Saint Stephen
Saint Stephen
We give the thanks, O Lord of glory, for the example of thefirst martyr Stephen, who looked up to heaven and prayed for his persecutors to thy Son Jesus Christ, who standeth at thy right hand; where he liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
Saint Stephen
Scripture citation(s): Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Galatians 3:23-25, 4:4-7; John 1:1-18
A Sermon by
The Rev. Mark Schultz
on
Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Galatians 3:23-25, 4:4-7; John 1:1-18
✛
The Time Being
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I remember in our apartment on 215th Street
(Seems like ages ago now),
The super would figure out a way
To rig the elevator to play Christmas music for weeks and weeks before the Day:
I think what he did was just put a radio on top of the elevator
Set to a perpetually Christmas radio station.
And it would be cute for a bit at the end of November:
You could grumble to yourself, “Oh, it’s not even Advent, what’s with this Santa music.”
But you’d be delighted nonetheless, it’s hard not to like Christmas music,
Even if it’s early and even if it is Santa-centric.
And then…after a while…you’d wish that George Michael never formed “Wham!”
So you could give quiet thanks that the song “Last Christmas”
Was mercifully left unwritten and therefore uncovered by so many mediocre pop bands.
On the Day itself it would be nonstop, commercial free, Christmas music endlessness,
All those warm feelings and wishes that Christmas could last the whole year round;
And then, 26th of December, the actual second day of Christmas, St Stephen’s Day, Boxing Day:
You’d get in the elevator to go to breakfast or something and…
… it was like emotionally slamming into a brick wall:
Vapid nondescript adult contemporary music would fill the elevator.
You never yearned so hard for a song about magic reindeer in your whole life.
It was like nothing had actually happened the day before, the weeks before.
Like all that mounting expectation of something wonderful didn’t just fizzle out…
It vanished. Like it had never been:
The Vision of something wonderful evaporating,
The world suddenly less bright now, slightly more plastic and weary and shallow now.
And you’re left to wonder: is it actually possible to hold onto the Vision,
However attenuated your grasp of it…
Not the snowmen and the reindeer and the fireplaces and the roasting chestnuts,
But the Thing to which all those things feebly point…
Not merely to keep a day in your heart all year round,
But to hold the Vision in spite of the times
To deepen the Vision in spite of the times;
Even while acknowledging, perhaps, as WH Auden writes, “To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.” [1]
The terrible ache of the Time Being.
It’s true, Christmas has Twelve Days.
But so often Eleven of them feel threaded through with a kind of inarticulate yearning.
Yearning for the Vision, Yearning for an end to the Time Being
And the inauguration of the Time Fulfilled.
Because yesterday,
We stood with shepherds keeping watch over their flocks on a deep December night
Surprised when the darkness around us blazed with a joyful angelic glory,
Eager to sing and to celebrate the birth of a Savior;
Yesterday we traveled with the shepherds, awe-struck and wonder-filled
For a glimpse of Our Newborn King,
To worship the Light of the World, veiled in human flesh, blood and bone,
We saw the very Bread of Life lying in a manger, a food trough (what a divine irony!);
We were close enough to feel the warmth of his breath,
Able to look into the Child’s eyes
And to see in them the timeless and fathomless depths of his love for us
Him whose name is Love
And to read in those Eyes of Grace and Mercy a desire to be born again
In us, in our hearts
Now and now and now and now and every moment of our lives.
Yesterday, there at the manger, we reeled dumbstruck and silent at what Eliot calls
“The still point of the turning world” [2]
And if someone had asked us, we would’ve told them
That the world was made of light and fire and radiant bliss: and we would not have been wrong.
But then, with the shepherds, we had to go home.
Because, I mean, let’s face it. The world was and is still turning:
And the sheep still need looking after;
Bills still need paying;
Our sick friends and family members need nursing;
Our departed loved ones need mourning;
Our broken hearts need tending;
And there’s probably a Netflix series or two that needs binge-watching.
The cares and occupations of our lives have a way
Of spilling into the dearest moments of our deepest peace and contemplation.
“It must’ve been a dream,” we might think, “it was all too wonderful to have been real.”
And we fall into that old pattern of thinking that
What is most blazingly wonderful about human life
Is the least real thing about it,
Is a dream from which we must always awake
Banished by the brutal naked facts of our world and our work-a-day lives.
And we, who have had the Vision, find ourselves back:
Slogging along in the Time Being.
