Watching and Waiting – Julia Aegerter – Dec. 22, 2002
The Christmas Season is a time of waiting. And though we celebrate Christmas every year – the world is still waiting. Watching and waiting – waiting and watching – for what we are not quite sure.
According to the Christian Scriptures – there was an ordinary man, a carpenter, who was to marry a woman named Mary. When he found out his bride was pregnant he decided to quietly divorce her. Now according to the law of his day, he was to report this and his betrothed was to be stoned and for some reason he decided to spare her the humiliation of being publicly accused and also a death by stoning. Did you ever wonder what made this guy go against the law of the day?
And then the story continues. It says that one night in his sleep Joseph was visited by an angel who told him to keep her as his wife; that the baby was from the Holy Spirit and they should name the baby boy Jesus.
Now it is hard enough for me to imagine being a father. Actually, it is quite impossible. But if you were the father to be and you had this dream – what would you think? The phrase, “you must be kidding”, comes to mind. Maybe you would add an expletive or two. I don’t know maybe it wasn’t so odd in those days for people to have such dreams and follow them. In those days people actually went to seers to find out things and I don’t imagine the author would have written this story if it would have been absolutely unbelievable to the audience of his day.
So let’s assume – there was a guy and he had such a dream.
Talk about waiting and watching – what do you suppose this guy thought about for nine months. I imagine he must have wondered about the baby. Perhaps he wondered what it would look like, what it would be like. And maybe he made plans. Perhaps, he thought he would take him to the temple, that Jesus would be a carpenter like him, that he too would find a woman and get married.
I wonder who Jesus looked like. I wonder if he walked early; if he liked to go to the temple? The bible paints a picture of a rather independent son who challenged elders at the temple and talked back to his parents. I wonder what Joseph thought about that?
I can’t imagine that Jesus life went as Joseph might have planned. What was it like to be the father of a son who was so different? A son who went wandering around, hanging out with all sorts of people, speaking heresy, accumulating enemies as well as followers. Did Joseph watch and wait all those years wondering what it meant that this son would be a savior?
We too are watching and waiting this year as in years past.
For many it is a time of parties, of visiting, of giving and receiving gifts. It is a time of paradox; a time of love and light and romance for some and a time of confusion, darkness and loneliness for others.
Someone here this morning actually enjoys buying and wrapping gifts, filling the house with the smell of cookies and fresh pine. Some of us are anticipating children returning home, trips to see grandchildren time spent with loved one. For some here Christmas is a time of anticipation and joy; others are waiting for it to be over.
Another person here this morning is somewhere in the cycle of grief, dealing with a loss, a lingering sadness, a heart slowly mending. Some of us have memories of other Christmases when things were different or happier.
Another person waits and knows Christmas as waiting, for babies to be born, for good news.
Some are letting go of old customs that no longer fit, and creating new customs. Some are so busy doing the season that the season never happens. And someone will listen to the old story about the birth of a baby in a stable and hear it for the first time.
All of these Christmases are real. Christmas is complicated.
This 21st century Christmas brings a new anxiety to our watching and waiting.
Are we going to war? Will Saddam Hussein comply with the UN? Will our children, our brothers or sisters, our friends be sent to fight? What will the world be like if the US takes such a step?
This Christmas many people are watching and waiting and hoping for a savior; someone to lead us out of this mess. As for me I believe in the potential that is Christmas. The possibility that compassion, love and justice may yet reign in the world. I believe in that potential rather than a someone and I believe that the potential is already present among us.
In our story this morning we heard that something got into the mayor. Or perhaps we should say – something already in the mayor – got set free. We heard that the kindness of his words and the compassion of his action let something loose into the world. (children’s story was The Christmas Ship)
At Christmas we celebrate that something. That spirit that moves in us and among us. That spark of something deep and eternal that resides in us and causes us to reach out and help someone, that causes us to sing carols with reckless abandon, to give gifts, to love, to care, and to act justly and with compassion. .
