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At the beginning of his Gospel, Saint Luke spent more than a chapter setting up the events that led to the coming of Jesus into the world. But then Luke used only one verse to describe the actual birth.

And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. –-Luke 2:7

Mary gave birth in a stable, wrapped her son in strips of cloth to keep him warm, and laid him in a manger. Her baby’s crib was a feeding trough for farm animals . . . because there was no place for them in the inn.

No place. No place for them. No other place to lay one’s head.

It doesn’t take much imagination to realize just how widespread is this experience of “no room in the inn,” no place to call home; no place to be at ease. So much of our modern Christmas mentality and Christmas mythology is about family, about home, about having a place. What’s the holiday song, “I’ll be home for Christmas?” 

And yet the one who’s birthday we celebrate was uprooted from home and extended family in Nazareth and forced to be born in a barn and to sleep in a feeding trough. And in the Gospel of Matthew, who with St. Luke also wrote a birth narrative, the infant Jesus is forced into exile in Egypt.

For many of the world’s people, both in the first century and today, the experience of homelessness is an ever-present reality. For some, they have no place to lay their head because of addiction or mental illness. Others are victims of poverty and economic dislocation. Far too many have had their homes destroyed by the forces of nature. Still others are refugees from home and hearth because of the evil, violence, and hatred that grasps and twists some human hearts.

In Bethlehem’s around the world tonight, God’s children are laying down to sleep with a cardboard box for a manger, some old newspaper for swaddling clothes, a bit of plastic stretched over a pole for a stable . . . because there is no place for them in the inn.

But we don’t have to be homeless refugees to be dislocated and to feel as if we’re not at home. So many of the certainties and securities, which many of us thought we knew, have vanished. In a world of Pandemic, massive job losses and business failures, racial and political distress, global climate change—in a universe of multiple realities, where truth is relative or time-limited, we are afloat, cast adrift, lost in a sea of ideas, beliefs, experiences and ideologies. 

The consumer culture teaches us to value things over relationships through which we discover our humanity.There is a dis-ease in the center of our souls wherein we know that we’re lost, but haven’t a clue about how to get home. This is especially true in a time where we cannot be home with all those we deeply love without putting them and ourselves at risk of illness and death. 

These past few nights many of us have been watching the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. When we look up at the vast array of stars and galaxies in the night sky, it’s a humbling, disorienting realization that we’re but a speck in God’s vast universe. We’re refugees even when we have beautiful homes, paid up pensions, and good health insurance. We yearn for something, someone, more. We have a deep longing for a place that we can call home.

The deep mystery of God calls to us from Bethlehem’s manger. For it’s there that God became human and dwelt among us, experiencing the dislocation and alienation of the human condition. And it’s in that same manger that our hearts can discover their true home. 

G.K. Chesterton captured the wonder of such a thought in his poem, entitled The House of Christmas.

There fared a mother driven forth

Out of an inn to roam;

In the place where she was homeless

All men are at home.

The crazy stable close at hand,

With shaking timber and shifting sand,

Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand

Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,

And strangers under the sun,

And they lay their heads in a foreign land

Whenever the day is done.

Here we have battle and blazing eyes,

And chance and honour and high surprise,

But our homes are under miraculous skies

Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,

Where the beasts feed and foam;

Only where He was homeless

Are you and I at home;

We have hands that fashion and heads that know,

But our hearts we lost – how long ago!

In a place no chart nor ship can show

Under the sky’s dome.

To an open house in the evening

Home shall men come,

To an older place than Eden

And a taller town than Rome.

To the end of the way of the wandering star,

To the things that cannot be and that are,

To the place where God was homeless

And all (people) are at home.

Blessings and joy and exultation. Such celebratory emotions have felt mostly absent this December with the possible exception of the approval of the two coronavirus vaccines. 

The Gospel speaks of the time that Mary went to visit her cousin Elizabeth. Both women were pregnant, and we’re told that when Elizabeth heard the sound of Mary’s voice she said, “The child in my womb leaped for joy.” And shortly after that Mary broke out in song, singing the Magnificat:

“My soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior.”

The news of the day, whatever it might have been, would probably have not been encouraging about a hopeful and joyful world. But here we discover joy and rejoicing nonetheless, despite the darkness of the world around.

