Born Enough
a sermon given by the Rev. Claire Phillips-Thoryn
on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, December 23, 2007
at The First Parish in Lincoln
To listen to this sermon click here.
Advent Readings:
Isaiah 7:14-15
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.
Matthew 1:18-25
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: "Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us." When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him
Jesus.
John 1:3b-5, 12-13
What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
[…] To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
Second Reading: EE Cummings, excerpt from “Introduction to New Poems”
We can never be born enough. We are human beings; for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery, the mystery of growing: which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life, for eternal us, is now; and now is much to busy being a little more than everything to seem anything….
…Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn….
“We can never be born enough.”
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
Every year we tell the story of Jesus’ birth, and so he is born again and again, he is never born enough. Every year we tell the story of a baby who grew up to become a man who said that all of us, even the lowest of the low, all of us are children of God, loved by God, born of God.
Jesus has a pretty dramatic birth story. Mom was disgraced. Dad took her in anyway, says the book of Matthew. They end up giving birth in a barn. Strangers came from miles away to bring gifts of treasure and praise. A baby who wore the dangerous looseness of doom and found it becoming.
Most of us have no such dramatic story of our birth. But the Quaker pastor and author Philip Gulley has a very dramatic story about the night he was born.1 Like the story of the birth of Jesus, he was told the story of his birth once every year, by his father. When he was a child, his dad would come into his bedroom and tell it to him as a bedtime story. As an adult, his dad would call Philip and always say the same thing: “Did I ever tell you the story about the night you were born?” And Philip would always say, “I don’t believe so.” And the story would begin. It was a dark winter’s night. Gunsmoke was just coming on, but they couldn’t stay for it because his mom’s labor had started. There was a terrible snowstorm, so terrible they could hardly see to the neighbor’s house. Philip’s father and mother got into the car and started the drive to the city hospital. The defroster didn’t work and the snow was so bad, his father had to stick his head out the window to see where he was going, and his face was getting frostbitten. He ran a red light and they got pulled over by a policeman. But when the policeman saw what was going on, that Philip was about to be born in the backseat, he told Philip’s dad to follow him and he turned on his lights and siren all the way to the hospital. Philip’s dad would end the story by saying, “So you had a police escort to the hospital. Not everyone can say that. That makes you special.”
This story held Philip his whole life. When he was a teenager and annoyed at his dad, he would think of how his dad got frostbite just to bring him safely into the world, and his heart would soften. When he got teased or bullied at school, he would take comfort in thinking how he had had a police escort to the hospital, and his bullies had not. Philip writes, “It was a wonderful gift my father gave me, that story. He could not give me wealth or fame or ease my way, so he gave me that story and it provided deep consolation.”
Philip grew up and had children, and one night his five year old son asked him, “Daddy, what happened the night I was born?” Now the truth was nothing very remarkable had happened that night. But Philip had been reading a Reader’s Digest in the waiting room right before his wife gave birth, and he remembered very vividly the story he had been reading—“Drama in Real Life”, where a man had run off the road and had to use sticks to spell out HELP and was finally spotted by a plane. So Philip incorporated that story into the night of his son’s birth. And he told his son about how it had been a terribly snowy winter’s night, and they raced to the hospital. The roads were slick and their car slid off the road. His mother was pinned in the wreckage, in labor. Philip managed to crawl out of the car and gather sticks and spell out HELP. And in the morning an airplane circling overhead spotted them and they were rushed to the hospital where his son was safely born. Of course Philip’s son was very proud of his dramatic birth.
A few weeks later it was Philip’s birthday and he and his wife went to his parent’s house for dinner. And at dinner Philip asked his dad to tell the story about his birth, about the snow and the policeman. And Philip’s mom asked “What snow? What policeman?” Philip reminded her of the whole exciting story. And she said, “It wasn’t snowing—it was unusually warm that day. And he wouldn’t take me to the hospital until Gunsmoke was over. It was his favorite show, you know. He almost named you Festus.”
Philip looked across the table at his father, and his father just smiled, winked and said nothing. But later that night, when Philip was back home, the phone rang. It was his father, and he asked, “Say, have I ever told you what happened the night you were born?” And he told him the whole story, with the snow, and the siren and the policeman. “Not everyone gets a police escort,” he said. “That makes you special.”
Philip writes:
It was all a story—no snow, no policeman, no frostbite, no siren, no swirling lights. But it was my story, true or not, and I was grateful for it. I did not have wealth or fame or muscles or good looks to ease my way into this world. But I did have my story. My father gave it to me. It was his gift to me, bestowed with love, and I treasure it.
…We have only these legends to remind our children that on the day they were born, the ordinary was suspended and the miracles flew thick.
“Each night a child is born is a holy night.” “We can never be born enough.”
As we tell and retell the story of the night of Jesus’ birth, we suspend our disbelief and share a story that is bigger than truth and more personal than myth. We choose to live within this story during the month of Advent because it reflects the heart of the human experience. When Joseph, hurt and bewildered, hears the words of God in his heart, he returns to Mary, and decides to accept her, to father the child that is not of his blood. He makes a choice to stay in relationship, as hard as it may be. As The Right Rev. Edmond Browning, former presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, has said, “Joseph was called by God to do what was socially unacceptable in taking a pregnant Mary into his house ... He reminds us that our relationships may not always be trouble-free or happy, but they can be holy.”2
Joseph made that choice, and it changed his life. And his choice became part of a story that changes our lives, renews our spirits, every year, if we allow it. We can never be born enough.