We watch and wait in hope and expectation for it is true that as we heard this morning (Richard Gilbert): Out of the birth of the humblest babe,
may come one of the great prophets of the human spirit.
And out of each one of us, proud or humble,
may yet come truth beauty and goodness we cannot now imagine.
We hope this – we wait for this – we yearn for this because there is something deep within us that knows how to love and to care. And it may not be a pipe dream.
It is said that on Christmas Eve during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 – French soldiers and German soldiers were facing each other in trenches not to far apart. Suddenly a French soldier stood up on top of a mound of dirt and sang “O holy night”. Not a shot was fired. Then a German stood up and did the same singing,“From Heaven to Earth Come.”
There seems to have been a similar out break of “that something” another year during another war.
On Christmas Eve 1914 the Germans launched their first air raid on Britain, making at least its point with a bomb dropped in a Dover garden. The next day a solitary plane was driven off at Sheerness. And on the western front there was the familiar thunder of artillery and the clatter of machine-gun fire.
And then, at midnight on Christmas Eve, Allied soldiers in various sectors of the freezing trenches heard a new, less congruous sound – a brass band in the German trenches playing carols. The immediate firing stopped. All around a new kind of silence echoed the richly chorded brass, as if it played from inside its own wide halo of separate, sacred impermeable frost, yet with the distant world outside still grumbling an ostracized flash and boom of artillery fire – and in that low, hard landscape of torn mud, the dual pattern of sounds could be heard as emblematic of Christmas itself, a simple sound of human good will isolated against thunderous voices of ancient gods receding.
The music went on through the night. Early next morning, there came from the German trenches cries of “Merry Christmas, Tommy!”; heads appeared above the parapets; and soon there began that tentative approach to each other of the men themselves, half suspecting a trick, ready to drop or run, and perhaps in everybody’s mind a certain unspoken confusion bred by the well meaning phrase of that autumn, “It’ll all be over by Christmas.”
So men for a time shook hands and exchanged presents. Gold flake cigarettes went east to Fritz, and Tommy tasted a German cigar. Plum puddings went east and German sausage west. A half-way line was agreed on, and on this a football match was played; meanwhile, much talk together of wart and everybody’s dislike of it, and there was the singing of carols. No man’s land for a time was Everyman’s.
Some days late a general order came from the command that fraternization was forbidden on penalty of death; love was too dangerous for war. The firing began again, and the silence to which, in one man’s words, “even the murdered trees seem to listen,” was broken and stayed so. (William Sansom – Christmas in the Trenches)
These stories give me hope. They are the story of ordinary human beings who found a way to put down their weapons and reach out to each other.
I find hope because the world is becoming a smaller place and technology for all its ills has also brought us into closer communication with other people. We have more potential to meet people we think of as strangers, we have increased possibility that we will meet them and know them as people. And I believe that when we get to know them there is the distinct possibility that we won’t be so eager to kill them.
My hope is that someday when the soldiers put down their weapons to play and the generals order them to get back to fighting that the soldiers will refuse. That the movements for peace around the world will become so strong that presidents and dictators will not find anyone to fight their wars. That somehow that something deep within us all will finally be set free.
So let us give thanks this morning that at this dark time of the year there is a festival of light and warmth.
At this grave time in our nation’s history, when we get ready to loose our weapons on another people, when we struggle to understand our president and our congress it is tempting to become cynical, hopeless and despairing.
May this holiday season of lights rekindle our hope that someday humanity will find a way to be humane, that cruelty will end and nations will strive for peace. That love will prevail. That was his hope. That’s why they followed him.
And that is the hope we celebrate at Christmastime. That in the messiness of our world, and our very lives something may yet break in and we will know peace, love, joy.
A hope that in human lives and a human world, which is largely populated by folks who act out of fear and inbred instincts; there may yet be a way out of the mess and we may find it.
A so like the shepherds we are following a star we know not where, like Joseph following a vision we do not understand; hoping against hope that like the mayor we humans may yet incarnate peace, love and joy in the world and we will be saved.
Amen and may it be so.