Our Gospel this morning is insistent, however:
Telling us that the Vision’s wonder is no dream: it’s real,
That the Incarnation is too wonderful not to be real,
That wonder is at the heart of the real
At the heart of everything that is anything;
Telling us that in the birth of Jesus Christ,
The Word, the Logos of God, the Pattern of the Real
By which God understands God’s own fullness
And by which God speaks and arranges and loves all creation into being,
The fundamental plan and pattern of all things
That One Logos, that One Word
Incarnates, becomes human, and discovers its home with and among us;
Telling us that the most mysteriously wonderful central naked fact of all
Is the Nakedly Vulnerable Almighty and Wordless Infant Word of God
In whose very real Body and Blood
All of Heaven and all of Earth
All of God and all of Humanity
Are blissfully sweetly joyously joined…
The Vision is intimately bound up with us.
But, as Eliot writes, “Human kind / cannot bear very much reality.” [3]
That conscious proximity to the Vision at Christmas,
Proximity to the Vision of Grace and of Grace’s fulfillment,
Might actually mean for us a Joy which is at some point experienced
As desolating…
Not because Grace desolates us
But because Grace makes us alive to and suddenly aware of
The desolation in and with which we already live
And which heretofore had been comfortable to us, normal, our life as usual…
Even as that same Grace fits us for a Joy we could not have previously imagined,
Deepening our vision of- and longing for the Kingdom that both is and is coming.
This tension between a desolating consciousness of the way things are in the world,
The way things are for the Time Being,
And a joyful and anticipatory awareness of what is coming to be even now
In Christ and through the Church:
This tension can be a difficult thing to bear.
But I think that’s the invitation of these remaining Eleven days of Christmas:
Not to shy away from living into that tension.
Which is a challenge.
Because our tendency will be:
To keep Christmas yesterday. To let Christmas stay yesterday.
To resist the inexorable draw of that Christmas Star of Mystery every day of our lives,
Afraid that what we’ll encounter at the end of its silvered tether of light,
In the human life of the Infant God-Man Jesus,
Is a brightness that, in our present state, is far more than we can bear:
A brightness that brings home to us, makes us face,
In no uncertain terms, the desolation of the Time Being,
The distance between us and the Vision’s fulfillment in us.
Refusing the Vision, receiving it not, packing it away with the tinsel,
Is a way by which we can come to an uneasy peace with our real proximity to Heaven:
By refusing to see it, we can convince ourselves that we’re not seen by it,
That it can’t ask anything of us, because we’re actually much too far away
To understand what it’s saying.
Because if Heaven really has come among us
If Heaven really was born among us in a stable’s poverty,
If Heaven really grew among us as a child
Really suffered with us as a human
Really suffered from us as a human
Really loved us enough to die for love of us
Really died our death to undo death from the inside
And really rose again so that death would no longer be our lived reality
Nor the limit of our life
If Heaven really is here, now, as it promised
In a community, in Heaven’s own Eucharistic Bread
If Heaven is really here:
Then it might, at any inopportune moment
—And what moment would not be inopportune—
It might turn to us and say something so terribly good
and so devastatingly life-changingly wonderful as this:
“I love you. I love you so much.
And there is nothing you have done or can do to earn this love or lose this love.
I will never stop loving you. Not even death can stop me loving you.”
In the face of this blindingly brilliant and vulnerable love:
How is it possible to live a “normal” life without being transformed?
How is it possible to just go about one’s day? To eat our little breakfast? Do our little work? Sleep our little sleep and wake up again as if nothing was wonderful?
How is it possible not to be aware of our own smallness
In the presence of a love which loves us so far beyond our capacity to love anything?
How is it possible to live the Time Being as if it were anything other than what it is:
A desolation yearning for redemption?
How is it possible for one’s own heart not to break with yearning for the love so freely given?
Yet
In the breaking
How is it possible to miss the life of love flooding through the cracks and into our lives
Healing, redeeming and becoming our lives?
How is it possible to miss that the joy of heaven, incarnate in Jesus, sharing our humanity
Is filling every aspect of our ordinariness with its own extraordinary loveliness?
How is it possible to miss that the love which names us beloved
Is empowering us to love more fully, more deeply
And to participate in the redemption of the times by grace?
How is it possible to miss that we are becoming, even now:
Sites of Heaven’s inbreaking, our own lives blazing stars
Pointing the way to an always-already arriving glory of depthless love?
Beloved, we’ve seen the Vision that makes the ache of the Time Being more keen.
I invite you this Christmastide to live in the tension of that ache,
To understand the ache as a sign of your need for the Vision
So that when it comes to you more clearly, as Eucharist, as a stranger in need,
As a child wordlessly pleading for nurture, comfort, shelter, love,
You can hold the Vision and be held by it, even in the midst of the Time Being
Becoming a sign of the dawning Fullness of all things
From whom we have received grace upon grace.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom be all honor and power and glory with the Father in the Unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.
