It has often struck me that our lives come down to a few defining moments. Sometimes it is a moment you’ve planned for, like a wedding or a graduation. Sometimes it is a moment you’ve worked for, like a promotion or sitting back in a chair and surveying the room you’ve painted. Some moments are thrust upon you, like a car accident or hearing bad news from a doctor. Some moments you don’t expect at all, like the time when you realized you really didn’t love him anymore or that you had to change your life or slowly wither and die.
Some of the most satisfying moments are moments we seize. I remember when I was in eighth grade I was sitting in class when all of a sudden several students got up and left the room. Clueless as only an eighth grader can be, I asked someone where they were all going. "Oh," came the reply, "they’ve been selected to take a special English test for advanced placement in high school." Well, I knew nothing about such a test -- probably it had been announced several hundred times and it hadn’t registered. But I also knew that English was my best subject and that some of the kids who were leaving the room were not as good at it as I was and how dare they get to take the test when I should have been asked to take it. So I got up and I followed the kids and I presented myself at the table and said I wanted to take the test. Well, the woman said I wasn’t on the list and I said I didn’t care if I wasn’t on the list. I wanted to take the test. Now this was pretty unlike me, then or now, but my blood was up and I was not going to be denied.
As a result of seizing that moment and taking that test, I was enrolled in an advanced English course in high school, which helped me get some credits when I went to college, which in turn allowed me to take graduate level history course when I was in college where I met a professor who encouraged me to go to Cambridge, which I never would have done in a million years, all because of that one seized moment in eighth grade. Now of course this story would be much better if I had then gone on to win the Nobel Prize or something, but so far, that hasn’t happened.
I have to tell you about another moment associated with this series of events but this was a moment of sheer panic that can come to us. When I went to England to go to Cambridge, I was of course, terrified, feeling a complete and utter fraud and dreading the moment when someone was going to find out that I had no business being there. On the morning I was to actually go from London up to Cambridge, I was in a hotel room getting dressed and shaved and that sort of thing. For no particular reason I turned on the TV and there was a program, the English equivalent, I suppose of our sesame street. It was for little kids and they were doing shapes.
The announcer said, now boys and girls, what is this shape. I peeked out of the bathroom and saw a square on the screen. "Square," I said mentally. "That’s right boys and girls that’s a square." Then I heard him say, "and what is this boys and girls." Again I looked out and saw a rectangle. "Rectangle," I said in my head and again the announce said, "Yes boys and girls that’s right, it’s a rectangle." Now boys and girls, he said, what’s this? When I looked at the screen, there was a group of squares and rectangles all abutting each other, sort of like a pattern on an old kitchen floor. "What’s this boys and girls?" I stared at the screen thinking I have no idea. A kitchen floor? "That’s right boys and girls he intoned. That’s a tessellation," a word that I had never heard before in my life. And in that moment, I knew I was in trouble. But I overcame it, and did graduate without anyone finding out that I didn’t know what every 5 year old in Britain had learned that morning.
In our text this morning, there are several significant moments that are taking place. The first is actually a moment that was missed. The second is a moment that was seized. And the contrast can perhaps remake how we approach Christmas this year.
The story tells us that Mary and Joseph journeyed to Bethlehem because of the census. And Mary and Joseph go to an inn, actually a lodge, where many travelers would gather under one roof for the night. The Bethlehem Hilton it was not. Luke says there was no room for them.
I have often wondered about the people who were there that night, and the moment of the savior coming into the world he would one day die for. And the people who were there that night, concerned with their own well being missed that moment and it would never come again.
I think of the moments that are most difficult to deal with in our life, missed moments are the hardest because we can never have them back.
It seems to me that Jesus was a master of moments with people. As you look through the accounts of Jesus dealing with people, you can see him as it were watching for the moments that would change people’s lives. He spots Zacheus a short man sitting up in a tree. And rather than ignoring him, he engages him in conversation and the man’s life is forever changed. So too the Disciples, reckless and selfish though they were, he seems to watch for moments to teach them and to encourage their faith. So too the man born blind in John chapter 9. And yes, the man by the pool.
There is one story that I think especially illustrates this the woman who reaches an anonymous finger to touch the hem of his robe. Do you remember the story? Those who took my class on Mark will.
