Pondering the Time Being – Bill Harkins
Luke 2:15-21
2:15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.”
2:16 So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger.
2:17 When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child;
2:18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them.
2:19 But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.
2:20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.
2:21 After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.
In the Name of the God of Creation who loves us all, Amen.
I bid each of you good morning, Happy New Year, and a heartfelt welcome to Holy Family on this first Sunday after Christmas! Just a week ago we heard the lovely narrative from the Gospel of Luke, telling us of the earthly origins of Jesus in the form of the birth and infancy narratives of which we are all so fond. The Gospel of John, in contrast, does not include an account of the birth of Christ as do Luke, from whom we hear this morning, and Matthew, both of whom are ever the storytellers. They charm us with angels and shepherds, a virgin birth in a stable, a villain named Herod, and heroes in the form of peripatetic kings. John, who is more of a theologian, gives us in those first 18 verses pure poetry in the form of a lovely Christological hymn and a dazzling, paradoxical conundrum: the light by which everyone sees came into the world, yet the world did not see it. And this morning we hear of the shepherds who also needed to bear witness in person to the light, and Mary ponders in her heart these words.
These mysteries can sometimes raise as many questions as they answer. For example I wonder if, when Mary says, “Let it be with me according to your word” after Gabriel’s announcement in Luke (1:38), the temptation is to consider her as passively surrendering to God. But her Magnificat suggests otherwise. She boldly reminds God of who God is. The God of “our ancestors” is the one who “scatters the proud” and “brings down the powerful from their thrones and lifts up the lowly” (vv. 51, 52). Mary’s word of consent in Greek (genoito [“let it be”]) recalls God’s first command in creation: “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3). By agreeing to God’s word, Mary is mandating God’s creative, justice-making word for the world, the Word whom she will mother into being. Knowing the power of Mary’s agency, I can easily imagine something left unsaid by Luke after Mary sang her song: God whispering in awe, “Let it be.”
We, too, dear ones, participate in this Holy narrative. The 13th century philosopher, theologian, and mystic Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) echoed this: “We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself?” What might it mean for us to ponder in our hearts, as flawed and finite human beings, this Divine invitation to be light bearers, here and now? How do we ponder and discern this Incarnational invitation even as we, too, are vulnerable to not seeing the light that may shine in our midst? How do we live into the invitation, the mandate, to let the same mind be in us which was in Christ Jesus? It is so easy to forget. Are we, like the shepherds, willing to make the arduous journey to bear witness to the light? And perhaps more important, are we willing to be light bearers ourselves?
Last year, on the night after the winter solstice, my running buddies and I ventured once again into the darkness of the trail, with our headlamps lighting the way until we reached a place we affectionately call “Beech Cove.” Deep in the woods, alongside a lovely brook, we turned off our headlamps and let the darkness settle in around us. The water could be heard in a new way, and above us Orion and Perseus were visible. Wendell Berry, our American treasure, wrote this about the dark: “To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet, and dark wings.” Anyone who has spent time in the woods at night will know the truth of this poem, and its paradoxical lesson that we know the light, in part, because we are willing to become familiar with the dark. And, sometimes we know the dark by virtue of the fact that we are human, and vulnerable, and in spite of this, amid our darkest moments, we see glimpses of light. May we be mindful and discerning, lest we fall into a simplistic, binary sensibility of light over darkness. “The light shines in the darkness, and darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1) The witness is not that the light abolishes the darkness; the light is known as light because it burns in the dark.
And this is where the Gospels of John and Luke speak to one another, in dialectic fashion perhaps. Now, in Christ, we can gaze upon God, both human and divine, just as light—the Word—is both particle and wave, and in seeing Him we see who we were meant to be. We are reminded of W.H. Auden’s similarly paradoxical Christmas Oratorio in which he wrote: “To those who have seen the child, however dimly, however incredulously, The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all…we look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit our self-reflection.” This being human can be so very hard, until we remember that we are held in the hands of a God who chose not to leave us alone.
