In my pre postal period, which was 41 years long, I spent a decade and a half as a professional church person.
I had almost forgotten.
This past Sunday we suspended our usual worship schedule in favor of one 10am service and Christmas Eve services at 7 and 11. Following the 7pm service a man I’ve never met before was leaving with his friends. I noticed him because he was walking down the aisle across the sanctuary from me, pointing a finger in my direction and saying, “that’s the guy!”
Unnerving!
Finally, he asked if I was the same person who preached the sermon two Christmas Eves before. “Yes,” I said.
“I knew it,” he yelled smacking the guy in front of him. “I told you that was the guy.”
Of course I had to look up that sermon, which I forgot to do until tonight. Since I am also a blogger, I figured I’d post it in case any of you are so totally devoid of interesting things to do that you can afford twenty minutes to read it.
So hear it is, ready or not, my sermon from Christmas Eve 2004, called…
Our Helpless God
There was that Christmas Eve when my parents decided to help Santa out by putting together the air hockey table he had left for us. Sometime in the wee hours, I followed the sounds of both construction and my father’s frustration, to the basement stairs. We had no door there, it was simply an open stairwell with a three foot high wooden gate. Was I eight? Nine? I’m not sure. The gate was easy to get over. I was straddled on it, both feet a short distance from the ground on either side, when two things happened almost simultaneously: the sounds of construction and my father’s aggravation suddenly stopped, and my mother appeared at the foot of the steps.
“Get back to your room!” she hissed.
Or there was that other Christmas. Maybe the following year? I don’t remember. My brother, my sister, and I were exploring the middle-of-the-night darkened house together. We groped our way from my sister’s room where we had met secretly to launch our covert operation. In single file, on our knees, we crept to the tree. Once there, we felt the wrapped gifts in the dark. “This one feels like a GI Joe with the Kung Fu Grip!” said my brother. My brother wanted to do more than just feel the gifts and so he reached for the switch that would turn on the tree lights. “Don’t do that Frank! You’ll light up the whole darn house!” Only I didn’t say ‘darn.’
We crawled back to my sister’s room in silence to discuss our findings. There was some uncertainty as to what one of the larger gifts was, so my siblings asked me to go back to the tree for another reconnaissance. I turned off the bedroom light and opened the door a crack to listen for sounds before setting out. I opened the door a bit more—but wait. The door wouldn’t budge. I tried to shut it, it wouldn’t move that way either. “The door’s stuck!” I said, more to myself than to anyone else.
Then two things happened almost simultaneously: the door suddenly opened all by itself, and I heard my mother’s voice. “Get back to your rooms,” she hissed.
Ah, Christmas, when we were children …
“Childhood is the country we had to leave behind,” says Garrison Keillor. “And at Christmas, we get to go back and speak our very first language.”
From a relatively young age, I started to leave that country, the country of childhood, behind. Christmases tell the story. My parents used to get us kids one or two things in addition to what Santa would bring. And every year starting when I was seven or eight, I snooped through the house during the weeks before Christmas, trying to unravel mysteries. The first time I did this, I found a scant few presents in wrapping paper. The following year, I made bold to actually open the end of one or two and then retape them. The year after that my parents, wise to my detective work, hid their gifts somewhere else and I had to search harder. I found them. I was getting better at uncovering things. And then there were those late night Christmas Eve training missions when I imparted to my brother and sister the finer points of being a Christmas Detective.
I was slowly becoming a grown up; learning to figure things out, to unravel mysteries, to become self-helpful. Toys like detective kits and the like began appearing on my Christmas lists. I didn’t know then that the more adept I became at searching and discovering, the more life would hide its secrets from me. Over time, I learned that what most of the rest of us now know—that each mystery we solve leads us to another one. At every turn of the supposed key, when the lock should finally open, it remains resolutely shut.
But back then, in my blissful ignorance, I was eager to leave behind the language, the customs, the country of childhood. And even if I hadn’t been eager, I would eventually have to leave anyway. Wouldn’t I?
Childhood is the country we had to leave behind. At Christmas we get to go back and speak our very first language.
That language, I have come to believe, is helplessness. Helplessness is not a language we like to speak. And if it is, as I believe, the native language of childhood, then most of us are as eager to leave it behind as I was.
What is this paradox then; that at Christmas, God shows up as a baby? I don’t remember being a baby. I wonder, sometimes, if Jesus could remember that first night lying in the straw, looking up at Mary’s face, at Joseph’s, maybe a cow or a sheep. Probably not, is my guess. On his first night on earth, Jesus, the mighty savior of the world, the all knowing all powerful God in the flesh, was helpless, knowing nothing. God placed himself at the mercy of his creation and, as he did so, the angels said, “Fear not. Peace. Goodwill.” All is well.
A past colleague of mine had a nasty car accident this past year. Someone ran a light and slammed into her. Her car was totaled but she walked away—seemingly fine. A couple of months later though, as she was walking down the hall at her office, she had to drop the things she was carrying and fall to her knees because of a sudden searing pain in her back. She couldn’t move, she could barely breathe, and she certainly couldn’t get up on her own. Helplessness had intruded on her life.
