Putting God in the world

My Christmas Eve reflection at Edgecomb Community Church

I’m feeling kinda partial to babies this year.. anyone with me??

I had a baby this year.

My daughter was born, this year!

Now, technically (literally, spiritually) speaking, it was my wife who had the baby.

What I had was the honor of being there to witness—up close and hands on—the primal miracle of birth.

Emma is preaching this very evening at the church where she’s been serving for the past few years. It’s her last Christmas Eve with them, as we’ll be moving up from Boston in the new year.

Over the past year and a half I’ve been splitting my time between Boston and Midcoast, back and forth a whole bunch. I wore out one Subaru, and got a whole new one.

And I’m so excited to be moving back to Maine after a few years away. And bringing my new family with me.

The sermon that Emma is sharing with her congregation this very evening—she titled: The Risk of Birth.

And it is that, isn’t it? Risky business, birth.

Not only for you mothers who have carried and birthed children. Though certainly there is a special quality to the courageous act of mothering.

But also—for every one of you, every one of us: Being born into this world is both a primal miracle and a radical risk.

Risky because the world is not as we know it could and should be.

Our world is filled to the brim with loneliness and despair, with warfare and violence, with greed and envy, with judgement and hate.

The world we all got born into is not as it could and should be.

And that’s precisely why we do things like this.

We gather to gather what we need in order to steady our hearts, boost our spirits, and ready us to go out and reshape the world.

The past several weeks here at Edgecomb Community Church we have been slowing down each Sunday morning to meditate on the world-changing qualities that this season brings to light..

Hope, Peace, Joy, Love.

We’ve looked at these things considering how—as people of good faith—we are invited to add them to the world, regardless of whether or not we’re feeling them at any particular moment.

I want to point out to you something that you probably already know:

That LOVE is not simply a warm feeling.

And PEACE is different from the mere absence of conflict.

And HOPE is something other than just optimism.

And JOY is different from happiness.

Happiness—as the writer, Frederick Buechner, pointed out to me—comes at us in predictable ways: a happy marriage, a pleasant vacation, a job well done.

But JOY is more surprising than that.

JOY, as often as not, tends to turn up when it’s not being looked for, and in places you’d not necessarily think to look.

HOPE and PEACE and LOVE have the same tendency to turn up in unlikely places.

I can think of one of those unlikely places..

a very particular—smelly, lonely, dark, dank, and frightened—corner of a stable in a small town called Bethlehem, in the hill country of Judea, a place now known as Palestine: Where the JOY of life showed up one starry night a couple of thousand years ago.

I can imagine the primal scream and the final push that resulted that night in an infant child, all gunked up with the goo of birth, lifted with LOVE to his mother’s breast for first communion.

I can feel in my own muscle the HOPE with which that child’s roadweary father scurried around trying to find anything that approximated a clean bundle of cloth to wrap his new child in.

I can look back on this story at the contours of PEACE that took shape in the memories that rippled out from every encounter with the child.

Peace, Hope, Love and Joy are not just sentimental words.

They are the qualities of an active faith.

Faith is often misunderstood as a passive thing. Something that we possess. Something outside of us that we get a hold of, if we’re pious and holy enough.

But that’s not quite right. Faith is active. It’s not something we possess. It’s something that we live. Drawing on the qualities within us, we birth God into the world again and again.

God is often misunderstood as a good luck charm, a sort of totem that we take out from time to time in order to fend off bad feelings or hard realities.

But faith is not passive. And God is not an easy fix.

Faith is active. And God is dynamic—not so much a thing to be believed in as a force to be caught up in—a movement that invites us to participate in the world—as messy as it is—with courageous and illuminating acts of HOPE and PEACE and JOY and LOVE.

The great gift of the Christmas story, in my opinion, is less about who showed up and more about how he did.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad it was Jesus who showed up.

But he was never not going to show up.

God is too biased toward life to not be in it with us.

The great gift of the Christmas story is not that God showed up in human form but the particular way that God went about showing up in human form.

Jesus could have gotten here any old way. But reflecting every year on the particular way that Jesus did show up—in this unlikely story, in the midst of the mess, the child of immigrants on the move, unhoused, underresourced, in the arms of a teenage mother, under the care of a frightened father, against all odds: Reflecting on this story has got to get us asking questions about where else the divine might be showing up in our world in corners where we haven’t bothered to look?

And where else might we go about putting God in the world?

When I think about faith and God I can think of no better way to sum up both than with these words uttered by the 16th century Saint, John of the Cross: “Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love.”

The same can be said for Hope, Peace, and Joy.

Faith is the act of putting these things where they are not. Making Hope, building Peace, cultivating Joy and putting LOVE into the corners of the world where they are least expected.

Let it be known, dear hearts: When we move through the world in these ways, God moves through the world in us.

AMEN