Christmas Eve Service
By The Rev. Anne Michele Turner, Bridge Rector
O come let us adore him. So we sing, this night. Come let us adore him. I want us to think together, for just a minute, about what we mean when we sing that: adore him.
Most of us have heard Luke’s gospel so many times that it dangerously familiar. But forget the poinsettias and the evergreens, if you can, and listen to what this story is talking about. It is about ordinary people displaced by political maneuvering. It is about an unwed mother. It is about a couple forced to spend the night in a shelter. It is about migrant workers. It is about religious and ethnic minorities in the middle of a vast empire. It is about where power and authority might really reside in an unstable and broken world.
Luke’s gospel begins by saying, “in those days”—but, honestly, we might say, “in these days.” This story did not only happen two thousand years ago. This is not only a story of the past, the story of Jesus’s birth. It is a story of the present. And the central question is just as urgent now as it was two thousand years ago. In the midst of all these competing claims for our loyalties, which one should win? Whom do you worship? Whom do you adore?
There is a lot of competition for our hearts. So many of the systems of this world want to co-opt our affections. Do you have a customer loyalty card somewhere in your wallet? Have you gotten on the mailing list for a major political party? If so, you know how it works. These systems are not necessarily evil and sometimes they are very ordinary but they are relentless in their pursuit. Give your attention to us, they say, in one way or another. Give your attention, and so give your identity, and so give your heart.
The gospel reminds us if we mean what we sing—if we come to adore Jesus—then we are defying all those other things. If we believe that story we just read—if we believe that God’s love for humanity is best shown by a baby born in poverty to two nobodies from a backwater town—then we are not going to fall for glossy ads or slick campaigns or partisan rhetoric. God is not shown in power but in weakness. And we will not be afraid to find him there, or to honor him there, or to love him there.
I can’t say that coming to church on Christmas Eve is exactly counter-cultural, although maybe it is more so than it used to be. In this part of the world, coming to church is an easy thing to do. But it is nonetheless a powerful thing. When you come to this place, on this night, you make a statement to yourself and to others about to whom your heart belongs and to whom it does not. And when you get on your knees and sing Silent Night, you are making it clear that you do not bow down before political power, and that you do not bow down before wealth. When we say that we come to adore Jesus, you and I, we say that we will not adore anyone less, and that our deepest loyalties are spoken for and are not for sale.
Most of us tonight will do something else that doesn’t exactly seem countercultural. We will feel joy. We will adore God, and then we will feel joy. We will leave this place with light hearts, I hope. I mean, it’s Christmas Eve, right? And yet this seemingly ordinary experience of sentiment is not remotely sentimental. It’s been said that joy is an act of resistance in the face of despair. It seems especially true on this night. We have so much to despair about, in the story then, and in our story now. Read the paper. Berlin. Aleppo. Unjust governments prosper. Bigotry thrives. Poverty persists. Moral indifference and human cowardice allows evil to flourish unchecked. Despair would make sense.
And yet we who adore Jesus know joy. We who come and lay our hearts down at Bethlehem are given peace—not because all is well in the world but because all is well with our souls, and with our God. In Jesus, we know a love stronger than hate, or evil, or death. And so, yes, we are joyful, persistently, even defiantly. We believe the good news. We do not have to be afraid, as the angels are always reminding us. It’s the first thing they always say.
What we do tonight is simple. But it might also be the most important thing we can do this night, or any night. We lay our hearts where they belong. And so we prepare ourselves to lay the rest of our lives where they belong, too. Because God has not just come to us here, of course. God has come to us here. And we prepare to honor and love him in all the places we encounter him.
Unto us a child us born, unto us a son is given. So, this night, all nights, in this place and in all places, come, let us adore him.
What is My Identity?
January 8, 2017 by Elaine Horsfield • sermons • Tags: Anne, Bridge Rector, Turner •
By The Rev. Anne Michele Turner, Bridge Rector
A friend of mine has, for a couple of years, been encouraging me to join Twitter, and a little while back, I went poking around on the site, trying to figure out if I wanted to. I noticed that most people described themselves with a series of labels: Knitter. Bird-watcher. Scientist. Father. Runner. Patriot. Cook. It made me think about what label I might give myself. Mother? Priest? What is my identity?
