Epiphany 2A

January 16, 2011

Isaiah 49:1-7

John 1:

Christmas Eve Revisited

Can you believe Christmas Eve was only three weeks ago? Do you remember what it felt like to worship on Christmas Eve? The exquisitely soft silence, flickering candlelight, poetry, Christmas carols. I think that for many of us, we feel closer to God on Christmas Eve than at any other time of the year. Easter is certainly the cornerstone of our calendar, but Christmas Eve, when we ponder God’s promise of peace on earth—and our few moments together to experience that peace—is especially moving.

God’s dream, God’s promise, God’s plan at Christmas is to move us ever closer to being in perfect relationship with God and one another and ourselves. At our Christmas Eve worship, we have traditionally focused on our own brokenness and the hope we find on the dark and quiet of a winter’s night. We hear God’s promise of peace on earth, of God’s power and love in scripture, and we sing of God’s coming as a human baby in carols that we all know by heart. Those carols are alive in our hearts, aren’t they? We all have broken places—relationships with relatives and dear friends that have broken down, robust health than has been invaded by the dreaded Big C, enslavement to drugs or alcohol, dreams we assumed would come true and that--at some point in our lives--we realize will never come true. Loved ones have died during the year—parents, brothers and sisters, cousins and aunts and uncles, dear dear friends. Christmas Eve is the moment when we are drawn as near to God as we are likely to get this side of the grave, and on Christmas Eve, we truly feel God’s presence, God’s comforting embrace, God’s gentle power. For those few moments, God is so close, so very real. Our lives may be falling apart, but for that hour we release our troubles and rest in the marvelous holy mystery that is God.

As I searched for the poems I would read on Christmas Eve, I found an entire body of literature that hears the promise of Christmas Eve in a much more literal way than we do. Poems written by people who are enslaved, who are in exile—some in foreign lands, some in their homeland, some in their own homes—people who live in the day-to-day terror of war, people who will NEVER have enough to eat, people who will never have health care, people who will never have clean water to drink—people who rarely have ANY water to drink. This morning’s passage from Isaiah, in which God promises the exiles that God WILL bring them home reminded me of the tens of millions of exiled people whose poems I had discovered, people who ache for God to help them, to feed them like Moses fed the exiles in the wilderness, like Jesus fed the five thousand, to heal them like Jesus and the apostles healed so many, to provide water like Moses did when the exiles were wandering in the desert, to shelter them like the Angels sheltered Jesus in the wilderness, to love them because so many of them are so far gone that ONLY God could love them. I didn’t read those poems on Christmas Eve, but they are poems that cry out to be heard.

We have moved from Christmas Eve to Epiphany, from the promise of God to the revelation of God. The Gospel lessons from last week and this week stress the importance of our renewing our role as disciples, as God’s eyes and ears and hands and feet so I am going to read a three very different poems written for and by people in exile, each of them in exile—in their own homelands. They are from the book, Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry. As I read, I invite you to settle into an Epiphany version of Christmas Eve. Let the light of God, the presence of angels, the sweet breath of a new born baby capture us and inspire us as we listen to voices that are much less romantic that our traditional Christmas Eve poems, voices that call out to us to help.

The first poem, written by René Depestre (day-PES-ter) is entitled, “Friend, This is Your Christmas.” Depestre was born in Haiti in 1926, a time when Haiti was devastated by deadly feuds and conflicts and the mismanagement of its leaders. In 1915, a mob killed the Haitian President .That same day, U.S. troops landed in Haiti, and organized the election of a new president. American contempt and brutality against the local population--people who lived there, people for whom Haiti was home—American soldiers took the lives of thousands of men, women and children, and turned many more into exiles in their own land.[i] This was the country and the time into which Depestre was born, and by early adulthood he was not only poor, but bitter and disillusioned. We begin with this poem so that we might enter into the world of the hopeless and try to imagine how difficult it is to celebrate the birth of Christ in a time of war and killing and abject hunger and poverty, a time when home is no longer home. The poem is written for and to Depestre’s countrymen.

There is no

Baby Jesus Christmas-time

for dirty hands

for tattered clothes

for empty eyes

for gazes hanging on the baker’s loaves.

For the sneering smile of poverty

on gaping lips

there is no

Baby Jesus Christmas-time

for the darkness of hovels

for the cold hard bed of pain

for the lack of blankets

for the paradox of slaving for your bread

for the crime of the salary-man

for all that underground humanity

that you would lighten with your firebrand words.

No, no my friend

the Christmas-time of gleaming shops

of pretty toys

of low-necked gowns

of dancing midnight revels

of cannon-shots

of stupid sermons

of starch-collared gentlemen

who wear away the future of your children

of merrymaking in the fine big houses

no, if the poor little child of Bethlehem

chose this day to be born

in the heady swirl of dizzying dances

Christmas-time is not for you.

