21November1999sermon.htm.wpd

"A quiet whisper"

Sermon for Christmas 2, Year B, 2000

St John's, Chews Landing

Reading: Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23.

Well, we survived.

The world didn't end,
the power and water are still working,
even my computer
appears not to have suffered
any major problems.
No nuclear missiles
were accidentally launched,
no terroristds strikes
marred the New Year's
celebrations.
Only the slot machines
at Delaware race tracks
seemed to have a problem.

It was all a lot of fuss
over nothing.
Or so we say
with all the benefit
of hindsight.
I wasn't worried
at all.
Or so I'd like you all
to believe.

But just some times
in the last few days
of the twentieth century
I found myself
beginning to worry.
What if...
And so I filled a few empty soda bottles
with clean drinking water,
got a couple of hundred dollars
out of the bank,
made sure my car had plenty of gas,
checked my supply of candles,
and bought some fuel for my camping stove....just in case...

And at odd moments,
I found my self wondering
what if...
What if
the survivalists are right
and there is looting and anarchy
and no food
for a month?
What if
all my computer preparations fail,
and I can't get my papers finished
because they're all locked up
on a little plastic disk?
What if
some little computer
in some essential part of my car
leaves me stranded
at 12.05
on the first of January?
There was a moment of fear
as midnight arrived
in the Holy Land, and then again
with Greenwich Mean Time,
and even as I wrote this sermon,
making sure it was finished Friday
in case I couldn't print it out
when the date clicked over
to 2000,
I could feel the anxiety
in the pit of my stomach.
What if...

And even in the midst
of the celebrations
that knot of anxiety
has not dissolved.
For we are in uncharted territory.
The years stretch in front of us, a new century, a new millennium. All
those
zeros
on the end
of the date.
None of us
have ever faced this before,
none
will face it
again.
It's as if we have
a blank slate.

People
will remember the twentieth century
in many ways.
It was a century which began
with people traveling
by foot, and horse and carriage,
and ended
with cars
and planes
and spaceships.
It began
with letters and primitive local phone systems
and ended
with the Internet.
We had wars,
the war to end all wars,
the Holocaust
and more wars,
in France and Germany and Russia,
and Japan, and China, and the Philippines,
in Korea and Vietnam,
in the Falklands and Argentina and El Salvador,
in Afghanistan and Burma and Tibet,
in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and the Sudan, and Rwanda,
in East Timor,
in Bosnia, and in Chechnya.
It was the century
which saw
the first atomic bomb,
and when we thought we would die
in a nuclear firestorm.
It was a century of AIDS
and of medical miracles - the eradication of smallpox and leprosy and polio
and TB,
of bypass surgery and liver transplants,
of contraception
and fertility treatments.

But that is history. Now we begin again. The twenty-first century
is a blank slate,
and how it will be remembered
is up to us.
How it will be remembered
not just on a worldwide scale
but right here,
in Chews Landing, in St John's/at Princeton, in ECP
and in the other places we will live our lives.
That can be tremendously exciting,
but it can also be
just a little bit scary.

I don't know about you,
but for me, that little knot of anxiety
somewhere in my stomach
is still there. The New Year has come, and nothing catastrophic happened,
but now there is all this time ahead
and I don't know
what is going
to happen.

In Scotland
they marked the turn of the millennium
by pouring molten iron
into the North Sea. The age of iron, they said,
has given way
to the age of uncertainty.
I don't know about you,
but for me,
any uncertainty,
any part of my life
where I'm not in control
makes me scared.
I want to know
what will happen today
and tomorrow
and the day after,
and if I have my choice,
I'd like to know that
for the rest of my life.
What will I be doing
in five years time?
I don't know.
Where will this community be
in three years?
I don't know.
I'm not even sure
about what will happen
in the next twelve months,
or the details
of the next twelve days.
I just
don't
know.