“We are human beings; for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery, the mystery of growing: which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves.”
Sometimes we make choices that lead us to our new birth, that help us to grow, change, be born again into a new way of being. Sometimes we are thrust into situations that we would not or could not have chosen, and the only choice we are given is how we will handle the situation now that we are in it. Sometimes we don’t know our life is changing until after the fact. One preacher, Charles Swindoll, has pointed out that when a baby is born, we don’t know how important their life, their choices, their birth will be.
Take the year 1809. The international scene was tumultuous. Napoleon was sweeping through Austria; blood was flowing freely. Nobody then cared about babies. But the world was overlooking some terribly significant births. …[That year] Alfred Tennyson was born to an obscure minister and his wife. …On the American continent, Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And not far away in Boston, Edgar Allan Poe began his eventful, albeit tragic, life. It was also in that same year that a physician named Darwin and his wife named their child Charles Robert. And that same year produced the cries of a newborn infant in a rugged log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky. The baby's name? Abraham Lincoln.
People of the day surely saw the world’s fate being shaped on the battlefields, in war. They had no idea that the world’s fate was also being born in the small cries of new infants. When Jesus was born, the big news of the day was taxation. Yet the real news was the birth of Jesus, a man who would shake up the world more than anyone could ever foresee. 3 Even now, as our newspapers and radios and televisions report on war, the presidential race, the actions of great men and women, perhaps the real news is in a crib somewhere. A baby whose life will shape our lives and our children’s lives, more than we could imagine.
“Each night a child is born is a holy night.”
The Bible calls Jesus “Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” The book of John says, “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” In times of war, babies continue to be born, and we can find hope and joy. Like Joseph, in the darkest, most difficult times in a relationship, we can find a holy peace. We choose our path carefully through the darkness, trusting that God is with us.
When I was studying for the ministry, I went on a retreat with some other seminarians and ministers, a chance for the ministers to give their insight into this vocation we were preparing for. During one worship, we were sitting in a circle. The minister leading worship handed us all magic wands he had made himself—a wooden dowel, painted and topped with a glittery star. We held the wands while he spoke of the difficulties of ministry, of how hard it can be to stay in right relationship with God, the church, oneself. And at the end of the worship, he went around the circle, and one by one, he took our magic wands from our hands—we had already gotten rather attached to them—and held them up, and broke them in half. There is no magic wand to help you, he said. Life is hard, and we will all face difficult choices. God will be with you, and you will find a way. But there is no magic wand.
When the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph, the angel didn’t tell Joseph he was going to make it all better. He told Joseph, “do not be afraid.” He told Joseph, “I know, this is tough. But this is what you have to deal with. And God is really hoping you will choose to do what is kind and good and help raise this special child.” And Joseph made his choice.
In Calvin Trillin’s recent book about his life with his wife Alice, he recalled an experience Alice had volunteering at a camp for seriously ill children. Alice remembered:
Last summer, the camper I got closest to, L., was a magical child who was severely disabled. She had two genetic diseases, one which kept her from growing and one which kept her from digesting any food. She had to be fed through a tube at night and she had so much difficulty walking that I drove her around in a golf cart a lot. We both liked that. One day, when we were playing duck-duck-goose, I was sitting behind her and she asked me to hold her mail for her while she took her turn to be chased around the circle. It took her a while to make the circuit, and I had time to see that on top of the pile was a note from her mom. Then did something truly awful, which I’m reluctant now to reveal. I decided to read the note. I simply had to know what this child’s parents could have done to make her so spectacular, to make her the most optimistic, most enthusiastic, most hopeful human being I had ever encountered. I snuck a quick look at the note, and my eyes fell on this sentence: “If God had given us all the children in the world to choose from, L., we would only have chosen you.” Before L. got back to her place in the circle, I showed the note to [another volunteer], who was sitting next to me. “Quick, read this,” I whispered. “It’s the secret of life.”
L.’s parents chose her. Joseph chose Jesus. And we choose to tell the story of the birth of Jesus, again and again, seeking the secret of life. In his birth story we are reminded of the stories of our birth, the paths we have chosen. “We are human beings; for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery, the mystery of growing: which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves.” Each night a child is born is a holy night, and we are never born enough.
…We have only these legends to remind our children that on the day they were born, the ordinary was suspended and the miracles flew thick.
And so on this Sunday so close to Christmas we can taste the fruitcake, I leave you with EE Cummings’ promise:
…Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn….
May we all find our light in the darkness, our choices made clear, and our spirits reborn on this day and on every day.
Amen.
____________________________________
1. This story is found in the first chapter, “A Time to Be Born” of Philip Gulley’s book For Everything There Is a Season .
2. In Browning’s Christmas message from 1988.
3. Overall point credited to Charles Swindoll.
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