Christmas Eve Sermon
The Rev. Aron Kramer Christmas Eve Sunday December 24, 2007
Well baby I've been here before
I know this room and I've walked this floor,
I used to live alone before I knew you
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
But love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Now maybe there is a God above
But all I've ever learned from love
Was how to shoot someone who outdrew you
it's not a cry that you hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Leonard Cohen caught something in the imagery of a broken Hallelujah. There is something on this night when we sing hallelujah, when hallelujah is on all our altar hangings, on this night when we give praise for the birth of Emmanuel, God with us, on this night when God puts on human flesh and walks among us, as us, with us, that rings true about a broken hallelujah.
In the Gospel, the people of God are ordered to be counted, something that claims them as the Empires’ people and not God’s people that is a broken hallelujah. Jesus is born in a feeding trough in a stable or maybe a cave behind a place where others sit warm and comfortable that is a broken hallelujah. Mary, Joseph and Jesus’ life together begins in poverty; it begins as homeless people, with no comfortable place to lay their heads that is a broken hallelujah. It begins not as a glorious story of joy, but an odd story of broken hallelujahs. Luke keeps this story of Jesus’ birth with the lowly, the poor and the marginal of the earth. It is a dirty story for Luke, unlike other Gospel accounts that dress up the story to make it seem a little more miraculous. The angles do not come to Mary and Joseph; they stay far away from them, in the fields with the shepherds. Luke tells a story that is starkly contrasted with even Matthews’ royal visitors and John’s miracle of Zechariah regaining his speech at the birth of Jesus. Luke keeps it simple, lifting up the symbolism of God’s faithfulness to all of us, to God’s people for whom Jesus has come.
We know all this; we understand this idea of God with us being born in stark contrast to our expectations for the savior of the world, or the King we would desire to have. We understand in our heads why this story is told in this way, but what do we understand in our hearts? It is in our hearts that we allow the spirit to come alive, that we allow God to walk among us, now today, not just as a sanitized safe God, but as a crazy, dangerous and powerfully present God. It is in our hearts that we come to understand that this birth story is more than just a story, and more than just a cute historical reckoning of something that happened 2,000 years ago. In our hearts, we come to understand the power of God’s transforming love for us and we begin to see how we are transfigured by God’s power and love through this simple story of a child’s birth.
Desmond Tutu writes, “Dear child of God, I write because we all experience sadness, we all come at times to despair and we all lose hope that the suffering in our lives and in our world will never end. There is a no such thing as a hopeless case. The most unlikely person, the most improbable situation these are transfigurable and can be turned into their glorious opposites. Indeed God is transforming the world now through us, because God loves us.” Indeed, God is transforming the world now, I love that, God is not done with us, God is not far away from us, God is transforming the world right now as we sit here and listen to God’s words and praise God’s holy name. God is at work among us, God is doing amazing and wonderful things all around us and this birth story as un-miraculous as Luke makes it out to be, is the piece that we hear this silent night. Tutu goes on to write, “God is not in the wind, the earthquake or the fire but in the still small voice. In the hum drum, ordinary, unexpected and unlikely places and people. In a baby in a manger, on a cross, if we just have eyes to see. We see transfiguration at work in the lives of the people all around us. Perhaps even in our own lives.”
Those broken hallelujahs that pull at our hearts to overcome our logical and reasoned minds, those broken hallelujahs that call at us to listen to the poor, the marginal, the people on the fringes of society. Those broken hallelujahs are more than just simple songs with broken tunes; they are God’s hand at work in the world about us. It is in those broken Hallelujahs that we see and experience God alive and present with us, those are the thin places where God is felt more strongly than anywhere else. A year ago, Sara and I were singing a broken hallelujah as our little boy sat tied to tubes and machines waiting to be touched by God. Just under a year ago, we found out Jeff Smith would be singing a broken Hallelujah as he battled with a brain tumor that would eventually take his life. Jane still sings that broken Hallelujah. Kimi Hara and Dorothy Rajacich died this past year, and though they lived full and powerful and amazing ives, it was still a broken hallelujah that we sung in celebrating their lives with us. The broken Hallelujahs have come to us, mostly unexpectedly these past several months, but they have come, and with them Emmanuel, the child born this night, has come also. God wades into our despair, our hopelessness, our sadness and lifts us up, carries us if God must but God remains with us to sustain and nourish our souls and bodies.
