Just Stand There And Shine
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 21 December 2008 00:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
{player 2008-12-21-9am-sermon.mp3}
A Sermon for the late December Holidays of 2008
Every few years there is this amazing confluence of holidays in late December, resulting in enough flames surrounding me up here in the pulpit to make a firefighter’s heart quicken. Hanukkah begins at sundown tonight, today is the winter solstice, and though this is the Fourth Sunday of Advent, we in the low churches of the far-left end of the Reformation just go ahead and make this Christmas Sunday, looking out over the first part of this week to Wednesday night and Thursday, flames everywhere, lights everywhere, longing everywhere.
And so we have the menorah and its candles and the blessing, all poignant and beautiful enough, this oil that burned and burned and burned, it burned for eight days, it could not be extinguished, the human spirit cannot be extinguished, a religion cannot be extinguished; this faith of our Jewish brothers and sisters cannot be denied; the lights burn, here on the menorah, and they burn, too, there in your heart someplace.
We light this menorah each year here in this sanctuary for a complexity of reasons, but we light these Hanukkah candles mainly because many of you ARE Jewish, you hold onto large and small pieces of your Jewish identity from your childhood, from grandparents who may have taught you the stories and the prayers. We light these candles because this congregation contains couples who have blended rich religious traditions when they were married and wish to teach these stories to their children, Jewish, Roman Catholic, all the palette of Protestantism.
But we light these candles, too, for a larger reason, I think, we non-Jews. “We light the candles,” writes a colleague Lisa Doege, “to symbolize, to honor, to celebrate the ways, great and small, that each of us has triumphed over forces that would have us abandon our beliefs, give up our faith, or lose our identity… You all have stories like mine,” she writes. “Stories of the decades-long friendship you had to end when you could no longer stand the racism. Stories of the protests you marched in, the picket lines you refused to cross… Stories of times when moral or ethical decisions cost you your job but saved your soul. Stories of times when to speak out, difficult as it was, was easier than to remain silent… Stories that belong to almost everyone of you who left other religions behind to follow this one, and thus keep your faith.” We light these menorah candles this morning for you.
And the menorah means yet one more thing to me today. It is so tied to our own chalice, I think, in the witness the chalice bears to our own deepest need to worship as we wish. We have that religious freedom here in America. There are peoples who did not, and do not now, have that freedom around the world. This is surely the story of our Transylvanian brothers and sisters, half a world away from us, we remembering them now as they remember us, these people who were denied their books under Communism, denied their freedom of assembly without fear of persecution. This is their story, not even a generation ago, and so many of us have traveled there to Szekeleykeresztur and can witness to what a free faith means to them.
“Light fires that can be seen for miles,” writes Lynn Ungar, as if in tribute to our friends there,
“that dance and spark and warm the frozen marrows.
Set lamps in the window.
Declare your presence, your loyalties,
The truths for which you do not expect to have to die.“It would take a miracle, you say,
to carve such a solid life
out of the shell of fear.
I say you are the stuff
From which such miracles are made.”
They ARE the stuff, and so are you. There are miracles everywhere. Victoria Safford calls them blessings. “Now is the moment of magic,” she writes, “when people beaten down and broken, with nothing left but misery and candles and their own clear voices, kindle tiny lights and whisper secret music, and here’s a blessing: the dark universe is suddenly illuminated by the lights of the menorah… and the whole world is glad and loud with winter singing.” We light these candles of the menorah, and we remember all these miracles and blessings, and we celebrate the resiliency of the human spirit.
We light the Yule log, too, on this day, this shortest day, this time of winter solstice, these ancient rites that laid out meaning for later religions, these celebrations of the sun and the moon and the earth that we may have been taught to fear or ridicule. Our forebears had wisdom we often lack. There is this piece recited each year at the Christmas Revels at Saunders Theater, “Everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world came people singing, dancing, to drive the dark away. They lighted candles in the winter trees; they hung their homes with evergreen; they burned beseeching fires all night long to keep the year alive.”
The days will be getting longer after this day, this day we tilt toward the sun and toward spring. It may be primitive to celebrate such things, but I can tell you there have been years that the promise of longer days has brought me to my knees. Here is Annie Dillard, alongside Tinker Creek, searching for some tree – was it from her own childhood? – a tree, she says, “with the lights in it.” And can you imagine the magic this image holds, “a backyard cedar,” she says, “each cell blazing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire… The flood of fire abated,” she says, “but I’m still spending the power… The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.”
