December 13, 2009 Third Sunday of Advent
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Luke 1:26-56
Advent and Christmas ask us to believe some difficult things. Consider
today’s story alone: Do angels really exist? Does Gabriel? Did a virgin get
pregnant? Did an old, barren woman? Did John the Baptist leap for joy in
Elizabeth’s womb? Did Mary really sing out the Magnificat just like that? And
did God really bring down the mighty from their thrones and exalt those of low
degree and fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away empty by
what he did through Mary?
Our experience of reality argues against all those things, and if this church
required that we believe them all in order to worship here, probably very few of
you would be in these pews today. Even if we believe in a virgin birth, who
could hear the world news and believe that God has brought down the mighty
from their thrones, or filled the hungry and sent the rich away empty?
And yet the words of Elizabeth to Mary haunt us: “Blessed is she who
believed.” Advent is full of the tension between darkness and light, and here is
another manifestation of it: on the one hand we are reluctant to believe
something we strongly suspect is not factually accurate; and on the other hand,
we know that it is blessed to believe. To be stuck in a state of disbelief is to be
able to see only darkness and not the light that shines in the darkness, the light
that blesses those who believe with the vision of hope, peace, love and joy.
In our pew Bible translation, Elizabeth says, “Blessed is she who believed
that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” But in
a footnote it offers an alternate translation: “Blessed is she who believed, for
there will be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” There is an
implication, a hint, that it is through belief that the fulfillment comes. Jesus and
the Apostle Paul are absolutely clear about this later in the New Testament. They
say that faith gives us access to God’s power, that faith allows God’s power to
flow through us. God, Christ and the Holy Spirit are always within us, and by
turning to them in total trust, seeking them with our whole heart, we find them
and become bearers of them into the world. We become radiant with their light.
We become candles that can transform the night. Belief and trust like Mary’s
open us to this grace.
So how can we arrive at this blessing of believing? There is only one way,
and that is to choose to believe. It is to say, “In spite of everything, yes.” Or it is
to choose to employ what the 19th Century poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called
“a willing suspension of disbelief.” Or it is to choose to follow the advice of the
White Queen to Alice in Through the Looking Glass, to practice believing six
impossible things before breakfast every day. The blessing of believing is ours
for the choosing.
I am not saying that we need to believe everything or even anything in the
Christmas story in order to be blessed. Unlike many Christians, I will not tell you
exactly which six impossible things you need to believe before breakfast. That
makes me an unsuitable pastor—even a scandalous one—for some. Some people
want to be told what to believe.
I am more of the 12 Step school of faith. Groups like Alcoholics
Anonymous and Overeaters Anonymous work only if people believe in a higher
power and hand over their life and their will to the higher power’s care, but it is
entirely up to them each to define who or what the higher power is. It can be the
group itself, it can be an inanimate object or a character they imagine and give a
name, it can be the Great Spirit, it does not matter. What matters is that they truly
believe and entrust their lives to its care. This freedom goes against the
fundamentalism of every religion, it goes against even the more progressive
creedal and doctrinal Christian denominations; but it turns out that it works.
It does not matter what we call God or how we think of God, as long as we
have in mind a merciful and loving entity that has the power to change us for the
better. That belief opens the power’s channel within us, and we begin then to get
to know who this God really is as we see it working in our lives. Some are
surprised when one day they look at the higher power that they have been calling
by some other name and suddenly realize that it looks and acts just like Christ.
Belief in the sense of trust comes first, and then over time we learn who it is that
we are believing in and trusting.
You will be blessed as long as you believe in the fulfillment of God’s
promise of love and life and light within you. You will be blessed as long as you
trust it enough to hand over your life and your will to God’s care, as Mary did,
saying “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your
word.”
George Vaillant is a former neighbor of ours and frequent worshipper
here. He is a psychoanalyst, research psychiatrist and professor at Harvard, and
he is the author of several books, including one of the most highly regarded
books about alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous. His most recent book is
entitled Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith. In it he talks about
how the brain’s evolved capacity for faith has helped humans survive and thrive.
He says that trust in the universe is essential to finding the meaning and love we
need to sustain us when things seem most meaningless and loveless.
