Sermons

I probably shouldn't say this, but the bible is just not easy to read. It's tough. We adults can fake this. More often we just ignore it. This is the word of God. We say with assurance and bit of a blind eye.

When you can't fake this or ignore the difficulty of the Bible is with kids. We like the idea of the kids knowing bible stories, hand out children's bibles, but to actually teach children the bible, to teach them the stories of the bible we need to cut out a lot, pass over whole parts, add enthusiasm to rather uninspiring tales.

Now, the bible, especially the Old Testament, is not boring.  Not dull by any means.  There is a lot of action and wild events.  Most of the action though is violence.  Terrible violence and lots of it.  When it is not violent there is some sort of betrayal or injustice or subterfuge, lying, stealing. 

              Many years ago, I taught a midweek bible study on the history of Israel as recorded in Judges, Samuel, and Kings.  A great collection of stories.  Week after week the grandmas in the study, they were all grandmas who came, the grandmas shuddered or blushed or stared forward with mouths agape. The stories were not what they thought of as the Bible. Finally, one of the members of the study, Dottie Galloway, couldn't take it.  She said, these stories are as bad as my soaps.  Somebody is always cheating, lying, stealing, foolin' around.

              Lots of death and destruction in the Bible.  Fair to say children would be quite interested and engaged with these stories, but they are not appropriate given our desire to guard their innocence. 

              And then, like someone threw a switch, things go from wild and violent to, well, boring.  Chapter after chapter of woes or lists of ancestors or what sort of gem should be stuck to the hat of the priest or what sort of grain offering should you make if you injured your neighbors' donkey.  We say, the word of God, but don't you wonder if a list of ritual sacrifice compiled 4000 years ago is important to us today?

              Many of the stories about Jesus are not very compelling.  They simply suffer from a lack of storytelling.  Someone shouts "hey, Jesus, can you help me?"  Jesus says, "what do you want?"  The man says, "I am blind; I want to see."  Jesus heals him.  This is great and good and lovely.  I am happy for the man who was healed, but, you know, how about some back story?  How about drama or the challenge of getting to the right place to shout at Jesus.  No.  For the most part, none of that. There is a lack of story.

              Right now I am reading Barbara Kingsolver’s recent novel, Demon Copperfield.  Great story.  It's an awful story, but it's great. I'm halfway through and I am dying to know how it ends.  The main character has my heart.  An orphan in Appalachia, the destruction caused by opioids in the heartland, the fragility of life and the resilience.  Each chapter there are moments of hope dashed or tragedy averted.  Kingsolver is a great storyteller.  For the most part in the bible, there is no such offerings.  They went here and they stayed.  End of story.   

              I will say this about the bible, there is not much in the sweeping under the rug category.  Most of the bible reads like a Faulkner novel with all the ghosts and the regret and the misery.  Which is fine, but not something we would deem appropriate for a six-year-old child.  We protect children, for the most, as best we can, from the cruelties of life, the brokenness.  People are just sad.  We don't explain the ravages of depression.  That was a bad man who did a bad thing.  We don't give the details or expose children to the tawdry or the bloody.  Uncle John doesn't live with Aunt Sue anymore. Enough said.

              I am not sure we are very successful in shielding them. They often know more than we would wish.

              One year during October the church members were encouraged to put colored ribbons on a leafless tree, each ribbon signifying a health concern women endure.  Concerns often kept quiet hence the ribbon for all to see.

              There were ribbons for heart disease, breast cancer, depression.  There were ribbons for domestic violence. Each week I spoke to about a different ribbon to the children.  For the most part this was fine.  But I was very nervous about how I might address domestic violence to the kids in a children's sermon.  I should not have been nervous.  When asked the question of what it is, one after another explained to me how sometimes people who should care for you hurt you. I was both impressed and sad.

              We want to keep the kids away from such things.  They are too young to know.  They are still innocent, unable to navigate the darker parts of life.  Tragedy should not reach them.  Irony can be left for another day when you are five. 

              This is the other why reason the Bible is so hard to read and difficult to teach to children.  All our flaws are there without a filter or a screen.  All the stuff we don't want them to see or hear is told again and again.  Cruelties, genocide, famine and war, suffering.  What you want to keep as far away from a child as possible fills page after page of scripture.  All the heroes are terribly flawed, all the victories tinged with reversals of fortune or fate.  And they all lived happily after is just not there.

              I was tempted to lay aside our reading today.  A dying child, a suffering woman, a moment of profound grief.  Not very holiday as they say in Whooville.  Not very Christmassy.  I wanted to keep the suffering away from Advent.  Build a perfect world of light and wonder.

