being born, but to the parents who are born at that same moment. The way in which a woman gives birth – the support she is given, the options she has, the respect she feels – those things all contribute to her emotional state at that crucial moment of birth.

And in that moment – whether it’s the baby being handed to her and put to her breast or the baby being whisked away for testing or her being unconscious because she’s had an emergency surgery – in that moment, she becomes a mother. That moment can never be re-done. And the other partner, if there is one, becomes a parent, too. In that instant, a line is drawn. A new person – the mother or father of that particular child – is born.

It makes me wonder, of course, about the birth of Jesus.

It makes me ponder what it felt like for Mary and Joseph when they became Mother and Father to that particular child. We usually see scenes of Mary and Joseph, simply yet cleanly dressed, kneeling or standing beside the manger-bed. Jesus is wrapped in a tidy blanket and Mary looks on adoringly – sometimes with her hands folded in a simple prayer. It is the gaze of a woman who is politely grateful for a new set of china or is posing for a photographer.

It is not the gaze of a woman who has just given birth.

Where is the blood? Where is the mess? Where are the gallons of sweat pouring off of Mary’s brow? For that matter, why is everyone wearing clothes? And who in their right mind would lay a newborn down into a bed of hay? Surely not a new mother.

If I had tried to do that when my son was born, my husband surely would have snatched him up and held him tightly to his chest. You don’t just down lay a newborn down like that. Everything within you wants to hold on tightly – to wonder, to ponder, to gaze, to love, to stand amazed in the presence of something so holy as this moment of new life.

To be fair to the thousands of artists over the years that have depicted the birth of Christ – I’m fairly sure most of them were men who, due to cultural norms, never had the opportunity to see a birth or to see how a mother becomes a mother. We are fortunate to live in a time where men are no longer banned from their right to be present as their new Father-selves are born.

As we move from the season of Advent to the season of Christmas, we have arrived at the point in our stories where it’s time for all of us to give birth.

I said a few weeks ago that if you come to Christmas and you’re exhausted, you haven’t done Advent right. Advent has been a time for waiting – for preparing space. Space for reconnecting with ourselves, for connecting with the Divine, space for getting ready for the work of birth. As we’ve done so, we’ve prepared ourselves not only for the birth of Christ but also for our own births.

Because we are all – all of us – called upon by God to give birth to Jesus Christ again this year.

We are given the distinct honor of bringing the Christ Child into the world again and again. We are allowed to re-birth ourselves as we do so – celebrating the moment when we each become mother or father to the Eternal Christ in our midst.

The stories we typically think of when we tell the story of Jesus’s birth are those from the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Mark has no birth story. John has a birth story – we just heard it – but it’s not immediately recognizable as the birth.

There is no stable, no star overhead, no cast of characters – not even Mary and Joseph. Instead, we have this cosmic story of Christ’s birth. John artfully weaves the larger story for us – not the story of how a particular boy-child was born to a particular woman and man – but the larger story of how the Eternal Spirit of Christ is born to all of us. Instead of Mary and Joseph, we have the cosmic dust of creation. Instead of a human mother’s labor pains, we have the Word – the Logos – of God breathing forth Christ into creation. We have an image of Christ existing before and between and outside of time.

And if Christ exists in all these places and spaces and times, then surely Christ is with us here and now.

The stories of Matthew and Luke tell us why the birth of Jesus of Nazareth mattered to people living in first-century Palestine. The prologue to the gospel of John tells us why the birth of Christ matters to all of us – those who lived before the time of Jesus, those who knew him in the flesh, and those of us who celebrate Christ’s eternal presence forevermore.

****************

When I ponder the way I’ve been grumbling this pregnancy, I feel pretty embarrassed. I cringe when I hear myself telling my toddler that I can’t pick him up right now because “I need a little space.” I suppose I should be more gentle with myself – we all should, right? But I do wonder where I’ve gotten this idea that my body belongs to me.

I mean, yes, of course, it belongs to me and not to someone else. I don’t meant to insinuate that you should ever let other people do things to your body that you don’t want to have done, of course.

But, ultimately, this body belongs to God.

I am the caretaker of this particular body and it is important that I care for myself well because I’ve been entrusted with the honor of being me. But my body – like the rest of me – was not created and born of me. I was created and born of God. This means that I have a responsibility to some Holy force beyond myself.

It also means I have the ability to call upon strength that goes beyond what I can immediately see and perceive. If I do not belong only to myself then I am also reminded that I am never alone. The Holy Presence always exists within and beyond me – comforting and strengthening me in times of joy and sorrow.

As we move from Advent into Christmas we move from a time of waiting to a time of action. The birth of Christ is here – and Mary is not going to be the one doing all the work this time around. We are, all of us, called to give birth to Christ at this moment in time. It doesn’t matter if you are a man or a woman. It doesn’t matter if you’ve given birth to babies ten times or none at all. We are all called to birth Christ.

