Saturday, December 25, 2010

Christmas Proclamation

Christmas Proclamation

© copyright 2010, Robert J. Elder

Christmas Eve: December 24, 2010

Comedian George Carlin said he once entered a bookstore and approached the clerk to ask where the self-help books were located. The clerk responded, “Well, if we told you, it would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?”1 The implication being, of course, that in the end, we can only really count on ourselves for help, we are all alone in this business of living.


After all is said and done, Christmas is a sort of divine declaration that self-help won’t/can’t do the whole job, will never get us where we need to be. There is no question that anyone can work on personal issues; personal improvement is always a worthy goal, but the gift of a Savior – which is what this night represents after all – is a powerful declaration about the very nature of God, that God recognizes our innate inability to rescue ourselves from everything that life has done to us, and that we have done to one another. We need help. We need a Savior.


One of the most ancient Advent carols, with words dating clear back to the 4th century, offers these words to people seeking the child who will be the salvation of us all. The first line of this song was sung by the choir from the rear of the church at my home church almost every Sunday of the year during my childhood and youth, as the choral call to worship. I can hear it in my memory to this day, reverberating through that gothic-style stone sanctuary:


Let all mortal flesh keep silence,

And with fear and trembling stand;

Ponder nothing earthly minded,

For with blessing in His hand,

Christ our God to earth descendeth,

Our full homage to demand.

King of kings, yet born of Mary,

As of old on earth He stood,

Lord of lords, in human vesture,

In the body and the blood;

He will give to all the faithful

His own self for heavenly food.

Rank on rank the host of heaven

Spreads its vanguard on the way,

As the Light of light descendeth

From the realms of endless day,

That the powers of hell may vanish

As the darkness clears away.2


Let’s think for a moment about this ancient affirmation, how it describes what the Christ child comes to do for us, and the unique way in which he does it. The first stanza declares that Christ comes to us – the carol says he descends, as from the sky perhaps, but you are free to imagine him coming to you across a windswept meadow or from the other side of a crowded parking lot, the effect is the same. He fixes his gaze on us, and he comes to us. Without our having known it fully, we stood in need of a Savior, and one was provided, entirely apart from our ability or inclination to conjure one up. This is the caring love of God, expressed the same way people feed their own children, without regard to questions of their deserving or not deserving food, we come to them and we feed them. It is the way we hasten to warn someone who is about to step off a curb into the path of an oncoming bus. They didn’t know they needed saving, but that made their plight no less desperate, and we call out to them nonetheless.


Which brings to my mind the second stanza of the carol. “King of kings, yet born of Mary...” The sheer incongruity of the image of the highest king our minds can conceive, brought to birth by the merest peasant girl; this combined with “He will give to all the faithful his own self for heavenly food.” He comes in the most inconspicuous way, and in coming, delivers himself entirely into our deepest place of need, making available his very body, the very blood of his veins, everything he has and is. Every time we eat the bread and drink the cup at the Lord’s Supper we remember this one who comes to us, unbidden, rescuing us, devoting on our behalf the very essence of his life to our well-being. It’s an astounding thought if we stop to think about it.


The third stanza takes Christ back to heaven, but not without his having changed what happens on earth for all time. “Light of light,” he causes the brooding powers of all that is evil to recede in his light, and clears out the darkness the way a housekeeper removes the dusty bed sheets covering the beautiful furniture in a long-neglected home before it is restored to its old glory.


Why does the Christ child come to us? “That the powers of hell may vanish.” Anyone who lives in this world knows there is plenty more vanishing that needs to be done before that task of the Christ child is accomplished. Still, the Christmas celebration of his first arrival reminds us that the work of Christ is underway at this very moment in every nation on every continent.


“That the powers of hell may vanish…”


Reflecting on that, I want to share with you a recent reflection on Christmas from a young college student. He wrote the following note after the annual, beautiful Christmas season program on the Willamette University campus in Salem two weeks ago. My wife Christine directs the women’s choir, there is also a men’s chorus and a mixed chorus. In all about 120 singers and 20 or so orchestra players. With that background, I found this to be a remarkable reflection on this young fellow’s experience of college life.


Dear Choir Directors:

Thank you for another glorious Christmas in Hudson (Hall). I think that for many of us it’s the high point of the semester, and I know that these two days and the preceding months of preparation will figure prominently in my fondest and most vivid memories of Willamette. I want to share with you a short story, an experience I had that gave this Christmas in Hudson a very special meaning for me. So begging your indulgence, I’ll give you a little background.


Every weeknight a small group of friends and I gather to pray for our university – sometimes we sing in prayer, walk around campus in prayer or just sit in a room in silent prayer. Well, on Thursday night after the concert, we got to do something a little more unusual. A lady from a local church called us. She opens her doors to several homeless folks, sheltering them and feeding them. One of these had relapsed that day. After 14 months of sobriety under her care and influence, he gave in again, stumbling back to her, soaked, inebriated and ashamed. She was discouraged, obviously, and wanted our presence and our prayers. So she called that night.


