Birthing God Into Our Lives

"Birthing God Into Our Lives"

Exodus 23:4-11
December 10, 2006

Title: Birthing God Into Our Lives

When you come upon your enemy’s ox or donkey going astray, you shall bring it back.
When you see the donkey of one who hates you lying under its burden and you would
hold back from setting it free, you must help to set it free.
You shall not pervert the justice due to your poor in their lawsuits. Keep far from a false
charge, and do not kill the innocent or those in the right, for I will not acquit the guilty.
You shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the officials, and subverts the cause of those
who are in the right.
You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were
aliens in the land of Egypt.
For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; but the seventh year you
shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may eat; and what they
leave the wild animals may eat. You shall do the same with your vineyard, and with your
olive orchard.

It’s been a strange Advent for me as a preacher, but most of the blame can be laid at
my feet, because I wanted to do something different from the pulpit this year. As you
well know, I usually follow the Lectionary, which is a prescribed set of weekly texts,
based on a three year cycle, that many of us preacher types use to find the Scriptures
we are going to preach from on a weekly basis. So, on any given Sunday, Pastor
David next door and I might actually be preaching from the same text, and its always
interesting to see how different folks come at the same text, and how it speaks
differently to each of us. But the texts assigned during Advent are so often the same
ones, and I’ve been preaching for some 9 years now, and I’m just a little tired of
preaching on those same Scriptures year after year.

So, this year, I decided to preach on the Jubilee texts that our denomination is using to
celebrate its 50th anniversary—Scripture texts that are attached to our lighting of the
advent candles each week…and, of course, Jubilee in the Jewish tradition is a time
when things get set right again, when past inequalities get finally straightened out.
Sometimes computers just get screwed up and you just have to turn it off and on in
order to get it going right again, and that is a lot like how the year of Jubilee works in
the ancient Jewish faith, where on the 50th year, all the slaves are set free, and all the
property bought and sold during that fifty years is returned back to its original owner.
Think about this for second: Jubilee is all about making sure that the rich don’t always
end up with most goods, and that even slaves and their families have a chance to be
free, at some point, so that they and their families won’t ALWAYS be slaves. Jubilee is
that time in the Jewish calendar when the world is made new again, that we start from
ground zero, all of us—and whatever difficult times made a person have to sell their
family farm 30 years ago, Jubilee made sure it wouldn’t ruin the family forever, and their
was a chance for that family to start over again. Jubilee is that time when whatever
circumstances—war, debt—that caused an ancient family to be enslaved by an
Israelite, Jubilee made sure those circumstances would be forgotten and that family
would be set free, in that 50th year. Life starts over again, life begins again—that is
what the Jubilee moment does in the religious system of Israel, and it our theme for this
year as the people of the United Church of Christ—this is our time to reset and think
about who we are as a denomination, but more importantly, it gives us an opportunity
during this time to think about who we are as a people in this church, in this particular
embodiment of the United of Christ.

And, to be honest, embodiment, en-fleshment is what Advent is all about, because
Christianity makes an extraordinary claim about God, during this particular time of the
year. It says that God, the Creator of all that is, of all human life, and all the cosmos,
hurling above us and beneath us on this planet—that this God came to us as one of
us, and came to us humans in a way that was most amazing. Even though the Gospel
of John has Jesus sort of arriving out of the mind of God, so to speak (“in the beginning
was the word, etc”) and the Gospel of Mark has Jesus simply arriving out of the desert,
with no birth stories, both Luke and Matthew give us stories about Jesus’ human birth,
though it is a birth under incredible circumstances. This choice by both Luke and
Matthew to give us a beginning to the Jesus story by telling stories about his birth, by
giving us his human beginning, something we can recognize and understand makes a
big difference in may ways—I mean, we’ve all been babies before—we understand this
beginning, even with the extraordinary stories about the circumstances surrounding
Jesus’ birth, told differently by both Matthew and Luke. What makes this emphasis by
these two Gospel writers so important is how they have chosen to make sure that we
know how vulnerable, how fragile, how human, the God of universe chose to be in the
birth of Jesus—it is the story of a God who so wants to get underneath our skin and to
know us, to really know us, in all of our human beauty and all of our human frailty, that
this God chooses to become one of us in this Jesus—and to share our humanity, to
share our weakness in that moment in the stable, and on the cross, to know what I
means to live and to die. This is surely a God who is in love with what God has so
beautifully created in this world, and this life lived by our Christ, surely this too is a sign
of what lengths God will go to in order to understand us, and to be understood by us,
so much so as to be embodied, to be en-fleshed as one of us.

