Just about every weekday of the year, Trinity’s day begins with Morning Prayer, read in the St. Columba Chapel behind me, and live-streamed over Facebook. It’s a quiet, lovely way to start the day, and depending on the time of year, the light glows in through the windows next to the small altar, sometimes blindingly. We’re usually the first ones in the church and we open the front door and put the visitor sign out, and on some mornings I wait until as late as I can before 9:00 to turn on the church lights, so I can see this space shaped by the morning sun of different seasons and weathers. Mary and the baby Jesus, back there along the east wall, or the fragmented colors of the windows across from her, or the glow – sunrise or sunset? It’s hard to tell – of the Benedicite window that looks like a view of Eden. It’s always a small, quiet, sweet service, sometimes just two or three of us gathered, sometimes half a dozen.
And so a few weeks ago, I was saying Morning Prayer and toward the end of the service we read together the prayer of St. Chrysostom, with those beautiful and comforting words echoing the Gospel of Matthew: “you have promised through your well-beloved Son that when two or three are gathered together in His name you will be in the – ______
midst of them.”
But this particular morning I was a little extra tired and I wasn’t articulating everything completely clearly and what came out was something like “when two or three are gathered together in His name you will be in the mess of them.”
And as soon as the word tumbled out of my mouth I had to laugh – silently of course – and was struck by the realization that truth is sometimes what is spoken when we say the words we don’t mean to say.
God, we give you thanks for your well-beloved Son, for when two or three are gathered in His name, you will be in the mess of us.
Because God is in the mess of us every time God is in the midst of us, and as we mark the last Sunday of Advent and count down the last few days before Christmas, which are messy, we are reminded of that powerfully. God was and is in the mess of us – from the moment Mary told Joseph she was pregnant, and he knew good and well he’d had nothing to do with it. That was a mess.
God was in the mess of us when Caesar Augustus called the world to be counted and taxed and the roads were full of people on the move, including Mary and Joseph, traveling miles and miles from home, nine months pregnant, and there was no room at the inn. God was in the mess of us when Herod got nervous and sent (unwitting) spies bearing gifts, and God was in the mess of us when God sent them home by another way.
The mess that God sent God’s son into, the mess that Jesus was born into, is the mess of us.
For the past couple weeks in adult Sunday School, we’ve been exploring a series of prayers, the O Antiphons. These are seven prayers spoken in the last week of Advent, and if you haven’t heard of the O Antiphons by that name, you sang them just this morning – the Advent hymn “O come, O come Emmanuel” is built entirely on the O Antiphons. We’re not sure exactly how old these prayers are, but they likely date back to the 6th century or so, and they were sung before and after the Magnificat, the Song of Mary, in Vespers – evening prayer – on the nights leading up to Christmas.
Each Antiphon describes Jesus in a different way, names Jesus with a different image, connecting the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, and each Antiphon ends with a prayer for the Messiah, Jesus, to come and be with us: Emmanuel.
After a few centuries, an eighth O Antiphon was added, a prayer to Mary, but it’s not always included even today.
O come, O come Emmanuel
O come, thou wisdom from on high
O come, O come thou Lord of might
O come, thou branch of Jesse’s tree
O come thou Key of David, come
O come thou Dayspring from on high
O come, Desire of nations, come
And today, December 21, is the day that we pray the O Oriens – “thou Dayspring” – which translates as the dawn, the sunrise, or the morning star or morning light. Day springing up from the horizon, the sun bursting over the mountains, the light banishing the darkness of night. Depending on the translation, it may read:
O Radiant Dawn, splendor of eternal light, sun of justice: come, shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.
or, from the hymn:
O come, thou Dayspring from on high,
and cheer us by thy drawing night;
disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
and death’s dark shadow put to flight.
It’s powerful that this image of daybreak marks both Christmas and Easter – birth and resurrection.
And it’s significant that we pray to Jesus as the morning light on the winter solstice – the same night that we mark the longest night, a time associated with grieving, with the deepest of winter. Christians in the 6th century and following sang the O Antiphons in the evening vespers because this season is at the eve of the year, at the eve of the world – it is the time of the year when we are in greatest darkness, and the time when we begin to move more and more quickly toward the dawn. This night holds both of those things – darkness and light, grief and hope – together.
A week ago, I was invited to see the ShenanArts production of “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” – a book I’d read years ago but hadn’t seen on stage. It’s about a Christmas pageant that’s taken over by the most unexpected of cast members – kids who don’t know who Jesus is, kids who are the least-liked and the most difficult kids at school, who get in trouble all the time, steal the other kids’ lunches and are bullies. Imogene, the girl who decides she will play Mary, smokes cigars. The Pageant almost doesn’t happen – the community is in an uproar, it’s canceled and then it’s rescheduled and then the kids don’t show up, but then they do, at the last minute, the Magi bringing a ham instead of frankincense, and Mary has the nerve to burp the baby Jesus in the middle of the pageant. Well, don’t all babies need to be burped?
Imogene – and by the end of the pageant, everyone – got what the regular church-going folks in the story didn’t – that Christmas wasn’t perfect, a barn wasn’t the easiest place to have a baby, and while Mary probably didn’t smoke a cigar, she did have to burp the baby Jesus on a fairly regular basis, and to make sure he was fed, and protected, and loved – all the way through childhood, adulthood, in the wilderness, all the way to the cross, the tomb, and the resurrection.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph were human beings, living messy human lives, right along with us. Whatever darkness that we were lost in 2,000 years ago, whatever darkness we feel lost in today, God is stepping into the mess of it with us, in the birth of a child in a barn.
On Christmas Eve – Wednesday at 4:00! – we’ll be holding our own best Christmas Pageant ever here at Trinity. Forty-some young people were here yesterday along with parents and grandparents and siblings and volunteers and teachers and musicians and choir director, fitting costumes, practicing lines and rehearsing music – a whirl of tinsel and crowns and shepherds’ staffs and microphones and cookies and apple cider and sheep costumes. (You might find some feathers and sparkly stars this morning in the church, maybe even a donkey, or the baby Jesus waiting in the wings, if you look for them.)
It was beautiful, and it was messy – just as the birth of Jesus was, 2,000 years ago, to a young, poor couple living under the shadow of the Roman Empire was messy – just as the long journeys of a refugee family, a bunch of shepherds and the Magi bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, myrrh and ham were messy. The world, and all our journeys through it, was, and is, messy and beautiful and difficult and full of light.
In the midst of us, and in the mess of us, God is with us,
Into the deepest darkness will come the brightest light: Emmanuel.
Amen.