One way of dealing with it,
is to keep my head buried,
sticking with
the past,
and the present.
Reminiscing
about the century past,
working out
the hundred most significant people
in the last millennium, and worrying
about Y2K
was a great way
of not
worrying
about
the years ahead.
Those things
are known.
They appear to be
under our control
or at least
within our grasp.
And that way, we don't have to face
the uncertainty
of the future.

Because thinking about the future
can be really
hard.
It's messy,
it's unpredictable,

and I don't like it.

* * * * *

Christmas is over. The three wise men
have been and gone. The streets are quieter
now the census is over,
and the young family has a room
little more than a closet,
but quieter
than the stable, with its restless donkeys and
chewing cattle, and the early morning call
of the rooster.

No more gifts, no more special visitors,
just the ordinary stuff of caring for a new baby,
diapers to be changed, crying to be soothed,
sleepless nights and tired joy.

At last the baby has fallen asleep,
stomach full of milk,
and in the flickering lamplight
his father sees the
eyelashes like feathers on his cheeks,
hands like tiny starfish,
and wonders
what the future will bring.

As he drifts off to sleep,
in the all too short silence of the sleeping child, he wonders
about the things which have happened. An angel, predicting a birth,
shepherds, visiting from the fields,
wise men from the east, bearing gifts.
Huddled in the corner,
trying to get some rest
Joseph dreams...

And suddenly,
startlingly
he wakes,
the memory of that dream
seared into his brain.
He shakes Mary awake.
"An angel", he whispers fearfully, "an angel, in my dream. They will kill
our baby. We have to go!"

Hurriedly
they gather together their few possessions,
quietly, so as not to disturb the still sleeping baby,
a change of clothes,
his carpenter's tools,
the precious gifts
of the kings,
leaving a few coins
to pay for their lodging,
quickly,
they pick up the baby,
muffling his whimpers
against their clothes,
and sneak out of the city,
the beginning of a long journey
with an unknown end.

* * * * *

We know
the end of that story.
We know
that they made it safely to Egypt,
and later, once Herod had died,
came back again and settled in Nazareth,
that Jesus grew up
like any other child,
and it was not until later
that their fears were to be realized,
yet beyond those fears, the joy
of resurrected life.

We know that.

But for Joseph
and Mary, none of that
was known.
None of that
was certain.
All they had
was the dreamy whisper
of an angel
at night, the assurance
of God
with us.
A fragile thread
of hope.
And they took one step, and another, and another,
all the way
to Egypt and back,
listening
for the faint sounds
of God's voice
in the darkness.

You might find it hard to believe, but I think
that we
are a lot like Mary and Joseph
that night when the angel
called to Joseph
in a dream.

I don't think the Scots
are far wrong
when they label the age
the age of uncertainty.
In front of us
are choices to be made,
people to
lives to be lived.

In some ways, we have been here before,
every time
we are faced
with decisions,
about where we make our homes/ about where we go to college
about who we make our lives with/ about who we befriend, and who we date.
But in other ways, we have never been here before. It is
a new millennium.
We have opportunities
to begin again,
to try to do things differently, to try to do things better,
as individuals
and as a nation and a world.
And as a community of faith
we have decisions to make,
grieving to do,
and new joys to discover.

But there are no guarantees. This world is
messy, this world
is unpredictable, this world
is uncertain.
And we have to live with it, like it,
or not.

But we are also called
to follow in the footsteps
of Joseph and Mary,
one step
at a time,
sometimes seeing ahead only
as far
as the next corner,
but always listening
for the quiet whisper
of the voice
of God.

That quiet whisper

which Joseph first heard
giving a name
to that tiny baby
yet unborn,
"God with us."
A tiny baby, whose birth
is the excuse
for the biggest party
the world has yet seen
these 2000 or so years
after his birth.
"God with us".

A quiet whisper
calling us
to be faithful
even in the middle of all our uncertainty,
a quiet whisper
God with us.

Raewynne J. Whiteley
2 January, 2000