And so here we are, people who are well-known by God, and even in being THAT being
well-known by God, we are still a people well-loved by this God who has gotten to know
us and be known by us through this Jesus of Nazareth. For God, the reset button got
pushed in that moment when Jesus was born some two thousands years ago, and it
has changed the world, and it has the possibility of changing each of us as well, in this
place. The question the Christian church has been asking for two thousands years
ago is how to give birth to this Christ ONCE AGAIN in our lives, how to make it a Jubilee
year in every moment of our lives, where we begin again, where all the reset buttons
get pushed and we start all over again, despite our obvious failings, despite our
choices at time to ignore the Jubilee moments in our lives, those moments that call us
to do the right thing by others or by God. The passage from Scripture today is one of
those moments when we are told what it means to give birth to God in our lives and in
this world—but there is nothing in this passage that is all that theological, or mystical, or
anything else usually associated with faith and religion. And yet this passage is all
about God, all about Christ, and all about embodying God’s presence in this world. If
we want to embody God in this world and in our lives, if we want to give birth to God in
our lives, in every moment of it, this passage is simply a reminder about how to do that
and what it might look like, in the actual world we live in.

In the Living The Questions series we’ve been doing on Wednesday nights this fall,
John Wilming recently asked a really good question, one of those questions that
haunted me for awhile, even before John asked the question. One of the hallmarks of
our denomination, the UCC, is that we talk a lot about doing justice in this world, of
making this world a better place for all of humanity. But we’re often times not very
specific in how to do that work of justice—justice is a big idea, but we don’t often offer
very small ways to live out that call to justice in our every day lives. The situation in
Darfur is a good example—a large humanitarian crisis is going on half-way around the
world, with a genocide certainly reminiscent of Rwanda, and we’re asked to speak out,
and to write and give, to help stop this horrible crisis. And we need to do that, we need
to care about people on the other side of the world, who are depending on us to speak
for them…and yet, its hard to really wrap your head around it, or even really wrap your
life around that call to do justice, for other people, OVER THERE, somewhere. Don’t
get me wrong—we need to do something about that situation in Darfur, but we also
need to do something about the situations right around the corner from this church, or
the situation right next to us in the pew. That is where the text we heard today is
coming from—and for the people hearing this passage in the ancient world, doing
justice is as practical as making sure that your enemy’s donkey is brought back to him if
it is found wandering off, or if that same donkey is found to be straining under too much
of a burden, us making sure that we help relieve that burden. This is justice
understood on a practical level, as practical as possible. It is doing the right thing by
those who we feel haven’t done right by us, and it starts right there, when we’re in the
field, so to speak, and we know that the donkey of the woman that hates our guts is
loose in the woods, and you and I choose to retrieve it and return it back to that woman
who has done much harm to us. Embodying God in this world is as easy—and is as
difficult—as doing the right thing to the person next to you and me. It’s that Golden
Rule all over again—hey, I would hope that my enemy would return my property, so I
am going to do what I hope someone else would do for me. Now, they may or may not
do that for me, but my job is to embody what I hope others will do for me. And
embodying that practical justice is all about embodying God in this world—that is
Jubilee in our lives and in our tiny corner of this world.

But its hard work isn’t it? Sounds easy, but it isn’t, of course. When Douglas and I
were moving here from Texas, I had one of those moments when I realized how hard it
really was to embody God on a practical level, and how hard it was to do right by
others. I went into a gas station to pay for something, and, for whatever reason, the
clerk just ignored me for minutes and minutes, despite the fact that I was right there,
right in front of her face, waiting to get back on the road, and I am sure I was tired and
exhausted and we were worried about our cat that had gotten lost in the move, etc, etc,
but I just went off on her, and I was rude and even a little bit mean, and I walked away
just crimson, but by the time we hit the road, I was mortified at my behavior, mortified!
But justice is as real as that moment, when I’m asked to treat others as I would want to
be treated, even if I think they are not treating me right. Justice is not only something
we need to do in Darfur—it’s something we need to do at the Speedway or the Wesco
station as well!