A key to understanding Elizabeth and Mary’s joy is embedded in the Magnificat in the line, “He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.” The more contemporary translation is, “He has scattered the proud in their conceit.” And while that may be true, the problem as stated in the older version is with our imaginations. As we look around at the darkness and the anxieties with which we live, can we imagine a different world, a better way—more meaningful and compassionate? So Mary sings her heart out, imagining all sorts of reversals of power and wealth and help for the hungry and lowly when God reigns. 

Some years ago a professor told me, When it comes to preaching at Christmas time, don’t try too hard to explain it. Tell the story. Sing the carols. Let the poetry of the season carry the message.

Writer and researcher Diana Butler Bass tells the story of her friend, theologian Phyllis Tickle, who was lecturing in the Episcopal Cathedral in Atlanta. During a question-and-answer period, a person asked, “Do you believe in the Virgin Birth?” Immediately, another person jumped up and proclaimed, “Of course, the Virgin Birth is true! If it’s not, then how can we believe any of the rest of the Gospels?” And then a shouting match broke out with people loudly arguing various positions. 

Later on, after calm was restored and the session was over, Tickle was approached by a teenager who’d witnessed the whole spectacle. He asked, “What was that about, all those adults arguing about the Virgin Birth?” Before she tried to explain, Phyllis Tickle asked the young man what he thought. And he replied, “The Virgin Birth has to be true, because it’s so beautiful — whether it ever happened or not.”

“Sing Out My Soul” – based on Magnificat by Janet Morley 

Sing out my soul,


sing of the holiness of God: 

who has delighted in a woman,

lifted up the poor, 

satisfied the hungry,


given voice to the silent, 

grounded the oppressor, 

blessed the full-bellied with emptiness,


and with the gift of tears 

those who have never wept; 

who has desired the darkness of the womb, 

and inhabited our flesh.


Sing of the longing of God,


sing out, my soul. 

One of my favorite philosophers is Arlo Guthrie who said, “You can’t have a light without a dark to put it in.” 

Diwali in November – Hindu Festival of Lights

Just concluded Hanuhukkah – the Jewish Festival of Lights

Skandinavia – Dec. 13, Santa Lucia, Teenage girls wear crowns of candles in their Hair

Chinese New Year will be observed with lots of fireworks.

We’ve been lighting our Advent Candles—adding an additional candle weekly—increasing the light.

Here in the shortest days (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), the darkest days of  the year we Christians celebrate the birth of one who is the Light of the World. We decorate our homes and trees and communities with lights. And then after twelve days we observe the Feast of Epiphany with the wisemen following the bright light of a star.

The author of the Fourth Gospel does not have a birth story as such. But here’s how St. John spoke about Christmas.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

Joy to the World! Sing of the longing of God, sing out, my soul.

Gurdon Brewster was a seminarian at Union Seminary in New York City in 1961 when he did a summer internship at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Brewster was white. His father was a lawyer and his mother a pediatrician. He’d gone to boarding school at Philips Exeter Academy. He has written a fascinating account of his Atlanta summer in his book entitled, No Turning Back.^[1]

What was distinctive about Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1961 was that the co-pastors were Martin Luther King, Sr. (known as Daddy King) and his son, Martin Luther King, Jr. Brewster, who’d never preached a sermon before he stood in the Ebenezer pulpit, preached a few times that summer to shouts of  “Amen!” and “Preach it, bother!” and “Praise Jesus!” It was quite disconcerting for this New England Episcopalian. But the shouts of encouragement from the congregation, were punctuated by the deep voice of Daddy King, seated nearby, saying “Make it plain, Brewster, make it plain!”

Not a bad bit of advice for any preacher, especially when the texts seem so dense, so laden with forgotten history and hidden meaning as these from Isaiah and Mark with their images of the end of the world, the great judgment, the coming of Messiah: the heavens torn open, mountains quaking, fires so hot the waters boil, sun and moon darkened, stars falling from the sky, and the powers of the heavens shaken. 

These are apocalyptic texts about the end times. But “apocalyptic” also means “an unveiling” or “revealing.” Biblical authors like Isaiah and Mark use these dramatic images of a supposed distant future to reveal something about the present. The 13^th chapter of Mark was written around the year 70 of the Christian Era just as the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed and the residents of Jerusalem fled the city. The text purports to come from the mouth of Jesus forty years before as a future prophecy, but for the author of the gospel, it’s really a description of current events.

