Christmas Eve 2011
[Just before this meditation, our church's jazz band played a song called "Orphans of God" by the group Avalon...the lyric includes a refrain like this..."There are no strangers, there are no outcasts, there are no orphans of God." For me, the song's come to signal the promise of communion, community and the body of Christ.]
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Maybe you
heard the story this week about a little girl named Bella in a 5th
grade class up in San Francisco. It
seems that Bella overheard a bully in her class, a bully threatening another
little boy named Jonny. And it wasn’t the first time. Now Bella was always troubled by big Mikey
and his nasty ways. Often the little boy
who was bullied would leave school with tears in his eyes. And Bella watched him quietly walk away.
Finally, it
happened again; and Bella knew she had to do something. “You’re just a pathetic piece of crap,” the
bully hissed at the boy. Over by the
sink, where the teacher couldn’t hear.
“Me and my friends, we’re gonna find you after school.” Bella watched Jonny’s face fall, and she noticed
the look of ugly delight in big Mikey’s eyes.
Apparently,
she’d given this some thought, and she’d even talked it over with her
parents. Because right then Bella stood up,
confidently, and she approached the bully at the sink. And without a moment’s hesitation, she gave
the bully a big wraparound hug.
Now as you
can imagine, Mikey just blushed. And he
blushed and he blushed and he blushed.
All kinds of red. ‘Santa Claus is
coming to town’ red. ‘Rudolph the
Red-Nosed Reindeer’ red. Seeing that all
was going according to plan, Bella followed up quickly with stage-two of her
nonviolent intervention. She got up on
her tippy toes and kissed big Mikey on the cheek.
By now,
most of the class had noticed something happening by the sink, and they’d
turned to watch and listen. “I know who
you are,” the little girl said to the bully.
“And I know you are a child of God.
I know you are a good boy with a good heart.” The bully’s face had turned just about the
color of a big red pomegranate. And he
stood as still as a Christmas candle.
“And from now on,” she said, “you’re going to leave little Jonny
alone. Because he’s a child of God too. And you’re gonna have to find some other way
of having fun. No more bullying.”
And Bella
turned then, in a hushed classroom, and sat down again. And as she did, she added, out loud: “Oh. And see you at church, Mikey! See you at church on Christmas Eve!” Because it turns out that Bella and Mikey go
to the same church, to the same Sunday School every week. They’d been learning about Jesus together
their whole lives. And, don’t you know,
it did them some good that day. Going to
church made a difference.
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You see,
every Sunday, at this table, we say something to one another, something like: “There
are no strangers, there are no outcasts, there are no orphans of God.” And we mean it. This is the place where God recognizes and
names every single one of us. This is
the place where strangers become friends and orphans come home. One big family of God. There’s no doubt it was just that way at
Bella’s church in San Francisco. And she’d
been paying attention.
What
happens here is precious, holy, sacred. Because
out there, on the streets, in the market place, even in the schoolyard, the
world can be hard on us. Tough on the
children of God. Bullying, for example. Maybe you know someone who’s been bullied at
school. The other kids make fun of the
way he dresses, or maybe the way he plays piano not kickball. Maybe they just pick on him to be cruel. Call him names at recess.
Or who
knows? Maybe you know someone who’s been
bullied at church. There are churches
like that. Where a teenager’s harassed
because she dresses like a boy or she holds hands with other girls. Or maybe other kids call her names because
she asks hard questions in Sunday School.
Or maybe
you’re the one. Maybe the mean kids wait
behind the dumpster for you to come by.
Maybe they throw their pointy elbows into your ribs and warn you not to
say a word. Maybe you’re the one with a
knot turning in your gut when you leave the house in the morning.
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I’ll tell
you what. Jesus knows what bullying’s
all about. That baby born on Christmas
becomes a young man harassed and bullied by the world. Jesus is bullied by priests and
preachers. He’s bullied by soldiers and
policemen. He’s bullied by jealous
zealots and competitive classmates.
But here’s
the thing. Here’s the Christmas
truth. God’s grace is planted in the
heart of that same vulnerable nonconformist; in the heart and soul of that love
child who marches to his own drummer.
That’s what God does. That’s how
God rolls. God invests the divine dream
in Jesus, a grown man who weeps for world; a true believer who questions everything,
even God; a fragile soul who bruises easily and breaks sometimes.
And for
all that—just because he refused to be anybody else—Jesus was bullied by the
world. They called him names. They questioned his manhood. They poked him with elbows, fists and worse. And Jesus stayed true. He stayed true to himself. He stayed true to the dream God invested in
his soul. He stayed true to the tears
that welled in his eyes when he saw the hungry suffer. He stayed true to the love that he felt for the
sisters and brothers who had no family.
He paid a price for this. For his
integrity. For his courage. For his vision of things. But Jesus stayed true to the end.
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You see: Jesus
comes into our lives so that we can have the same kind of courage, Bella’s kind
of courage. Jesus is born in our hearts
so that we can show one another the same kind of love, the same kind of
tenderness. Sure, this old story begins
in Bethlehem, a long, long time ago, in a cave where Mary and Joseph bring a
baby boy into a troubled but beautiful world.
But it
continues now in us, in you and me, in Santa Cruz in 2011. And in San Francisco—with Bella and Mikey and
Jonny.
Here’s
what I want you to hear tonight. Christmas
means believing that the God who made you made you holy. Not ordinary.
Not average. The God who made you
made you holy. Not just to fit in. Not just to conform. To Hollywood. Or Bollywood.
Holy! Do you understand? Do you get it? You are not an accident. You are not a mistake. If you like to dance, if dancing brings you
joy, then you’ve gotta dance, my friend.
Dance like the glory of Christmas depends on it. And if you like to dig your beautiful hands
in the good earth, if gardening’s your thing, then you’ve gotta garden. Tend the earth, grow veggies and roses;
because the world’s a better place, a sacred place, when you do what you love.
And if you’re
a girl who likes to wear neckties or a boy who likes to wear pink, then you
gotta be what you gotta be. The world is
counting on it. Christmas means
believing that the God who made you made you holy. It’s not always easy being our holy selves,
being our unique and fabulous selves, wearing pink when the world says blue, or
wearing ties when the world says heels.
It’s not always easy following our conscience—as Bella did in her 5th
grade classroom, to the glory of God.
But Jesus comes to each of us, with love and with courage—so that we can
look in the mirror tomorrow morning and see nothing less than the glory of God. It’s true.
You can look in the mirror tomorrow morning and see Christmas. You can look in the mirror tomorrow morning
and see God’s promise. “There are no
orphans of God.”
There’s a
dark and holy cave tonight, deep in your beautiful soul. And there, right there, a child is born. Jesus is born. In your heart. In your heart and my heart and every heart on
earth. So before you go to the tree
tomorrow morning, look in the mirror.
Jesus is born there. God’s
promise looks exactly like you; and “there are no orphans of God.”