Incarnation

dawn wind stirs tree tops
where the smallest slice
of waning moon rises
snow caresses the curves of the earth
the moon’s tiny arc suggests its fullness
and spring dreams
in black twigs and branches

O God, you were born
a human baby.
After nine months of dreaming
in the watery dark
you were shoved by the rhythm of nature
out into this bright harsh world.
Your small head pushed
through the bands of your mother’s muscle and flesh
you emerged pale blue, still for a second
eyes closed and then a gasp, a cry,
your lungs seared by oxygen, coloring your blood red.
Pink and softer than you would ever be again
you lay at your mother’s breast
pillowed, wondering;
found the nipple and began to suck.

O God, how more glorious
than your “triumph over death”
as a man upon a cross
is your journey from the womb
as a helpless baby.
We each have been cast out
of that slow, all-answering darkness
into this world of light and screaming surfaces.

You walk
all of it through, with us.
Hallowed be thy name!

Alice Aldrich Hildebrand
December 1986

A very Merry Christmas to you all!

“Good News to the People”

Rev. Alice Hildebrand

Sunset Congregational Church, UCC

First Congregational Church of Deer Isle, UCC

Luke 3:7-18

There are certainly churches in which the minister gets up on Sunday morning to thunder at the congregation in words not unlike the ones John uses here in Luke – “You brood of vipers!  … Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” But this is not that kind of a church, and I am not that kind of a minister.  For me, perhaps for you, it is incongruous that those words and more like them are followed in Luke by this sentence – “So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.”  The good news is that we are a brood of vipers?  The good news is that Jesus is coming with a winnowing fork?  How can these accusations and threats be good news?  This is the third week in a row when we are asked to deepen our Advent experience, our time of preparation for Christmas, by reflecting on apocalyptic scriptures.  Why is that?  How is that helpful to us, and what on earth do we say to anyone who might want to check out our church during this time, expecting to hear about the Prince of Peace and the tender baby lying rosy in his manger, representing the love of God? Why we are focusing instead on words that seem so despairing and angry?

In the story that Luke is telling us, John’s audience doesn’t know anything about Christmas, of course.  They don’t know anything about Jesus, who John (and of course, Luke) already recognizes as the Christ, the Messiah who will draw together God and humanity.  What they know about is despair and anger. What they know about is longing to be released from their present state of living.  When John calls them a brood of vipers, when he tells them that they cannot rest complacently on their ancestral heritage but must bear fruit for themselves, they don’t seem to be offended.  They don’t turn away, or turn on John.  They don’t say, whatever do you mean?  No, they ask, hopefully, “What then should we do?”  And John’s answer lets us know what they should do, and why he is so angry and upset with them – he’s not just a grouch, arbitrarily ranting away in the desert, he’s seriously concerned about their behavior.  “If you have two coats, share with whoever has none, and the same with food to eat.  Be honest, be fair.”  John makes the connection between human action and divine will vividly clear and concise, like all the Hebrew prophets who came before him – repentance is not for individual benefit but to fulfill an obligation to the less fortunate, an obligation that God expects of us.  Scholars point out that John the Baptist as described by Matthew, Mark and John doesn’t have that same urgent ethical agenda.  But as Luke tells it, that’s the main point.  Repent – turn again to God, and show that you have done so by taking care of one another.

It used to be that Christmas was celebrated on and after December 25^th, not before, as it is now.  The day on which we mark Christ’s birth is meant to be the beginning of a joyous time, just as Easter is meant to be the beginning of a joyous time.  Advent, like Lent, is mean to help us clean house internally, so that we can really let go and feel that joy.  A much bigger joy than mere pleasure – joy as a steady state.  There is much in the world to cause us anger and despair.  The things about human existence that are so very hard and painful don’t go away just because it is Christmas.  If anything, the Christmas season can heighten those feelings.  The fact is that being human has many challenges, whether they are in the intimate world of our families, or the larger social and political world.  The fact is that many people live in what could actually be called hell on earth, and even if we are not among those people, we know that this is true.  That’s why we reach out to places like Darfur, why we send money via Heifer project or Church World Service around the globe, why we give money to domestic violence prevention or to the Volunteers for Hancock County Jail residents.  Too many people live in hell.  The hell of addiction.  The hell of poverty.  The hell of war.  The subtle hells of self-judgment and isolation.  Of loneliness and loss.  John the Baptist wasn’t just a moody, touchy kind of guy – he saw the absolute horror that his people had lived through, their hopelessness, their corruption and their pain, and he said, adamantly -  Look, this not the way to go!  You can do better!  Smarten up!  He did battle with the powers of hell, and he did it on behalf of the powers of love.  God’s love.  That’s the good news – the utterly other, transcendent and mysterious vast power of love – made familiar and home-y and comprehensible and small scale in Jesus.  That’s what we’re celebrating in a few weeks, folks – God among us, all the time, at work to heal and love.

