I’m handing out pain killers tonight.  You can take it if you want.  You always have that option.  But Advent asks you to wait just a minute, before you do, and consider this:

Painkillers don’t do what they say they are going to do. They might immediately mask the pain, but they don’t kill the pain.  They numb our sense of the pain, but they don’t address the source of the pain.  Now I’m not saying that there aren’t good reasons to numb your pain.  And it seems like Advent brings a lot of these reasons to light.

Earlier we read in Isaiah about a time when everyone comes running to God to teach them how to live, about a time when the world forgets how to fight, a time when every tool to make war is repurposed into a tool to make food.  And yet the present reality is that most of our children cannot remember a time when our country was not in two wars.  The drastic disparity between what God promise for the future and what we experience now is hard to bear.  And Advent seems to bring these differences out.  So it makes sense that during the season of Advent we encounter so much pain-killing, like… excessive eating… excessive drinking… excessive shopping… excessive entertainment…  the list goes on because your pain-killing is as unique as your pain.  Making the connection is scary – but it could change everything.

Karl Marx said, “religion is the opiate of the masses”, “Religion is the people’s pain killer.”  And that is definitely one of the many shadow-sides of religion, but tonight Jesus is calling us out of our opiate stupor.  Advent is the smelling salts of the masses; wakes you up to all that is around you, wake you up to all that is within you even if it hurts, because there is some pain that is linked directly to your hope and if you kill that pain, you kill your hope.  Making the connection is scary – but it could change everything.

There are times when we feel so drugged, so groggy, so numb that we need something to surprise us into hope.  The salvation of God always comes as a shock.

This year, you’ll know it’s Advent if there is desire awakened in you tonight.  You’ll know it’s Advent if you face the possibility of becoming horribly disappointed, but you risk to hope anyways.  You’ll know it’s Advent if you are beginning to feel the discomfort of reality and you know that you were meant for more.  You always have the option of taking a pain-killer, but this year Advent is asking you to wait, confront your pain, and be shocked by the closeness of your God.

Take a minute to be shocked and alarmed by this:  The inconceivable, Almighty, All knowing, and Omnipresent God becomes conceived as an utterly powerless fetus, with zero brain activity, and confined to one solitary place in time and space, in an oppressed Judean Town in the hill country of Palestine, in the womb of a young Jewish peasant girl.

And now here is the microscopic God.  Here is the embryonic God.  Here is the God that is small enough to fit through a birth canal, small enough to fit within cradled arms, small enough to fit within humanity.  This is a mystery that angels still scratch their heads over.  Because, just as difficult it is to grasp how huge our God is, it’s also next to impossible to grasp how incredibly small our God is – how humble our God is.

But as soon as the shock and wonder wear off I immediately think, “Well, what good is this little God? I want the galaxy maker!  I want the human heart judger!  Now that God can really get stuff done around here.  I could really get some hope behind that God.”  But instead we get a year’s supply of God’s dirty diapers.

Now enter Mary’s song – the magnificat.  Remember that in St. Luke 2?

Somehow, I’m not sure how, but somehow, while Mary was separated from her embarrassed fiance and shipped off to her secluded cousin’s house, somehow she sang these words, “My soul magnifies the Lord.”  What a weird thing to say about God.  I’ve always thought it odd, “My soul magnifies GOD.”

A few years ago I got my little nephew a magnifying glass that electronically connects to a TV screen for Christmas.  It was amazing how close it brought us to whatever we put under it.  We could see with crystal clarity the fibers of the carpet and the dimpled peel of an orange, and the skeletons of dead bugs.  It was so fascinating that we played with it for hours.

When I thought about that magnifying device Mary’s song start to make sense.  Mary had to “magnify the Lord” because God was becoming so microscopic.  In order to look at an unplanned pregnancy in first century Judaism, which would have caused her to be shamed and ostracized by her entire community, hypothetically punished by death according to Jewish Law, and then to be able to say about that scandal, “From now until the end of time every generation of people will call me blessed”, rather than cursed…  Mary must have used magnifying glass.  In order to look at a year’s supply of dirty diapers and say, “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty”, one must use a magnifying glass.  In order to look at Jesus strung up between two thieves on an device meant for public humiliation, torture, and death and then say, ”Surely this man was the son of God”, one must use a magnifying glass.

