11:27

Good morning. It is 11:27 a.m. On Christmas morning. Well done, you! Look at all you’ve already done. You’ve gotten out of bed, had your morning cup of coffee, and gotten a good start on Christmas. You’ve opened presents, or wrapped last-minute presents; you’ve had a big family Christmas breakfast, or at least snuck in your favorite holiday pastry. You’ve opened up the eggnog, put the turkey in the oven, cleaned up six of the seven fishes from last night’s supper. Maybe you’ve even caught a few minutes of A Christmas Story on TBS. And you’ve made it here for Mass – bravo! Some of you on very little sleep – I know, because I saw you at midnight last night. But you’re here, at 11:27 on Christmas morning, showered and shaved and present-ed and pastry-ed and warmed up and full of joy.

Of course, that’s nothing compared with what families with kids have accomplished by this time on Christmas morning. Can you remember how many things you had already done by this time in the morning on the Christmases of your childhood? By 11:27 in the morning, kids have been up for hours and hours and hours. The presents are not only unwrapped, they’re out of the packaging and strewn about the house. Dolls have been fitted out with several different outfits, bikes have been tried out in the street, new gaming systems have been plugged in and shapchats posted, remote control cars have been crashed into the molding enough times that Moms have had to use middle names. Some kids have even gotten dressed and come to church! Breakfasts have been eaten and cleaned up, the Christmas playlist has already been repeated, and parents everywhere are wishing they could settle down for a long winter’s nap. Christmas with kids means a busy morning; Christmas with kids means that by 11:27, you’ve already done it all.

I can only imagine how much the Holy Family had done by 11:27 on Christmas morning. Jesus had been up for hours and hours. And with the long night of labor and of listening to the lowing of the cattle and the shuffling of shepherds, I imagine that Mary and Joseph were ready for a long winter’s nap. But there was so much to do! There were blankets and bedding to clean up; there was food to find and plans to make. Joseph gathered some wood and made a fire outside the mouth of the cave; he milked the sweet little goat who had kept them warm all night and gave the milk to his beautiful, exhausted wife. Mary was feeding the babe, again – so grateful that her little Jesus was so hungry, because she had seen what happened when newborns wouldn’t nurse. She cleaned him and swaddled him, and it took her three full tries to get it right. She had done this for other babies hundreds of times, but somehow when the child was finally her own, every tuck and fold of the fabric seemed so much more important. Joseph walked to the well, drew some water and drew some stares when he did so as the only man within sight or recent memory to carry a water jug. Mary bathed, Joseph helped to rake fresh hay. Mary joked about going back to the innkeeper, babe in arms, to see if there was a room now; Joseph laughed and said that he preferred the company of the cows. They fed and ate, washed and cuddled, cleaned and packed, napped and prayed, smiled and wept and shook their heads. By 11:27 on that Christmas morning, the Holy Family must have felt like they had already lived an entire day’s worth of worry and wonder and joy.

But by 11:27 on that Christmas morning, something else had happened, something greater and grander. What God had done by 11:27 on that Christmas morning made all our actions look as tiny as a newborn’s toes. For by 11:27 on Christmas morning, God had changed everything. By 11:27 on Christmas morning, God had moved in the world, and moved into the world, like never before. God’s own Word, speaking since the beginning of time, no – not the beginning of time, but simply the beginning – that eternal Word that brought all things into being, the seas and the heavens and the whole round world, that same Word had been made flesh and begun living among mortals – and among about the mortal-y-est mortals there could be – a harried innkeeper, a motley bunch of misfit shepherds, a brave and frightened carpenter, and a faithful and fledgling mother.

By 11:27 on Christmas morning, God had already changed everything. The Lord had bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth could now see the salvation of our God. True, the arm that was bared was surprisingly small and pudgy. And true, you could see the salvation of our God only if you were willing to travel to a literal hole-in-the-wall in the hole-in-the-wall town of Bethlehem. But that was the miracle – by 11:27 on Christmas morning, God had changed the game, but in a way that was so quiet and so real, you had to pay attention to notice. You had to look for stars and start following them. You had to listen to angels and start trusting in them. You had to find the shepherds and start moving like one of them. And when you did, you found yourself gazing into the eyes of this tiny, beautiful boy, and you knew, somehow, that the world at 11:27 this morning was simply not the same.

This was true at 11:27 on Christmas morning, and it is still true for us at 11:27 today. The world we live in is different because of what we celebrate here. We have to pay attention to see it. We have to look for the light in our hearts and in each other; we have to listen to angels and to the Angelus, we have to find our identity as disciples, as followers of Jesus, and start walking like one. But when we do, we find ourselves gazing into the very heart of Christmas, and we know that the world is wholly different – holy, and his.

