Christmas I - Sunday December 31st, 2006
(by Rev. Glenn Brown)
As we look over the past year of our lives as individuals, as families, and as a church, we are probably seeking to know whether we have lived well. Behind that question, which seems deep enough in itself, is the question, what is it to live well? The Scripture answers in many places, that living well consists in living not just for yourself, but also for others – for your family, certainly, but for others still. For others. The anthropologist writes in the latest Harper’s that the key motivation for the ordinary American is the desire to be able to accumulate enough for yourself so as to be able to give yourself over to a higher cause. Reinhold Niebuhr, the eminent theologian of social issues and war and peace of the 1940s, writes that we have two different expressions of the primary drive to survive. Both are spiritual. One is the desire for power. Facing, as we do, a seemingly uninterested and impartial universe, and many risks and dangers, we seek to protect ourselves by acquiring a bit more than we need, a bit more protection that we have. This desire causes conflict with others and is, in its commercial, domestic, and diplomatic forms, a major daily preoccupation.
The second is the will to live truly. It is this in us which acknowledges that there are more important qualities in life than what we get by exercising power. It is this in us which allows recognition of beauty, which creates a thirst for knowledge about where we came from and who we are. Niebuhr points out that it is the peculiarity of humans that we actually rise above not only our daily lives and above history itself, to critique it all and ask what it is all about, what each of us is about. It is from that pentacle that we seek to decide whether life in and of itself is meaningless and random, as science says, and that we must give it what meaning we can, or that there is One is who above even our heights, One whose plan and intentions are above history also, and in whose thoughts and ways there is deeper and eternal meaning. In the even of either conclusion, we find meaning in self-giving.
For those of us who examine our lives particularly at this time of year, how we go about answering these important questions may depend upon our life stages. The anthropologist points out that people are most selfish (in regard to things outside the family) in the young family years. We put our all into what we do for the kids, and we do that in a variety of ways (super involvement in sports, purchasing things, spending family time, earning as much money as possible, guiding and counseling). But my own observation would be that the years of involvement with our kids tend to be the times of strongest involvement in community, not only the fund-raising activities at school and the endless early morning hours at hockey rinks where we meet and socialize and sometimes build strong friendships, and also our strongest church involvement (except when sports takes away our Sundays as well, or everything else takes so much out of us that we keep Sundays to ourselves, rather than devoting them to God). For some people in empty nest years, the greater free time sees us immersed in others; for some it is the time to catch up on time lost for ourselves.
So I don’t think any of these sources is correct in their assertion that we use the early years to build up our security in order that we may use the later years for the benefit of others. What we do for others, and when we do it, has more to do with individual character than time of life. (I know that the super-rich, Gates and Buffets and movie celebrities, having established themselves, currently get a lot of ink for giving millions of dollars to great causes. But I don’t know whether they were giving of themselves all along the way. Do you?)
`So we ordinary people are back to religion and the task of living truly. Though I call this a task, we must not live day-in-day-out thinking that living truly encompasses only what we try to do. It also includes identifying and accepting what God does in our lives. The end of a year is an excellent time to survey our life and see what God has done, even looking for miracles. What do I mean by miracle? Well, I certainly mean the kind of thing we see in this morning’s scripture passage, of course. The extraordinary thing which contradicts, or changes our experience of how life works, of what is “natural” or “normal.” You realize that miracles were no more likely in New Testament times than in ours, but, not tied to the idea of scientific laws (although certainly aware of the natural world’s ways) perhaps it was easier for people to believe that the sovereign God could do whatever it pleased. Yet you remember the scoffing Nicodemus challenging Jesus, “can one enter his mother’s womb and be born again?” So let us understand that these stories were told because they were meant to be taken literally and seriously. God enters this life to do things, and sometimes we are direct witnesses.
Now, ours is a difficult and busy age, with many new things happening all the time. The range of our own technologies is astounding, and the growth of our sciences constantly brings into question the verities and laws of the past, or discovers limits to them not previously perceived. So if we can accept the amazing things which we ourselves can do, it ought not trouble us to be able to accept things God can do.
But being people of faith, it ought to be easier for us. Our faith in God and God’s deeds is not based on ignorance of the natural world or science, and it is not merely a response to things which take place without normal explanations. Let me try to draw a parallel. Any of us with close friends, or good spousal relations, become so knowledgeable of our friends/spouses that we trust them not to harm, and to be unsurprised when they do things for our benefit. But, were we not to know them so well, nice things done by them would prompt suspicion or skepticism. So it is with our faith in God – we are familiar enough with God to be open to the good things which God can do in our lives, even miracles, the extraordinary things which contradict, or change our experience of how life works, of what is “natural” or “normal.”
So this New Year’s, as you peruse your life, look for God’s deeds. Look for those gaps between your efforts and the subsequent events; look for qualities of life that are not your doing; look for healings which might not or ought not have happened in the normal course of things; look for the uptake in fortune; look for the support and courage found during the hard times.
Be sure you get the whole picture.
