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Dec 21st, 2008 – Fourth Sunday of Advent
Readings: 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38
This week’s headline: “There will be no Nativity Scene in Ottawa this year!” The Supreme Court has ruled that there cannot be a Nativity Scene in Canada’s capital this Christmas season. This isn’t for any religious reason they simply have not been able to find three wise men in the Nation’s capital! PS – There was no problem, however, finding enough asses to fill the stable.
Boy, it must be tough being a politician and being the butt of so many jokes! Maybe it’s one of the reasons Canada seems to have a real lack of intelligent and competent politicians – the best and brightest have gone on to more lucrative and respected professions! As enjoyable as it may be to poke fun at them from time to time, I do think our political leaders are in greater need of our prayers than our jokes these days.
I came across an article from Saultthisweek entitled, “Canada is in a housing crisis -- provinces must take lead.” In it the author talks about the deterioration of housing conditions for many Canadians and the dearth of affordable housing. “Rental vacancy rates have reached staggering lows in many Canadian cities, spending on shelter has outpaced income growth, and energy costs continue to rise. In 2005, fully one-quarter of Canadians spent 30 per cent or more of their income on shelter. Low-income renters have felt the affordability squeeze the hardest and many have been forced into homelessness.”
The Soo is being hit particularly hard: an article in SooToday tells the story of ‘Laura’, a woman who regretfully voluntarily signed off on her five-year Sault Ste. Marie social housing unit. Within hours her apartment was given to someone else, and unable to find a new residence, Laura was forced to live at the Women in Crisis shelter. Having been there a few months already, she is being asked to leave the shelter with no place to go. Laura, admitting her own ignorance of the current housing market created her personal crisis situation, wanted her story known to silence the critics who believe the city's rental crisis is overstated. "My situation is real, it is stressful and frightening, not overstated," she said. "It should be a wakeup call for people who don't believe we have a housing crisis."
In 2009, funding for four federal housing initiatives – the Residential Rehabilitation Assistance Program, the Homelessness Partnering Strategy, the Affordable Housing Initiative, and the Affordable Housing Trust – is set to expire and with it fears that Canada will plunge into a full-out housing crisis.
I share this information with you this morning because I think it’s important we recognize that in our community, within our own faith community in fact, folks are in constant anxiety over their living conditions. We need to pray for our politicians that they would cultivate attitudes of compassion and justice towards this issue and instigate programs borne out of wisdom. But we as the people of God also need to recognize that the gospel message demands us to explore ways we can make a difference. Especially in this Christmas season, we need to see how prevalent the theme of homelessness appears in our Scriptures.
In our Old Testament reading the theme of housing emerges: David recalls the history of God’s people as wanderers without a land to call their own. Land, in ancient times, was everything. But the nation of Israel started out as a displaced people without a home to call their own. They were forced to rely on themselves, and ultimately on their God who provided for them, often in miraculous ways. But now under the great King David they were enjoying prosperity, and David himself is impressed with the cedar mansion he calls home. But then David remembers that the ark of God, the dwelling place of Yahweh, had no home but a tent. In David’s mind this is an injustice and he wishes to build an elaborate dwelling place for God. Seems like a good idea right?
God does not, however, concur with David’s reasoning. He reminds David that in His people’s travels the presence of God journeyed with them, moving about them and granting them victory and favour. “This God is a free, mobile, dynamic God who sojourns, bivouacs, and comes and goes, but never settles and becomes confined in one place. Thus, unlike every other god, this God wants no temple, needs no temple, and will approve no temple. David’s pet project is rejected!” David’s benevolence seems authentic, though misplaced. God is the one who will provide for David, not the other way around. And Yahweh promises David a ‘house’ that will stand the test of time, and a place for the people of Israel to rest and prosper. Our Psalm today is David’s response to that promise: he sings of the Lord’s ‘steadfast love forever’; he remembers God’s promises: “I have made a covenant with my chosen one, I have sworn to my servant David: I will establish your descendants forever, and build your throne for all generations.” (Ps 89:3-4)
God promises that through David He would establish a family, a kingdom, that will last forever. David’s descendents will find a permanent dwelling place to be fruitful and prosper.