It may not always look like it. It may look like hate has won the day, that suffering and want will soon swamp us all. But here at 11:27 on Christmas morning, we lift up our voices and sing a new song. For God has already changed everything. The light of the world has shined into the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. Jesus is born, Jesus is God with us, Jesus is God for us, Jesus saves us, Jesus loves us and commands us to love one another, Jesus tells us to bless and break and eat and drink in remembrance of him and when we do, Jesus comes. Here, at 11:27 on Christmas morning, Jesus is come. For us, and for the blessing and redemption and salvation of the whole world.

This is what God had accomplished by 11:27 on Christmas morning: only the reordering of the entire universe and the gift of a love that will not fail us, ever. This love always is. This love always is with us. For the truth is that by 11:27 tomorrow morning, God will already have been blessing you for hours. And by 11:27 on Tuesday, God will already have been breathing life into your body since the stars winked out into the morning. By 11:27 on Wednesday, God will already have loved you awake. By 11:27 on Thursday, God will already have poured out peace upon you and those you love. By 11:27 on Friday, God will already have been healing and inspiring, offering and nudging, calling and forgiving, comforting and redeeming you and renewing the whole world for hours and hours. By 11:27 every single day for the rest of your life, God will have already been God, and God with you. So check the clock. It’s now 11:36. Look at all that has already been done. It’s 11:36, and God has already been awake for hours and hours. It’s 11:36, and this child is born for you. It’s 11:36, and this child has changed the world. It’s 11:36. What are you, children of God, going to do next?

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

Christmas Day, 2016

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

Christmas at Sunnyside

The late neurologist, Oliver Sacks, is famous for, among other things, documenting how music affects the brains of people suffering from profound memory loss, or amnesia.  He reported, for instance, that almost without fail music has a deep impact on people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and sometimes allows them to access memories that are not otherwise available to them.  Indeed, he said that hearing an old, familiar song can allow someone who has lost the memory of his or her own past, family, experiences, and history to “regain the identity they had when they first heard the song.”  Sacks said that such people have lost their own autobiographies, but music can “touch springs of memory and emotion which may be [otherwise] completely inaccessible to them.”  Let them hear the music of their own past, and that “past, which is not recoverable in any other way, is sort of embedded in the amber of the music.”[i]

In his books and elsewhere, Dr. Sacks provides case-study illustrations of this phenomenon.  But nowhere does he give the example of one Joseph, who, as the story goes, was a resident of the Sunnyside Rest Home, a long, long drive from here.

Joseph had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s young, in his early sixties, and by the time our story begins, he had been consigned to the home for several years.  An affable sort at the outset (before the disease moved in full-time) he had since become a recognizable figure to anyone who has ever visited friends or family in places like Sunnyside.  Although he was perfectly capable of walking, it was impossible to know where his steps might take him, and of course he might just fall, so the staff parked him in a wheelchair and encouraged to remain in it.  He seldom spoke any more; and when he did his words made little sense.  He could stare blankly into space for hours on end, while game shows played on the TV in the common room, until he drifted off to sleep, his chin on his chest, listing a little to the left, a line of drool dangling from his lower lip.

Sunnyside, like so many of these places, was owned by a church organization, I’m not sure which, but there was no question that Christmas would be observed.  And the staff were the type whose theological sophistication had never advanced much beyond the insights available from the annual Christmas pageant they remembered from their collective childhoods.  And it so happened one Christmas Eve that the staff noticed old Joseph lolling in his wheelchair, and beside him, there in the common room of the somewhat ironically named “Memory Unit,” a woman of about his age, who had recently been admitted to the unit with pretty severe dementia, whose name happened to be Mary, and who also was dozing.

There they were next to each other in the common room of the Memory Unit of the Sunnyside Rest Home: Mary and Joseph next to each other on Christmas Eve; who could blame the staff for coming up with an idea?

The idea was to conduct a Christmas pageant with the residents of the Unit.  We often think of the elderly as reverting to their childhood states, and treat them accordingly; why not put on a Christmas pageant with the demented and the amnesiac?  Such a plan is actually far easier to carry out than the traditional pageant with children, for the wheelchair-bound are far easier to maneuver, and are often more compliant than the youthful and independently mobile.  Plus, you need fewer permission slips.

The artificial tree and its glittering star would provide the backdrop for the pageant.  Simple costumes were quickly improvised from bed linens and towels, and a stuffed teddy bear was procured as a stand-in for the baby Jesus.

