Embracing Vulnerability

Bible Text: Matthew 2:18; Isaiah 61: 10 – 62:3; Psalm 148; Galatians 4: 4-7; Luke 2: 22-40 | Preacher: Rev. Scott Agur

Imagine the spiritual and emotional toll on Mary and Joseph during this past year.  They are given a divine mission to complete.  These two new parents are within the first forty days of their baby’s life.  They have journeyed from Nazareth to Jerusalem, to Bethlehem and back to Jerusalem during a time of emotional and physical exhaustion.  The text opens with the young and weary Mary and Joseph at the temple with their new baby boy.  After many sleepless, uncomfortable nights, they meet two elders who know something about time.  These elders have been waiting for a lifetime to see the Messiah.  It appears that Mary and Joseph have brought the baby Jesus to the temple in their arms.

Simeon and Anna have waited a lifetime for this moment to find perfect peace.  For Joseph and Mary it is only the beginning of their stewardship of a favored life.  This is the beginning of a journey of unanswered questions for first-time parents.  They know that they have a long way to go in their responsibility as parents to fulfill the divine promise of parenthood they have made to God.

Joseph and Mary are young people of limited means, who struggle to get to Bethlehem for the census.  While there is no room at the inn, one might wonder if the new dad possesses the resources for a hotel stay.  He stands by helpless, vulnerable and poor, watching the mother of his child give birth next to beasts of burden.  After his divine child’s arrival in the world, he witnesses shepherds and others worshiping him.  Then he is faced with his human role as a provider in the time beyond birth.  All he has to offer his son is a life tied to the limitations of a father’s social location.

We live in a society where it is hard to understand the blessings in poverty.  Mary and Joseph, like many poor parents in our midst today, are trying to be faithful, but the journey is not easy.  In the context of the capitalism of our generation, it is hard to accept the idea of being blessed but not prosperous.

We say that they are ‘blessed’, that they hold new life and future possibilities in their arms. We say that they possess faith, and yet they must find a way to afford the social expectations of church life.  For many of the poor but faithful in our time, this is still a painful reality. And yet in their vulnerability lies their hope (and ours) for a closer walk with community and with God.

Every day Joseph and Mary know that they are vulnerable.  Every day they know that they must embrace their vulnerability, or erase it and live disconnected and lonely lives.  This elemental choice largely determines the texture and the trajectory of our personal and communal lives.  The former choice leads to flourishing.  The latter leads to a downward spiral of disengagement, isolationism, mutual suspicion, violence and despair.  Christmas is God’s embrace of vulnerability.  Christmas is God’s act of hallowing vulnerability by entering human history as a fragile child and living a life of nonviolent love.

This Christmas season, as we live in the wake of the violence committed against innocent civilians near the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, we are once more confronted with a basic decision:  heed the Christmas call to vulnerability or refuse it in a futile quest to arm ourselves against each other, thereby severing the bonds that make a humane and enriching life possible.

Las Vegas and Jesus’ Bethlehem are bound together by a common horror: the slaughter of the innocents.  In Matthew’s telling of Jesus’s birth, King Herod hears from the wise men disturbing word of a newborn king.  Frightened by this possible threat to his power, he orders the execution of every child under two born in and around Bethlehem. Matthew 2:18 tells the tragic story:

“A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.” (Matthew 2: 18).

As soon as news of the shooting in Las Vegas began to break, biblically literate Facebook folk began to post on their walls this harrowing verse from the Gospel of Matthew, thereby calling to mind the connection between Las Vegas and Bethlehem.

Reading this text each year compels Christians to confront a hard truth:  the Prince of Peace enters a wounded world in which there is no peace.  This biblical scene of violence reminds Christians that we have always been asked to perform a difficult task: we are called to proclaim the coming of Emmanuel, God with us, in just those places and times when God seems most absent.

The slaughter of the innocents and the birth of a child in excruciating vulnerability: this is a profoundly counterintuitive way to speak of God’s coming.  Unlike the light and the unblemished merriness that we wish each other every Christmas, the Bible offers no happily-ever-after fairy tale.  The world into which the Christian Messiah enters is shattered by terror and ruled by a harsh and merciless Roman imperial power.

But when God assumes flesh and enters the world, this very world is accepted and embraced.

God does not first remake the world in order to enter it, and entering the world does not diminish the dignity of divinity.  The incarnation affirms that our fragility and frailty are not contrary to divine intention.  Rather, they too are taken up by divinity when God becomes flesh.  This world, as it stands, offers the necessary conditions for love and community.  The coming of God as a child affirms that this fragile world is as it ought to be.

God does not come to eradicate vulnerability but to teach us how to welcome it, precisely in our delicate bonds with each other. From womb to tomb, Jesus lives under the watchful eye of Rome’s proxy rulers.

The threat of violence, arrest and execution haunts his ministry. It is precisely under these conditions that Jesus proclaims his good news of love of neighbor and love of enemy.  Jesus does not issue his call to love in an era that was kinder and less brutal than our own.  Instead, he teaches that love is the energy that is released when vulnerability is embraced.  Love is the celebration of our mutual entanglement and our inseparability.

By contrast, every attempt to escape vulnerability brings about a loss of community.  When we arm and barricade ourselves against each other, we sever the ties that bind. When we attempt to undo our vulnerability, we are caught in a logical and practical contradiction:  we cannot simultaneously move away from and move toward those whom we are called to love.

The American love for the gun and the National Rifle Association’s vision of an armed and militarized way of life are an inversion of the Christmas celebration of the holiness of vulnerability.  When we seek refuge in the gun, we refuse our unbearable proximity to each other.  Devotion to the gun amounts to an inhuman quest to overcome our vulnerability: the very thing that binds us to each other in need and love.  The NRA’s control over the political agenda of America is obscene and terrifying.

