Ralph Ahlberg, Senior Interim Minister
December 21, 2003
Fourth Sunday in Advent

Micah 5: 1-4 and Luke 2 (traditional reading for Christmas)
The Curative Power of Love

I’m sure we all know that our children are our best gifts of this season. And just now as we’ve watched them putting together the nativity scene here in our chancel, we’ve experienced them beginning a tradition and a memory of what Christmas in its deepest sense means. In one place the Apostle Paul writes that God “destined us in love.”(Eph.1:4), Now, that’s a powerful idea that incorporates what our children just re-enacted: The idea that you and I aren’t’ simply pawns of fate. We aren’t given the gift of life to be victims of blind and purposeless chance. But rather, our destiny can be shaped, in fact is meant to be shaped by love. So that in a real sense Christmas initiates the very intention and norm and purpose of God!

Let me illustrate what I mean with a story. About mid-way through the twentieth century, in about 1950, there was this woman who worked at the telephone company. Every day at five minutes before noon she received a call from a man who asked her what time it was, and she told him. He called every day, every week, every month and he did it year after year. So as you can imagine this woman became very curious as to who this caller was and why he called. But both the company rules and the law wouldn’t allow her to begin a conversation. So she had to tolerate this curiosity of hers for many years. And difficult it was! But finally the time came when she approached her last day on the job. It was the day after twenty-five years when she was retiring. So she decided when he called, she was going to nail him down and ask him who he was and why he was calling.

Sure enough, at five minutes to twelve he called. And sure enough, she said to him, “Look, you’ve called and asked me for the time every day for years. This is my last day on the job and I’m curious. Who are you?” “Oh,” he said, “I’ll be happy to tell you. You see, I work in a factory and my job is to blow the whistle at twelve noon. And that’s why I always call you five minutes before. I do it to make sure I’m accurate. Because just about all the people in town set their watches by my whistle.” The woman paused for a minute to take all this in. And then she said, “Oh my goodness, so do I!”

Of course the point is that we all need broader, more objective standards than the people in the story evidenced. And in the realm of keeping time, that objective standard since 1861 has been called, “Greenwich Mean.”

There’s also an agreed-upon international standard in the northern hemisphere in astronomy that’s called the North Star. And then there’s an agreed upon standard for the tuning of musical instruments that’s called A440, the note A producing 440 vibrations per second. So wherever musicians tune their instruments – in Moscow or Washington or Rio de Janeiro – A440 is the standard.

In a similar way, for those of us who call ourselves Christians, the deepest, most vibrant word we most often use in our inadequate language to describe the ultimate standard of God -- is the word love. Incarnate love is our standard. It’s God’s name and the fullness of God’s being. It’s the dynamic for all of our mission and program as a church. It’s at the heart of that for which we strive as a congregation.

And so if Christmas tells us anything, it tells us through the incarnation that God came to us and took on our human condition and that you and I are to fill the world with love. In order to do that, I simply remind us all this morning of a couple of things: First, we need to build lives on the real possibilities of the human spirit. And second, we need to celebrate human worth.

Authentic and genuine love is always built on the real possibilities of the human spirit. It’s the quality of spirit we celebrate in our heroes of faith, people who’ve demonstrated in their lives a costly love, people like Albert Schweitzer or Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Mother Teresa or Dorothy Day. But that quality of spirit and love is just as likely found in the many unsung, anonymous sons and daughters of God whose lives have contributed to and deepened what it means to be authentically human. It’s a quality of spirit that’s built on a personal integrity that’s unafraid of justice and one that’s also well blended and seasoned with compassion and love.

Several years ago, Dale Turner, a very able pastor of our denomination, told a story about the power of love to build that quality of life. It’s the story of a princess who was poisoned through the malice of a jealous witch. The princess fell into a deep sleep from which she couldn’t be awakened. The physicians of the kingdom did their best to rouse her. But their efforts were to no avail. And then one day while hunting in the forest, a prince discovered the gloomy old castle where the princess slept, the castle by now covered with years of weeds. Upon entering the dark castle, the prince found the princess, kissed her and with that she awakened. He helped the beautiful girl to her feet, lifted her into his arms and carried her away to his palace where they lived happily ever after.

Well, Dale Turner points out that this story seems at first to be the most slushy and childish kind of sentimental nonsense. But underneath it, he says, underneath it lies a message of the curative power of love. And it’s a love that came alive for him when he read about the experience of Elizabeth Barrett, a woman who was considered to be a hopeless invalid. She lived in a gloomy old castle on the long, unlovely Wimpole Street of nineteenth century London. And there her stern and savagely jealous father guarded her, allowing very few people to even visit her.