The staff were in no way motivated by cruelty or meanness, and they meant to inflict no indignity on the patients by thus manipulating them.  If pressed, they might have said that they hoped to stimulate some long-forgotten memory in their charges.  But mostly they just thought it would be nice to help these somewhat helpless folk celebrate Christmas.

And there were Joseph and Mary were parked in front of the tree.  The baby Jesus was placed between them in a milk-crate-manger lined with nursing-home bed sheets.  Some residents were cast as shepherds, others as the stable animals.  Three of these elderly souls were each given an empty box wrapped in silver paper, tied with red bows (of the type that go under the tree just for looks), and cast as the Wise Men, even though two of them were women.

A script was prepared that depended as much on what the staff could remember from the Charlie Brown Christmas special as it did on the Gospel of Luke.  But if you can remember Linus’s speech you are dealing with the Gospel, so you could do a lot worse.

And a CD was found with Christmas carols on it, and popped into the CD player.  And the staff stood behind the wheelchairs of the residents and moved them from place to place to enact the scenes, pushing Mary and Jospeh from room to room, asking for a place to spend the night, and getting every one out to join them in front of the tree, where they rocked the residents back and forth in their wheelchairs as the carols played, in between vignettes of the parts of the Christmas story.  And in a moment of serendipity, the carol that came up on the CD right after they had enacted the arrival of the shepherds by rolling two residents with towels draped on their heads and candy canes clutched in their hands over to the milk-crate-manger to adore the Christ Child/teddy bear just happened to be “Angels we have heard on high.”

In truth, the music had already had a subtle but positive effect on the residents of the Memory Unit of Sunnyside.  Everyone was awake and seemed generally more alert than usual.  Smiles could be seen on many faces, and some of the shepherds, and one or two of the Wise men (two of whom were actually women) were humming familiarly.  But at the start of “Angels we have heard on high,” Joseph’s entire being was altered: his eyes opened brightly, he sat up with a straight posture, and he looked around the room as if recognizing his surroundings for the first time in many years.

Joseph gazed warmly at Mary, seated across from him, and looked down without the slightest confusion at the teddy bear/Christ neatly swaddled in a pillowcase and laid in a milk-crate at his feet.  And when the refrain of the hymn came around, he opened his mouth and sang out with a clarity that had been lost from his voice for years, “Glo-ooooo-ooooo-ooooo-ria, in excelsis Deo!”

He looked intensely into the eyes of Mary at the end of the first verse, as if inviting her to delight in this song as much as he was.  As you know, there are four verses to “Angels we have heard on high,” and Joseph didn’t remember all the words to all the verses, but it hardly mattered, because each time the refrain came around, it was as if he was a church organ, and another rank of stops was added to his voice, and his singing became louder and more confident, and encouraged others around him to do their best in joining in, which they did.

As the last verse was playing on the CD player, it was obvious that Joseph was ramping up for something big.  And just before the refrain started, he stood up out of his wheelchair and he spun lightly on his feet as pushed Mary around as if dancing with her in her chair, and sang “Glo-ooooo-ooooo-ooooo-ria, in excelsis Deo!”  And as he did, everyone looked up, because they could have sworn that night that they heard Joseph’s voice joined by other stronger, angelic voices from a source they could not identify.

The carol came to an end and the CD stopped playing.  Still standing, Joseph looked around at expectant eyes all focused on him.  And, as if scripted, he recited his own passage of the Christmas Gospel, “When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.’ And they went with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.”

And Joseph sat down in his wheelchair, breathing a little fast, beaming.  And Mary was beaming, too; everyone was.  And the staff brought around eggnog flavored Ensure, and apple juice, and Christmas cookies.  And the normally un-sociable residents of the Memory Unit chit-chatted about Christmases past, and hummed little snippets of carols, and everyone marveled that the music had touched some deep memory in Joseph, almost as if he had been there all those centuries ago when Jesus was born.

But before long, heads began to grow weary, and eyelids closed, and the residents of the Memory Unit were taken to their rooms and tucked into bed until Christmas morning, when some would have family visitors who’d bring slippers wrapped in cheap paper, and some would bring cookies, and most would leave with a kiss on the forehead, and a sigh at the loss of so much among those living in the Memory Unit.

Once a year, on this holy night, you come, if you are so inclined, and if God has urged you to do it, and you check yourself in to this Memory Unit for a couple of hours, in an uncomfortable pew, at a time that is too late, when you would otherwise be sleeping.  And we acknowledge here that the world is demented and amnesiac, and has so often seemed to lose track of its own autobiography, nearly forgetting who we really are.  Certainly we Christians are inclined to this forgetfulness, prone to wander around as though lost, as though we are not, in fact, children of God, not the blessed company of faithful people who follow the Way of Jesus.

