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Room For God, After All

 

O sing to the LORD a new song,

for he has done marvelous things.

(Psalm 98:1a)

 

A Christmas Eve meditation by Siegfried S. Johnson on December 24, 2007

Volume 2 Number 25

First United Methodist Church, 605 West 6^th Street, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

 

(Visit our website at www.fumcmh.org for more of Rev. Johnson’s

sermons/devotionals and information about FUMC Warren)

 

 

“O sing to the LORD a new song” seems a bit out of place on Christmas Eve, does it not?  The songs we sing tonight are anything but new.   O Come All Ye Faithful.  O Little Town of Bethlehem.  Angels We Have Heard on High.  These are the songs of the Season whose message we know well.  Christmas inevitably draws us to the past, to a rich store of memories and yet we desire, somehow, to hear it as “a New Song.”  How is this possible? 

 

In our responsive Pastoral Greeting you said, “How can this Good News be a new song for us to sing?  Is this not the story we have heard all our lives?”  I responded, “Indeed, it is a story we all know well, and yet yearn to know again and, perhaps, wish we had never heard, so that the message would be heard again as for the first time, leaving us aghast at such a radical notion, the scandal of the Word become flesh, of the divine becoming human, of God becoming Bethlehem’s baby in a manger.”

 

How might I find a way to help you hear the story in a way that fills you with Wonder rather than mere nostalgia?   Ironically, our familiarity with the Christmas story can work against us.  Listening can take considerable effort, for our natural inclination is to coat over the rawness of the biblical message with sentimental memories – images of storefront nativity scenes and Santa Clauses, of light displays, shopping trips, and family gatherings.  At the thought of Christmas our senses recall the pleasant odors of Christmas cookies baking more than the offensively stale odors of a stall.

 

As magnificent as the words are, The Word became flesh, we’ve heard them so often that our minds can slip into automatic pilot at their reading, so that as we hear the Holy Wonder of God becoming flesh, we may suddenly remember that we forgot to take the rolls out to thaw, or find ourselves wondering if the gift we bought for our sister-in-law is appropriate.

 

Confession time.  The contemplative in me tends to enjoy Advent more than Christmas.  Advent seems always fresh, precisely because it is mostly uncluttered by nostalgia.  We experience Christmas with an ever-expanding treasure chest of memories.  But a treasure chest of Advent memories?  Not likely.  Advent is refreshingly uncluttered, making it easier for us to hear the New Song of how God is working in our lives and our world.  Relatively empty, there is room in Advent that waits to be filled. 

 

How can we approach the Christmas story as empty, rather than as full already?  I want to conclude by telling you about a self-confessed atheist, Dana Tierney, whose emptiness is crying out for God and who, in a very real way, is hearing a New Song.  She wrote an essay for the New York Times Magazine called, Coveting Luke’s Faith.  Dana wasn’t writing about the Luke of scripture, whose Christmas story we have read tonight, but rather about her four year old son, Luke.  She opens by remembering her childhood, her Sunday School experiences, her innocent faith and questions, confessing that, soon enough, the Old Story was not able to meet the criteria of her newly educated mind.  Her confession is, “I am unable to believe in God.” 

 

Her atheism, however, is not an atheism of which she is proud, but has become, in recent events, a self-perceived emptiness, an emptiness which is opening her heart to hear a New Song. “Most of the other atheists I know seem to feel freed or proud of their unbelief, as if they’ve cleverly refused to be sold snake oil.  But over the years, I’ve come to feel I’m missing out.  My friends and relatives who rely on God . . . have an expansiveness of spirit.  When they walk along a stream, they don’t just see water falling over the rocks; the sight fills them with ecstasy.  They see a realm of hope beyond this world.  I just see a babbling brook.  I don’t get the message.” 

 

Allowing that the baptism of their son was only to reassure family members, she says, “I assumed we had stranded our four-year-old son, Luke, in the same spiritually arid place we’d found ourselves in.  When my husband went to Iraq for several months, I thought Luke and I were in it together, a suddenly single mom and a nervous little boy whose daddy was in a war zone.”  But Dana received a revelation, a New Song, one day while she and Luke watching television.  There was a story on about a soldier home on leave, getting married, soon to go back to Iraq.  And Dana caught it out of the corner of her eye, her son Luke, hands pressed together and head quickly and quietly bowed.  “What are you doing?” Dana asked.  

 

Luke shyly confessed, “I was saying a prayer for Daddy.”

 

“‘That’s wonderful, Luke,’ I murmured, abashed that we had somehow made him embarrassed to pray for his father in his own home.  It was as if that mustard seed of faith had found it’s way into our son and now he was revealing that he could move mountains . . . I was envious of him.  Luke wasn’t rattled, because he believed that God would bring his father home safely.  I was the only one stranded.” 

 

“I was the only one stranded.”  Ah, but you see Dana, it is precisely to those who feel themselves stranded that this message comes.  And suddenly, Dana heard the Old Song of her childhood as a New Song of hope, a gift given to her by her four year old son, Luke.  Her self-confessed emptiness invited God to enter and fill her.   Dana found that she has, in her heart, Room for God, After All. 

 

She writes, “My husband did return from Iraq safely, but if something had happened to his father, Luke would have known his Dad was in heaven, waiting for us.  He doesn’t suffer from a void like the anguished father in Mark 9 . . . who cried out with tears, ‘Lord, I believe.  Help thou mine unbelief.’”

 

“For Luke, all things are possible.  At the end of his life, he will be reunited in heaven with his heroes and loved ones, Mom and Dad and George Washington, his grandparents and Buzz Lightyear.  Luke’s prayers can stretch to infinity and beyond, but I am limited to one: Help thou mine unbelief.”

 

Ah, but don’t you see, Dana?  That is a good prayer, the best of all prayers.   If one is limited to a single prayer, let it be this, “Lord, help thou mine unbelief,” for the prayer itself brings salvation, this cry in the darkness for the light that came on Christmas Day, this emptiness of heart which, once discovered and confessed, shows that there is, “Room for God, After All.”  

 

May there be on this Christmas Eve, in each of each, Room for God, After All.

 

Sources and notes:

The spark of inspiration for the writing of this sermon came from an essay by Dana Tierney, “Coveting Luke’s Faith,” originally published in The New York Times Magazine.  I found the essay in a collection titled, The Best American Spiritual Writing, edited by Philip Zaleski (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2005, pp. 185-187).