We are called to prepare room for Christ. – to make space in our lives for this Holy Mystery which is coming again into our world. To ponder the new life growing inside of us.

We are called to labor – to move with each increasingly-difficult contraction towards the moment of birth. To draw on the wisdom of those who have gone before us. To surround ourselves with those who will respect and support our important work.



We are called to surrender – to turn ourselves over to a force larger than ourselves. Midwife Ina May Gaskin calls this instinct in birthing women getting in touch with their “monkey self”[1] – that version of yourself which knows instinctively just what to do in order to bring a child into the world. We are called to surrender to the doubt, the fear, the pain, the ecstatic joy as we bring Christ to the world.

We are called to greet – to open our arms to the Holy being born at this moment. We will focus all our energy and attention on simply being present with Christ as we welcome the Living Spirit of God in our midst.

And we are called to present this gift to the world. One thing I do love about artistic depictions of the nativity is the posture Joseph often has. He frequently is standing protectively above the manger, looking to the side and gesturing to the babe in the hay. He is introducing his son to the world. We are called to do the same – to bring this gift of the Christ Child to those who need to be re-introduced to the Love of God in this time and place.

In doing these things – in giving birth to the Christ – we also give birth to ourselves. We are, each of us, reborn in the moment that we become the mother or father of Christ. The ways that we prepare for the birth, the way that we labor, the way that we surrender ourselves to the mighty power of birth, the greeting that we offer, and the way we present the Christ to the rest of the world…all of these things shape who we are as Christians. We re-form ourselves as followers of Christ and as children of God when we commit ourselves to the work of bringing Christ into the world.

Birth is not easy. It can be painless. It can be short. It can be filled with laughter and joy. But it is still never easy. We must labor for birth. It is work.

We do this work with our bodies and our very selves. But we do not do it alone, for we do not belong entirely to ourselves. We were created by the Most High to do this work. And the steady, sure, gentle hand of God accompanies us throughout our labor. A firm pressure on our back in the midst of a difficult contraction. A cool cloth applied to our forehead at just the right moment. A word of encouragement whispered for only our ear.

God invites us to give birth to Christ and, in doing so, to give birth to ourselves. And God goes with us into the difficult work of birth. Thanks be to God and Merry Christmas.







[1] Gaskin, Ina May. Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta. 173.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Christmas Prayer from Candlelight Communion


First United Church of Bloomington, IN
December 11, 2011

Holy One who was born before time began – who is born again each year in the manger – and who will be born again and again wherever you see fit, we come before you and offer our whole selves in a spirit of thanksgiving and praise.

We wait – O, God. Not because we particularly enjoy waiting or because you are late, but because to wait is to practice a kind of holy watchfulness – a way of being that reorients our minds, bodies, and spirits to your presence. We give thanks for this period of Advent waiting which interrupts our regularly scheduled programming every December. We rejoice that our faith gives us an alternative to the hustle and bustle of the elven, candy-caned, gingerbread-latted Christmas that often gives us more stress than relief.

We wait because to wait is to rest. We come to you weary – tired of working, tired of worrying, tired of pretending to be people we cannot be, tired of finding little solace in the tiny rituals we perform to make ourselves feel better. We seek rest, O Holy Friend. And we know that rest can always be found in your presence.

And as we wait, we hear the faint fluttering of wings in the distance. Growing closer, closer still.

With Mary, we hear the words of your messenger, “Be not afraid. God adores you. You will be given the gift of a child who will grow in your innermost self. You are to name the child Jesus.”

With Mary, we hesitate. We question how this could be. And, finally, we admit that this news is too wonderful to understand, too wonderful to deny.

Christ will be born again this Christmas – born into a world every bit as broken and needy as Mary’s world.

And we will be both the mother and the midwife…..providing sustenance as the tiny secret in our belly becomes a kicking, crying baby who cannot be contained. Providing nurture and care to each other as we witness the dawn of life in our friends – whispering encouragement when the birth is difficult, preparing the way for a new life to come again and again.

Come, O God – Come, O Christ! We are ready to bring you forth into the world once more.

Amen.


“Reclaiming Joy”


1 Thessalonians 5: 16-24
December 11, 2011
Third Sunday of Advent (Gaudete Sunday)
First United Church – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

I’ve noticed that a lot of people don’t seem to like Christmas. As December moves along, it seems that I hear more and more complaints about how stressful this time of year is – too many parties to attend, too many presents to buy and not enough money to buy them, too much pressure to be the perfect parent who somehow finds the time to hold down a 50-hour-a-week job and makes sugar cookies every weekend and still finds time to travel across the country to see Grandma and Grandpa for Christmas.

You know these complaints. You’ve heard them or perhaps you’ve made them yourself.