Our mobility here in this temporary Memory Unit tonight is restricted, our diet is simple, and the food is not very tasty, neither is the little sip of wine.  But it will suffice.  We come here, perhaps frightened that we have forgotten some of the most important things we ever knew about ourselves and the world we live in; hoping to come into contact with some deep memory of the past.  And we come here confident that that past, which may not be recoverable in any other way, might at least be embedded in the amber of the music.  For while we know that God’s truth is also embedded in his Word and in his Sacraments, there is something about music- and especially about the song of the angels, sung to simple shepherds – that reaches deep down into the past and retrieves the memories we most need to recall.

We don’t really know what causes people to lose their memories, to forget their own identities.  And we don’t know why it is so easy for us to forget who we are, who God made us to be.  We lose track of the meaning of Emmanuel – God with us.  We forget why it seemed important to us that God should be with us, or why it seems important to God.

But tonight we rejoice to discover that God has left open a window to the lost memories of his love for us.  He has, in fact, made it easy: you don’t have to know what to believe about the Scriptures, or the Sacrament, or the Creed, or anything else.  You don’t even have to know what you believe about Christmas.  All you have to do is sing, and if you can’t do that, then just listen to the music, the song of the angels, and see if you can’t hear them singing too, on this holy night.

We are made in such a way that when all else is lost to us – even the memory of who we are - God has given us a secret path to remember, to reclaim our identities for a short time, at least, and to rejoice.  This is why we can never allow this night to be a truly silent night: we have to sing about the silence.

Because God wants us to remember the message of the angels.  He wants us to know that through the birth of his Son he promises that he is with us in life and in death – God with us.  He wants us to understand that he will never allow us to truly forget.  And he wants us to hear the angels singing a song that we know from our past, even though he knows that tomorrow we may start forgetting all over again.

Shepherds, why this jubilee?  Why these songs of happy cheer?

What great brightness did you see?  What glad tidings did you hear?

To answer those questions, all you need to do is sing with the angels, and remember!  And by God’s grace, perhaps, although we have forgotten so much, we may for a while tonight, regain that ancient identity we had when shepherds first heard the song, and we may go with them to the manger and find that Jesus Christ is born!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Midnight Mass 2016

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[i] uploaded to YouTube by Knopfgroup of Random House Publishing, 22 Sept 2008

Guide Us Waking

The hymns we sing in Advent are particularly haunting and beautiful, not least because they interrupt the relentless Christmas music we hear on television and in big box stores and at Christmas festivities. You will likely recognize the lyrics to Advent hymn: 

“Sleepers, wake!” A voice astounds us,
the shout of rampart-guards surrounds us:
“Awake, Jerusalem, arise!”
Midnight’s peace their cry has broken,
their urgent summons clearly spoken:
“The time has come, O maidens wise!
Rise up, and give us light;
the Bridegroom is in sight. Alleluia!
Your lamps prepare and hasten there, 
that you the wedding feast may share.”

“Sleepers, wake!” we sing, and the majesty of the hymn carries us into the prophetic joy of this Advent season. We are shaken awake like the bridesmaids in that parable about the wise and foolish virgins. The Bridegroom is at hand and we must go witness and share the wedding feast. An “urgent summons”: God is at hand. Jesus is born, Jesus is with us now, Jesus is coming again. Be ready!

John the Baptist has been calling out to us in a similar voice in the Gospels we’ve heard this Advent. “Repent,” he says, “for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near!” “The axe,” he tells us, “is already at the root of the trees!” And indeed, if we look around at our world, the need to awaken and repent is strong with us. It’s obvious. We must awaken to the coming of Jesus among us. Urgently. For the sake of the world and for our own salvation. We get it. Advent. All about waking up.

How strange, then, that an angel appears to Joseph in this morning’s Gospel while he is fast asleep. This isn’t our typical story of Advent awakening. Sleepers wake? Joseph meets his angel in a deep, dark, slumber. Joseph would appear to have been unprepared for the coming of Jesus. We don’t hear anything about Joseph waiting in prayer for his Messiah, the way Simeon and Anna are waiting in the Temple in Luke’s Gospel, at the Presentation. Joseph isn’t a prophet like that. We only know that he is a man of the House of David, who plans to marry a woman. He is preparing for a wedding feast, sure, but it’s not the great feast of the coming of our Lord. Joseph just wants a wedding. And when his betrothed turns up pregnant, Joseph is ready to cancel, not to announce that the kingdom of God is at hand. Joseph doesn’t want any announcements. He wants a quiet divorce and a conventional life with a woman who won’t make him feel displaced and foolish.

