"Saving Presence"

A sermon by the Rev. Matthew B. Reeves
Parkville Presbyterian Church, Parkville, Missouri
The First Sunday of Christmas, December 30, 2007

Text: Isaiah 63:7-9

My brother Josh is visiting from San Diego where both of us grew up. He’s thoroughly enjoying our weather. I’m not kidding! He stepped out of a 75 degree day to board his plane back home and one of the first things he saw upon arrival was his own breath. He says this is a blessed thing—blessed because here is weather you can notice! It’s a funny thing about San Diego life: the weather is so consistently beautiful you stop noticing it. San Diegans don’t enjoy their nice weather as much as people in, say, Kansas City because there just isn’t enough bad weather to make the nice weather nice.

This would not surprise Garrison Keillor. Besides being one of our great storytellers, Garrison Keillor is our greatest philosopher of winter who says that winter teaches us great things. "Winter," he says, "is a season when you are blessed by the force of reality. …A blizzard makes peasants of everybody." Or, an ice storm. Three weeks ago we all hunkered down in our homes and listened to the symphony of ice pelting windows and tree limbs snapping. The days after the storm we told each other stories about power going out, our car getting stuck, how many branches we lost. At our house a limb smacked our power line and left our power standing on one leg—power in parts of the house, but not in others. Our furnace still worked, but one more hit and we’d be cold and in dark.

So it was nighttime, kids were in bed, and outside the cracking wood sounded like batting practice at The K. But we were still cozy. Christmas tree lights shone, a fleece blanket covered Heather’s lap as she curled up with a book, and I was spinning my wheels in the kitchen, cleaning counters that were already pretty clean. I plunked down on the couch next to Heather, jiggled my leg, stared at the Christmas tree, got up and straightened toys, and returned to the kitchen to find something else to clean. I went back to the couch. Heather looked up from her book. "You’re waiting for doom to strike, aren’t you?"

I said, "Yes, I am." Waiting for the branch to fall and the house to go black. It never did, but I was gearing up for it. Anxious, a little fearful. I don’t think I was alone. Here’s something I noticed: in the week after the storm, everyone I talked to about power outages could tell me exactly how long it was out. Precisely when it went off, precisely when it went on. Garrison Keillor might tell us we were feeling our wintertime peasant-ness, out vulnerability. Stripped of our protective layer of electric devices—our blankets, stoves, furnaces, lights—we felt our nakedness. How many of us sighed with relief as the furnace fired back up? When we saw the alarm clock blinking 12:00?

We don’t like to be vulnerable. We’re not used to it. We do all kinds of things to protect ourselves, which isn’t so bad. We’ve got security systems and deadbolts, seatbelts and airbags, home and car insurance. It doesn’t feel good to be vulnerable so we protect ourselves if we can, and there’s wisdom in this.

But something like an ice storm comes along, and we realize our protective armor is like aluminum foil. The unavoidable truth is, to be human is to live with risk. Talk to a patient on a chemo, to a soldier on patrol, talk to a spouse that’s been betrayed. They’ll tell you that being human is a risky enterprise. To say that it’s not is, as Garrison Keillor puts it, to deny "the force of reality."

So it’s stunning that God should choose to become human. God chooses the risk of human life, and chooses it freely. The Son of God takes on frail flesh and enters human experience as the baby Jesus. Matthew’s gospel highlights the peril facing the baby Messiah. It’s a terrible story, today’s gospel text. Mighty Herod is quivering. Wise men have come seeking a child "born king of the Jews" and the news is like a December ice storm. Herod feels vulnerable. He sends the wise men with instructions to find the child so he too might "pay him homage" (finger across throat). But the wise men don’t come back, and Herod takes drastic measures to keep his power on. He orders the death of all the children around Bethlehem under two. Mary and Joseph pack their bags for Egypt. Jesus is in danger.

It’s one of the Bible’s most awful stories. It shows the measures we’ll take in the name of security. It also shows the chance God takes in becoming human. Incarnation—Word made flesh—is God’s dangerous enterprise. God chooses for the Word to become human, and so accepts the possibility—more, the certainty, really—that the life the Son’s would be snuffed out. To be born is to live with the threat of death. Before Jesus is can decide for himself, defend himself, take precautionary measures, he’s in grave danger. Thirteen verses after Mary bears him, Herod is out to destroy him and the Lord of creation is a refugee.