That seems like a big jump to go from Christmas to Good Friday. They don’t seem to have too much to do with each other. But under the magnifying glass the incarnation and the crucifixion are no different.  For the sake of loving us, God becomes very small in the cradle, on the cross.  And this is what it looks like when God comes close:  humble and vulnerable.  That’s not what I would do about the world’s desperate hopes.  That’s not what I would do to bring about peace on earth.  But it’s what God is doing in Jesus Christ to bring about God’s dream for mending your family, your relationships, the environment, nations at war… and all of Creation.  Now that’s really difficult for me to see.  I need a whole new lens for Christmas.

God, as a generic distant galaxy creator who lives light years away is pretty easy to believe in.  Most the world believes in that big distant God.  But the little God, the Jesus-God, that one is next to impossible to believe in.

So here’s my Christmas prayer:

“Hey Big God,

if you are giving out presents this year, how about wrapping up some “little-God magnifying glasses” for all of us with poor “God-eye-sight”… I think I remember you calling it “the Holy Spirit” or something like that.  That would be great.  Thanks.”

Merry Christmas everyone.

My parents recently had some of their old home movies turned from super eight film into DVDs.  The footage was sixty years old or more, the colors were vibrant like only the super eight can capture and the scenes were of sunny days at the beach, a young woman in a flower print dress laying out a blanket on green grass, her daughter sitting in a bright red child sized rocking chair.  There was a dreamlike quality to the movement of the old film of my mom with her mom.  They were beautiful and overflowing with life.

But in the other room there was a very different scene.  The young woman who was laying out the blanket on the grass in the home movie was lying very still in a hospice bed.  The color was gone from her face.  Her skin seemed almost transparent, lying loosely over her hands.  By all accounts this was a good death.  She was surrounded by her family who loves her.  She had lived 96 amazing years and claimed zero regrets.  And yet, even under these best of circumstances there seemed something so offensive about her death.  The inability to walk, the moving in and out of coherent consciousness, the spoon feeding, the diapers… all the roles that she had once performed for her own child were now being reversed.

When God’s word, “became flesh and dwelt among us” he entered all of it, the very deepest of human offence.  It seems to me that Joan Osborne was saying something right… maybe orthodox, and even pulling some punches when it comes to the offensiveness of the incarnation.

READING PSALM 139: GLORIA
ONE: This is the prayer of the psalmist concerning the body:
O LORD, you have searched me
and you know me.

You hem me in—behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.

ALL: O Lord, you know me inside and out.

ONE: For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

ALL: O Lord, you know me inside and out.

ONE: My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,

your eyes saw my unformed body.

ALL: O Lord, you know me inside and out.

ONE: All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.

ALL: O Lord, you know me inside and out.

ONE: In fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.  If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

ALL: And we are the body of Christ.

ONE: So let there be no division in the body, rather its parts should have equal concern for each other.  If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

ALL: And we are the body of Christ.

We have received God’s promise to us is Jesus Christ.

MANY: Tonight we gather around a promise

ONE: Just as God-with-us in Christ was nurtured by human milk,
in the same way Christ chooses human vulnerability again
and relies on us to nurture the incarnation.

MEN: Together, mother and God nurture a Christ

WOMEN: Together, we are the body of Christ

MEN: Together, we rely on Christ’s vulnerability

WOMEN: Together, we choose to allow Christ to rely on us

MANY: Tonight we gather around a promise

ONE: This child will grow up to say, “My friends, how I have longed to share this passover meal with you.”
This child will grow up to say, “Take this bread and eat it.  Remember that I am God’s gift to you.” and
“Take this wine and drink it.  Remember that I have renewed your relationship with God, forgiving all sin.”
This child will grow up to say, “Forgive them, they have no idea what they are doing.” “I am thirsty.”  and “It is finished.”
This child will grow up to say, “Touch my scars.”  “My peace I give to you.” and “I am with you always.”

Church of the Beloved, Christ has come among us.
Christ is here now, coming to you in the gifts of bread and wine.
And Christ will come again to make all things new.

MANY: Tonight we gather around a promise.  Amen.