Less than an hour after performing in Hudson, drinking in the warmth, the light, the radiant joy, the dignity, beauty, pageantry – after living in the wonderful celebration of worship for the infant king, I found myself surrounded by the darkness, the harsh city sounds, trying to stay warm, trying to stay dry, on the porch of an unfamiliar house with a drunken man at my feet, entreating God that He would make Himself known here, that He would intervene, heal and restore.


The dichotomy of the two worlds distracted me for a while, but as my friends and I prayed together, I began to understand something new, to get glimpses of a certain sameness between them. “The Lord God omnipotent reigneth." I had sung those words in a place of comfort and peace, amid excellence and splendor. But my removal from a building didn’t diminish the truth of the text. Omnipotent, He reigns. Everywhere. Here in the darkness His glory is undimmed – indeed, it’s the only thing shining. “The angels sungen the shepherds to.” To whom? Poor workers on the outskirts of a no-name town. To these, to the lowly ones, and to the discouraged woman and the ashamed reprobate, the angels declare a message of salvation.


More than this, I was struck with the realization that our celebration, as glorious and grand as it was, can’t approach the magnificence, the reckless and exuberant abandon that goes on in the throne room of heaven when this lady acts as Christ to the needy, or when the needy respond and welcome Him into their hearts.


So we prayed. After a time, we helped the man to a bed and took our leave.


In the comfort of my dorm room, I knew that I had encountered God in two profound ways – each one glorious, each one rich, but I don’t know that I would have recognized the beauty in the dark cold and wet had it not been for the wonder of the first. There are so many reasons to put on Christmas in Hudson: it serves the community, gives us a chance to sing great literature, it’s a mainstay of the university. But I need to thank you because it was something else for me this year. Thank you for your dedication to excellence, your sincerity, enthusiasm, vision, and most importantly your willingness to lead us in the adoration of the Christ child. You helped to make my experience transformative and revelatory; I learned something deeper about “our Lord and His Christ.” And every time God is glorified like He was on Thursday and Friday, there is the opportunity for transformative experience. So with all of my heart, thank you for Christmas and Hudson. I really can’t tell you how much it means.

- Dan Daly

The King of glory comes to us this night, in whatever place of need we may find ourselves. The Lord comes, whether in the shape of glorious angels, or a handful of ministering college students. The Lord came, and is coming still. Let all mortal flesh – which is everyone here and anywhere the word is proclaimed – let us all offer our full homage to the King of kings.


Copyright © 2010 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1. Publishers Weekly. October 18, 2004, alt.'

2. From Liturgy of St. James, 4th century.




Sunday, December 5, 2010

Making Welcome


Making Welcome

copyright © 2010, Robert J. Elder, Pastor

Second Sunday in Advent: December 5, 2010

Romans 15:1-13

Welcome one another, therefore,

just as Christ has welcomed you,

for the glory of God.

“The abominable greeting.”


I have heard it called that.


Here at First Church, Vancouver, we have been calling it the “passing of the peace.” I have also heard it called the “fellowship moment,” and the “ritual of friendship,” among other things. I hear occasional complaints about it, praise for it, questions concerning it, but mostly, it provides barely even a dent in our worship life, it is but a blip on the liturgical radar screen, a whispered hello, and handshake or two, and then it’s gone.


When any of us tries to think about what is the essence, the main event or outcome of worship – if we think about it at all – probably we would offer a variety of perspectives. I doubt, however, that many of us would offer the opening greeting or the passing of the peace as the highlight of our worship experience. More’s the pity, because if the New Testament writers recommended anything to those earliest Christian churches, it was the blessing of hospitality, of welcome, and, most especially, the welcoming of strangers.


Probably all would agree that a church ought to be welcoming. But what do we mean by that? Exactly whom do we think we are welcoming? People just like us? People slightly different than we are? People drastically different than we are? More importantly, how do we express the thing we call welcome in such a way that those outside the church family would see it, experience it as true about who we are? And how do we go about making this an important aspect of worship?


It might alarm, or even frighten us to know in our flu-bug-sensitive, vaccine-seeking age, that there were churches in those earliest days of gatherings of Christian believers that passed the kiss of peace. Some still follow that practice. Yet for stout Northern European types, among others, the practice, if it survived at all, eventually devolved into the much less intimate business-handshake of peace, or, as I recall from my long-ago sojourn in the South, the “Texas howdy of peace.”


Recently I read that in some church assemblies, word has come from denominational authorities offering permission for folks to skip the kiss and even the handshake of peace in favor of the more sanitary “wave of peace.” The whole point of the kiss of peace, of course, is that a kiss is intimate, germs and all. And by this action, members of the community of faith are meant to remember that Christ would have us be reconciled to one another, even “leaving our offering at the altar,”1 as scripture says, to reconcile with one another before going about our religious rituals. It was meant to be a gesture of intimacy among those who had formed a small, faithful community for Christ in the midst of a world that barely knew who Jesus was, if they knew of him at all. Genuine affection would be hard to miss if we were asked to kiss each other as worship got under way. Even the simpler greetings we do make would cause some to wince in discomfort in churches that do no such thing.


