4 Advent B – December 21, 2014

4 Advent B – December 21, 2014

Advent 4  B         Dec. 21, 2014
Luther Memorial Church         Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie G. Hutson
2 Samuel 7: 1-11, 16  +  Luke 1: 46b-55  +  Romans 16: 25-27
     +  Luke 1: 26-38  + 

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

          One Sunday morning, a few years ago, a visitor to this congregation shook my hand during the sharing of the peace, leaned into me, and asked “So, are you Swedish or Norweigan?”   I was inclined to just respond “And also with you” but instead I answered her question. “Neither.  I’m German.”  We never saw her again.

I often joke that my German heritage is the secret I keep hidden in this historically Scandanavian place.  But these days I look around and see more diversity and I know that you forgive me many things.  So, I think it’s safe to speak von Deutschland.

Last December Bruce and I took a long planned for, long saved for, much longed for trip to Germany.  I had lived there as a small child and my family is from Munich.  My maiden name was Guengerich, after all.  Bruce lived in Germany while in high school.  So, for both of us, in many respects, this trip was a homecoming.  Or, more precisely, a homegoing.  And it was a deeply meaningful experience.  In Nuremburg we stayed directly across the street from the apartment building I lived in as a toddler.  I looked from the windows of our room in the inn, into the windows of my early childhood home.  We walked down the streets where the earliest chapters of my childhood were written.  Where I learned to walk and talk.  Where I learned, to drink beer.  It’s true.  A tale that is often told in our family is how my parents were at a bowling alley one night and I toddled off to the bar where I drank the beer left in the steins on the tables.   The bakery on the corner where my mother and I would stop on our morning walks is still there.  When we left I wept.  And I’ve not been able to speak of it because it feels very holy to me.  Holy in the sense that this is a place set apart, where I am known in my roots and in my core.   I have heard many of you speak of similar journeys to places far away that are, nonetheless, home.

Our Old Testament reading and the Gospel reading today are readings about homes for God.  In the reading from 2 Samuel, Nathan brings word that God has no need for a home of wood and permanence.  And in the Gospel, the angel Gabriel brings word to Mary – her womb will become a home for the one who will fulfill the promise given to David so long ago.

Our homes hold much more than our belongings.  They hold our hopes and dreams.  They hold those things that we accumulate to define us.  I do not know what that is in your homes.  For us, it is my books, the momentoes of my children’s childhoods, and Bruce’s amazing photos.  Our homes also hold our expectations.  They become our haven at the end of the day.  Or they don’t.  And at this time of year there is a great draw toward home.  Even the song reminds us:  O, there’s no place like home for the holidays.

So why was God so opposed to having a place, one place,  to call home?  This is actually such a great text.  “But that same night the word of the LORD came to Nathan: Go and tell my servant David: Thus says the LORD: Are you the one to build me a house to live in?  I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle.  Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’

I mean, this is sarcastic, ticked off Yahweh.  This is God asking “Did I ASK you to build me a McMansion?”  And we know it’s a rhetorical question.

And then there is the Gospel reading from Luke.  The angel Gabriel comes to Mary with news that she will be the unlikely one to bear the son of God.   She is not noble and she is not married.  Her family is not well known.  She is betrothed to Joseph the carpenter, a deal that was likely brokered between the families as she entered puberty, perhaps even before.  She is young, probably 13 or 14.  And it is to her womb and to her life that God will find a home.

It is so easy to forget the difficult edges of this story, especially because it is filled with our Christmas dreams.  We imagine Mary as a young innocent, but we forget that her response to Gabriel is curiosity and confusion, which was certainly to be expected, followed by a song of radical faith.  Mary sings that suddenly God is on the side of the oppressed.  Suddenly, with the news that God has found a home in an ordinary girl from an ordinary town….nothing is the same.  This is a holy, irreversible game changer.  God has cast the mighty from their places of power.  God has scattered the proud.  The hungry have been filled with good things and the rich have been sent away empty.  With all of this, the promise is fulfilled and everything is possible.

Where then, is the home of God?  What are we to learn from God’s insistence that the place for God is in fact, not in the buildings we would erect to house God, but in a disenfranchised young girl?

It has been said by a bishop in the ELCA that he never closed a church where the building wasn’t well cared for.  Because even in the face of what feels impossible, we tend carefully to our physical buildings.  And I, for one, know that I do this.  I consider it stewardship – taking care of what God has given us.  But when we do this AND we ignore what God has called us to, we ignore the place where God has called home, that is when we lose sight of the message and meaning of the Incarnation.  That is when we forget why God chose to come to earth to begin with.

God came to earth, not for the sake of a structure to hold to the sacred or a house for the holy or a dwelling place for the divine….God came to earth out of sheer love.  Love so wide and so great and so all encompassing that we cannot even begin to imagine it.  And so we spend a great deal of time trying to determine who is worthy of it.  Who is in and who is out.  And God asks, perhaps just as rhetorically as God asked David….when did I tell you to judge one another?  I said love one another.  Love God.  Love yourselves.  Nothing about judgment.  But for those of us who are wired to judge, this is hard news.  The author and theologian Madeline L’Engel said: “A tidy Christianity with all answers given is easier than one which reaches out to the wild wonder of God’s love, a love we don’t even have to earn”.

And so rather than house the homeless we try to house God.  Rather than love our neighbor as ourselves we judge them and wonder if they are worthy of that love.

I wonder if we are not, somewhere deep inside of us, questioning whether we are worthy of God’s love.

But God’s answer is always Yes.  Yes.  We are worthy.  Each and every one of us.  Yes.  God came for ALL of us and in case we had any doubt whatsoever about that….God came to this earth through a young woman.  Oh, young women, let this give you hope.  Oh, oppressed and marginalized folks let this fill you with joy in every trial.  While some are busy building a box around God, God is busy breaking into the world in the least likely places.  Turning it on its head.  Standing arm in arm with those we have strong armed to the margins.

When we go looking for home – we aren’t really looking for a building.  We are looking for that place where we are known and loved for precisely and exactly who we are.  That’s why I was reduced to tears on a German street named Lindenenstrasse.  Not because of the apartment building or even the bakery, but because in that place I was a beloved newborn daughter.  Cherished by my very young parents.  And if we take that kind of love and multiply it many times over, we still can’t even come close to the way God loves us.  It’s mind boggling.  It’s homecoming.

Thanks be to God for love that is home.  Amen.