Old South Sermons:

Glad Tidings

by Rev. Nancy S. Taylor, Senior Minister

Based on Luke 1:26-38

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Listen to this sermon

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Children of the village were playing outside the house. Their feet were bare and calloused.

Their brown limbs were long and slender. They wore tattered shorts and shirts. They were playing a game of tag while they waited.

The tiny home outside of which they waited was, like the other homes on the island, painted in bright colors: this one was sky blue with yellow trim: a canary yellow door and canary yellow window sills and canary yellow shutters.

From within the home there came a small cry … the first cry, the very first cry of a just born infant. Out of doors, the children, hearing the cry, froze … their game of tag no longer of interest. They stared at the canary yellow door. The door opened and a woman appeared. The midwife. She held, swaddled, the baby whose cry they had just heard.

This is what the children had been waiting for. They let out a communal yelp of glee,
and then spread out in every direction, sprinting to deliver the news to every home and every shop and every passerby.

“Good news! The baby is here! The baby arrived! God is good! Good news!” they cried.

You see, on this tiny Caribbean island, the birth of a child is reported as God’s latest news from heaven.

In the midst of lives of wracking poverty, devoice of prenatal care, rife with diseases that can carry one off in the blink of an eye … on an island where death is woven into life … and where one cannot help but wonder if God is still there … if God still cares … in this midst of this life, the very event of a birth is treated as news, as intelligence, as information, as confirmation that God is still with us.

It is because of the Christmas story, because of the angel’s words to Mary, because of the promise of Emmanuel, God with us, that the people of this small, impoverished Caribbean island look upon a new born baby  and see in that infant evidence, data, verification that God is still with us and hasn’t abandoned us.

In truth, one need not live on an isolated, impoverished,  under-doctored island to grow increasingly concerned with mounting evidence of God’s absence. One need not fear each mosquito-bite to wonder where God has gotten off to …

We have amassed our own growing body of data, evidence that tilts toward the suspicion that God is off fishing somewhere and frankly inattentive to human need:

Where is God when we exercise our human proclivity to bloody our hands and stain our souls with the ease with which we go to war?

Where is God when we are wracked with grief at the death of loved one, or when we hear to our terror, news of an illness from which we may not, in fact, recover?

Looked at from a certain angle, the daily news is filled with evidence of God’s absence:

A $50 billion dollar bilk! A financial scandal of unprecedented scale and scope … and it’s not enough that it takes down the mighty, but it is also taking down major philanthropic foundations;

Allegations of a pay for play governor … with, for this New Yorker, the single slim silver lining that Chicago politics is making New York politics look innocent;

Giants of America’s great industrial revolution – Chrysler and GM – humiliated, hat in hand begging for billions;

Economic insecurity and waning faith in our great institutions of finance and government;

A vanishing middle class;

A shoe thrown at a head of state in disgust … and carrying with it in its brief flight across a room, the distance, difference, and wariness that exists between two peoples, two nations two cultures, and two religions;

A punishing ice storm and day-ten without power for many of our neighbors…

and then a whopping great snow storm … these on the days that retailers hoped finally to sell their wares.

Ours is a faulty, fragile, dangerous, brutish world. These are disconcerting days and weeks.

As we turn toward Christmas, I feel like those island children out playing the in yard: waiting, waiting, preparing for news from heaven ... waiting for a baby and the assurance, the evidence, that God is present, Emmanuel.

God was so very wise and kind to send us a child: when we had thought we needed a military leader; to knock at the doors of our heart with an infant when we had expected a monarch; to approach us with a frail innocent when we had hoped for a canny politician; to proffer a peasant, when a brilliant economist might have overcome the chasm between rich and poor.

God knew what we have learned the hard way: that even good military leaders are not sufficient; that monarchs, for all their power, cannot or do not or will not, save us from ourselves; that neither the greatest politicians, nor the most brilliant economists have been able to get it right … and, so, God offers a thing both startling and disarming: the gift of tenderness and vulnerability … the gift of frail flesh and mortal bone.

 

OLD SOUTH BABIES ARE CARRIED INTO THE SANCTUARY BY THEIR PARENTS. THEY SPREAD OUT, COMING DOWN ALL THREE AILES,

SURROUNDING THE CONGREGATION AND PEWS.

Here, I stumble upon an admission, a confession: the reach and capacity of my words are limited. Word’s cannot contain or carry or the glad tidings, the joy, the hope, future,       the hopes and fears of all the years that are embodied in the angel’s words to Mary …

THE PIANIST BEGINS TO GENTLY PLAY

O LITTLE TOWN OF BETHELEM

So, today, where words fail and only the thing itself will do … I am delighted to introduce you to the babies of Old South …

Look upon these babies … their faces, skin, eyes. Listen to their voices. Look and see in them what Mary was promised by Gabriel.

Look and see the news for which the children of the island were waiting: God’s latest news from heaven; God’s assurance that God is with us … all is not lost. News from the earth is wretched …but news from heaven is very good.

God’s gift to us, so surprising and tender, so vulnerable … melts the coldest heart, soothes the most troubled soul … causes us, despite ourselves to smile and laugh and coo and dare again to believe in the future.

These babies are fragile, gentle, precious, risky reminders of God’s fragile, gentle, precious, risky gift of self and love.

Look upon these little ones. Feast your eyes. For this is what God’s love looks. This is what God’s love feels like.

 

These little ones are intimations of the child whose birth the world awaits.

 

Receive and believe God’s gift to our battered and weary world: good news of great joy to all people.

 

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SCRIPTURE   Luke 1:26-38                     

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you." But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end." Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?" The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God." Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.

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