God delivers!

Written by Alissa Bender

Associate Pastor Alissa Bender
Calgary First Mennonite Church
Advent 4 – December 20, 2009

God Delivers!
A series of reflections

1) Special Delivery
When I was a kid, I sometimes got chain letters in the mail.  It was exciting when a friend had taken the time to write out the letter and carefully copy the names at the bottom that were supposed to be moved up in the line so that in theory we would each get a whole pile of mail delivered from strangers around the world.  Times have changed from the excitement of getting a chain letter in the mail.  If you ever use email, I’m sure you get email chain letters all the time.  With a few clicks of a mouse, ten of your closest friends can have the same message and you can sit and wait for 100 new recipes from perfect strangers to come flying into your inbox.

I have decided, though, that I won’t send those letters forward anymore.  Although I like getting new recipes to try, I look at the chain letter in my inbox and I wonder – who would want to receive this message?  What if the message would just be a bother to whoever receives it?  What if they don’t want to pass it on?  And not trusting in the value of the message to anyone else, I decline to deliver it.

We’ve just sung about the delivery of a message to some shepherds. Shepherding wasn’t a very romantic profession.  Shepherds were poor and without political power, outcasts from religious society because their job didn’t allow them to keep up with various expectations of purity.  I suspect that night started like any other, with them just minding their own business and doing their job.  And then an angel of the Lord appeared and delivered a message to them.  Good news of great joy – the Messiah, the Christ, had been born.  And just like there wasn’t much room for the shepherds in their society, there wasn’t much room for this baby to be born either.  They would find him in a place that made sense to them – lying in an animal feeding trough.

After the heavenly host left, what did the shepherds ask each other?  “Is this message for real?  Is it worth what we hope it’s worth?  Is it valuable enough to act upon?”  The shepherds decided to act and to go to Bethlehem.  There, Luke says “they made known what had been told them about this child”.  And as they left, they were glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

This part of the story is about messages being delivered, from the angels to the shepherds, and from the shepherds to everyone else they met.  And in the stories of the birth of Jesus we are sent a message too.  How do we treat the message of Christ’s birth?  Like me with my chain letters, do we question whether anyone else really wants to receive it?  Do we question its worth for anyone beyond ourselves?  Or do we, with the shepherds, believe that this message is about life?  Do we trust the message enough to deliver it ourselves?

2) Some Delivery Room…
I have a small, one-piece nativity scene that I bought many years ago.  It’s a painted ceramic one that probably came from Peru.  Every time I put it out at the beginning of Advent, it makes me excited about Christmas coming. 

This week, though, I read the feature article in the Canadian Mennonite magazine that just went online and I realized that my nativity scene has something missing.  I had never really noticed its absence before, but my little stable has no manure pile out back.  And there’s a cow and a sheep and a donkey, but there are no ceramic flies perched anywhere.  It doesn’t look very much like the barn where we raised our sheep and chickens back home.  It actually looks cleaner than my kitchen.

At the beginning of Advent this year, it struck me that there are two very different kinds of Christmases around.  One is the Christmas that our society plasters on every billboard and in every shopping mall.  It’s absolute perfection in reds and greens complementing each other, gold trim on perfectly placed serving dishes, delicious meals with ample leftovers shared by pictures of perfectly happy families, with delicate bells or solid organ chords to accompany every beautiful moment.

But what I spent this month reflecting on is that there is little room in this perfect Christmas for the realities of pain and struggle that may be as real in people’s lives in December as they are at other times of the year.  Three days ago a man visited our church, looking for some help to put food on his table and as he sat in my office he said a couple of times – “It’s a bad time of year… It’s a bad time of year.”  This struggle struck me in stark contrast to the eternal optimism of the commercials on TV that make a person believe that you can buy enough to be happy this year.

But there is good news.  The good news is in the other kind of Christmas, the one we focus on when we gather here and can hold onto as we wade through the frantic, shining activity everywhere else.  The good news is that Jesus wasn’t born into clean, colour-coordinated perfection.  Jesus was delivered in the usual messy way to a couple of peasants under Roman oppression in a place where animals lived and ate and spread around their various pungent smells.

Not out of the largest and most powerful but out of that little clan of Bethlehem of Ephrathah a saviour was born into the unpleasant realities of human life.  To paraphrase Dan Epp-Tiessen, the good news is that God does not turn away from a world of dirty, painful brokenness, but rather God chooses to become immersed in it. 

Many of us will see loved ones this Christmas and eat delicious, well-prepared meals, and those times will be beautiful.  But the bleakness and poverty of Jesus’ birth are part of our good news, because Jesus isn’t separated from the things that make this Christmas hard for some.  Jesus burst into a world that needs a whole lot of fixing, so who are we to panic about the perfect party?  Let’s view the kinks in our perfect Christmas plans as moments of grace.  Let the messiness come in, and see what God may be working this year in the imperfection of real life.

3) God Delivers!
(Here’s a true story from Plant a Seed of Peace by Rebecca Seiling) Over three hundred years ago in Switzerland there was a Mennonite preacher named Peter.  It wasn’t always easy to preach about his beliefs in his village.  He was often harassed by those who didn’t agree with him.  One night just after he had fallen asleep, he suddenly woke up to a noise.  He thought he had imagined it and he tried to go back to sleep.  But then he heard the noise again, and it definitely wasn’t a dream this time.

The noise came from outside.  It sounded like someone was on the roof.  Peter got out of bed, lit his lantern by the fire, and went outside.  He looked up to the roof.  It was true!  Several men were up there, busily working.  Peter held his lantern up, to see better.  He realized sadly – “They’re taking the thatch off my roof!  What have I done to them, that they would treat me this way?”  Peter was shocked.  He prayed, “God please help me to do what is right.  Give me the right words to say to these men.”
Then Peter had an idea.  He went back into the house and woke his wife with a whisper: “Wake up!  There are men working on our roof. This sounds strange, but could you make a meal for them?”  Immediately, Peter’s wife understood what was happening.  She got up, stoked the fire, and began to cook for the men who were destroying their house.

The old preacher went outside.  He called to the men, “You must be tired!  Come in for a bite to eat.”  Surprised, the men came down from the roof.  Slowly, they entered the house and sat down at the places set for them.  They looked down at their plates, too embarrassed to look up at the kind preacher and his wife.  Peter prayed a simple prayer.  “Thank you, God, for the meal you have provided.  Thank you also for our guests.  Bless them in Jesus’ name.  Amen.”

Peter’s wife served the food to the men, but all they could do was stare.  They couldn’t eat.  They just sat quietly.  After a while, the men left the table and climbed back onto the roof.  Peter and his wife heard scuffling noises, so they cautiously stepped out the door to see what was happening.  To their surprise, they saw the men putting the thatch back on the roof and fixing the holes they had made.
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God delivers.  This is a familiar message, and one that runs through Mary’s proclamation in the gospel of Luke.  In these much-sung words, we hear that Mary trusts in God’s deliverance of the victimized from the arrogant and powerful, God’s deliverance of the poor from the uncaring rich.  And by what means will God bring this deliverance about in this point of history?  Through a girl who said “yes” to God.  God brings deliverance, but God listens for our “yes” to be participants in this work of justice.  We can choose other answers, as Peter could have, responses of fear, apathy, or anger, but God wants to hear Peter’s prayer from each of us: “God, please help me to do what is right.  Give me the right words to say.”  And with this “yes” on our lips and in our hearts, we join in with God’s plans for deliverance, and injustice is shown to the door.  Inequality is not given room.  Fear and hunger do not take root.  God delivers us from whatever is getting in the way of being part of God’s deliverance for all of humanity.