The woman is described as having a flow of blood for many years and had been to doctors but they only made things worse. Some things don’t change.
And by having this flow of blood she would have been considered unclean. And if she were to touch Jesus or Jesus were to touch her, he would also have been rendered unclean. She thinks Jesus can help her, but she’s terrified about what might happen. So she works her way through the crowd, and she pushes her hand between the jostling people and she stretches an anonymous finger out and touches the little tassels that would have been on the bottom of Jesus robe.
And in that moment, Jesus knows what has happened and says who touched me. And the disciples, almost missing the moment, say who can tell? There are so many people. But Jesus is not about to miss this moment. Who touched me? And the woman trembling with fear – for surely this rabbi is going to let her have it for what’s she’s done, stands there and it says, she told him the whole truth. And Jesus does not rebuke her for contaminating him, he does not even point out what a timid faith she has, but in that moment he told her the three things she most wanted to hear in the world. Your faith has made you whole, he affirms her faith, go in peace, he says because she was so afraid, and be of your disease, because that is why she had come to him.
Jesus, in dealing with people, is in the moment. How often do we long for someone to really listen to us to hear not only what we’re saying but what we mean? That’s what Jesus did. He took people seriously and thereby changed their lives.
I wonder if part of Jesus ability to not miss critical moments was nurtured by his mother. After all, she did not miss the significant moment of his birth but, as the scriptures say, she kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. You have to believe that Jesus learned how to be contemplatively thoughtful from Mary so that later, he would not miss important moments in the lives of those he met.
You might say that the greatest gift that we could receive this Christmas is the ability to recognize when God is giving us a moment that we dare not miss.
Could it be that this person I am talking with right now has something they need to share, some hidden hurt that needs a soft answer and word of encouragement. Or are we to busy, too preoccupied with our own trials, our own stuff that we miss the moment that God has presented to us. To the person who is sensitive to the possibility that God is presenting them with a significant moment, oddly, more significant moments come to be.
You know the other day, I was ordering Concord grape vines because I am wild about Concord grapes. Forget the world series, October is all about Concord grapes as far as I am concerned. So I was ordering these vines from someplace down south and I was talking to this very nice woman who was giving me all kinds of advice about growing these things successfully. And at the end of the conversation, I said good-bye as you do, and she said to me – now this is something I wasn’t expecting and I’m not sure it is something I would necessarily do – she said to me "I hope you have a blessed day."
Well I had not been having a blessed day, I’d been having a truly awful day but in a moment of time, I suddenly did feel blessed.
And if one word can change a day, how much more when we tell someone something about them we like or admire or are proud of them for.
I’d like to say just a word about the moments we spend here together on Sunday morning. One of the reasons we are not as open to God’s moments as we might be is because we are way too busy. And it’s okay to be busy, life requires it. But if we do not pause once in a while and open ourselves to introspection, to correction, to admonition, then will we be able to recognize a moment from God when it comes?
I mean if we go Monday through Sunday without pause, without prayer, without being with our chosen faith community, when do we have time to become spiritually recharged. But here in this place, and not only in this place, but at least in this place where we can experience some of God’s moments, maybe in a hymn, maybe in an anthem, maybe in the word of the person sitting next to you.
The same could be said for the whole experience of Christmas. So preoccupied are we with its trappings. That we can miss the moment of wonder that God sends to us and miss the power that this old, old story still contains. And I know it feels like a fairy tale to many of you, something for children and pageants, but it remains the news that God did the most extraordinary thing. He decided to become one of us. The most important word in the much maligned John 3:16 – for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have eternal life – the most important word is the word "so." He loved the world not a little bit, not even very much. He "so" loved the world that he gave his only son. He is still coming to people today, even to people who have almost given up.
Two things. One there will come a moment this week – if you pray for it – when you will recognize God in that moment. Some serendipity, some look, some encounter, some person. And you will know God is in that moment, that he has sent it to you.
Second, I want to share with you the briefest of passages that for me captures the hope of Christmas
It’s called "Sometimes" by the Welch poet Sheenagh Pugh
Sometimes things don’t go, after all, from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel faces down frost, green thrives, the crops don’t fail, sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war, elect an honest man, decide they care enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor. Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to. The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.
This week. In a moment of time.
Amen.