This Gospel, this Good News is about the expectations we carry. It is about the fear that we hold on to in order to gain comfort and strength not from God, but from our own actions and being. We place expectations in our lives and in our world so we can control what goes on around us. We have expectations so we can at least have an idea, as small as it really, might be, about what next might come. But this Gospel blows our expectations out of the sky; it dissolves them completely not with violence or force, but with love. The opposite of fear, is not doubt, you have heard me say, the opposite of fear, is faith and maybe tonight, it is love. Maybe tonight love is something that transfigures us in unexpected ways. Maybe tonight love dispels the fears that we have about how we will get to the next moment in our lives, about whether or not we will have enough food to eat, or whether or not we will be able to buy those things that bring us comfort.
Broken hallelujahs abound in our lives, and it is in those broken hallelujahs that we see God’s love for us, that we see God with us, that we see how we are transfigured and made new. We see that even the bad, difficult and secret parts of our beings can be made into their glorious opposites. God is at work in us, and around us and about us. God is always at work and we can choose to see God at work, or we can choose to ignore, through our fear, God at work in us. Through us, this night, as we go out into the silent cold of our little corner of the world, I hope a spark ignites a flame, a flame that warms those cold broken parts of us, a flame that heals and renews those cold and broken hallelujahs we have.
Mary treasured all the words she heard the night Jesus was born. But tonight, we are not Mary, tonight we are not about pondering and treasuring, tonight we are the shepherds, broken and poor, thieves and malcontents, tonight we are the shepherds going from the stable, from the feeding trough where Jesus sleeps, glorifying and praising God for all that we have hears and seen. Tonight, our fears are dispelled by love, tonight our broken hallelujahs are torn apart by God’s emergence into our lives as a living and holy God. Tonight, even we, gathered together as an imperfect people, are transfigured and told the Good News so that we may be made holy and glorify God singing Hallelujah….
I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.
Well baby I've been here before
I know this room and I've walked this floor,
I used to live alone before I knew you
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
But love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Now maybe there is a God above
But all I've ever learned from love
Was how to shoot someone who outdrew you
it's not a cry that you hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Leonard Cohen caught something in the imagery of a broken Hallelujah. There is something on this night when we sing hallelujah, when hallelujah is on all our altar hangings, on this night when we give praise for the birth of Emmanuel, God with us, on this night when God puts on human flesh and walks among us, as us, with us, that rings true about a broken hallelujah.
In the Gospel, the people of God are ordered to be counted, something that claims them as the Empires’ people and not God’s people that is a broken hallelujah. Jesus is born in a feeding trough in a stable or maybe a cave behind a place where others sit warm and comfortable that is a broken hallelujah. Mary, Joseph and Jesus’ life together begins in poverty; it begins as homeless people, with no comfortable place to lay their heads that is a broken hallelujah. It begins not as a glorious story of joy, but an odd story of broken hallelujahs. Luke keeps this story of Jesus’ birth with the lowly, the poor and the marginal of the earth. It is a dirty story for Luke, unlike other Gospel accounts that dress up the story to make it seem a little more miraculous. The angles do not come to Mary and Joseph; they stay far away from them, in the fields with the shepherds. Luke tells a story that is starkly contrasted with even Matthews’ royal visitors and John’s miracle of Zechariah regaining his speech at the birth of Jesus. Luke keeps it simple, lifting up the symbolism of God’s faithfulness to all of us, to God’s people for whom Jesus has come.
We know all this; we understand this idea of God with us being born in stark contrast to our expectations for the savior of the world, or the King we would desire to have. We understand in our heads why this story is told in this way, but what do we understand in our hearts? It is in our hearts that we allow the spirit to come alive, that we allow God to walk among us, now today, not just as a sanitized safe God, but as a crazy, dangerous and powerfully present God. It is in our hearts that we come to understand that this birth story is more than just a story, and more than just a cute historical reckoning of something that happened 2,000 years ago. In our hearts, we come to understand the power of God’s transforming love for us and we begin to see how we are transfigured by God’s power and love through this simple story of a child’s birth.