Some 25 years ago now, I was serving a small parish tucked away the mountains of north Georgia. I was by now was teaching full-time, and very early each Sunday morning Vicky and I would make our way up I-575 to this wonderful place where I began my formal journey to the priesthood under the wise and watchful tutelage of the rector, also a bi-vocational priest. The people there were warm, and gracious, and forgiving of my rooky mistakes, my awkwardness with the liturgy, and my efforts to find my voice in the pulpit. They were, and they remain, a grace-filled blessing for us. On this particular Christmas Eve I arrived mid-afternoon to prepare for the 4:00pm service. That year, as was true this year, winter came early, and stayed long. As I drove north the radio was replete with warnings about freezing rain, sleet, and snow. The second service that evening was to have been an ecumenical effort, with our parish hosting the choirs of the local Lutheran and Catholic churches and by late afternoon both had canceled for fear of driving the icy mountain roads. Shortly after I arrived, amidst the excitement of the preparations for the services to come, a parishioner mentioned to me that his father lay dying in the local county hospital, and asked me to pray for him, and for his family. I gave him a hug, told him I was sorry, and that I would remember his father in my prayers. And I was swept up in the services that continued through the evening, and ended with the midnight mass. The weather continued to worsen, and I began to wonder if I would be able to make the drive back home where my family waited, having attended services closer to home on that wintry night. By midnight the sleet could be heard against the windows as Luke’s Gospel was read, and the light indeed shone in the darkness of this deep December winter night. After the final service of the night I walked out into the storm, and, perhaps foolishly, decided to try to make it home. I wanted to be with Vicky and the boys to celebrate Christmas with them the next morning, and I wanted to sleep in my own bed.
Slowly, I made my way from the church into town. As I came to the intersection that would take me out to the highway and home, the light turned red, and as I applied my brakes I slid on the ice midway into the abandoned intersection, my car, now pointing left, to the east, and my right-hand turn signal blinking on and off, keeping time with my windshield wipers in the frozen darkness of that dark town. And, sitting thus askance in the middle of the road, my blinker now meaninglessly indicating a right-hand turn, I remembered my parishioner’s father, lying in the hospital down the road to the left. So, I turned left. A couple of miles down the two-lane road lay the old county hospital, ageing and almost defunct, with a newer, much larger facility now just down the highway towards Atlanta. I made my way up the icy steps to the lobby, where a pitiful Christmas tree now bereft of most of its needles, worthy of a Charlie Brown Christmas, sat forlornly on an institutional metal table now bending beneath the weight of too many decorations. The reception desk was empty, and I paused at an intersection of four hospital corridors leading off like spokes on a wheel, or like being at the center of a cross. I was lost.
Choosing one corridor, I walked halfway, about to turn around, when a nurse appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and said “You must be here to see Mr. Lewis.” “Yes. I am,” I said, wondering how she could have known. “This way,” she said, leading me to a single room where a man lay amidst a tangle of tubes and wires, his breathing shallow and raspy with the aid of a respirator. I turned to ask the nurse about this, and she was nowhere to be found. Carefully, I made my way into the room, and stood for a moment beside the bed. Suddenly I felt very tired, and a little out of place. I did not know this man—had never laid eyes on him until this moment—and I had only a passing acquaintance with his son, our parishioner, whose comment earlier in the evening somehow, mysteriously, led me here. I did not know what to do, or say. I pause here to remind myself, and all of us, that I was by now a professor of psychology and religion and pastoral care—the irony of which did not escape me in that moment—but I felt as if I were wandering a trail alone at night, without a light to guide me. I was in the dark. I said a perfunctory silent prayer—I had thoughtlessly left my Prayer Book in the car—and I turned around and left the room. I wanted to go home. About half-way down the hall I heard the nurse call out behind me. “You probably already know this,” she said, “but the last sense we lose before we die is the ability to hear. I just thought you would want know…If you didn’t already know…which you probably did.” And then she disappeared into another room. I stood there for a moment, feeling foolish, but somehow emboldened, and I went back down the hall and into the room. This time, I carefully made my way into the tangle of wires and tubes, and sat on the bed, and took his hands in mine. And I prayed out loud, in a clear voice. I asked God to shepherd this man’s transition home, and to welcome him there, and to bless his passing and be with those who loved him, and comfort them. And I told him that God was with him, and would not leave him, ever, no matter what. And I sat there for a while, listening to the sleet hitting the windows and the respirator breathing in and out, and the sound of my own breathing, now calmer. And then I went home. Before I left, I tried to find the Christmas angel so cleverly disguised as a nurse, and I could not. Where had she gone? Had she been there at all? Could this dying man hear me? I do not know. But I do know this; the light of the forlorn Christmas tree in the darkened lobby of that old hospital has stayed with me, and reminds me that the Word on that evening penetrated even the darkness of my inadequate, hesitant, finite, and all too human brokenness. Grace. That’s the word. Sometimes, in the darkness, despite ourselves, we catch a glimpse of it…and of the light from which it comes.
Each human soul, my sisters and brothers, is sacred and unique, and Christ dwells there, too. Let the same mind be in us that was in Christ Jesus, so that each of us might in the particularity of the “time being,” and the sacred landscape of our souls, give birth to that light. God has poured upon us the new light of God’s Incarnate Word. Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives. Amen