A friend of mine who has a young toddler posted an article on facebook earlier this week about Holiday Affective Disorder that she found on Babble.com. She said, “I have this, or at least some version of this. Just ask my husband about my pity party the day we tried to take our Christmas card picture.”

Just what is this mysterious new condition? “Holiday Affective Disorder covers a wide range of manic symptoms including overwhelming feelings of nostalgia, frustration and extreme guilt paired with weight gain, binge eating, high blood pressure, and sleeplessness. Sufferers have delusions of grandeur, believing they have the ability to create meals of prime rib and make place cards out of pine cones while hosting family, friends, random neighbors, stranded co-workers, and pets, while also wearing an infant and taking care of hyperactive children.”[1]

The article goes on to humorously detail what it looks like when you put way too much pressure on yourself during the holidays. It even suggests a drinking game for family holiday meals – “Every time Uncle Lou says something offensive, take a sip of wine.”

Although I chuckled at parts of the article, recognizing the symptoms in myself and in my friends, I was saddened by the proposed “solution” at the end:
“Remember: If it can be cooked, it can be cooked by someone else.
If it can be sewed, it can be glue-gunned.
If it can be made, it can be bought on Etsy.”

Now I don’t want to be one of those obnoxious “let’s put Christ back in Christmas” people who get really annoyed if you refer to Christmas as X-mas. As a sidenote, the X comes from the Greek letter Chi and was commonly used in the early church as a way to refer to the followers of Christ – so, really, X-mas it totally appropriate. Or maybe we should call it Chi-mas?

I digress.

I don’t begrudge people who want to celebrate the secular version of Christmas. If Christmas if about Santa Claus, and sales at Kohls, and gingerbread lattes at Starbucks, and the office holiday party, then, okay. That’s a holiday, sure.

I think we’ve truly reached a point where there are two versions of Christmas in the U.S. There’s a secular Christmas which revolves around the trimmings and trees, Santa and his reindeer, gift giving, cookie baking, and all-Christmas-all-the-time radio stations. I love that stuff as much as the next person. Aside from the blatant worshiping of consumption, I take no issue with it. There are plenty of things that the secular Christmas teaches us that are good– sharing, loving, creating traditions, focusing on our loved ones, taking time off from work, taking care of those who are impoverished. I’m on board with all of that.

But those of us who are followers of Christ have another option at Christmastime.

For starters, we don’t have to worry about maniacally celebrating Christmas from Halloween until the 25th of December. We have a liturgical season of Advent to guide us in our preparations for the birth of the Christ Child. I saw a quote somewhere this past week and, sadly, can’t remember where so I can’t give the author credit, but I still want to share it with you. To paraphrase, “If you get to Christmas and you’re exhausted, you haven’t done Advent right.”

Amen and amen.

Advent and the Christian Christmas are totally different than the holiday season of craziness.

Instead of working ourselves into a tizzy, we are called to prepare in a quieter, more intentional way for the birth of Christ. Instead of focusing on the trimmings, we are invited to look deep within ourselves and our communities at the dawn of the Christian New Year. Instead of frantically creating our own traditions, we are encouraged to live into Christian traditions that have existed for many centuries. Instead of beating ourselves up, trying to measure up to all the hype of the season, we are allowed to rest secure knowing that the grace of our God envelops us, no matter what the season brings.

Of course, the challenge is that most of us celebrate both Christmases, right? How do we find a balance between these two holidays that share a date, but pull us in different directions?

When I first looked over the lectionary readings for today, I didn’t think much about the short passage from Paul’s letter to the church at Thessolonica. It seemed to just be a few pithy words of generic advice – not rocket science and not particularly tied to Advent.

Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians is probably our earliest piece of Christian scripture. Written in the year 51 of the Common Era, it was written even before the Gospel of Mark. Paul is writing to a group of Gentile Christians and today’s passage from chapter five is the blessing at the end of his letter.

At first glance, it’s not much: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” Both boring and seemingly impossible all at once, right? Not the type of text I usually enjoy ruminating upon.

But then I started thinking more deeply about these simple words. Paul exhorts the community to continually be filled with joy….and this is Gaudete Sunday, the third Sunday in Advent, the Sunday where we contemplate what it means to live a joy-full life.

A few weeks ago, I stopped at a McDonalds to grab a coffee while driving to Indianapolis for a meeting. They had put their holiday menu up – you know the one. All bells and Christmassy fonts and warmth and candy canes. As I was admiring the font, I stopped and actually read the text. Next to a photo of a mint mocha it said, “My comfort and joy.”

I almost pulled out of the drive thru lane, I was so mortified.

When I hear the words “comfort and joy” I immediately think of the Christmas hymn “God rest ye merry gentleman.” You know “oh, tidings of comfort and joy – comfort and joy”? It’s an elaboration on the angel’s greeting to the shepherds in Luke’s version of the nativity story. For me, those are words that are forever tied to the birth of Christ – not to a mint hot cocoa from McDonalds.

