Sermon for Sunday, December 15

Remembering: Prayer Shawls
Numbers 15:37-41
December 15, 2013


When I was in youth ministry in I had what I thought was a great idea for a Christmas program. We solicited most powerful Christmas memories from the members of the congregation and the youth performed them as a series of monologues. Let me repeat, I thought it was a great idea. It did not go well. First of all, it was a whole lot of talking. It’s in the midst of this program that I learned one of the first painful lessons about ministry and Christmas—it doesn’t much matter what you say at Christmas time because people only remember what you sing. Easter, Easter is a preaching Holiday. Pentecost. Even All Saints Day. But Christmas is all about the music. On top of that, People's memories were either really pedestrian or painful. A couple of the memories were down right boring and the ones that weren’t boring were depressing. One man remembered a Christmas he spent while serving in the Marines in Korea. He looked out across the snow, felt completely alone and imagined the loneliness that Christ endured for him. Another person remembered the year their home burned down just before Christmas. An another remembered the year the family didn’t have money to buy Christmas presents. She went through the house collecting favorite Christmas gifts from years past and placed them under the tree. I was gratified to see stories that say sometimes the true meaning of Christmas shines brightest in the darkest points of our lives. But, I was probably the only one so moved. Even my biggest supporters admitted that it got a bit heave. Looking back, I had put the kids in a difficult position. It is difficult to take a memory you personally did not live through and make it your own.

That is the precisely the task that Moses gave to the Israelite people. He tried something simpler than a Christmas program. He instructed them to make prayer shawls. These instructions were future generations. In terms of the narrative structure of the Pentateuch—the first five books of the Bible—this comes as the people were still in the wilderness between the captivity they suffered in Egypt and the promised land they would eventually obtain. The instruction to make prayer shawls with tassels was for future generations given to people who did not personally remember the experience of deliverance from Egyptian slavery. A few scenes earlier, Moses had sent 12 spies into the land to determine what the nature of their task was. Of the twelve, only Joshua and Caleb came back with the faith to say--we can do this because the Lord is on our side (Numbers 13). God was angered by their lack of faith, he forgave their sins but vowed not to allow any of the faithless generation to enter the land promised to them (Numbers 14). It's in the light of their faithlessness and forgetfulness of what God had done that a series of commands are given about offerings for sin, the punishment of wrong-doers, and the importance of tassels are given. The tassels are meant to cause people to remember. Remember God's command--The tassels are reminders to stay on the path God had given them and a call to be faithful. Remember God's call to be courageous--The tassels are responses to people's failure of courage. At one time, they believed they couldn't do what God had told them they could do even though they had been delivered from captivity in Egypt. Remember God's actions on behalf of the people.--"I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the Egypt to be your God. I am the Lord Your God." It is difficult to take a memory you personally did not live through and make it your own.

Part of Christian Discipleship, a big part, is learning to assimilate the memories of the whole people of God into one's own system of memories. Next to that is sifting wheat from chaff--learning from the best memories and taking the worst memories as warnings. Close to twenty years have passed since I was a youth minister trying to get young people to assimilate a memory from just one other person. In those twenty years, one of the biggest challenges has been trying to think biblically without being fundamentalists with congregations of reasonably intelligent folk. Here’s an example. We have been talking about cloth for the cradle. Our make-shift crate-of-a-cradle here looks a lot like a manger. It evokes the thousands of nativity scenes that get put out this time of year. Every couple of years or so
someone will ask—so who got to the manger first the Shepherds or the Wise men. If I give the simplest answer, I point out that Matthew says that the wise men entered the house suggesting that Mary and Joseph might have remained in Bethlehem for some time after the birth of Jesus and that Jesus himself might have been a year old or more by the time the Magi visited him. That’s the simple answer.

Here’s the more complicated answer. Matthew is the most Jewish of the Gospels. Matthew makes more references to Old Testament than the other three Gospels. Matthew shows greater understanding of the Jewish context of Palestine. It was likely that Matthew worked within a scribal community of Christian Jews. Yet he does two things that are striking and uncharacteristic. In narrating the genealogy, he mentions four women. All of them Gentiles. Four gentiles in the lineage of the King of the Jews. It sets up, of course, the conclusion of the gospel in which Jesus says, “Go therefore to all nations and make them my disciples.” When Matthew, the most Jewish of the four gospels describes the first people to respond to the birth of Christ, he tells us about pork-eating, foreign astrologers from another land. He does not mention the people who were most like his audience. He talks about the people most unlike his audience. The shepherds aren’t in the Gospel of Matthew. They come in the Gospel of Luke. Luke is the only gentile author in the New Testament. He dedicated his gospel to Theophilus. We don’t know much about Theophilus but we can surmise two things—one he was wealthy, two he was not Jewish. So, of course who are the first people to respond to birth of Christ? Peasant shepherds off on some hillside. Again, something about the gospel caused Luke to emphasize the reception of Christ by people who were not like his audience. Their memory, in short, is one that from the very beginning made room people who were radically different. To assimilate the memories of Matthew and Luke into our own memory system isn’t about keeping it straight about who got to the manger first. It’s about living through this truth, “Christ came and preached peace to you who were far away and you who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit (Epheisans 2:17-18). It’s a memory that guides. It commands us to be evangelistic and make the Gospel known to people who have not heard. It calls us to have courage and say with Caleb the spy, “We certainly can do it.” It is a memory that reaffirms to us time and again that the Lord is our God.

And so, embedded in this Christmas story is this question about how we who are near declare peace to those who are far away. For our part, our experience is not that we have been delivered from a culture. Rather we live within a culture that is a mixture of faithful and disobedient. The very patterns of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany belong to the memory of the church that has always tried to navigate a meaningful observance of Christ's nativity past the jagged edges of materialistic, gluttonous cultural forces.

Most people have heard that many of our traditional Christmas traditions--the tree, the gift giving, caroling from door to door, candles, excessive eating and drinking come from Roman traditions of Saturnalia, the Mithras Sol Invictus celebration, and Northern European traditions of Yuletide. The story is more complicated. Christian missionaries moved into areas where these traditions had a powerful hold on the culture. If forced to choose between the gluttony and mood bolstering practices of winter solstice festivals and the disciplined fasting of Christian spirituality, most people will choose the festival every time. So, the missionaries had a dilemma. Either require austere asceticism or find ways to give Christian meanings to embedded cultural practices. The success of Christians had in infusing the native winter solstice festivals with Christian meanings is the reason that Christmas is the biggest holiday on the planet. The success did not come without compromise. Just as the values of Christian faith influenced these native winter solstice practices, the values embedded in the cultural practices did not disappear. The influence was mutual and reciprocal. Christians today struggle to differentiate between the joyful celebration of incarnation and the self-absorbed gluttony of our culture.

We can learn from St. Boniface and Augustine of Cantebury and Martin Luther as each of them sought to give secular practice sacred meaning. We can learn from the Puritans and others who tried to

eliminate Christmas celebrations altogether because they viewed it as hopeless corrupt. When our memory expands to these things--When we learn to remember experience that do not belong to us personally, we see that Christians in every generation have struggled with the very same tension. Observing Advent. Seeking to add spiritual practices to secular excess is a way of tying a blue thread and making a tassel at the end of our prayer shawls. To remember that God is the one who has delivered us and the Lord is our God. How do we tell our own stories in ways that invite Magi and Shepherds or whoever we perceive to be unlike us to the manger where they to can experience the Christ. The tassels on the end of the prayer shawl aren’t really made of a single piece of fabric. The come from the gathering together many different threads and uniting them as one.