Your Christmas-time, my friend

lies sleeping in your conscience

in your bitterness

in your hopes

in all your question-marks

that stand before the world they made for you

in the overflowing torrent of your hatreds long held back.[ii]

The grief and hopelessness of Christmas as strangers in one’s own homeland take my breath away.

Our next poem, “Snow in Paris” was written by Léopold Sédar Senghor, a black African Roman Catholic Priest in French Colonial Senegal in the early 20^th century. Senghor also lived amidst the rampant racism of the time, but in contrast to Depestre, Senghor, shines the light of his faith upon his experience. This poem would surely have been understood and appreciated by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Lord, you have visited Paris on this day of your birth

Because it has become mean and evil,

You have purified it with incorruptible cold, with white death.

This morning, right up to the factory smokestacks

Singing in unison, draped in white flags—

“Peace to Men of Good Will!”

Lord, you have offered the snow of your Peace to a torn world,

To divided Europe and ravaged Spain

And the Catholic and Jewish Rebels have fired their fourteen hundred

Canons upon the mountain of your peace.

Lord, I have accepted your white cold, burning hotter than salt.

And now my heart melts like snow in the sun.

I forget

The white hands firing the rifles that crumbled our empires,

The hands that once whipped slaves, and that whipped you,

The snowy white hands that slapped you,

The powdery white hands that slapped me,

The firm hands that led me to loneliness and to hate,

The white hands that cut down the forests

Of straight firm palmyra trees dominating Africa,

In the heart of Africa, like the Sara men,

Handsome as the first men born from your brown hands,

They tore down the black forest to build a railroad,

They cut down Africa’s forests to save Civilization,

Because they needed human raw materials.

Lord, I know I’ll never release this reserve of hatred

For diplomats who show their long canine teeth

And tomorrow trade in black flesh.

My heart, Lord, has melted like the snow on the roofs of Paris

In the sunshine of your gentleness.

It is kind even unto my enemies and unto my brothers

With hands white without snow

Because of these hands of dew, in the evening,

Upon my burning cheeks.[iii]

The final poem is one that I did read on Christmas Eve. It was written by Gladys May Casely-Hayford, who was born in 1904 in the gold coast (now called Ghana) and lived there and in Sierra Leone. Her poem, “Nativity,” gives us a glimpse of the birth of Jesus from the perspective of the people of her time and place. I find it particularly touching.

Within a native hut, ere stirred the dawn,

Unto the Pure One was an Infant born,

Wrapped in blue lappah that His mother dyed,

Laid on His father’s home-tanned deerskin hide,

The Babe still slept, by all things glorified.

Spirits of black bards burst their bonds and sang

‘Peace upon earth’ until the heavens rang.

All the black babies who from earth had fled

Peeped through the clouds—then gathered round His head,

Telling of things a baby needs to do,

When first He opes his eyes on wonder new;

Telling Him that sleep was sweetest rest,

All comfort came from His black mother’s breast.

Their gift was Love, caught from the springing sod,

Whilst tears and laughter were the gifts of God.

Then all the wise men of the past stood forth,

Filling the air, East, West, South and North,

And told Him of the joy that wisdom brings

To mortals in their earthly wanderings.

The children of the past shook down each bough,

Wreathed frangipani blossoms for His brow,

They put pink lilies in His mother’s hand,

And heaped for both the first fruits of the land,

His father cut some palm fronds, that the air

Be coaxed to zephyrs while He rested there.

Birds trilled their hallelujahs; all the dew

Trembled with laughter, till the Babe laughed too.

Black women brought their love so wise,

And kissed their motherhood into His mother’s eyes.[iv]

We are now in the season of Epiphany, when the glory of the Lord shines all around us. Isaiah, Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr.: they each experienced firsthand the worst that humans can do to one another. They each entered the fray unarmed, fighting only with the power of the Word and the examples of their lives, demonstrating for all the shining truth that all of life is God’s business—every nation, every person, every life. Surely this is the song God sings to each of us; that all of our work, no matter how local, must have the good of the whole world as its aim. In our globalized world, in which a seemingly innocuous action—a purchase of, say, sneakers...or Snickers—a purchase in one place can contribute to suffering in another....Embedded in the call to be a light to the nations is a call to know the world in which we hope to shine. The promise of peace on earth is to be found, not in missiles and AK47s, but in our choices of what to buy, what to wear, what to eat—choices that affect God’s children the world over. In the season of Epiphany, may we see our lives and the life of the world through the eyes of Isaiah, of Jesus, of Martin Luther King, Jr.[v] May our lives, built upon the common faith we share, shine forth and bring hope and promise to all who hunger for peace. AMEN