              I like Christmas.  I like the wonder and the beauty and the pageant.  This is the time of stockings and Santa. Sugar plumb ferries, whatever they are, are the focus of the time, not fear and desperation of a parent trying to save their daughter.  Read the Magnificat or the birth of the Baptist or the annunciation of Gabriel to Mary or to Joseph.  Sweet stories. Read a sweet story was the temptation.  Something without need of redaction, no suffering or desperation or fear. 

              Isn't that the whole point of the season?  Waiting for hope in splendor? There is a deep impulse in us to create places of beauty in Advent.  Who hasn't heard the chastisement for poor words or bickering, "hey, it's Christmas."  In other words, be nice, behave, don't spoil the beauty, act like you like each other.

              I almost put this passage off till next year, but it kept pulling me back, begging like the father in the story.  I was reluctant and unconvinced till I saw the 12s.  Jarius's daughter was twelve; the woman who touched Jesus suffered for twelve years. Such details are big in the Bible.

              Twelve years is usually the limit of innocence, adolescence.  Kierkegaard called these twelve years dreaming innocence.  Twelve years is the limit, perhaps, of what we can protect, shield, guard.  This is an anthropological truth.  Culture after culture sees this age, this time as transition from childhood to becoming an adult.

              In some ways Advent can be understood as an annual renewal of innocence. We adults create a wonderland of trees and trains, garland and gifts all to foster a sense of childlike splendor.  And there is a very profound truth beneath our elves and reindeer.  Jesus came as a child. He bids the children come unto him.  He says you must enter the kingdom of God as a child.  He tells Nicodemus you must be born again, be a child again.  His most dire warning in the gospels is to those who would cause a child to stumble.

              And the woman suffered for twelve years.  Coincidence?  Unlikely.  This is all a construction, a masterful creation.  The two stories need not go together.  Could easily have been told separately.  All the gospel writers, though, interrupt the panic of Jarius with the suffering of the woman.  By their choice, she intrudes into the primary story.  She stops the flow of the narrative.  She ruins everything.  Jesus is delayed and the child dies.  The story should have been Jesus made it just in the nick of time.  That's a sweet story.

              It all works out in the end, true.  Except not for Jarius, the pleading father.  Imagine for just a moment what the delay would have meant to him.  Jesus stopped and asked, "who touched me?" Jarius must have thought, who cares, keep going, hurry. But Jesus stops and the story is no longer sweet. 

              Unlike so much of the bible this story has drama and details, twists and turns of fate and fortune.  But like so much of the bible there is brokenness and suffering, and subterfuge.  Jesus told them the girl was not dead.  But she was.  He told them, tell no one what happened here.

              Advent is for the kids.  Presents wrapped under the tree: Without small children in footed pajamas, it doesn't always feel right or worth the effort.  You need children to come and rearrange manger scenes.  Creating different scenarios of livestock and magical Persian princes who bring Frankenstein. Try to imagine how boring it would be if the Christmas pageant was cast with big people, historically accurate actors who sought to embody the drama of a cold night and quiet barn.  You need kids, wild monkeys, errant donkeys if you want magic.

              And that was the temptation: leave this story out of Advent.  It doesn't have the simple joy of angels or quiet little towns late at night where poor shepherds kept watch of flocks. No. A child is dying, a woman is suffering, Jesus is delayed, and tragedy is overcome, but not averted.  Can't really end this story by saying, "Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night."

              But what spoke to me, what I heard as I sat with the story of Jarius and the woman and the child, what I heard as I sat amidst our trimmed tree and the large snowman who now stands sentinel beside our television, what I heard was the purpose of Advent.  Not the story itself, no; I heard the reason we tell the stories, the intent of all the tinsel and angels, stars fastened to the top of fir trees. The reason of Advent is to keep the child, save the child and as we do we heal the suffering of those who need to become a child yet again, those who lost the splendor of life.

              Advent, Christmas, it’s for the kids.  We buy presents for children we don't know hoping against hope they would be relieved of hard circumstances and thus believe life is wonderful, beautiful, kind and gracious.  We construct small barns or turn the church into a live barn with donkeys and sheep.  I will never forget the frozen family who finally came in on Christmas Eve after standing outside the church in subzero temperatures with their sheep so to create a living image of the nativity.  Why did they do this?  For the kids.

              We do Advent so children will abide in the splendor of innocence.  That is why we do all of this.  And yet, if truth be told, we also do this so to regain the innocence we have lost, to ease the suffering life's limits have brought to bear upon us.  We safeguard the innocence to be sure, but we also seek healing of our own heart, a moment where we too can be a child again.  It’s for the kids and for the child in us.  Amen.

Speaker: Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

December 15, 2024

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