OK, I suspect some of our personal space intrusion-meters might be starting to click like Geiger counters, so let me put fears to rest, or at least at ease. There are no plans afoot to initiate the practice of the free-for-all exchanging of the kiss of peace in the sanctuary. After all, we don’t live in the first century, which is one of the many things about which we don’t need to feel guilty. We aren’t a community of believers on the far margins of a culture at best ignorant of, at worst hostile to our faith and the community in which we celebrate it, as those first Christians were.


Still, I find myself cycling back to the many, many admonitions to the earliest church communities to be communities of welcome, and I do think if we need to recognize our shortcomings about anything, we need to recognize them when we fail the test of Christian welcome, in any form that welcome might take. There is little chance we will be found overly welcoming, our particular shortcomings are more likely to run the other way.


In the New Testament, words for welcome occur 46 times; for greetings 61 times; for hospitality 7 times. The word kiss appears 15 times, though, as we know, not always in a happy context, since Judas was known to have betrayed Jesus with a kiss in the gospels. Still, there is plenty of kissing apart from that unhappy scene, as when the Ephesian church elders said their farewells to the apostle Paul with weeping and kissing.2 This was a description of hospitable kissing, the Ephesian version of the Texas howdy of peace.


In other words, making welcome is, in the New Testament, a high-level Christian duty, right up there alongside jacking the log up out of our own eyes before pointing out specks in others’, and practicing kindness to the poor, the powerless, the weak and the suffering. But this sounds so great to hear, it is often not so easy to do. After all, since, biblically speaking, welcome is not intended only for those already in the community of faith, there is a high likelihood that welcome to those currently outside the community will include a welcome to some outsiders whose presence we might even find discomforting. Yet scripture seems clear, welcome is meant to be expansive, not restrictive. Paul’s words certainly provide a case on that point.


In Paul’s day, Jewish Christian believers worshiped right alongside non-Jewish Christians, often referred to as Gentiles, which, really, meant anyone not born a Jew. Because most faithful Jews grew up with a laundry list of religious practices we associate with the Old Testament – like refraining from eating pork or other meat the Old Testament law declares to be unclean, circumcision as a religious requirement for males belonging to Israel – there was a tendency in the earliest churches for conflicts to develop between those who believed that to be faithful followers such requirements as circumcision were still required, and those who didn’t. It doesn’t make much sense to revisit those ancient quarrels which are no longer our quarrels, except to find in them the opportunity to ask what barriers we may place between ourselves and others in our own time when, as Paul said,


“Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. Christ became a servant of the circumcised [that is, the Jewish believers] on behalf of the truth of God, in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.”


Pretty clearly, Paul says that the welcome of Christ came first, his decision to become a “servant” for the sake of all, Jews and Gentiles, equally. If his welcome can be so global, how can ours be any less? He who died that all might be one is crucified again when we seek to divide, when we fail to welcome one another “just as Christ has welcomed you.” If Christ offers welcome, we must let go of any barriers dividing us and also welcome one another. It is a religious act, not just a way of being neighborly, and it is meant not only to transform us but to transform the world. And the world will be transformed when all who confess Jesus as Lord, believing God raised him from the dead, are found together in the same worshiping community, celebrating his gift of himself at the same table.


A friend of mine was preparing to retire from ministry after 37 years in the same church when he shared his delight in his memories of speaking with the children in that church in the annual season of Advent. Something he reflected on with great joy is an experience many of us have come to cherish in our own church life, and that is the telling of the story of Jesus’ birth to the children. If you’ve ever attempted to “tell” a group of children this particular story – or any other story really – in a way that takes the children seriously, you will know that “telling” is not really the right word. Even many very young children, given a chance to speak, already know so much of the story, it is astonishing. They are generally eager to supply details about names and places as hands shoot up with eagerness to be part of the telling. And then their own stories begin to weave into the big story, the “travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem,” calls up memories of recent family trips, and mention of names like Joseph and Mary elicit the naming of their own fathers and mothers.


Why do children feel this way? Because they instinctively know they have been welcomed in the church, this story is as much theirs as it is ours – maybe more so in a way. They are at home at church, and they feel it, they know it. Children understand this effortlessly and at this season of the year it is they who welcome us to join in the telling, so that the story of Jesus “becomes our story and our story to tell.”3


As we move through Advent with it’s built-in longing for Christmas and the arrival of the Christ who receives us all, it is especially good for us to think again and again on ways in which we receive each other in his name. If reaching toward another person in welcome and fellowship seems a bit of a strain, we need to think of it like the strain required for muscles to become stronger. Though the process may require some discomfort, in the end, it’s a good thing, the healthy thing to do.


In the name of the One who is coming to us, may we always welcome one another, as well as those whom, year by year, Christ is bringing to our faith and fellowship; because in doing so, we welcome Christ himself.


Copyright © 2010 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 George Chorba, in The Pipe Organ, New Vernon, NJ, December, 2004.

2 Matthew 5:23

3 Acts 20:37