Centuries later something very strange happens. An angel appears to a virgin named Mary, who was betrothed into David’s ancestral family through her fiancé Joseph. The angel’s message: that Mary will conceive a son to be named Jesus, “and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” (31-33). Jesus would take up David’s mantle of leadership and inherit his kingdom, but in a different way from his ancestor. A line of human kings is easily broken, but Jesus, Immanuel, would be God-in-the-flesh and he would establish an eternal kingdom that will never end.
Mary is naturally confused - most obviously since she was a virgin and the thought of giving birth without having had sex was just as ludicrous back then as it is today. The angel, Gabriel, explains how this will happen: “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.” (v.35)
Something remarkable and frightening is promised Mary – the very Spirit of God which ‘hovered’ over the waters in the beginning of creation will ‘hover’ (Message translation) or ‘overshadow’ her. God is up to creating something new and wonderful and sacred just like he was in Genesis 1, but this time he is re-creating humanity by entering into it. God Himself would grow inside the womb of a pregnant teenager weaving together human DNA and divine nature. The Son of God who sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven, existing in pure reality as truth and light and beauty, would choose to make his home not in an extravagant Temple, but inside a humble human body.
In Jesus, God would know what it was like to be a drifter. First he leaves his heavenly home to sojourn the earth as a child and young man in a humble first century Hebrew family, and later he leaves his earthly home to be a homeless itinerant preacher and healer. But in his travels he gathers others ‘round him – mainly the rabble of his society and humble working-class – and many would leave their homes to form a new community, one that depends on others. Jesus once instructed his disciples before they were to go out healing and preaching in his name to bring nothing with them so they need rely on the hospitality of strangers. And that’s what he and his disciples did.
The Son of God who himself knew the heartache of separation from those closest to him, who knew the vulnerability of living without a home to call his own, lived this life in order to bring about a new community, a new kingdom, a new home, for his people. We here today are only just beginning to learn how to live in this new community, and we will never be totally ‘at home’ until we are with Christ in God’s presence in our resurrected life. But we are called to help in God’s kingdom building project on earth. Like Mary and the disciples, God has chosen us to be his agents of bringing his healing presence to all we may encounter.
Just as the ark of God was portable, moving about the land, and bringing God’s joyous presence and prosperity to his people – we too are to move about this earth as vessels, or temples of the Holy Spirit. We are to reflect his glory and love. We are to be moved to compassion and driven to just causes. And we are to draw others into this new community to find an eternal home long anticipated.
We may not feel up to the task, but that’s the way it’s supposed to be. The message of Christmas is that God intrudes upon the weak and the vulnerable, and this is precisely the message that we so often miss. God does not come to that part of us that swaggers through life, confident in our self sufficiency. God leaves his treasure in the broken fragmented places of our life. The places of intense loneliness and homelessness. The places of woundedness and fear. God comes to us in those rare moments when we are able to transcend our own selfishness and pain long enough to really care about another human being.
On the wall of the museum of the concentration camp at Dachau is a large and moving photograph of a mother and her little girl standing in line of a gas chamber. The child, who is walking in front of her mother, does not know where she is going. The mother, who walks behind, does know, but is helpless to stop the tragedy. In her helplessness she performs the only act of love left to her. She places her hands over he child's eyes so she will at least not see the horror to come. When people come into the museum they do not whisk by this photo hurriedly. They pause. They almost feel the pain. And deep inside I think that they are all saying: "O God, don't let that be all that there is."
God's hears those prayers and it is in just such situations of hopelessness and helplessness that his almighty power is born. It is there that God leaves his treasure of Christ’s Spirit. In Mary and in all of us, as Christ is born anew within.
This Christmas season may we find room in our hearts for the Spirit of God to re-create within us the capacity to forge a community of compassion and justice, and let all of us find our true home in Christ.
“Now to God who is able to strengthen you according to the gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ…to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever! Amen.” (Rom 16:25, 27)
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