But then the dashing young Robert Browning, prince of poets, fought his way past the cruel dragon to the imprisoned young woman, and awakening her with a kiss, carried her away to a land of sunshine, where she seemed to respond to his overflowing health. So that she no longer gave the impression of being an invalid but blossomed into a beautiful woman, artist and lover. Dale Turner’s point was to never underestimate the power of love.

The Nobel Poet Laureate Tagore once described a weakened faith and a fearful religion in just two lines:

The cowardly pious crowd the churches
To lull their God with flattery…

But I’m convinced that churches like this one are in business to disprove that kind of heresy. We’re not here to be “cowardly pious.” Nor are we here to somehow lull God or to cringe in fear or guilt. We’re here, and I believe this deeply, to celebrate love. We’re here to share with the whole world an expanding and expansive love. We’re here not to be bombarded with the lazy regurgitation of an archaic and judgmental theology. We’re here to receive and be grounded in the gifts of hope, joy, faith and the incarnate love that Christmas celebrates.

So we’re here in church to foster and support lives that count. And when we leave this place on Sunday mornings as we do, occasionally restored and lifted to a more profound awareness that God’s for us and not against us; when we actually feel that God’s amazing gift of love is for us to experience and to share; when we sense that God’s love motivates human love; when we believe in a commitment to go out to places like Honduras and share that love in a practical way: Then we’ve got to know we’re involved in an enterprise of enormous power. Because its helping and healing and making lives count in the deepest ways possible. And even more amazing for this congregation is the probability that the future holds even greater possibilities!

And then my second idea this morning is this: The love announced in this place and during this season celebrates human worth. One of the books I’ve most enjoyed in the past year is the autobiographical account that the well-recognized contemporary author Pat Conroy gives of his experience as a college basketball player. Personally, I love high school and college basketball. And if I had my choice, I’d be watching those “less-than-professional-athlete-grooming” teams; in other words those teams that make up the Ivy League or Division III small colleges in New England. So I really latched onto Pat Conroy’s book, My Losing Season. It’s mainly about a year of basketball at the Citadel, a military institution of higher education in South Carolina. But it’s also the story of a young boy growing to manhood. He’s a boy born into a family with an abusive and violent father, a boy who then graduated to encounter an abusive coach. Growing up, Pat Conroy never knew when he’d be slapped by his father nor did he understand why. Nor while in college did he understand why he’d be benched or required to run extra tortuous drills. He never received encouragement or a pat on the back from either. And as a consequence, he knew what it was to feel deeply the pain of low self-esteem.

The fortunate thing for Pat Conroy was that he became a part of a basketball team that was ultimately destined to fail. And yet for this military kid who grew up on the move, that experience allowed him to become his own man. And so for him, the losing season of his senior year became a personal metaphor in his writing about a growing spiritual and psychological maturity.

Our world has too many people with the experience of Pat Conroy who haven’t overcome feelings of being afraid or unworthy. Hopefully, most of us know that if hostile forces, like an unseasonable frost, injure the bud of a flower it just won’t open; and so too are people when they aren’t given the encouragement of love but instead have to endure the chilling absence of affection and affirmation.

And so our mission as a church, as Christians, our primary calling as followers of the Child of Christmas is to find ways to offer our world that gift of love. Our calling is to help women and men, boys and girls discover the God-given dignity of all human beings and of the creation itself. It’s to help infuse people with self-esteem. It’s not to limp along in the shadow of a frowning, grey winter god, but to walk in the warmth of the God of Christmas, who gives to human life the gift of love – the highest and the best of human values.

Someone once said that the three most welcome messages in the world are these: The war’s over, Merry Christmas and I love you. All three of these messages, you see, reflect our deepest need as human beings: a sense of dignity, of self-worth, of the recognition of our own and our world’s immense value. Christianity celebrates that God’s love for our world is personified in Jesus. And so the ministries we seek to support and to make real are all grounded in that most profound dimension of life, which is the incarnate love we celebrate at Christmas.

That’s the “Greenwich Mean” of all theology.

That’s the “North Star” of any mission or program we undertake.

That’s the “A440,” the universal basis, the music of effective and authentic living and serving.

God destined us in love. Our work is to make that gift embrace the world.

That’s what Christmas is all about.

Prayer:

Holy One, who holds before us the Advent and Christmas gifts of hope, faith, joy and love, prepare us anew for Christ’s entry into our hearts and minds. May the love that comes into the world through Him increase in us, that we may bear witness in word and deed to his presence among us. Amen.

Home