George Vaillant took over as the lead researcher on the second half of a
famous study that has followed people over their entire lives, from childhood
into their nineties. He has documented how faith and trust in a loving higher
power have contributed to their health and joy and their ability to feel
compassion and empathy and find meaning in life. He has seen how faith builds
up the body’s resources, as opposed to other choices like nihilism or an
untrusting fight or flight response that drain the body’s resources. And yet for all
his documentation, and for all that he has witnessed, he agrees with philosopher
William James who “observed that the effort of science to capture the energy and
reality of faith is analogous to trying to appreciate through [still] photography a
freight train going fifty miles an hour.”
Belief opens us to a mysterious yet real, living higher power, one that we
cannot control or predict or ever fully define. Belief requires that we leave
questions unanswered, that we accept that some things will always remain a
mystery. Belief is not a comfortable place to live for humans who by nature
crave security and control, and trust is an impossibility for some people who
have been terribly wounded in life.
So it is no wonder that people struggle with belief and some even turn
against it all together. A man once stood at the foot of the stairs in his home and
encouraged his five-year-old son to jump down from several steps up. The father
said, “Come on, jump—you can trust me.” The boy was afraid to do it, he had
tears coming down his face, but finally after his father’s repeated loving
reassurance, the boy jumped, and his father stepped back and let him crash
painfully onto the bottom step. The father looked down at his wailing boy and
said, “Son, you can never trust anyone or anything in this world. Don’t ever
forget it.”
Pity the poor boy who went through life not trusting anyone or anything,
pity the darkness of his hopeless fear and painful emptiness, but pity also the
father who was driven by his own pain and fear to do that to his son, caused by
past wounds that had taught him not to trust. He probably did it out of love and
out of the desire to protect his son from being hurt. He thought, if you do not
trust anyone and anything, they will not be able to hurt you by breaking that
trust. If you do not believe in God, you will not be disappointed when God does
not live up to your expectations and desires.
And yet George Vaillant offers abundant evidence that we do far more
damage to ourselves and the world if we do not believe or trust, than if we trust
and find ourselves let down from time to time.
Vaillant also points out that there are different kinds of belief. Some open
our hearts, but other beliefs can make us heartless. There is a world of difference
between believing in a God who is loving and forgiving and a God who is angry
or vengeful or cannot be trusted.
The Rev. William Sloane Coffin was chaplain at Yale University during
the 1960s. Sometimes rebellious students would try to pick a fight with him,
saying, “I don’t believe in God.” Coffin would ask them to describe the God they
did not believe in, and when they were done, he would say, “I don’t blame you. I
don’t believe in that God either.”
I do not care what part of the Advent story you believe or do not believe, I
really, truly don’t. I know some of you feel embarrassed when you confess to me
all that you do not believe. Please do not worry. It really does not matter to me.
What does matter, though, what makes me ache with longing, is that you do
believe something—that you do choose to trust in some form of a loving, life-
changing higher power.
Then I know that I do not have to worry about you, because if you believe
even just a little, if you open the door of your heart just a crack, the light will
pour in, and the power of God’s love will flow through it. As long as you can go
through this night—this night of Advent, this night of a life of struggle with all
the forces of darkness and all the reasons not to believe—and keep open even
the thinnest crack of belief, you will have access to what someone at Prayer of
the Heart this week called “the boundless source” of peace and joy and love. If
you let even the littlest bit of that source into your life, it will teach you what to
believe.
The boundless source, the higher power, the God who is love, the light that
shines in the darkness, the life of Christ within us—these are what the wide-eyed
expectant watching and waiting in the Advent dark open our hearts to receive.
The goal of our preparation is Emmanuel, God with us, Christ’s power flowing
through us, making us part of the fulfillment of Mary’s vision, making us the
ones through whom God brings down the powerful from their thrones and lifts up
the lowly and fills the hungry with good things.
Exactly what or how we believe is not of ultimate importance. What
matters is that we believe enough to be instruments of Advent hope, peace, love
and joy, enough to be bearers of Christ’s life and light to the world. If we believe
that these things may happen through us by the grace of God, that we may be able
to help another person after church today through our lovingkindness or change
the world in some small way, then how can we not sing our own Magnificat with
joy, even before all these things have come to pass? If we can have Mary’s
belief, we will have her blessings as well.
Let us pray in silence….
Sermon 12/13/2009