The apocalyptic language of Isaiah was actually a contemporaneous description of the destruction of Jerusalem in the first part of the Sixth Century Before the Christian Era. The Babylonians destroyed the city and the Temple, and carried the residents off into captivity for a period of fifty years. 

The Markan language about “the desolating sacrilege” and “the Son of Man coming in clouds” is actually taken directly from the Book of Daniel, another apocalypse written during the time of the Antiochus IV, the Seleucid Emperor who in 167 BCE desecrated the Temple with the sacrifice of pigs on the high altar and banned all Jewish religious practices.

So what we have here, to make it plain, are apocalyptic projections lifted from earlier contexts and applied to new, current situations.^[2]

These authors are looking around at their contemporary world – especially at the earth-shaking events that called into question the survival of the world as they’ve known it – and they’re asking, “What does it mean?” and “Where is God?”

Isaiah laments, “You used to speak clearly to our ancestors, the great heroes of our past, so where are you now? You talked plainly to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and Elijah. But you’ve hidden your face from us.” “Our world is falling apart. But you are the potter and we are the clay. Make us anew, and sculpt a new world for us.”

When terrorists strike, when hurricanes and earthquakes and fires and famines and floods and Pandemics occur – we, too, look back at the apocalyptic predictions from the past and ask, “Is this the time?” Is this the end? Daily, we listen to the news: economic news, the number of positive COVID tests and hospital admissions; we spin the dials of our radios, scanthe newspapers, click our keyboards, surf the channels of our televisions searching for pundits (prophets) to interpret the signs. 

• “Is this the time?” 
• “What does it mean?” 
• “Where is God?”

Theologian Christopher Hutson has written:

Amid the smoke of battle, the fog of politics, the confusion of economic distress, the babble of would-be leaders wearing God masks and claiming divine authority, how shall we know which way to turn? God’s people should not be surprised or confused, because Jesus warned us ahead of time that such things would happen. 

The powers that be will lull us to sleep by reassuring us that they have our best interests at heart as they pursue their worldly agendas. They play to our fears, our prejudices, our self-interests, so we do not notice their demonic behaviors. Beware. Keep alert. Keep awake. The one who endures to the end will be saved.^[3]

The reality is that although there may one day be a final apocalypse, there have already been multiple apocalypses – ends of worlds as we have known them. The Babylonian Captivity, the Antiochine desecrations, the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, The Black Plague, the Middle Passage, the Trail of Tears, the Holocaust, 9/11, multiple hurricanes and tsunamis, Global Economic Recession, climate change, the Covid Pandemic. Each was an unveiling. 

• September 11 brought to an end the view that we were immune from evil; and revealed that the United States was not the City on a Hill and a New Jerusalem for all people.
• Katrina revealed the racism and poverty that had been so carefully hidden from plain view. 
• The economic apocalypse of 2008 unveiled the greed and collusion that was rampant among bankers, financial institutions, markets, government, and rating agencies. And it revealed the cooperation of many of us who – even if we didn’t know the details of what was happening – nevertheless enjoyed the easy credit, consumer lifestyles, and the upward-spiraling Dow Jones. 
• And the pandemic has certainly revealed just how fragile we are—fragile health, fragile jobs, large and small businesses as risk.

Here at the beginning of Advent, we’re invited to open our eyes and to stay awake. As the world rushes toward another Christmas, with its Black Fridays, Electronics Mondays and 4 a.m. store openings and stampedes, let’s pause to recognize that whenever one world ends, a new one emerges. The Potter’s hand is at the wheel as she reworks the clay and recasts her creation.

The people of God are asked to watch for signs of it, and to listen for the voice of God. It’s a time of waiting for the holy to be born. 

But it’s not just a passive waiting, like a person standing at a bus stop. Rather, it’s an active time of caring for one another, serving the victims, and ministering amidst the brokenness of the latest apocalypse — all the while listening, watching, waiting on God. 

Advent – God is coming – when, where? 

God is speaking – how, what?

God is creating – why, who?

God is. Listen! Watch! Wait!

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^[1] Gurdon Brewster, No Turning Back: My Summer With Daddy King, Orbis Books: 2007.

^[2] See David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, editors, Feasting on the Word, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, 2008, p. 22. 

^[3] Ibid., p. 24.

