Brickyards and Bees

Brickyards and Bees

December 6, 2016

Isaiah 11:1-10 and Matt 3:1-1

I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My maternal grandfather worked in the brickyard. It was hard work. But he saw an opportunity. He worked piece meal which means once you achieved your quota for the day, you could go home. He prided himself that he would never pack a lunch. He’d have breakfast and head to the yard and be done by lunch. This afforded him the time to become a beekeeper, so that’s what he did.

So we traveled around to all the county fairs and craft shows in the area. We’ve been in Medina a few times, and I remember your tree-lined streets.

My mom also had the entrepreneurial spirit. In the days before computer screen savers, my mom sold sandscapes as a side business. I was 5 or 6. Sandscapes were two panes of glass with water and sand in them. You would turn them over and watch the sand slowly trickle down and form patterns. These usually had some dramatic photo in the background, like lightning or outer space. We sold those, too, at various county fairs, including spending some time here in our motor home at your fair grounds.

I remember spending most of the Christmas season of 1987 at the sandscape kiosk at New Towne Mall in New Philadelphia. There was a little over hang with a curtain that my sister and I would curl up in and take naps in between going to the mall fountain and watching the water there for what seemed like hours.

The mall was warm and festive. There were Christmas trees and garlands hung overhead. Red and gold tinsel everywhere. The store displays depicted winter scenes, snowmen skiing down cotton slopes, slaloming around the latest toys, books and suchlike.

I am now a parent. Sandscapes are a thing of the past. But there is a connection to those days. When we come to this time of the year, we turn the sandscape and watch things fall like they usually do in the comforting manner. Christmas cards are sent and received with smiling, happy families, just like when I was a kid. The stores are decked out with Christmas trees and tinsel. We also have our nieces and nephews’ Amazon wish lists, so shopping is a little less stressful. We will deck the halls of our home and put up the tree. All will be merry and bright. Frank Sinatra will play on our home stereo, our radios tuned to the Christmas channel in the car, our Pandora on the Christmas channel at work. Our kids don’t know what sugar plums are, but visions of presents will dance in their heads, just like they did when I was their age.

That is what our traditions are. Maybe you have similar ones. I heard of a candle light walk on the square and look forward to next year’s. The background scene is the same comforting ones, and the sand may fall a little different due to family schedules, but there will be no alarms and no real surprises.

Yet reading Matthew, he doesn’t give us cheery phrases with smiling faces, or visions of presents. He gives us John the Baptist, the anti-sandscape. John would smash the sandscape and yell at us to wake up and get active. John, the grimy prophet proclaiming in the wilderness. John who today would be a homeless person in the square wearing a cardboard sign saying, “Will work for locusts and wild honey.”

John with this message of “Repent! Turn! for the kingdom of heaven has come near!” Who repeats the words of the prophet Isaiah, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight!”  Who, when he sees the religious leaders, does not wish them a Merry Christmas, but says to them, “You brood of vipers! Who told you about this? Don’t feel so high and mighty about being chosen, for God can raise up others from the rocks.”

These are hard words. So why are they in Advent? John is asking us, “Do we really want Christmas?” By asking that, I really think John is asking, “Do we really want Jesus in our midst?”

He’s born to poor, homeless parents who don’t have two wooden nickels to rub together, do we really want people like that hanging around? How comfortable are we with people giving birth in abject poverty because they cannot afford to go to a hospital? How comfortable are we with the homeless?

I grew up in a small town with lots of different economic classes. Our neighbors, the Pattersons were the type of poor you’d notice. They were little grimy and smelly. I was and still catch myself judging those like the Pattersons. Yet the holy family would be more like the Pattersons than my family or maybe yours. Dirty from the road. Unable to bathe since there is no room at the inn. Are we sure we want Christmas?

Our nation of immigrants is getting ready to celebrate a holiday where the holy family is about to become religious refugees in Egypt, yet here we are still debating whether or not to accept immigrants and refugees. If we really want to celebrate Christmas, welcoming immigrants and refugees would be a great place to start. Are we sure we want Christmas?

Both John and Jesus  talk of doing what you say and saying what you do. Of loving your neighbor and turning the other cheek. Neither offered much self-defense, both get killed for their message. Jesus said on the night he was betrayed, “Whoever lives by the sword, dies by the sword.” Hard words in a nation full of fear and worried about its safety. John and Jesus were not afraid. Nor were the first three hundred years of Christians who sang on their way to be martyred for their faith. They stood for the idea that a “fearful Christian” is a contradiction in terms. They were challenging us to think can we be fearful if everyone is your neighbor and you’re praying for your enemies and doing good to those who harm you. Is this what Christmas is calling us to? If so, I’m not there yet, but I want to be.

John uses water, but not in the soothing way that the sandscapes do. John’s message feels more like brickyards and bees. It is fearless, hard work. Dangerous work. Work that can sting you. The water you are baptized in is the sweat of your brow. This is the life of Christmas. Water for repentance. For we know that there is one who comes after us, we are not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize us with the Holy Spirit and fire.

Do we really want Christmas, that is the question our lectionary text puts in front of us today. Yet there is another one that you face on this day. Do you want this guy as your senior pastor? One that offers cryptic stories and highlights the challenge in the gospel when we might want comfort? What can you expect with me as your pastor?

I will walk with you and work alongside you. We will prepare the way of the Lord, and make paths straight. We will eat food together, maybe not locusts, but I hear you know a good place for wild honey. We will gather and share our stories together. I will baptize your children, visit your sick, and celebrate the lives of those who have died. Mourn with you. Celebrate with you. Teach you in classes and Bible studies and be taught by you. I look at this not as a sprint but as a marathon. I look forward to seeing what gospel trouble and communal living we can stir up together for a long while. I look forward to our work together. I look forward to our life together of trying to be Christ to one another and to our community. Where we find that every day is Christmas and we try to live into the promise and the challenge of the season that John presents to us today.

Our baptism will be the sweat of our brows as we work for the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized. As we build homes in Costa Rica, deliver Easter Baskets to families of those in jail, and do the hard work of finding Christ in one another and ourselves. To confront our fears and encourage one another to live by faith, hope, and love instead. I’m sure there’s more that you do that I don’t know about and I look forward to learning and working with you.

And in this, the Triune God will be with us. Jesus is in our midst and how our hearts will burn within us as we are baptized with the Holy Spirit and fire. We will dream new dreams, impossible dreams like we heard in Isaiah, of lions and lambs, cows and bears being together. Boomers, Gen Xer’s, Millenials and more, gathered together. Maybe even donkeys and elephants given our last election cycle. And children shall lead us.

Sometimes in dreaming, we find that we cannot sell sandscapes any longer. So we must put them away. This might be painful at first for we know the routine of selling them. We know the sights and sounds for our kiosk, and we will miss it. But in time, we won’t miss it and it won’t even come to mind. I can’t stay 5 forever, we must grow and change. For we find that life is much fuller when we are living into this paradox of being Christian. The paradox where we find that in comforting others, we are comforted. That in feeding others, we are fed. In visiting the prisoner, we are freed.

We will discover the paradox of Christmas so eloquently described by theologian G. K. Chesterton, “Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.”

This life is infinitely better and worth the alarm and the surprise than watching sand fall gentle on our wall, in stale and enclosed water. Yes, life is amazingly better in the living water of Jesus Christ. I look forward to our life together and the traditions, new and old that we will live into as we build, together, by the sweat of our brows, the Kingdom of God. Amen.

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