Sunday, December 14, 2014

Keeping Time Together

Cantata Sunday

Luke 2:8-20

This has been a beautiful work of the people.
Young and old and middlers,
Coming together to sing, to share, to contribute to the common experience.
I’m tempted to say that we need more events like this, 
but that just turns my gratitude into restless discontent.

I’m grateful for what people have done to make this happen.

And it makes me reflect upon what it means to be in community together.
What are communities for?
And I think one thing communities are for
is keeping time. 
Celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, saint’s days, new years, super bowls, insert other special days here.

and not just saints days, birthdays and anniversaries,
days which remember a person or event in the past.
But occasions in the present when we realize our common humanity
and share the space and time in mourning, in laughing, in wonder,
we realize and create community at funerals,
at weddings.
And births.

And not just special days.  Even the ordinary days.
People in community ask each other questions like,
“how was your week”
Or when Alice comes across the Mad-hatter, the March Hare, and the dormouse having a party and singing, “A very merry unbirthday, to you”
And she realizes that it is actually her unbirthday too – and so she joins the party.

When we share time together we give time meaning
and we receive the meaning that the time gives.

Meaning is the gift that present experience gives to our memories in the future.

What sharing time with others helps us do
is slow down and become aware.

Inevitably, as meaningful as community can be in our memories,
In the present, sharing time together with friends, neighbors, and strangers,
it can oftentimes be a very awkward thing – sometimes perhaps painful.

We look around and see other people with looks on their faces  that may be excited or weary, anxious or calm
As our minds weave in and out of being present to the experience of togetherness and thinking about the ridiculous demands of work
and Christmas expectations of culture and extended families,
to-do lists which occupy a corner of our minds like a dripping faucet.

But if we are to believe the message of the Christmas story,
it’s in the midst of our distractions, our awkwardness, our pain, our insecurities, that God comes among us as love.

Where two or three are gathered, Christ says, I am there among them.
he could have added: whether you’re aware of it or not.

What’s profound about community is the way
that just by being together we create meaning and memories. 
And one of the most significant memories we may carry away
is the plain fact that other people have laughed with us. 
Other people have sung with us. 
Other people have prayed and felt pain with us. 

We keep time by singing songs, slowing down words that could be said in one fraction of the time.  We join our tones and pitches, we awkwardly try to keep the same rhythms as each other.

Isn’t so much of community a clumsy attempt at cooperation?
But this for me is what is so beautiful.
Because there is so much grace in the willingness to come together
and be imperfect alongside one another

and then to make the most outrageous sounding claim
that in all of this awkwardness and clumsy attempts at cooperation,
in all of our misunderstood, half-heard, distracted, participation – God is in our midst.

This is one of the things that I think it means that the Christmas story
takes place in a stable and not an inn. 
It was not a well orchestrated,
well planned,
anxiously managed production.

The gathering place was a barn.
The gathered community was a carpenter, a mother and her newborn,
shepherds and some livestock.
And who knows how awkward it was for these strangers to come up to the manger,
and Joseph half awake, startled,
jumping up suspiciously and wanting to know
just exactly what these farmers think they’re doing coming in.
And then their story – quite literally unbelievable.

And we don’t get the dialogue around the manger.  But I doubt it was a Hollywood script.
There may well have been awkward silences.
There probably were awkward smiles –
hoping to communicate good will over the wide distance of not knowing each other.

And perhaps they told stories and sang songs.  I think they must have stayed a good while.
And maybe Joseph sat there tapping his foot – or maybe he went on a walk. 
Or maybe he was quietly content, I don’t know.

But the scriptures tell us that “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.”

Because here was a gathered community
that for a time shared a moment,
And in that shared time all of them were able to for a brief moment allow the fog of worries and of insecurities and regrets and frustrations – to slowly dissolve.

And they experienced each other as human beings sharing a very human experience,
and looking at Jesus, the baby that awakens their spirits to the gift of life,
and to the grace of God,

Grace is the delight of God in who we are as those God has made.
As children of our heavenly father.
The delight of God in the flourishing of life,
and the longing of God with us and for us, to be able to realize again the fullness of being God’s creation.

Grace is the love that God has for us
Not in spite of but because of and in the midst of all of our awkwardness and imperfections.

“For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there God is in the midst of them.”

The gathered shepherds, carpenter, mother, child, sheep, donkey, and so on,
Sharing in a moment of realization that God’s love is realer than the games of human society.  And in that enduring love, for a moment they rest. 

And a realization once again together, of peace, of joy, of renewed hope.
As the angel’s song stuck in their head, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward all.”

Amen. 

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