Always Aim for the Center

This is Christ the King Sunday. Actually, that title is a designation that was adopted in the 1925 by Pope Pious XI.  The Episcopal name for today is The Last Sunday after the Feast of Pentecost. But since the collect for today refers to Christ as “King of Kings and Lord of Lords”, and this morning’s Gospel refers to the Son of Man sitting upon his heavenly throne—It’s been very easy to adopt the Roman Catholic term. 

The Good Friday image, of course, has Jesus wearing a crown—it’s made not of jewels and gold, but of thorns. His kingly robes are stripped from him and he reigns from a throne of wood in the shape of a cross. And on the cross is a sign naming him “King of the Jews”.

But the title of “King” still rankles in our context with its suggestion of royalty and wealth, earthly power and empire. It even spills over into our liturgical life where our bishops wear the trappings of royalty with their purple shirts, copes, and miters. 

Libby Howe, a pastor in our partner denomination, The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, recently wrote the following: 

At least in the United States, Christ the King has become a triumphalist and militaristic image of Ameri-canity bearing no resemblance to the ethic of compassion envisioned in Matthew 25. Because of this perversion, I along with other church leaders, grumble about Christ the King Sunday every year. Can we just not do Christ the King Sunday? Can we skip over the Sunday where we feel compelled to proclaim Jesus as king but use our theological scalpels to detach him from everything associated with kingship and consumer culture like wealth, conquest, victory, supremacy, and nationalism? The grumbling about Christ the King Sunday has become as much a part of the script as the holiday itself, not unlike the annual Feast of Complaining about Commercialization that accompanies Christmas. You know, right before we all go out and buy stuff.” Howe then goes on “to imagine Christ the King Sunday as Christ the Center Sunday.”^[1]

Now that’s an intriguing idea. It is immediately stripped of thoughts of hierarchy and power, and it focuses us on what should really be the center, the heart of it all. Another writer, Audrey West, who teaches New Testament at the Moravian Theological Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, shares this story of a short video about archery. 

It begins with a young man gently tossing a six-inch wooden disk into the air above his head. Seconds later an arrow speeds its way into the face of the disk, fracturing the wood into pieces that scatter on the ground beside the man’s feet. A high-speed camera, replayed in slow motion, captures the arrow’s impact nearly dead center in the disk. 

The next target is a two-and-a-half-inch plastic ball. Again, the arrow launches toward its target and hits it nearly on center. Whether viewed in real time or in slow motion, the evidence is clear.

The archer’s arrow flies three more times, each time into an ever-smaller target, a golf ball, then Life Saver candy, and finally an aspirin tablet. In each case the arrow goes straight to the mark, even when the target is not larger than the diameter of the arrow itself. 

When the show’s host asks how it’s possible to shoot an arrow so accurately using a handmade bow, especially when the target seems so small, the archer replies, “The center of an aspirin is exactly the same size as the center of a beach ball. Always aim for the center.^[2]

Christ as the center of our lives: our worship, our prayers, our work, our play. Christ the center. 

I was thinking about this parable of the sheep and goats. What’s striking about them is that neither the sheep nor the goats were aware of what they were doing or not doing that would earn them eternal life with God. Both groups asked, “When did we see you hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, sick, in prison?” 

The difference between the sheep and the goats was that the sheep were focused on doing right and caring for others—especially the weak and the poor and the vulnerable. They had the same values as Jesus. Like a laser they are those who are centered on the love of neighbor. And in this parable Jesus is saying that loving and caring for the neighbor is the same as loving God and God’s Son. “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

So here we are today, marking the end the Church year, and poised to begin a new one next week on the First Sunday of Advent. The year ending has been one of great difficulty, struggle, and grief. The year to come promises to be similar—at least until late spring or summer—in terms of the Pandemic. We’re hopeful that there will be vaccines and treatments that will be broadly available by mid-year. But both years—and all years are years of the Lord—time marked with Christ at the center . . . at the center of our devotion, the center of our ethics, the center of our behavior. 

One of my favorite hymns is St. Patrick’s Breastplate, and my favorite verse goes like this:

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

Always aim for the center.

Amen!

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^[1] Christian Century, November 4, 2020: Reflections on the Lectionary p. 23

^[2] Christian Century, October 7, 2020: Reflections on the Lectionary p. 21