Sermons

“Wisdom & Welcome, Grace & Peace”

Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:4-13 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – December 8, 2019

 Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that our desire to welcome you might open us to the wisdom of all the earth’s peoples.  In the name of the One coming into the world we pray, Amen.

In case I haven’t mentioned it before, it is important for us to know that our faith tradition is full of paradoxes.  Now some people get nervous around paradoxes, especially if they are invested in the idea that faith is supposed to be simple and straightforward.  A paradox, after all, insists that two things that seem to contradict each other are both true.  But I would argue that many of the paradoxes of Christianity are things we should give thanks for and even rejoice in.  The one I have in mind today is a particular blessing.  Let’s call it the Christmas paradox.

In preparation for thinking about the Christmas paradox, I want us to take a second to locate ourselves in the scriptures we just heard.  There is a word that is repeated in that Romans passage six times, and it’s talking about us.  The word, of course, is Gentiles.  Now, if you were to describe yourself with 10 or 20 or even 50 words, I doubt that “Gentile” would make your list.  But when we run into this word in scripture, we need to recognize that it’s referring to us.  Not just us, of course, but it includes us.  Those of us who have lived our entire lives within the Christian tradition often feel like we’ve always been on the inside.  But when the word Gentiles comes up, we are reminded that when this whole thing began, we were still on the outside.  The point is not to make us feel like we don’t belong or that we’re second-class members of the body, of course, but to prod us toward thanksgiving that we have been brought into the family.

Having remembered that, let’s get back to the Christmas paradox.  As I mentioned last week, for Christians, Christmas is largely about celebrating the theological concept of the Incarnation, the idea that God took on flesh and lived among us.  Last week, we talked about how that means that part of the invitation of Christmas is, therefore, to take care of all the bodies, our own and everyone else’s.  The thing about taking on flesh though, is that it’s not something that can happen in the abstract.  A body is specific.  A “theoretical body” is not a body at all.  So part of what we have to recognize at Christmas is that when Word took on flesh, the body God came to inhabit was a particular body, a Palestinian Jewish body living under Roman occupation.  Christmas happened in a very specific context.  Jesus was a brown-skinned, Jewish baby.  He had Jewish hair and Jewish hands and a Jewish jawline and a Jewish heart and Jewish toes and knees and ears and shoulders.  His entire body was Jewish.

The Christmas paradox is that this completely and totally Jewish baby would become, as Simeon would put it in the temple, a “light for revelation to the Gentiles.”  The reason we are in – and not just us, but Christians in Korea and Congo and Peru and Finland and Indonesia – is exactly because of a specifically Jewish baby.  Have you ever been to a display of nativity scenes?  It’s amazing what humans have done with nativity scenes over the centuries.  Some of them do strive to portray the characters as they would have appeared in the original context.  But most nativity scenes are not trying to show us what a Palestinian Jewish baby being welcomed into the world would look like.  Most nativity scenes, instead, celebrate that the divine love that took on bodily form in this story breaks down all the walls of culture and race we use to divide ourselves.  And the resulting faith is not some abstract, default Baby with no color or race or ethnicity.  The result is that the Baby Jesus has been portrayed as every kind of specific baby imaginable.  Every culture has claimed the nativity and made it their own, seeing their own bodies reflected and made sacred in the story of God made flesh.

This is the “welcome” Paul is talking about when he implores the Roman church to “welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”  This is the welcome Advent invites us to prepare for.  We are getting ready to welcome not just the cosmic Christ – the spiritual manifestation of divine love – but also the bodies – all the specific, contextualized bodies – that Christ now inhabits.  All the babies are Jesus.  All the babies are vulnerable and in need of protection from the powers that be.  All the babies are causes for rejoicing and praising God.  All the babies are signs of the depth of God’s love.  Even the ones that have already grown up.  Even us.  Even you.  “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you!”

Now before we get too carried away with loving on all the babies, let’s also remember why it was that the Gentiles were getting invited.  It’s not just about welcome.  There is another layer here.  “The nations shall inquire of him,” Isaiah says.  The Gentiles come and are welcomed in, because we are seeking wisdom.  Wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge – all these words are included to make one point: that we don’t really know what we’re doing, and we need help.  We have heard the invitation of Christmas – to cherish and nurture all the bodies, but we’re not very good at it.  It’s not that Gentiles come seeking Jesus because we’ve figured something out; it’s that we’ve finally admitted we haven’t figured it out.

What is the wisdom that Jesus offers us?   It is the wisdom that leads to peace.  It is the wisdom that looks beyond what can been seen and heard and manipulated by unscrupulous forces to reveal true justice for all God’s peoples.  It is the wisdom that is grounded in humility, the fear of the Lord, that offers us the relief of being merely mortal.  It is the wisdom that dissolves our desire to hurt or destroy, creating a place of safety and refuge for all.  It is the wisdom that brings us hope and harmony, making it possible for us to truly “welcome one another,” across all lines of specific culture and race and tradition.  It is the wisdom that leads to shalom.

And here we are, back at peace.  Do you know this word, shalom?  It was a formative word for me, in the church of my childhood, a word that aimed to sum up all of God’s desires for our world that we are called to devote our lives to bringing into being.  Shalom is peace, but bigger and deeper.  Shalom is the peace that only comes once justice and righteousness have prevailed.  Shalom is the hungry filled and the mighty brought down from their thrones, as Mary sang.  Shalom is the peace that takes root when the world is filled with the knowledge of the Lord, true wisdom.  It’s a word I have a deep attachment to, but in our modern culture, “shalom” feels a bit archaic sometimes.  So often, I will simply say “peace” instead.  I used to sign off all my emails with the word “peace”.  It seemed like the best thing you could leave someone with.

If you’ve gotten an email from me lately, or a letter, you may have noticed that I almost always sign off the same way.  It’s not just “peace”.  I get to the end and I write (say it with me!) “grace & peace, Rebecca”.  I want to tell you about why I do that.  For years, I had simply signed off with the single word “peace”.  But a few years after starting my ministry here at VLM, I led a Bible study on Romans.  And in the course of that study, we learned about a tiny little linguistic trick that Paul used to make his point.  His point being, of course, about how Jesus had brought together the Jews and the Gentiles into one body.  He used the word “peace” in his greetings, a word that was rooted in Hebrew, a word that spoke to the Jewish people in his audience.  But he also used the word “grace”, a word that came from the Greek and would have connected more immediately with the Gentiles.  By combining the two, offering both of them to everyone, Paul was building a bridge, insisting that we can’t have peace unless it’s peace for everyone.  I decided, when we learned this, that I was going to amend my signing-off practice and make this point on a regular basis, if only to myself.  The Lord knows I need the continual reminder.  And now, perhaps, if you notice it in an email, it can be a reminder for you too.  As we move deeper into this season, when we celebrate Divine Love taking on a specific human body in order to redeem all the human bodies, in all of our rich and diverse specificity, let us give thanks for the welcome we have received into the wisdom that leads to peace.  Let us give thanks for the grace that desires God’s shalom for all creation.  Alleluia and Amen!