“Comfort, Comfort My People”                      January 3, 2010
Jeremiah 31:  7–14                                     Rev. Deryl Fleming

In his magnificent Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, W.H. Auden has one of the shepherds say to the others,

We, too, wait for Christmas to come, then to be over, to get the tree up, to get the tree down. Today we wait for the winds to subside. Somedays we wait for the rain to come, other days for it to go. A few weeks ago we waited for snow to come, and come it did. We’re still waiting for it to go.

All our lives we wait, first to be held, then diapered, fed, burped and held some more. We wait to walk and talk, to experience things for ourselves, even things that big people prefer that we do not experience for ourselves. We wait for Santa and the tooth fairy, to begin preschool, then to graduate from preschool and to big school, to grow in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and people. We wait for other graduations and for that crucial teenage rite of passage, the driver’s license.

We wait to leave home for college, many of us, to see how we can fare alone in the great big wide world, then to follow college becoming real live employed human beings. We wait to marry, longer than previous generations, more like those of previous, previous generations. We wait to have children, often longer than prospective grandparents want us to wait. We wait for promotions, transfers, deployments, new assignments. A former neighbor used to say he was waiting for his four children to graduate from college, the mortgage to be paid and the dog to die. Eventually all that happened, and he decided he needed a new dog.

Somewhere in all that procession our waiting takes on messianic proportions and we are waiting for the magic moment when something or someone will come to take away all the pain and make everything right. We are on a messianic quest.

For four weeks during Advent we waited for Christmas, God with us, God with us, God with us. Then Jesus came and made some pain but not all go away. He made some things right, but not all, maybe not even most. In the salvation story Jesus comes as the Christ to say there is no messiah who in this life can make all the pain go away and everything right. Always in exile, yet we can live with verve and vigor.

So here on the second Sunday of Christmas we are yet waiting. To the 6th century BC Judean exiles in waiting, God speaks in Jeremiah’s “little book of consolation” hope for those who had lost big time:  houses and lands, family and fortune, nation and temple. “For thus says the Lord:  Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob … See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor, together … With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back, I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble; for I have become a father to Israel and Ephraim is my firstborn.”

On Christmas Day I talked with a former parishioner whose 53 year old first born son had died a few days earlier. Following a two week hiking trip with his wife, the son’s cough intensified over the next several weeks until he was diagnosed with lung cancer, treated, then told it was terminal. The family was getting prepared to fly back to California on Dec. 30 for a memorial service set for today. At home in Greenville, S.C., they celebrated Christmas with their other two adult children and two college grandsons, but it was not a Christmas without the blues. Christmas came, yet still they wait. Comfort, comfort your people, O God.

I think of others who wait in their unique places of exile. The families of those whose Christmas letter had they the energy to compose one would have begun, “2009 was not on of our better years… the one whose job search has stretched beyond months into years … the woman who made this week’s news because after losing $60,000 in child support she lost her job and is on the verge of losing the house where she and her five children live … the one whose health is up for grabs or utterly undone … the one who lives daily with debilitating chronic disease … the one who years letter bears the scars of a family suicide … the one disabled by a brain injury or a mental disorder or both and those who love her and work hard at standing by her… those whose loved ones have been deployed or deployed again or whose lives have been taken all wait on God. How long, O Lord? The exiles groan.

I don’t know how long, but “He who scattered Israel will gather him and keep him as a shepherd keeps his flock. For the Lord has ransomed Jacob, and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him. They shall come and sing aloud on Zion and be radiant over the goodness of the Lord (and the bounty of life) and they shall languish no more.”

Twenty six years ago a friend who was chairman of the Philosophy Department at the university where he still teaches sent me a story from a philosophical journal called Woman’s Day magazine. The story was told by Nancy Gavin: “It’s just a small white envelope stuck among the branches of our Christmas tree. No name, no inscription, it has peaked through the branches of our Christmas tree of the past ten years or so.” She said it began with her husband Mike’s contempt for the commercial aspects of Christmas, the overspending, the scurrying about at the last minute buying presents out of sheer duty and desperation. Knowing how he felt about it she decided one year to forego the usual and look for something special for Mike.

Her inspiration came in an unusual way. Their 12 year old Kevin was wrestling with his school team and just before Christmas they had a non-league match with a team sponsored by an inner city church. Their boys were dressed in ill fitting shorts, holy tee shirts and shoes that looked as if they were barely held together by the laces. She noted that they were not wearing protective headgear, a luxury they obviously could not afford. Kevin and his team in their spiffy uniforms and sparking shoes were quite a contrast.

Nancy said “we ended up walloping them” taking every weight and class. Afterwards Mike shook his head sadly, saying “I wish just one of them could have won. They have a lot of potential but losing like this could take the heart right out of them.”

That afternoon Nancy went to a sporting goods store and bought an assortment of head gear and shoes and sent them anonymously to the inner city church.

On Christmas Eve she placed a note telling Mike what she had done and that it was her gift for him. Thus began the tradition of the white envelope. One year she sent a group of retarded youngsters to a hockey game, another year a check to a pair of elderly brothers whose house burned a week before Christmas.

“The envelope became the bright light of our Christmas,” she said, the last thing opened every year, and the children waited with wide-eyed attention.

Last year she said we lost Mike to cancer and “when Christmas rolled around I was still so wrapped in grief that I barely got the tree up. But Christmas Eve found me placing the envelope on the tree, and in the morning it was joined by three more. Each of our children, unbeknownst to the others, had placed an envelope on the tree for their dad.”

“The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not put it out.” On the other hand, the light has not dispelled the darkness. On the other hand, the darkness has not put it out and cannot put it out.

In 1969 giant theologian Karl Barth spoke of coming across a 600 year old parchment document, with seal affixed. It was the contract for the conveyance of a house, written in solemn language:  “Given at Basel on the first Monday after Pope St. Urban’s day in the 1371st year counting from the birth of God.” “Christmas,” said Barth “is where we come from. It’s where everything comes from, for it pleased God in his majesty to humble himself and become human.”

On the second Sunday of Christmas even as we return with the shepherds “glorifying and praising God for all we have seen and heard,” we wait. Not in the fantasy of wishful thinking, but “counting from the birth of God.” Memory gives birth to hope. “Do this in remembrance of me.”

To those in exile God says, “Then shall the maidens rejoice in the dance and the young men and the old shall be merry. I will turn their mourning into joy and give gladness for their sorrow. I will feast the souls of the priests with abundance and my people shall be satisfied with my goodness.”  In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.