This is the power that this log and these lights represent, a power that comes from these mountains, these meadows, these ponds and lakes and seas, these trees, these animals, those stars, this sun, this wind, this fire, this ground we stand on, this earth, moving through the darkness of the universe, spinning and spinning. And despite the pomposity of our leaders and our armies, our alliances and our coalitions, on all sides, we are so tiny. In the face of such immense darkness, we light these candles. “Now is the moment of magic,” writes Victoria Safford, “when the whole, round earth turns again toward the sun, and here’s a blessing: the days will be longer now, even before the winter settles in to chill us.” We light these candles of the Yule log, and we remember all these blessings and all these miracles, and we celebrate the resiliency of the human spirit.
And Christmas is coming, too. We have the menorah. We have the Yule log. And we light the candles of this Advent wreath, now the fourth Sunday of our waiting, and the anticipation is building. What hopes fill this room, what joys, what sadnesses, what new birth is waiting in you? This is what I wonder with you. We must let the light into us if we are to let the light shine out of us. And those words are at the heart of who we are as a religious community: taking the light in in order to let the light shine out.
Sue Monk Kidd, a wonderful author, remembers when her daughter was small. “She got the dubious part of the Bethlehem star in a Christmas play,” Sue writes. “After her first rehearsal she burst through the door with her costume, a five-pointed star lined in shiny gold tinsel designed to drape over her like a sandwich board. ‘What exactly will you be doing in the play?’ I asked her. ‘I just stand there and shine,’ she told me.”
Looking at the nativity scene in the past, I have never considered the part of the star. I’ve done more than enough sermons on the other characters hanging around, God knows: Jesus himself, quite oblivious, a bewildered Joseph, an overwhelmed Mary, the excited shepherds, the silent animals, the “we three Kings,” the witnessing angels, all these, but never the star. “I just stand there and shine,” says Sue Kidd’s daughter to her humbled mother who had rather imagined a more important role for her child. And do you remember our own children, moving down the aisles earlier in the service, and our involuntary smiles, the flash of our cameras, for God’s sake, “This little light of mine,” they sang, “I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.” “Just stand there and shine,” says the wise child to us, reminding us that our own mentors and teachers are found in many sizes.
“Now is the moment of magic,” writes Victoria Safford, “when an eastern star beckons the ignorant toward an unknown goal, and here’s a blessing: they find nothing in the end but an ordinary baby, born at midnight, born in poverty, and the baby’s cry, like bells ringing, makes people wonder as they wander through their lives, what human love might really look like, sound like, feel like.” We light the candles of the Advent wreath to remind us of the magic and blessings of love, a love perhaps to be found in the most unlikely of places and circumstances.
One more story here at the end, on the way to the sermon title. It is Clarke Dewey Wells this time, a Unitarian minister of a generation ago and a wonderful poet. He writes about a time “several years ago and shortly after twilight when [his] three-year-old tried to divert his parent’s attention to a shining star. [We] were busy with time and schedules,” Clarke writes, “[with] the irritabilities of the day and other worthy preoccupations. ‘Yes, yes, we see the star – now I’m busy, don’t bother me.’ On hearing this, the young one launched through the porch door, fixed us with a fiery gaze and said, ‘You be glad at that star!’”
“It was one of those moments,” Clarke says, “when you get everything you need for the good of your soul – reprimand, disclosure and blessing… If we cannot impel ourselves into a stellar gladness, we can at least clean the dust from the lens of our perception; if we cannot dictate our own fulfillment, we can at least steer in the right direction; if we cannot exact a guarantee for a more appreciative awareness of our world – for persons and stars and breathing and tastes and the incalculable gift of every day – we can at least prescribe some of the conditions through which an increased awareness is more likely to open the skies, for us and for our children.”
We are together on a remarkable day, you and I, the coming together of Hanukkah and the winter solstice and Christmas; this is a day of magic and blessing, a day of lights and promise, a day of celebration and humility; it is a day of invitation: that we might look to the heavens and be glad at that star and that star and that star. “Now is the moment of magic,” writes Victoria Safford, “and here’s a blessing: we already possess all the gifts we need; we’ve already received our presents: ears to hear music, eyes to behold lights, hands to build true peace on earth and to hold each other tight in love.” May this season hold all these things for you and for those you love. And may we let the light shine into us so that when we can and when we must, the light will shine forth out of us.