We focus on these words that seem so despairing and angry because it isn’t going to do us any good at all to ignore the despair and the anger of life.  We focus on these words because — in order to really feel the new life that we can have through deepening our relationship with God — we have to admit that the old life isn’t working very well.  We focus on these words in order to learn that when things were very, very bleak, along came John, to help people prepare for the revelation of God in Jesus.  Along came Jesus to make hugely visible God’s love.

A few weeks ago, Conference minister Rev. Darren Morgan re-visited with us something quite familiar– today’s 20-40 year-olds are not much interested in the kind of church life that previous generations have found so important.  (We are speaking here of what are called the Mainline churches – the churches that dominated the Protestant world until about 40 years ago – the world that our denomination lives within).  He said that the younger generation increasingly will be “pew-renters” rather than “pew buyers” – folks passing through a particular church at a particular time in their lives, as they change careers, towns; identities; as their sense of self and their priorities change.  Folks for whom church on Sunday morning is an option, not a necessity.  Yet nonetheless, folks with spiritual hunger.

Of course people can feel close to God in places other than a church – and many of the folks who aren’t here or in any other church on Sunday morning will say that they prefer to commune with God in nature, that they feel much closer to God there.  Frankly, I bet a lot of us could say that – I could say that myself – but — and apologizing if this sounds cranky – if the church hadn’t kept the idea of God sheltered all these years, hadn’t provided language and image for intellectual postulation and/or mystical union –  just who or what would we be feeling close to, there on the beach, in the mountains, under the stars?  How would we know how to name our experience? And where is accountability, where is giving back?  We feel awe and wonder and gratitude and humility when confronted by the splendors of the world.  But what do feel about our own shortcomings, or about the evil things that people do to each other?  How does the nighttime sky teach us to make amends to another, or to forgive ourselves; to become a peacemaker or give our goods away to the poor?  I think that that happens, but I think it happens because we weave our visceral response to the beauty and the splendor of nature into the teachings of our religious path.

Too much of the time folks who don’t make a commitment to an actual religion rather than to loosely defined spirituality end up with something kinda puny, in my experience – in not being willing to acknowledge the power of evil, of human cruelty, of anger and despair, they end up losing the truest, deepest power of joy and love.  That’s something we can offer to pew-renters – this is a place where we fight demons together.  This is a place where it is safe to acknowledge the powers of hell – and to overcome them, as a community.  What goes on here is the stitching together of emotion and longing and regret and questioning and courage, what goes on here is the building of relationship with the mysteries of life and death, what goes on here is connection and support and the formation of a kind of community that will see each one of us through our days.

Let the Good News be proclaimed to the people!  Amen.

“Prepare the Way”

Rev. Alice Hildebrand
Sunset Congregational Church, UCC
First Congregational Church of Deer Isle, UCC
December 6, 2009
Luke 3:1-6

Each year we begin the Advent season, our time of preparation for the celebration of Christ’s birth, by re-visiting scriptures that are not exactly sweetness and light. Last week we were invited to contemplate the coming of Jesus the Christ as ushering in the end of time and space, the passing away of heaven and earth. This week we are invited to repentance — to self-evaluation and renewal of our relationship with God. All this at the same time that the cultural Christmas machine is bombarding us with ever louder blasts of peace ‘n’ love ‘n’ joy. Not that there is anything wrong with peace and love and joy – but the Christmas machine reduces them to commodities rather than ways of being in the world. The Christmas machine wants only the well-decorated, color coordinated, appropriately scented, dumbed-down variety of peace and love and joy, and it wants that 24/7, 365 days a year, as a backdrop to perpetual shopping.