This tells us some things about God. It makes us wonder some things about God. Is God wise to entrust his Son to humanity? For God to give his son into a world of disease and accidents, not to mention paranoid tyrants, is for God to become vulnerable to the worst the world can do. God did not have to do this. But God did. God came among us in Jesus, who would "save his people from their sins." God chose to save us by flesh and blood presence—Immanuel, "God is with us." God willed for salvation to happen up close, personal, by a savior subject to all threats and uncertainties faced by those he would save.

Isaiah knew God to be like this. "God became their savior in all their distress," said Isaiah. "It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them." God delivered Israel by actual presence—not by an emissary, not by hired help, but by God showing up and dealing directly with people in trouble. An exiled people. A people returned to the ransacked and ruined land. A people with the soft underside of their faith exposed, all their illusions of safety stripped off in Babylon.

Yet God is among you, says Isaiah. God is present in abundance of love and pity. God is beneath you to lift you up. God is present within you, says the prophet, fully aware of the failings that led to exile from the Promised Land. But even still, God is before you, Isaiah says, present in the future being created: "Surely they are my people," God says," children who will not deal falsely."

It’s hard to believe God says this. It seems naïve, even a little foolish, given the people’s past. The people’s history is mostly failure in obedience, disloyalty to promises, half-heartedness in worship. To show hope for a future of trust and honesty, God seems only to open himself to disappointment. When we think of all that humans do to each other—this week’s events in Pakistan only illustrate all that we do to each other—it’s a surprise that God should come among people at all.

Yet into the world came a fragile, naked baby who was the Son of God. Into the dishonest, perilous world came a child whose birth, like ours, came with a guarantee that he would die. Only this child was full divinity, was himself the power that makes life and the might that saves it.

Christmas is the start of the story about the mighty acts of God in Jesus Christ. Yet when the mighty savior arrives, it’s not with a shows of force. He comes weak and vulnerable. He enters the world a helpless baby, he leaves the world a crushed man meeting the death he escaped in Bethlehem. But there’s more to Jesus’ vulnerability than his weakness. In him, God shows everything about himself. The thing that would terrify any of us, to lay bare all there is to see ofus—to be completely known by another—that is the openness of life that God chooses with us. In Jesus, God lays out all of his love, willing to be rejected; lays out all of his mercy, willing to be scorned; lays out kingdom hopes for the world, willing to see them refused. God comes among us a naked baby, willing to die a naked man.

For us to choose a life such as the one God chose in Jesus—a life in which all defenses are down, in which we would allow ourselves to be seen as we truly are—such a life is almost unthinkable. There is something terrifying about such transparency. This is the reason marriage is, if truth be faced, a fearful proposition, at least when it happens in its fullness. In marriage two promise their complete, honest presence to each other—they vow vulnerability—even though living that vow will be costly. Two promise affection, though each will at times refuse it. They promise loyalty even though each, at times, will falter. They promise to remain open to each other even through sickness, want, and sorrow. To marry is to invite grace and joy, but also pain and disappointment. Yet the two do it. They say the vows. They commit to living this fearfully vulnerable life. They give themselves to one another because love each other.

There aren’t many weddings at Christmas time, but maybe there should be. Because the story of is the definition of love. Christmas is the season when love came down and Christ became the marriage of the human and the divine. Incarnation announces that God is willing to bear any hurt, suffer any loss, endure the worst humanity has to give if it means God will win his beloved. That beloved is you.

Christmas—the celebration of the birth of God-with-us—is a message of sheer grace. It says that God opens his life to us so we might be open to God. It might feel a risky thing offering God our honest fears and hopes, our future and past, our obedience to the otherworldly way Jesus showed. But if we are wary, let us remember that vulnerable love is the way of salvation. It’s the risk God took for us in Jesus. So it’s a funny and a blessed thing: there’s no safer place in all creation than in the arms of our God.