Jesus’ message to his age and to ours is clear:  put down your weapons.  You cannot defeat your enemies by means of power and violence.  Only love can suffice.  This is the message of Christmas, and in its light, Christians must testify that love for the gun is idolatrous:  the worship of a false God that cannot save.  What Jesus said of money is true also for the gun.  You cannot worship God and Smith and Wesson.  Every weaponized attempt to escape our vulnerability is doomed to fail.

Rather, we must labor to build the beloved community in which we can be vulnerable together in mutual care and love.  This holy work is our only hope.

The text tells us that Simeon is “guided by the Spirit” to come into the temple at the appointed time.  When he arrives, he sees two young parents who have come a long way, to follow the law of the Lord and offer a sacrifice for their child.  These young parents, like many others of that time, could have made the decision to give up on the faith, because it costs too much.  Mary and Joseph remain, however, committed to the rituals of the faith, even though religion is costing them the daily resources they need for survival.

Simeon is a seasoned person of faith.  As one who has a deep relationship with God, he has surely taken note of numerous young families coming and going from the temple.  Simeon is expecting a miracle and waiting for the Messiah.  When he sees that this young family brings only turtledoves, he knows they did not have the funds to offer a lamb.  In other words, Simeon in a moment knows that the long-awaited Savior of the world is being raised by parents in poverty and vulnerability.

What does all of this mean to us as we attempt to live in Christian community?  Dr. Brene Brown, a thoughtful American author and educator, in her most recent book, “Braving the Wilderness:  the Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone”, suggests that “…belonging is the innate human desire to be part of something larger than we are.  Because this yearning is too primal, we often try to acquire it by fitting in and by seeking approval, which are not only hollow substitutes for belonging, but often barriers to it.  Because true belonging happens only when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our sense of self-acceptance.”

What makes you and I vulnerable, makes us beautiful.  Vulnerability is the core of shame, fear and our struggle for meaning.  But vulnerability is also the birthplace of joy, creativity and love. The way to live is through our vulnerability.  We numb vulnerability.  But we live in a vulnerable world:  we are the most in debt, obese, addicted and medicated cohort in the free world.  We numb happiness.  We think about vulnerability as a dark emotion, as the core of fear, shame and disappointment.  We ‘armour out’.

Vulnerability is the centre of challenging emotions, but also the birthplace of love, empathy and caring.  If there is no vulnerability, there is no empathy.  If there is no empathy, there is no true community.

Brene Brown suggests that Spirituality is “…recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and in compassion..”

This first Sunday after Christmas opens with a text of ferment from Isaiah.  Here is the social radical, the visionary, the street warrior arming himself for the sake of the city.  While the departments and committee rooms are closed for the holiday, this warrior seizes the moment to press for a broader vision.

What are we feeling and thinking this morning?  Perhaps on this first Sunday after Christmas our expectations are dropping.  The festive mood so doggedly maintained against deadly, daily news is replaced by the “post-Christmas Exhale”.  People wonder what the season has to do with the days ahead.  Perhaps there is joy in our hearts.  Or perhaps a shadow has crossed our path.

Touched by Isaiah’s vision, Jesus becomes the Righteous one alive in flesh, word and spirit. Such grace rises and walks among us.  Theologian Jurgen Moltmann suggests something that I think fits with the joyful journey to which we are called.  He says, “…optimism is based on the possibilities of things as they have come to be.  Hope is based on the possibilities of God, irrespective of how things are…Hope is grounded in the faithfulness of God and on the effectiveness of God’s promise.”  The Prophet underscores this hope by planting his listeners in a springtime garden.

In 1945, in the wake of a world-rattling war, Ruth Krauss wrote a children’s book called “The Carrot Seed.”  This book is as profound as it is brief.

A young boy plants a carrot seed.  He tends to the weeds and waters the ground, but his parents and older brother are not optimistic.  Still, the boy tends the plot and waters the ground.  Then one day, a carrot comes up just as the boy had known that it would.  The carrot is larger than life, larger than the boy….The image of that carrot underscores the promise of bounty and new life for us on this Sunday on the very edge of a 2018.

It calls us to cross the threshold of hope, where old wounds are healed, where impossibility yields to God’s ability to bring something green from the cold ground. And it calls us to consider the new life that God has brought forth in Bethlehem.

Like the carols that linger in our hearts on this first Sunday after Christmas, this passage from Isaiah celebrates God’s desire to be with God’s people in a new way. The promise of reconciliation gives us hope. The promise of God’s steadfast love gives us reason to sing again.  From age to age, our congregations repeat the sounding joy:  “I will greatly rejoice in Jesus, my whole being shall exult in my God.”

Today’s Psalm speaks to us wherever we are in this Christmas Season.  On this first Sunday after Christmas, commonly called a “low Sunday”, Paul calls us to be lifted impossibly high….

On a day when worship attendance in most congregations is low, a day when choirs deservedly take a vacation after the vocal workout of Advent and when the euphoria of Christ’s birth has turned to postpartum exhaustion, Paul, ever the counter culturalist, calls the church and its culture to a vivid, almost pentecostal transformation.  Our hearts, our over-indebted, over sweetened, very over Christmas hearts are directly injected with the Spirit of God’s Son.

….May there be in your hearts the sense that God has quietly given you a mission to fulfill. Perhaps you are at the beginning of your stewardship with God.  Or maybe you have been opening your heart to God for a long time.  In either case, may this be the moment when you show up at the temple with the Christ child in your heart to receive blessing, direction and love. In that moment may you realize more than ever, that God journeys with you and loves you…..

May this be so.  Amen.