While it is true that in an out-of –the-way rural place like Deer Isle we have some muffling of the Christmas machine’s clamor, it is also true that the invitation of these Advent scriptures is muffled and indistinct. To contemplate the coming of Jesus as ushering in the actual physical end of the world is not something that we do, or want to do. Maybe it is not even something that we should do, at least not in the ways which it has been done by many Christians. The invitation of that kind of scripture has been too often reduced to revenge — “All those people we don’t like are going to get it!” — or used to justify our own inactivity in the face of oppression and suffering – “God will take care of it in due time.” To withdraw into ourselves and think about repentance is hard to do while keeping up with the pace of the cultural season. Repentance is not the same thing as guilt and feelings of inadequacy – which is what we are pressured to feel by the Christmas machine – so that we will buy more!

Luke wants us to be very grounded as we read his story of the birth of Jesus, God’s Christ – he sets the scene precisely — letting us know just exactly who, and what, the people of his time are up against.  Luke is writing within a context of terrible suffering – not only individual suffering, but the massive suffering of people whose entire culture and society have been destroyed. He is writing to people who have lost so much that there is almost no hope, no healing, that can be realistically offered. And yet he dares to offer not just hope, but confident explanation. “This world in which we have lost everything is not the real world – the real world has not arrived yet. Prepare yourselves – the real world comes, and it comes in power and great glory! ” Luke is not writing about a cosmic kind of getting even, he is writing about the cosmos transformed. God’s purpose is not to save only a few people from suffering and death, but to save the whole world. He quotes Isaiah — “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.” Any teaching that focuses gleefully on destruction as God’s plan is missing the point; destruction is what we humans keep planning and carrying out. Restoration, new hope from the ashes, new life from death, incarnation of love in each moment – that’s God’s plan. Our repentance, our preparation, is so that we can participate in these purposes of God more fully.

We are not people who have just lived through conquest and annihilation, but we are people who live with loss and fear and powerlessness. We are not hungry or homeless or on the run – yet we are people who see the hungry and the homeless and the threatened, in our nation, in our town, sometimes even in our own families. We are not people whose city is in flames, whose government is dismantled, whose temple is in ruins – yet we are people who know that these things happen all around the world, daily. We are not people who can easily believe in a turning point to history, after which human life will be permanently transformed for the good – yet we are people who come to church, some of us Sunday after Sunday for many, many years because we believe, that despite any and all appearances to the contrary, restoration, new hope from the ashes, new life from death, incarnation of love in each moment, is God’s purpose.

We come to this season of Advent, this time of waiting, in all kinds of states of mind. We may be joyful, peaceful, loving. But we also carry burdens. We are worried about our children and grandchildren. We are waiting to hear the results of medical tests. Wondering if our savings will last. Thinking about health insurance, the war in Afghanistan, climate change. Lonely. Longing for meaning. Scared. We know well the anxiety that goes with waiting. What Advent offers us is the chance to remind ourselves of the hope that accompanies us as we wait. Not hope in a specific outcome, but hope as the orientation to the whole of our life experience. Hope grounded in our relationship with God.

We are not preparing for a distant future, when all will be well, because God has come back. We are preparing to notice yet again and in a deeper way, that God is here, in the world. We prepare to celebrate the birth of innocence, of vulnerability, of tender trust – a kind of noticing and celebrating that we really could do, should do, all year long. But it’s hard to be that conscious – and so the wisdom of the cycle of the church year brings us again to this point. Slow down! Remember! Open your heart. Advent is not about the future – it is about right now. God is not coming back, God has never left. Let all flesh see God. Amen.

Greetings

Hello, all –  No sermon to post this week, as we had a guest preacher — who I was not expecting! Back in July I had invited the Associate Conference Minister for Small Church Development of the Maine Conference of the United Church of Christ (yes, all of that is his title… also known as ACMSCDMCUCC) to preach and talk to us about small churches in Maine (even though we are too big to be one of the churches he works with — churches under 50 members) — and he had accepted the invitation to speak to us, but declined the preaching part. Then, when the time came, he forgot and wrote a sermon… I didn’t think the congregation wanted to hear two sermons, so I have saved mine — and when those scriptures come around again, on the first Sunday of Advent in three years, perhaps you’ll all hear or read it then…