This year, this Advent, when I’ve been pinching myself daily and saying “Wake up! Do something about the state of the world!” it haunts me that an angel comes to Joseph in a dream when all Joseph wants is the conventional life he thought he was supposed to have. It gives me great hope, and it fills me with gratitude. It reminds me that God is God, and that God does not need my skill at awakening in order to move powerfully to save the world. At some deep level, I am powerless to awaken myself.

Prophets may come to us in the wilderness, when we are ready for a challenge, but sometimes angels come to us too, and sometimes they come when we are most unprepared. When we are groggy and worn down. When our world stops making sense. When we can hardly sort out the story we are in. That’s how it was for Joseph. What a deep and weary sleep he must have fallen into that night before the angel appeared. What a surrender that must have been to the darkness and the discouragement and the sharp loneliness of losing Mary. What an insult that she is pregnant.

Joseph follows the instructions the angel gives him, and he takes Mary home to be his wife. But angels will come to him again in his sleep. In the second chapter of Matthew an angel will tell Joseph in a dream that he must take Mary and her child to Egypt because a great slaughtering of children will take place in Bethlehem at the orders of the tyrant Herod. And then an angel will come again, in another dream, to tell him when it is safe to return. But then he will be warned again in a dream that Herod’s son is reigning in Judea, so he will take his family to live in Nazareth of Galilee. “Sleepers wake!” we sing, but Joseph moves through the coming of the kingdom as an exhausted refugee, barely able to comprehend what takes place around him. He is visited not by prophets who challenge him but by gentle messengers from his God, who nudge him forward through a world of death and danger.

A world of death and danger, and also a world of miraculous birth and redemption. All of it over Joseph’s head. All of it determined by forces beyond his control. All of it sounding, I guess, like a story he would scarcely believe in his waking hours. When we read Matthew’s Gospel we get all the answers Joseph doesn’t get. We are told explicitly that his unconventional marriage is a fulfillment of a prophecy from Isaiah, that a virgin will bear a child and they will call him Immanuel, God with us. All Joseph knows is that he is to marry a woman whose child was conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit. How he would know what that meant I cannot begin to tell you. When angels direct him to travel to Egypt and back, we are told that he is fulfilling the word of the prophet Hosea, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11:1). But Joseph doesn’t know that. Joseph makes the trip in fear because Herod’s murderous forces are on the march. Joseph doesn’t know it, but when goes down to Egypt he is recalling for us another Joseph, the dreamer with the coat of many colors, the son of Jacob in the book of Genesis. But what could that parallel have meant to him at the time? Even living in Nazareth is a fulfillment of an Old Testament pattern, because the word “nazareth” means “branch,” as in the prophet Isaiah we are told that a branch will spring from the roots of the tree of Jesse (Isaiah 11:1). But why would Joseph appreciate the significance of living in a town called “Branch?”

Joseph lives in a world rich with God’s purposes but what he knows is displacement and fear and confusion. Joseph learns from the angels to be willing to give up his fantasy of a normal life, and thus to become a true husband to a woman whose love for God has born incomprehensible fruit.

And as for us: what angel will come to us? What or whom are we to espouse unexpectedly? Whom shall we embrace in spite of the fear of looking foolish or disgraced? What homes are we to leave? Where are we to go? What forces are arrayed to our detriment? And what blessings are waiting to be born? What sleep are we in, exactly? What purposes of God are our lives fulfilling? And beyond all these questions: can we desire the coming of this messiah? The one who comes to us in upheaval and confusion?

It seems that awakening to the coming of the kingdom of Jesus can take many forms. Joseph’s is a true awakening, though it often looks like sleep. When the angel comes to him, he listens, and his footsteps follow the path of God’s inspiration. There may be times in which surrender to God demands not only vigilance but also acceptance that the story we are in is too large for us to comprehend fully. Maybe sometimes we are in the grip of a deeper sleep. Maybe sometimes the sleep and the waking are happening at a level deeper than our full human will can reach. Perhaps there are times when deeper trust is called for, and resting in the arms of God can be a step in the larger process of conscious commitment. Maybe there are times when, even as we prepare to take action in accordance with God’s will, we must also rest in Christ’s peace if we are to function at all as the body of Christ. Can we trust God enough to accept this difficult birth?

Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.

Preached by Mtr. Nora Johnson

18 December 2016

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia