Christmas as the Eye of the Storm, and other wisdom gleaned from old sermons

A sermon preached by Jack Cabaness                                                                                    

First Presbyterian Church of Katonah, New York                                                       

December 13, 2015

As a preacher, one of the things that I like to do is to read through old sermons. On my bookshelves I have everything from sermons preached by Jonathan Edwards in 1743 in Northampton, Massachusetts to sermons preached by Barbara Brown Taylor in 1995 in Centerville, Georgia.

Many of the sermons, even by the masters, quickly become dated. 

They don’t seem to be very relevant to the church of today, even if they are interesting snapshots of church history. But sometimes old sermons do have staying power, and we do well to listen to them again.

More than sixty years ago the great Lutheran preacher Edmund Steimle preached a Christmas Eve sermon entitled, “The Eye of the Storm.” He began his sermon by describing his first-hand experience of Hurricane Hazel, which hit his hometown of Philadelphia.

In Steimle’s words,

Unlike most hurricanes, which lose much of their force when they turn inland, this one hit with all the fury of a hurricane at sea: drenching rains, screaming winds, trees uprooted, 

branches flying through the air, broken power lines crackling on the pavement.

It was frightening.

Then suddenly there was a let-up, a lull. Shortly after, all was still. Not a leaf quivered. The sun even broke through briefly. It was the eye of the storm.

“All was calm, all was bright.”

And then all hell broke loose again: Branches and trees crashing down, the screaming winds, the torrential rain, the power lines throwing spark on the pavement. But that was a breathless moment, Steimle wrote, when we experienced the eye of the storm.” (Edmund Steimle, “The Eye of the Storm,” in A Chorus of Witnesses: Model Sermons for Today’s Preachers, Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdman’s, 1994, pp. 237-242).

Steimle went on to say that Christmas itself is like the experience of the eye of the storm. Before Jesus’ birth—long before—there was Israel’s time of slavery in Egypt, followed by the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile in Babylon. There was the oppression at the hands of the Greeks and later of the Romans. It was a stormy history.

And then, following the calm of Jesus’ birth, there was the massacre of the male children under the age of two by King Herod, there were schemes to end Jesus’ life, and, in the end, there was the crucifixion.

It was a stormy time, and Jesus’ birth was the eye of the storm.

Steimle’s metaphor of the eye of the storm seems especially pertinent for our own time. We know first hand how Christmas is often juxtaposed with tragedy. The 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami that killed nearly a quarter of a million people took place on the day after Christmas. Tomorrow, December 14^th, is the third anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shooting. And thus it is appropriate and timely, although depressing, for the Gospel writer Matthew to juxtapose the story of the massacre of innocent children with the Christmas story.

And the land in which Jesus was born is no less turbulent today than it was in Jesus’ time. We find ourselves in the midst of the storm. In the Gospel passage I read earlier, did you hear how it said that King Herod was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him? We know something about that, don’t we? A poll released by the New York Times indicates that Americans have a greater fear of terrorism now than at any time since the Sept. 11^th, 2001 attacks. We are well-acquainted with fear.

And we are well-acquainted with grief. There is the empty chair to contend with, the stocking that stays folded in the box. The first Christmas without a loved one is often the hardest, but any Christmas can become the occasion to see whether the hurt has let up any since this time last year. And when the death of the loved one takes place on or near Thanksgiving or Christmas, this time of year is forever tinged with the experience of grief.

When the Gospel writer Matthew quoted the prophet Jeremiah about Rachel weeping for her children, the prophet said that Rachel refused to be consoled. And we can see why. No parent wants to outlive his or her child, whether the child is 4 or 5 or 45. Children are supposed to outlive their parents, and the grief is especially painful when children beat their parents to the grave.

In the midst of all this fear and grief, what are we to make of the Christmas story?

Is the Christmas story simply a misleading calm in the midst of the storm that falsely lures people out of safety before the rest of the storm strikes, or is it an intimation of the deepest truth we know?----that in the midst of everything and in spite of everything, there is a peace that passes understanding.

The purpose of Christmas is not to get us to forget all the storms that rage about. If we simply try to ignore the storms, we risk reducing Christmas to nothing more than nostalgia and sentimentality or to the deep depression that grips so many this time of year.

When we celebrate Christmas, what we celebrate is not peace apart from pain, conflict, suffering, and confusion. Instead, Christmas is a peace like the peace in the eye of a hurricane, a peace smack dab in the middle of it all, a peace that does indeed pass all understanding.

In the Christian story, the great God who created the Universe and everything in it, gets born into a very ordinary and real human life, and becomes just as vulnerable as any one of us at the moment of our birth and throughout our moment-to-moment lived lives.

While all Jerusalem trembles in fear, a baby is born in Bethlehem. While King Herod stokes the fears of his people and overreacts with violence, God reaches out to us in love and joins us in our vulnerability.

As my friend Ray Roberts, a Presbyterian pastor in Virginia, points out, there is all the difference in the world between healthy fears and anxieties and being possessed by a Spirit of fear, which is destructive. He writes that when we no longer trust God, we seek to secure our own existence.

But the trouble with that is that we can’t.

Only God is a Mighty Fortress.

The impossibility of securing our lives against every possible imaginable threat puts us in fear lock down.

It makes it impossible for us to take even modest risks in the name of love, such as reaching out to refugees fleeing violence in the Middle East, and we forget that Joseph, Mary, and the baby Jesus were themselves refugees fleeing violence in the Middle East. (See raymondrroberts/tumblr dot com, post entitled “The Real Decline,” December 5, 2015)

José y Maria

I wish, more than anything, that I could declare to you that the storm is over, but I cannot.

What I can tell you is that God is with us in the midst of the storm.

What I can do is to remind us that we are in the season of Advent, a time when we remember the word of the angels who said, “Fear not.” They said this because Jesus was coming into the world, and because Jesus embodies the perfect love that casts out fear.

I can tell you that in spite of everything, Christmas is coming. And on Christmas we rejoice in the fact that the storm—the destruction, the violence, the fear, the grief, the hopelessness—does not have the last word.

But God—who gives us this peace in the midst of the storm—has the last word.

And the last word is the Word that became flesh and lived among us.

All glory and praise be to our God. Amen.

Unlearning War in an Age of Terror

Sermon preached by Jack Cabaness                                                                                    

First Presbyterian Church of Katonah                                                       

November 22, 2015

Texts: Isaiah 11:1-9; Mark 1:12-15

One preacher tells the story of what happened when all the animals in the forest decided that now was the time to establish the peaceable kingdom once and for all. They issued a proclamation that all the animals in the forest would henceforth live in peace. Shortly after the proclamation was issued, a lamb saw a sleeping lion and nuzzled up to the lion, using the lion’s mane as a pillow. Then the lion woke up and ate the lamb. The moral of the story is that there’s always going to be someone who didn’t read the announcement. (from Presbyterian pastor Rick Spaulding, who is currently the chaplain at Williams College).

Isaiah’s vision of all the animals living in peace doesn’t seem very realistic. It’s beautiful poetry. Or it’s a beautiful image, as painted by the American folk painter Edward Hicks. Hicks repainted the Peaceable Kingdom at least sixty-two times, but even Hicks grew increasingly discouraged by the conflicts of his time, and each time he repainted the scene he made the predators more ferocious. (John Dillenberger, The Visual Arts in America, Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984, pp. 130-132).  

The Peaceable Kingdom (1833). Worcester Art Museum.
Painted by Edward Hicks (1780-1849).

A few chapters earlier in Isaiah, the prophet offered another utopian vision. The prophet speaks of a day when then nations “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

The people who first heard Isaiah’s message were devastated. What was happening a little more than 700 years before the birth of Christ was that the Kingdom of Judah was caught up in the Syro-Ephraimite War. Some people have referred to this as the first Jewish Holocaust. The holy city of Jerusalem itself was threatened with destruction. Their hope for rescue seemed cut off; their fortunes looking no better than a dead stump.

But still Isaiah dreamed of the day when the nations would no longer learn war. The proclamation of Isaiah 2:2-4 is repeated in Micah 4:1-3, with Micah echoing Isaiah’s hopes for a time when the nations would beat their swords into plowshares; and their spears into pruning hooks; but then Micah added an additional line to that beautiful oracle of hope …

Micah proclaimed, “They shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.” Micah moves from the universal desire for peace among all nations to the individual’s desire to feel safe.

We don’t need a biblical scholar to help us decode what Micah is talking about. We don’t need a historian to help us make Micah relevant to the present day, because we can hear this ancient promise that “they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid,” and we can immediately translate that to our own time ...

We can imagine Micah saying, “They shall all travel on planes, trains, and automobiles over the Thanksgiving holidays, or they shall stroll through Times Square in New York City or the Mall in Washington, D.C. or through the streets of London or Paris or Istanbul or Cairo, and no one shall make them afraid.”

In the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Beirut, Paris, and now Mali, we have seen terrorists learn new ways of waging war. How do we defend ourselves against those who are willing to blow themselves up to inflict harm on others? Isaiah and Micah dream of a day when the nations will not learn war anymore, but can we really unlearn war in an age of terror?

Before we simply dismiss the prophets Isaiah and Micah as unrealistic dreamers, notice what they both say after they speak of the nations unlearning war. Neither prophet promises that this vision will come true simply by magic. Isaiah says, “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!” And Micah says, “We will walk in the name of the Lord our God.”

Peacemaking is a journey--a long, ongoing, step by step journey, in which we strive to remain faithful to the vision of peace that God has given us.

Anita Datar was a U.S. Citizen, a resident of Tacoma Park, Maryland, who lost her life on Friday when terrorists sieged the Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako, Mali. She was a public health worker who had dedicated her life to working for the well-being of others.

It is in these devastating moments when the peacemakers loose their lives, that we are reminded that peacemaking is a long, long journey, full of many heartbreaking setbacks.

A few weeks after September 11^th, 2001, Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State, spoke at the House of Hope Presbyterian Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. She said,

There are different ways of waiting. There is waiting without carrying hope within ourselves, sitting—waiting for salvation to come from the outside …

And there are those who wait with faith and who fight for truth even when they are defeated and beaten back a hundred times. This is the kind of waiting that sends forth seeds out of which change and progress may one day grow. The difference is between waiting for lilies to appear that have never been planted, and doing your utmost to help good seeds find nourishment in rocky soil.

She went on to say,

It is, of course, beyond our power to turn the clock back before September 11^th, 2001. But we can choose to use the waiting time wisely: to be the doers, not hearers only; to acknowledge the presence of evil, but never lose sight of the good; to endure terrible blows, but never give in to those who would have us betray our principles, or surrender our faith. (as quoted in a sermon by John Buchanan, preached at Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church, December 9, 2001).

Today is the Reign of Christ Sunday. It is the Sunday when we look forward to the day when Christ’s reign will be fully realized. Long ago, the prophet Isaiah dreamed of the time when the earth will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Isaiah dreamed of a time when the wolf shall live with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.

And in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus proclaimed, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.” And right before Jesus made that proclamation, the Gospel writer Mark tells us that Jesus was in the wilderness with the wild beasts. Isn’t that an intriguing detail?

Could it be that there in the wilderness, the wolf was already nuzzling up to the lamb, and the leopard was already lying down with the kid? Could it be that signs of the reign of Christ were already there for those with eyes to see and ears to hear?

No matter how bleak the future seems. Even when we feel cut off from a future for which we had dearly hoped, we can dare to imagine a future in which green shoots do indeed grow out of dead stumps.

Where, in your lives, have you felt cut off? Perhaps you lost a job that you absolutely loved. Perhaps you’ve been cut from a family member or a loved one, and nothing exacerbates the pain of separation more than the holidays. Perhaps you are deeply worried about the state of our nation and the state of our world.

In whatever way you feel cut off, you can dare to imagine a green shoot growing out of a dead stump, even in these barren late November days.

I’m not trying to suggest that figuring out the next steps is ever easy or automatic. You’ll not hear me preach any sermons entitled, “Nine easy steps to get the lion to lie down with the lamb.” If Isaiah’s vision were easy to achieve, we would have already done it. But I believe this vision is enough to give us hope.

Several years ago, a future United States Senator was working as a tenements rights lawyer in Newark, New Jersey. He was walking around the neighborhood trying to offer his services. One day he knocked on the door of one Mrs. Virginia Jones. Virginia walked out of her tenement building and asked him to follow her. She said to him, “Tell me what you see?” He said, “I see crack houses and run-down buildings and gang graffiti.” Virginia replied, “Then, you can’t help me.” And she walked off. He went chasing after her and said, “Wait, you have to tell me more. Why are you walking away?” She said, “Young man, you need to learn something. If all you see is hopelessness and despair, then it’s a reflection of what’s inside you and you can’t help me. But, if you see signs of hope, new life, even the face of God, then we can get started.” (from a 2007 interview on NPR with Cory Booker, who at the time was the mayor of Newark).

What do you see? Do you see the stump—the evidence of heartache and tragedy?

Or do you see the green shoot?—the sign that the reign of Christ is already breaking through?

All glory and praise be to our God. Amen.

A Sermon in Response to Last Week's Terrorist Attacks, using Elisha as our model for honest grieving and faithful response.

A sermon preached by Jack Cabaness
First Presbyterian Church of Katonah, New York 
November 15, 2015

This sermon was originally written as a companion piece to chapter 12 in Brian McLaren’s book We Make the Road by Walking, and it was rewritten in response to the past week’s devastating terrorist attacks in Paris, Beirut, and Baghdad.

Text: 2 Kings 2:1-15

Our ancestors in the faith, the ancient Israelites, told and retold the central stories of their faith. They told the story of God using Moses to deliver the people out of slavery. And the people kept telling these stories. And they needed to keep telling these stories, because in the Hebrew Bible, Pharaoh does not meet his end in the book of Exodus, when the waters of the Red Sea close over his chariot.

In fact, Pharaoh lives on, as he later "haunts Israel in the form of its own kings who, intoxicated and blinded by political power, forget that the God under whose authority they serve not only despises tyrants, but also is inclined to intervene against them if they lead the people to apostasy or oppress the most vulnerable among them.” (Trevor Eppehimer, “Theological Perspective: 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14,” Feasting on the Word, Year C, Vol. 3, Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010, p. 174).

The story of God intervening on behalf of the most vulnerable and those who are being oppressed gets retold again and again. Just as Moses was God’s spokesperson on behalf of those who were being oppressed, so Elijah also becomes God’s spokesperson in the face of tyranny.

This message is captured in the words of the African American spiritual, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, which we will sing later in the service. It’s based on the story of Elijah’s fiery chariot ride into heaven. Written by Wallis Willis around 1862, the spiritual begins,

Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see, 
Coming for to carry me home?

A band of angels coming after me, 
Coming for to carry me home.”

The chariot likely both represents the hope of deliverance as well as a challenge to the institution of slavery. And the reference to the Jordan River also evokes an association with the Ohio River, because the Ohio River divided the Slave states from the Free States, and thus, freedom awaited, on the other side of the Ohio, on that far side of Jordan. (see comments by Haywood Barringer Spangler, “Homiletical Perspective: 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14” in Feasting on the Word, p. 175).

The Prophet Elijah in the cave (below) and on a chariot of fire. A fresco from Rila Monastery, Bulgaria, medieval Orthodox tradition, renovated 20th century.

When Elijah crossed the Jordan, he returned to the vicinity of Mount Nebo, where Moses had surveyed the Promised Land right before he died. And just as Moses once chose Joshua as his successor, so Elijah had come upon Elisha one day as Elisha was plowing the fields, and Elijah threw his mantle, or his cloak, upon Elisha, and Elisha said let me kiss my father and mother goodbye, and then I will follow you, and from that point on, Elisha followed Elijah.

And when it was time for Elijah to depart, Elisha asked for a double share of Elijah’s spirit. Now, Elisha was not asking to become twice the prophet that Elijah was. In this case, a double share means twice what anyone else would get, or a 2/3rds share, which is what the oldest son would inherit. In other words, Elisha was asking to be recognized as Elijah’s true heir.

Now, suspense enters the story, because we do not know until the very end whether or not Elisha will receive that double share of Elijah’s spirit. Elisha himself does not know, until he parts the Jordan with Elijah’s mantle. We can almost hear Elisha ask himself, “Will I see Elijah ascend? Will I be able to part the Jordan as Elijah did? Will the Lord grant me the spirit? The suspense Elisha must feel, parallels the suspense we feel in moments of transition and vulnerability. Will the cancer treatment work? Will I be downsized out of a job? Will my child make it through high school? (Spangler, p. 177).

And this story evokes our unease and uncertainty about the state of our world. After Friday night’s devastating terrorist attacks in Paris, which had been preceded by suicide bombings in Beirut and Baghdad, what happens now? All the events of these past few days have brought back memories of 9/11 and all those feelings of fear and uncertainty.

We do not know what the future holds.

Elisha does a couple of things in the face of his own uncertainty and fear. First of all, he persists in accompanying Elijah. Three times Elijah pleads with his disciple to abandon him, and three times Elisha refuses. Elisha becomes a model of persistence, of staying true to what he believed his calling to be, even in the face of frightening and uncertain times.

And notice what else Elisha does. When the company of prophets taunts Elisha about Elijah’s pending departure, Elisha tells them to be quiet. Thus, Elisha calls for silence or stillness rather than premature conclusions.

With all the talk after Friday night’s attacks in Paris, we need the sanity of an Elisha to warn us against premature conclusions about the dangers of giving shelter to refugees. We need someone to warn us not to give in to our preconceived notions.

We need a model of faithfulness. Elisha has no guarantee that God will give him the same gifts that Elijah received. But Elisha pursues his call, even without that guarantee. Elisha follows what he understands to be God’s will, although he does not yet know clearly what God’s will for him is.
Elisha must discern God’s call by participating in events. He must watch the chariot and the whirlwind. He must pick up the mantle. He must attempt to part the Jordan. Elisha confirms his call through his actions. Elisha becomes our model for faithfulness. He embraced the suspense and ambiguity that is a part of life, and he asked himself, “What is God calling me to do in this situation?” (Spangler, p. 177).

But almost everything I’ve said up until now is really next week’s sermon, or perhaps even the sermon for the week after next. Because you see, before Elisha can become our model for faithfulness, he is first our model for honest grieving. Before he picked up the mantle, before he started to test his calling, in that moment when Elisha realized that Elijah had been taken out of his sight, he ripped his clothes in half, which was a profound sign of grief.

What would Elisha do on the third day after devastating terrorist attacks in Paris? He would rip his cloak in two and weep.

Before this preacher or any other preacher attempts to give you easy answers, let our response be one of honest grieving and crying out to God with our fears.

The composer Giacomo Puccini wrote a number of famous operas. In 1922 he was suddenly stricken by cancer while working on his last opera, Turandot, which many now consider his best. Puccini said to his students, “If I don’t finish Turandot, I want you to finish it for me.” Shortly afterward he died. Puccini’s students studied the opera carefully and soon completed it.

In 1926 the world premiere of Turandot was performed in Milan with Puccini’s favorite student, Arturo Toscanini, directing. Everything went beautifully until the opera reached the point where Puccini had been forced to put down his pen. Tears ran down Toscanini’s face. He stopped the music, turned to his audience, and cried out, “Thus far the Master wrote, but he died.”

A vast silence filled the opera house.

Then, Toscanini smiled through his tears and exclaimed, “But his disciples finished his work.” He then turned back around and resumed directing. When Turandot ended, the audience broke into thunderous applause. (as told by Carrie N. Mitchell, “Pastoral Perspective: 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14” in Feasting on the Word, p. 176).

With Elisha as a model for honest grieving and for faithfulness, we, too, can turn to God with our grief and our fears, and, when the time is right, we can finish our story, as we live out God’s calling upon our lives.

All glory and praise be to our God. Amen.