Desmond Tutu writes, “Dear child of God, I write because we all experience sadness, we all come at times to despair and we all lose hope that the suffering in our lives and in our world will never end. There is a no such thing as a hopeless case. The most unlikely person, the most improbable situation these are transfigurable and can be turned into their glorious opposites. Indeed God is transforming the world now through us, because God loves us.” Indeed, God is transforming the world now, I love that, God is not done with us, God is not far away from us, God is transforming the world right now as we sit here and listen to God’s words and praise God’s holy name. God is at work among us, God is doing amazing and wonderful things all around us and this birth story as un-miraculous as Luke makes it out to be, is the piece that we hear this silent night. Tutu goes on to write, “God is not in the wind, the earthquake or the fire but in the still small voice. In the hum drum, ordinary, unexpected and unlikely places and people. In a baby in a manger, on a cross, if we just have eyes to see. We see transfiguration at work in the lives of the people all around us. Perhaps even in our own lives.”
Those broken hallelujahs that pull at our hearts to overcome our logical and reasoned minds, those broken hallelujahs that call at us to listen to the poor, the marginal, the people on the fringes of society. Those broken hallelujahs are more than just simple songs with broken tunes; they are God’s hand at work in the world about us. It is in those broken Hallelujahs that we see and experience God alive and present with us, those are the thin places where God is felt more strongly than anywhere else. A year ago, Sara and I were singing a broken hallelujah as our little boy sat tied to tubes and machines waiting to be touched by God. Just under a year ago, we found out Jeff Smith would be singing a broken Hallelujah as he battled with a brain tumor that would eventually take his life. Jane still sings that broken Hallelujah. Kimi Hara and Dorothy Rajacich died this past year, and though they lived full and powerful and amazing ives, it was still a broken hallelujah that we sung in celebrating their lives with us. The broken Hallelujahs have come to us, mostly unexpectedly these past several months, but they have come, and with them Emmanuel, the child born this night, has come also. God wades into our despair, our hopelessness, our sadness and lifts us up, carries us if God must but God remains with us to sustain and nourish our souls and bodies.
This Gospel, this Good News is about the expectations we carry. It is about the fear that we hold on to in order to gain comfort and strength not from God, but from our own actions and being. We place expectations in our lives and in our world so we can control what goes on around us. We have expectations so we can at least have an idea, as small as it really, might be, about what next might come. But this Gospel blows our expectations out of the sky; it dissolves them completely not with violence or force, but with love. The opposite of fear, is not doubt, you have heard me say, the opposite of fear, is faith and maybe tonight, it is love. Maybe tonight love is something that transfigures us in unexpected ways. Maybe tonight love dispels the fears that we have about how we will get to the next moment in our lives, about whether or not we will have enough food to eat, or whether or not we will be able to buy those things that bring us comfort.
Broken hallelujahs abound in our lives, and it is in those broken hallelujahs that we see God’s love for us, that we see God with us, that we see how we are transfigured and made new. We see that even the bad, difficult and secret parts of our beings can be made into their glorious opposites. God is at work in us, and around us and about us. God is always at work and we can choose to see God at work, or we can choose to ignore, through our fear, God at work in us. Through us, this night, as we go out into the silent cold of our little corner of the world, I hope a spark ignites a flame, a flame that warms those cold broken parts of us, a flame that heals and renews those cold and broken hallelujahs we have.
Mary treasured all the words she heard the night Jesus was born. But tonight, we are not Mary, tonight we are not about pondering and treasuring, tonight we are the shepherds, broken and poor, thieves and malcontents, tonight we are the shepherds going from the stable, from the feeding trough where Jesus sleeps, glorifying and praising God for all that we have hears and seen. Tonight, our fears are dispelled by love, tonight our broken hallelujahs are torn apart by God’s emergence into our lives as a living and holy God. Tonight, even we, gathered together as an imperfect people, are transfigured and told the Good News so that we may be made holy and glorify God singing Hallelujah….
I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.
Comments
And Leonard Cohen is an engaging refrence for me. As I write I'm listing to my current Netflix video (that I just finished watching) - Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man. I've been interested in Leonard Cohen since poet, now Parish Administrator at St Paul's Minneapolis took me to hear him at... I think it was the State Theatre. I'm all the more interested since hearing his music on Speaking of Faith & realizing what "Who By Fire" is about, since this video & since your reference. There seems to be something..."connected" about him & his music. Something we need more of at church. Then again, if not, or if we can't get it, as another of his songs says & your sermon seems to be saying: "There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
I like this..very cool. Hope all is going well for you.