Those who are suffering from Holiday Affective Disorder don’t need glue guns instead of sewing machines, and they don’t need fancy coffee from McDonalds to cure their holiday blues. They need something deeper and more meaningful to sustain them through the onslaught of stress and mania that secular Christmas brings.

What would it look like to connect more deeply with the true gift of joy during Advent?

Now, I’m just going to tell you some ponderings I have about joy that are running around my heart. I’ll own, up-front, that these are not based in reality in any way – they’re just a feeling that I have when I ponder joy.

I guess I’ve been a Christian too long because, for me, joy pretty much always has religious overtones. I think of it as being distinctly different than happiness. I know if you look them up in the dictionary, it says they are synonyms and there’s nothing about God in the definition for joy, but when I hear the word joy, I just can’t shake the feeling that it has a distinctly holy connotation.

Joy, for me, is not something external. It’s not something that can be given to you or wrapped up under the tree. Joy is more like a deep river within your heart. It’s cool and refreshing in the hottest days of summer and warm and bubbly in the coldest nights of winter. It exists there, within each of us, no matter what the circumstances.

On the happiest days of our lives or in our times of darkest sorrow, that river of joy still runs inside us. We can chose to ignore it; we can choose to remain partially aware of its presence; or we can pause and dive straight into it, allowing its refreshing waters to wash over us and nourish our truest selves.

This river of joy exists for all eternity and it is a gift from God. It will never dry up and it can never be taken away. Joy explains why some people, who are going through the most intense pain imaginable, still have hope for the future. These are people who take time, each and every day, to bathe in the waters of joy.

It also explains why some people, who have been given so much, still feel dissatisfied. Though they have innumerable reasons to be happy, they have lost touch with their inner river of joy. They have forgotten the simple and abiding pleasure that comes with visiting the river. They have traded in their joy for happiness.

And happiness, though shiny and sparkly, pales in comparison to joy.

When I first read Paul’s instructions to the Thessalonians to “rejoice always” because “it is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” I got a little annoyed. I mean, for starters, who can do something “always,” anyway? I get nervous when I’m commanded to do something “always.”

And then I got more annoyed when I thought Paul was telling me that we’re supposed to rejoice because God wants us to. How can you order someone to rejoice? What kind of God is bossy enough to hover over me and say, “Rejoice! Do it now! For the Lord hath spoken it!”

But then I thought about all those times when it seems to be impossible to find joy. And I thought about how, at those moments, it is the very presence of the Holy that enables me to find some measure of hope. It is the call of Yahweh that reminds me about the river of joy nestled deep in my heart.

Maybe it’s not so much that God is ordering us to be joyful….maybe Paul is just kindly reminding us that God wants us to be joyful. Like a mother who wants only what’s best for her child, God wishes and fervently hopes that we will always find a way to joy. Both in our times of happiness and sorrow, God calls us to remember to be in touch with joy and rest in the waters of that deep, abiding knowledge that whatever comes, all is well.

Paul did not write these words to individuals. He wrote them to a specific community of believers. His commandment to rejoice was not one meant to be heard on an individual level. Instead, he wanted the entire community to rejoice.

Advent and Christmas are times when we come together as community to seek joy - whether that’s around a family dinner table, the tree on Christmas morning, or here in the sanctuary as we gather at the table to share in Christ’s meal.

As we move into this new year of the church calendar, I hope that we will remember and reclaim Paul’s commandment to rejoice always. We have an opportunity to remind each other of the deep rivers of joy that exist within each of us gathered here. We have the ability to join our rivers together into a powerful force that can call out to others in our community – come to the waters! Come, and rejoice!

In the coming weeks, there are many opportunities to rejoice together.

Tonight, we gather at the table to celebrate Jesus’s continual invitation to be one with the ongoing Spirit of Christ. On December 22 we will gather in the chapel for our first-ever Blue Christmas service – a time for reconnecting with the quiet spirit of joy that can sustain us even as we struggle with the surface-level happiness that permeates the season. There’s Christmas Eve, of course. And we have a special gift this year – the ability to worship together as a community of faith on Christmas morning. An opportunity to reconcile both the secular and Christian Christmases as we move from the stockings hung by the chimney with care to the manger and rejoice in the birth of God in our midst.

I’m not reminding you of these upcoming worship services because I think you can’t read the announcements in the bulletin.

I’m reminding us because amidst the promises of happiness in price-matching from Wal-mart, the claims of comfort and joy wrapped up in a McDonalds latte, and the good wine that flows at the office holiday party, the Church has something more to offer.

Tidings of comfort and joy.

Not because God commands it, but because it is God’s deepest desire.

God wants us to find joy this Christmas.







[1] http://www.babble.com/mom/work-family/stress-family-holiday/?page=1