A Kick from the Inside

We’re less than a week away from Christmas, and we’re waiting. Some of us might be downright impatient. The baby Jesus is in his mom’s belly, getting ready, and while we’ve been hearing in recent weeks about how John the Baptist was getting people ready by shaking up the establishment, what I love about this story today is that it goes back to when John the Baptist was in his mother’s belly – and even then, he’s shaking things up. That’s what’s right here in the heart of this amazing story of these two women, Elizabeth – the mother of John the Baptist – and Mary, the mother of Jesus.

We get John shaking things up here, too – but this time it’s from the inside. The inside of his mother’s belly. John is the first person to recognize Jesus, apart from Mary who was probably still trying to figure this whole thing out, and he’s doing it inside Elizabeth’s body. In other words, the first way Jesus was ever recognized in community was by something that happened in someone’s belly.

To be specific, it was a kick in the belly – from the inside. And it doesn’t surprise me, knowing what we know about John the Baptist. Tim’s been telling us a lot about John in recent weeks, and I think it’s no surprise that he would kick his mother in the pancreas – from the inside – when he had something to say.

Yo Mom, tune in – something big’s going down.

Or, in slightly more elegant words, in the prayer of the medieval theologian Anselm to John the Baptist:

“You showed your mother the mother bearing God

before the mother who bore you within her

showed you the day.”

But either way you put it, it was a kick in the kidney that showed the way. Wow, talk about the “incarnation,” or the importance of life in a body. We are an incarnate religion, hallelujah!  Let the church say "Amen'!

Which makes me wonder – how often do we follow our bodies as a way of knowing that Jesus is around, that Jesus is “in the house”? I mean, if it was good enough for Jesus’ cousin and his mother, why would we leave our bodies behind as indicators of where God is at?

So let’s think about that for a minute. How do our bodies guide us, point us, toward God’s new thing, the way Elizabeth’s guided her?

Because God’s always up to something. The Scriptures tell us that all the time, our lives tell us that all the time, if we listen to them. Look for God’s new thing, the prophet Isaiah tells us – forget the old stuff, it’s history. Including our sins from the past – they’re gone, too. God just can’t stop coming up with new things to make for us, new things to make in our lives –

And the things is this: every time God does this, it’s a gift.

Not just a new thing. But a new gift. Because it’s going to give us something we couldn’t have come up with on our own, so it had to be given to us. It’s something we’re going to feel in our bodies, I can pretty much promise you. And it’s gonna help us in ways we probably didn’t even know we needed help.

Mary and Elizabeth and their big pregnant bellies were like that. This was a total detour from the way anyone expected either a prophet or a Messiah to come into the world. It was a gift, we know that now. But it was bodily, and it was not easy, and the Christmas story is a great example of that.

We’ve got Elizabeth’s saying, “Ouch, my body’s telling me something.” And then Elizabeth having a baby when she was older, something that’s not easy on any woman’s body. We’ve got Mary being pregnant unmarried, and by Jewish law, being liable to being stoned to death. And then Mary explaining this to her fiancé, and riding on a donkey for miles, and then having a baby on her own – because let’s face it, Joseph was a great guy but I am willing to bet he knew nothing about mid-wifeing. And all this difficulty is just the beginning of the whole, very not-easy story of Jesus.

But of course, it’s also a story that’s all about helping people in ways they didn’t expect.

And the whole idea here, in Advent, isn’t just that we look back at a story from 2,000 years ago. It’s that that story – that kick in the belly that John gave Elizabeth – gives us a kick inside to look for God’s new things in our lives now. Where God’s hunkering down and saying, Yo dude, look at what I’m doing over here!

You may be thinking of places in your life where you feel that new kick, that new wind blowing through old spaces.

And then I think of our community here at Christ Church, and all the places where God’s new thing seems to physical, to be not-easy, but maybe also to be helping us be more whole than we were.

I think of the justice work we’re involved in, as it continues to evolve more deeply with our neighbors. I think all of us are well aware of the discomfort across the street – but all toward a greater hospitality, not just renting space to other people, but giving space to other people, if you catch my drift.

And this kick in Elizabeth’s belly even make me think of the things being birthed around how we worship. I know there’s a whole range of feelings that come up about how we worship, and you know what? I’m thrilled about it. About all of it. People may agree or disagree more or less with certain perspectives, and lots of us are still just enjoying the ride of seeing what’s on offer. But agreement almost seems beside the point.

