Advent 4 / Christmas Eve (B) + Heart's Home + 12.24.17

M. Campbell-Langdell

All Santos, Oxnard

(2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Canticle 15; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38; Luke 2:1-14)

In today’s reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, Nathan wants to build God a house. This, he thinks, is a way to honor God. But, to paraphrase U2, God needs a house like a fish needs a bicycle!
All heaven and earth is the house of the Lord. Yes there is something special about this house, but it is not because God is here more than anywhere else. What makes it special is that we are more aware of God’s presence here than anywhere else, at least a lot of the time.

God is everywhere. God is in the room with the person breathing his last breath and in the room next door with the young baby breathing one of her first breaths. God is in your friend’s laughter and in the tears of your uncle. God’s wonder and beauty are all over the trees and the sunsets even in the ones that follow the destruction of the wildfires. God is in the kindness of strangers. We don’t have to make God a house. The church is for us to feel God’s presence a bit better. It isn’t, mainly, for God’s sake.
But we can make God a home.
God made the earth God’s home by coming in the form of the lowliest, smallest, most tender and vulnerable child so that we could conceive of something new. That we might, in our hearts, make a home for God.
Oh we had built our monuments to God. Our temples. And we still do.
But…

God doesn’t want our honors with sacrifices and with wooden houses. But God weeps each day and night God feels our hearts straying far from God’s loving presence. When we make choices to satisfy the desires of the world – to fit in or to betray our own values because we fear social rejection or simply being the different one. When we make choices that harm another of God’s beloved children. When we simply forget or deny that God is there, loving us every minute of every hour of every day.

I do not know about you, but all the time, I have to decide how to be. And sometimes I make bad choices. And sometimes I make better ones. But every day that I wake up I can decide anew to make my heart a home for God.

During Advent we speak of fearful things- of things we do not understand like Jesus’ second coming and how that might be. But we also hear of God’s promises. God’s promise to return to us.
And we know, in Jesus, that whatever we may have previously understood about God, that God’s main nature is love and relationship.

God’s promise is sure. God is coming. And we know this because God came in the tiny infant form of Jesus.
And for a moment, it all depended on a girl. A lovely quote by Frederick Buechner goes thus:

“She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he'd been entrusted with a message to give her, and he gave it. He told her what the child was to be named, and who he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon her. "You mustn't be afraid, Mary," he said. As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn't notice that beneath the great, golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl.”[1]

And thanks be to God, that girl said yes! Oh that holy yes. One of those “yeses” that make creation grind sternly forward and whirl in dance at once! And so today we transition from promise to joy, from expectation to exultation because God came in the form of a babe.

God loved us so much she came to dwell with us. To pitch her tent with us. Whether we snore or not. Whether we are inside a church building or sleeping out under a tree under the stars, God wanted to be with us. With us!

God in fact is with us here, as we respond to the needs of the now. And God will be with us sooner than we think, later than we may expect.

Let us celebrate God’s first coming to us in Jesus and in the promise that Jesus will come again, but perhaps more urgently let us clear out the cobwebs in our hearts, the things that draw us back from that childlike wonder and openness and acceptance of God in our lives. I don’t know how, we none of us know when, but may you have a moment this day or this week or this season when God stumbles into your heart like some friendly joy-drunk fool and you can’t help but grin and be engulfed in the bear hug wideness of God’s grasp and God’s love enfolding you. And as you settle in to the feeling, may you feel God removing the stinging toxin of all that has plagued you this past year, until you feel spiritually renewed, like a baby ready to enter this callous and lovely old world again to make it just a bit more loving and just, one more time, for one more year. Wise, but wondering as a child. Amen.

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[1] Frederick Buechner, from Peculiar Treasures and Beyond Words and reprinted at: http://www.frederickbuechner.com/quote-of-the-day/2016/9/24/gabriel.