Furthermore, according to the passage, justice is as simple as something like treating
the resident aliens in our midst, the immigrants, the people that are not us, treating
them as if they were us, people who ought to be respected and treated fairly, and given
as fair a shake as possible. It’s as practical as making sure that folks are treated right,
no matter how much they do or do not have, and that means me too—that means that
the folks that walk through those doors that don’t have much in this world are treated
like the people that do have a lot in this world. It’s about treating that woman at that
gas station somewhere in Indiana like a human being, despite my frustration with her at
that moment. You know, there is a story of a teacher who decides to tear to shreds a
map of the world and thinking it an impossible task, she gives it to a particularly difficult
child to put it together, perhaps thinking it will occupy him for just a bit. Within ten
minutes the boy is back, the task completed. Astounded, the teacher asks him how he
did it. The young boy replies: “When I turned the pieces over, I found a picture of a
torn-up man. I put him back together, and when I looked at the other side, the world
was whole again.” (Spiritual Literacy, Brussart, p 354-355). That is exactly right, isn’t
it? You and I can’t make everything OK everywhere on this planet, but we can try to
make it right in our part of the world—we can embody and give birth to God in this world
by our actions, by doing the right thing by others. And if I start with you and you and
you and you decide to start with me and the person next to you, and that crazy relative
you’ve got, and the person at Speedway that is stomping on your last nerve, maybe we
can eventually put the world back together again.

There is a wonderful parable told by the Christian storyteller Megan McKenna that goes
something like this:

Once upon a time there was a blacksmith who worked hard at his trade. The day came
for him to die. The angel was sent to him, and much to the angel’s surprise he refused
to go. He pleaded with the angel to make his case before God, that he was the only
blacksmith in the area and it was time for all his neighbors to begin their planting and
sowing. He was needed. So the angel pleaded his case before God. He said that the
man didn’t want to appear ungrateful, and that he was glad to have a place in the
kingdom, but could he put off going for a while? And he was left.

About a year or two later the angel came back again with the same message: the Lord
was ready to share the fullness of the kingdom with him. Again, the man had
reservations and said: “A neighbor of mine is seriously ill, and it’s time for the harvest.
A number of us are trying to save his crops so that his family won’t become destitute.
Please come back later.”

Well, it became a pattern. Every time the angel came, the blacksmith had one excuse
or another. The blacksmith would just shake his head and tell the angel where he was
needed and decline. Finally, the blacksmith grew very old and tired. He decided it was
time and so he prayed: “God, if you’d like to send your angel again, I’d be glad to come
home now.” Immediately the angel appeared, as if from the corner of the bed. The
blacksmith said: “If you still want to take me home, I’m ready to live forever in the
kingdom of heaven.” And the angel laughed and looked at the blacksmith in delight
and surprise and said: “Where do you think you’ve been all these years?” (Parables)

You know, we don’t change the world by only changing the situations in places like
Darfur—we change it by transforming our relationships with our neighbors, with our
friends, with our enemies, with those we love and those we don’t, doing the work of
transformation in the kingdom of God that we are living in at this very moment. Giving
birth is a messy business, and it is as hard a labor in this world as one can experience.
So too is the work of incarnating, or embodying or en-fleshing God’s very presence in
this world. We do it by doing justice right here, right now, with each other, with the
people we know and the ones we don’t. To change the world, we just need to help
change one life, for the better—it is all about knowing that the one life you change is
also about changing the world, it is also about turning that map of the world over and
discovering a human being. The Christ comes soon, very soon, but our work of birth
giving has been with us forever, and we need to pay attention to the God waiting to be
born in and through us. May God tend to us, we who are heavy with child and who will
soon enough be in labor—may God wipe our sweaty brow and hold our hand, as we
give birth to that very same God in this world through our lives and through our choices
to do right by each other. Amen.