The fact that we feel strongly about how we come together to worship God is thrilling to me. Because that’s what’s at the core of our hearts and feeling and sensitivities, and so it should be what we feel strongly about and that we feel it in our bodies. In how we hear and speak and see and touch, and in our physical memories. And to have those feelings be different is just fine.

What’s not fine, of course, is to say that any one feeling is “right” or “wrong.” Or it’s not-fine to just stop at our feelings and say “that’s that.”

Those powerful feelings are meant to show us something, they’re meant to reveal something that takes us somewhere new. We do need to have the feelings, absolutely. But if we stop there, then they become just that – absolute. Perspectives – which are very helpful – become positions, which are not so helpful. And the whole thing becomes a dead end.

But if we open our feelings up like a door that fresh winds can blow through – then we can find out what’s on the other side of that door, and what the new wind is bringing. For example, why is this powerful, what does it show me about what I love and what I fear, or what does that feeling show me about parts of myself??

If we use our feelings around worship that way, then what a gift those feeling are. Then they’re not roadblocks, for us or for others; then our feelings become ways to navigate the new winds, to fly on them, to let them bear us to new places. And maybe even to find that there’s something else on the other side of the feeling.

In fact, what if we were to take that very thing, right there, and make it our community prayer this Advent? It would be great, because it would be like the Psalm we just read. Psalm 80 is one of the few so-called “community prayers” found in the whole 150 psalms. Some psalms feel very individual, and some are like a voice speaking on behalf of a whole group of people.

But this one is one of the few that’s a prayer for everyone together. And doesn’t pretend that everything’s peachy; in fact, it evokes the image of the desert – Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh, those were three of the 12 tribes of Israel, and that was the order those three walked in as they all moved through the desert, away from the bondage of Egypt and toward the challenges of the Promised Land.

This prayer of the community remembers coming through hard times, and begs for God’s new thing. It begs for God’s new gift.

The community knows they don’t know what it will look like, they know it won’t be easy and that they’ll feel it in their bodies. But they know that that new and powerful gift will restore them once again. It will restore them. Meaning, it will make them more whole than they ever were before.

We’ve said in various places this year that worship is a gift. So I wonder what happens if we really take that at face value.

What does it feel like to get a gift, a really good one from somebody who knows you and is totally crazy about you and wants to give you the thing that will make you happy in places you hadn’t even realized you weren’t happy. Imagine getting that Christmas gift.

And whatever comes to your mind, we’ll all probably admit that such a great gift does give us something new – and I don’t mean what’s in the box. It gives us something new inside ourselves, that feeling of being loved that we can just never get enough of. And then, when we get that feelings, transformation just happens.

That’s what it’s like to get a real gift. So how much more is it when that gift is given by God – and when that gift is the chance to come together before God and to bring our whole selves into it, which takes some doing. If we’re so incarnate, then we know it takes some intention and creativity to squeeze our whole humanity in through those double glass doors. We say it here all the time, whether in preaching or in announcements or wherever, that this is about not leaving any part of yourself outside because you think it’s unacceptable. It’s about coming here with your whole self.

How hard that is for us to believe. And what a great gift it is to be able to keep trying.

And including others who also find it hard to believe.

How do we hold lightly this great gift of feeling acceptable and loved, and happy about it – in other words, how do we hold lightly the gift of worship? Not clenching it, not hiding it, but just …. bearing it lightly in our hands.

Welcome to God’s new thing. It’s always going to restore us to something better than before. And, I promise you, it’s never going to come easy. In other words – a lot like Mary’s song, the Magnificat.

So, in closing – let me do a little community prayer that sort of spins off of the psalm, only a bit updated.

“God, we’re traveling on this journey. We’re Ephraim, Benjamin, Manasseh, the tribes following a pillar of fire in the desert. And it’s not easy. So God, stir up your might, and your power. Stir it like you’re stirring up gales of wind that blow people’s hats off and open up their coats and blow over all the lawn decorations.

God, stir up your power among us until we can’t deny that it’s there anymore. Until we’re so tired of resisting it that suddenly it becomes like silk just to give over and ride on the wave of that might.

And then, God, bring us to the new place that you’re always making for us. The new place in our lives, or in our community life.