Our culture gives out lots of labels. Some of them we choose for ourselves. Others get stuck on us. A lot of them cling to us unintentionally, even insidiously in this culture of social media. The internet knows what I look at on line, and my browsing history has clearly labeled me as a shoe-shopper, a hiker, and a heavy user of Amazon Prime. Ads on the sidebar tell me so. You can understand who am I and what I think is important, presumably, by which Washington Post articles I click on, which charities I donate money to. We are all branded, aren’t we?
In this cloud of labels, it’s hard to know which ones are the right ones. It’s hard to know what is reflecting who I am, and what is shaping who I am, and what is trying to change who I am. You and I live in a world that makes us doubt who we are. In a world of brand loyalty, what should our brand be? Do we even get to choose?
Today we hear about the branding of Jesus. Today we hear about the most fundamental mark of identity that there is: the mark of baptism. Jesus comes to John at the Jordan river and is washed in the water there and comes up and receives this unmistakable proclamation from heaven: This is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.
In celebrating Jesus’ baptism, we remember not just that first baptism, but the very act of baptism—the gift of the sacrament to the church. Which is another way of saying that we celebrate the gift of identity. Because Jesus’s baptism was an act of identity—marking him as the one that John had foretold, as messiah, teacher, savior, anointed. And all of our baptisms are acts of identity, too. They brand us at a level far deeper than Twitter or Amazon could ever reach.
The act of baptism, of course, has many components—there is the ritual washing, and in our modern infant baptisms there is often the first presentation of a child in church. In fact, baptism is often equated with infant naming ceremonies in other cultures. And, indeed, there is a giving of a name. But it is not the infant’s name that matters, so much—not John or Elizabeth or anything like that. It is the giving of God’s name, the mark of God put on us that counts. I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. That’s the identity we get. That’s the brand to which we are made loyal. Once that name is given, it becomes the most fundamental layer of our selfhood.
Who are you? Maybe a runner or a cook or a shoe shopper or any of the rest. But once you have been baptized, the most fundamental, indelible truth of you is that you are a Christian. You are in Christ.
It’s important to unpack what that means, though, in this culture of labels—because, honestly, “Christian” can become just another hashtag, interchangeable with the rest. In our political and cultural climate, “Christianity” can become another marketing tool, a catchphrase with particular and even arbitrary signifiers. I’m guessing that a many of you have had that experience of being in a place where naming yourself as Christian lumped you with a particular and narrow brand of evangelical theology. So if we say that being “Christian” is at the bedrock of our identity—well, whose Christianity? Whose Christ?
I think the gospel today tells us. It is Christ the Beloved who marks us. Our brand is beloved. That is who we are. We are the ones who are loved by God.
This may sound ordinary and kind of obvious on the surface. But think about it for a little while, and it’s really kind of revolutionary. The most important thing that we who are baptized with Christ can say about ourselves is that we are loved. How often do you really, actually believe that about yourself—that you are loved? How often do you live that way?
When I first became a priest, I thought I would spend time helping people think about theological problems, or working with them to understand suffering, or wrestle with them to understand their sins. I was wrong. The hardest thing for almost all of us, I’ve come to realize, is to believe we are loved. It’s so hard to understand that love comes as a gift before we have done anything and not as a reward in response to our merit. I don’t get why it’s so hard. But it baffles us.
Can you know that you are loved? This is both the gift and the challenge of this gospel: to embrace our particular Christian brand, the brand of grace. And to embrace it not just for ourselves, but for our whole human community. Because once I realize that I am loved, not for what I’ve earned by instead as the completely wonderful and random gift of God—well, then I have to accept that the person next to me is probably loved the same way. And the person next to her, too. And the guy down the street who bugs me. And the person in pew behind me who I had a fight with last week. And the uncle at Christmas dinner who voted for the other party. And that woman at work whose Facebook postings are completely offensive to me. Beloved. All of them. All of us.
There was a piece in the Washington Post opinion section last week, and I’m not quite sure how it wound up there among the partisan sparring, but it said something pretty important: “it we must prove our worth, it is possible to be worthless. If we earn love, it is conditional and fickle . . . It is maybe the work of a lifetime to live as if we are loved.”
This is our work, here and now, the work of grace. You are beloved. Live that way with one another here and now, and live that way everywhere you go from this place.