Christ Church, NYC : About Giving and Receiving...

About Giving and Receiving...

December 20, 2009

Fourth Sunday of Advent
Luke 1:26-38; Luke 1:35-55
The Reverend Stephen P. Bauman

Are you going to receive what you want for Christmas this year? Many believe the hardest task of the season is figuring out just the right gifts for the persons on their must-give list. But, giving isn’t the only hard part of our holiday tasks. There’s also receiving. Knowing how to receive is at least as difficult.

Garrison Keillor has this to say on the subject: “A Christmas gift represents somebody’s theory of who you are, or who they wish you were, and of course, we know how to handle the wildly inappropriate gift from a stranger, but what if you see yourself as a suave dude and a swift intellect and then one year your wife – your wife – gives you a pair of singing undershorts that perform “O Christmas Tree” when you sit down and a battery-powered coin bank in which a little farmer picks up the coin in his pitchfork and hoists in into the silo?

“That’s when you go through a sort of identity crisis. You’d like to get a gift that aims high – say, an original copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass or a ticket to Nepal. Instead here is a pair of bedroom slippers with lights in the toes so you can see your way to the bathroom at night.” [1]

Notwithstanding the recession, what sort of expectations have filled you up concerning Christmas 2009? As far as gifts go, Melissa and I have discovered with more than 30 years experience its best if we either shop together or very explicitly detail our expectations. This takes surprise out of the holiday equation, but saves return visits to the store. You know the unspoken logic: if we’re going to spend some money we might as well get stuff we actually want.
But now as I tell you this it sounds rather homely and unromantic. We seem to have devolved into maximizing the outcomes on the expectation equation. What will make each of us reasonably happy, satisfied, shapes the underlining attitude. But again, that surely does denature the element of surprise, doesn’t it?

As I thought about this over the week it occurred to me that the whole season has become largely predictable. Most of us being well fed and usefully clothed give and receive stuff based on our wants, not our basic needs. And if we don’t get what we want, we either exchange it for something more to our liking or splurge on a post-Christmas sale believing with every cellular membrane that we deserve good stuff! For the most part, surprise has nothing to do with any of this, unless its very well orchestrated, in which case, we could hardly call it a genuine surprise.

Turning our surprise-less, consumerist attitude upside down, Mother Teresa tells a story about a nun at a seminary in Bangalore, India who said to her, “‘Mother Teresa, you are spoiling the poor people by surprising them and giving them things free. They are losing their human dignity.’

“When everyone was quiet, I said calmly, ‘No one spoils as much as God himself. See the wonderful gifts he has given us freely. All of you here have no glasses, yet you all can see. If God were to take money for your sight, what would happen? Continually we are breathing and living on oxygen that we do not pay for. What would happen if God were to say, ‘If you work four hours, you will get sunshine for two hours?’ How many of us would survive then?

“Then I also told them, ‘There are many congregations that spoil the rich; it is good to have one congregation in the name of the poor, to spoil the poor.

“There was profound silence; nobody said a word after that.” [2]

Which leads me to say that at its core, Christmas fundamentally concerns astonishing surprise for which we seem to have largely lost our appetite. We’ve pretty well tamed and tamped down any surprise into a human-scale, well-controlled series of financial and consumerist transactions. Even to the point of creating a national dependency for the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas to keep our economy humming when most of us indulge our ever-expanding wants having more than satisfied our essential needs.

Glen Wilberg asks, “What if Christmas is about a real surprise? Something we do not expect at all or even want, a gift we can’t take back? What if Christmas is about God’s surprising work which is a total reversal of our want lists?” [3]

If he’s right, and I think he is, we’re in a bit of a quandary if we take our worship and spiritual work seriously, because I think we really don’t want surprises during this time of the year. We’d rather have predictable, practiced, highly anticipated sentimental comforts warmly envelop us. The church markets the season this way. And of course there’s a healthy and wholesome aspect to this. It roots us in rich tradition and gathers us together as family across a remarkably diverse range of peoples. We have evidence of that right here in this space, something of which we’re justifiably pleased. What could possibly be wrong with people the world over symbolically gathering around the manger bathed in warm candlelight? Well nothing’s wrong with that. It’s all seeming very good.

Except for this one possible disconnect: the lack of startling surprise that shakes us awake, rattles our bones and turns us topsy-turvy. We’ve done a bang up job of domesticating Christmas into a variety of things we want rather than receiving what God gives, or at least, that’s what I’ve been brooding about this week – receiving what God gives rather than ratifying my expectations and demands.

Mary teaches about this matter of receiving what God gives in a startling manner. Consider that she’s an out-of-wedlock pregnant teenager in tight economic circumstance suffering along with her tribe the effects of foreign oppression. This past week HBO programmed the movie from a couple of years ago released during the holiday season entitled, The Nativity. Tuning in for a while I noticed that unlike most predecessor biblical epics, this one portrayed the couple making their way from Nazareth to Bethlehem in the gritty human press and dirt passing bodies of Jews hanging from Roman crosses set up along the road. The director depicted life unsentimentally, which struck me as oddly refreshing given the nature of God’s gift – human, flesh and bone, physical, earthy, pungent, vulnerable, set to die, real – a far cry from the dewy-eyed and often cloying package our culture wraps for the season.

But I’m torn. On the one hand, the nurturing seasonal sentiment has seeped into every crack and crevice of our cultural experience, religious and secular, and I think that’s rather remarkable when I stop to think about it, and it’s not all bad, even somewhat good. It’s a good thing that the congregation swells in these days often with people who aren’t entirely certain why they’ve come, except for the compelling warmth of human community in honor of something larger still, something powerful that binds humans together in some mystical way.

On the other hand for those of us supposedly “in the know” I’m afraid we’ve lost the surprise, the astonishment, the radical implications of God’s gift. Gabriel announces a shocking message: “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you.” Then Mary’s told she’s to become pregnant. Surprise! We could imagine an inner dialogue here. “You’ve got to be kidding! How can this be, why should this be, given that I have no husband? How will Mom and Dad take the news, much less my boyfriend? Who is the joke on anyway? How am I going to cope? What on earth will I do? This isn’t what I want! Not now, not under these circumstances…” [4]

But in the manner of women, as Luke tells the tale Mary makes her way to her cousin Elizabeth who is also surprisingly pregnant but for an opposite reason – she was supposedly beyond her childbearing years. Maybe Mary went to commiserate, or find comfort in her circumstance, an understanding ear, a compassionate embrace. But more than they might have imagined, in their community of two over several months they received a wonderful blessing – the future opened up for them in a startling fashion. In her joy of discovery Mary began singing, praising God for allowing her to participate with God’s intentions for the world, with her, a nobody from nowhere.

Two women, blessing and praising, mark the beginning of God’s great surprise – the great reversal where God will bring down arrogant people of power and offer to the powerless a future and a hope. Mary’s song still cuts a bit too close to the bone as it tells us that Christmas is not about getting what we want but about God both getting and giving what God wants. Good news of great joy and great discomfort. That’s our seasonal predicament – sitting in that paradoxical place of joy and discomfort. Joy for certain, but discomfort, too, if we take God’s surprise to heart.

At Elizabeth’s house Mary stopped wringing her hands and wondering what in the world she was gong to do next, and why she didn’t get what she thought she had wanted out of life. She was surprised by joy instead, and then started humming a tune the church is still singing to this day. [5]
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[1] As quoted in a Land’s End catalogue.
[2] Mother Teresa, In the Heart of the World, Novato: New World Library, 1995, p. 57
[3] Glen V. Wilberg, “God’s Surprise,” The Christian Century, December 7, 1994.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Barbara Brown Taylor

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