The other night, I was treated to a lesson in helplessness that didn’t cost me half as dearly as my poor colleague’s experience. It was Wednesday evening when, as I was in a festive holiday mood, I decided to download a nice Christmas-y picture from the web to use as a desktop image on my computer. What I got instead was a virus that shut down my computer and rendered my internet connection useless. I tried to figure it out using those long honed skills at unraveling mysteries I mentioned earlier. But if you all thought God was mysterious, you should try figuring out the workings of a computer. Eventually I threw up my hands and went to bed. Helplessness had intruded on my life.
We view helplessness as something to be avoided. And if certain short haired preachers or God himself start talking about helplessness like it’s some sort of virtue, well we might be downright offended.
Of course, the kind of helplessness I’m talking about is self-helplessness. “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” is what we would say. We quote this like it’s a line from scripture—but you won’t find any such thing in the Bible. We grow up, and insist that others do the same. “Help yourself,” we say, trying to be kind. And then God shows up, helpless, lying in the straw and every year, the angels tell us it’s a sign.
Sign of what? What could such a sign mean? You know, practically speaking. God can’t possibly be urging us to see Him as helpless. That can’t be, since if God makes Jesus helpless, then we who say we want to be like him are… well, I don’t even want to go there.
Is this why we can’t understand God after so many years, so many theological constructions, so many prayers of “just show us your will, Lord”? But if God were to answer our request by saying, “My will is that you embrace your helplessness,” would our response be, “Excuse me God, my ears must be going—I thought you said embrace helplessness.”
Maybe my mother’s command when she caught me detecting Christmas mysteries, “Get back to your room!” was actually a word of grace. Being forced back to my room also forced me not to leave the country of childlike helplessness too soon. My mother probably wasn’t thinking about how she was making me embrace my native state of helplessness, and not aspire too soon to a life of self-helpfulness. But that is exactly what she did. She sent me back to the country I would eventually have to leave behind.
Childhoodland, Helplessville. God’s country.
It’s as if, at Christmas, God says, “Here’s a sign of helplessness for you to remember and consider.” Remember those helpless moments when you actually had to rely on the intervention of another, the grace of a fellow human being. That time you fell and broke yourself. That time when your depressive emotions overwelmed your ability to be a self confident person. Remember when you were unable to help yourself.
Each year on this holiest of nights, God calls us to remember our helplessness, not because it is unusual, or something to be recalled nostalgically on cold winter evenings by a warm fire with a mug of cocoa. God reminds us of helplessness because that is what we are now. Not that we haven’t done a good job at pretending. We’ve convinced ourselves almost completely that we are anything but helpless. We’ve invented all sorts of technology and stocked our bookshelves with thousands of titles that reassure us we’re okay, that is, not helpless. We can pull through on our own thank you very much. No hand outs needed here. I’m alright.
Still, helplessness does intrude every now and again, under the radar. My friend’s back suddenly incapacitates her to the point where all she can do is drop and cry out. The old ticker starts to act up and you wind up in the hospital, needing someone else to take care of you because, hard as you try, you can’t. Am I being too bold by suggesting that at those moments we are more like Jesus than at most other times, times when we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps, helped ourselves. Is it unfair of me to insist that helplessness defines the condition of our lives to a much greater extent than we care to admit. And Jesus comes, but he comes like us, not above us.
Jesus entered the world in helplessness, and then determinedly embraced that helplessness throughout his life, choosing it even when the results would mean death. Those who witnessed his last helpless moments on the cross noticed it, and it unnerved them enough so that they called out, “Come down and save yourself!”
In Jesus, his birth, his life, his death, God continues to issue the audacious call to a people who are desperately determined to be self-helpful: embrace helplessness. All this time, we’ve been searching for a way to help ourselves. We map out plans for our lives—I ran across a book a while ago called Living the Life You Were Meant to Live in which the author shows you how to create your own LifePlan. We want to maximize the use of our spiritual gifts. We create vision statements and strategic plans for our churches, for our lives. And God shows up lying in the straw, saying “here’s your sign.”
Helplessness, unlike our plans, is not neat and orderly. It happens to us, even despite our LifePlans. Helplessness undermines our gifts and graces, redraws our maps. Helplessness burns our Christmas goose. It is the one bulb in the string of colored Christmas lights that renders the whole set inoperable. It’s the small patch of black ice on the sidewalk. It is the way we were, and the way we are, even if we refuse to admit it.
And helplessness is also the way God comes to us, and the way God’s grace enters into our lives. It is the door through which grace enters our lives. It is the language in which the sign is given, the language of the country we had to leave behind—but which God opened back up for us by coming into the world and making himself just like us.
This is the call: embrace not only the child, but become like him in his death, and in his life. You cannot get your own act together. Let Christmas be a sign for you: helpless I am and in this way I am just like Jesus.
Remember this, dad, when you’re trying to put together that some-assembly-required racetrack, or when you’re caught without the requisite triple A batteries. Remember this, mom, when the baby won’t stop crying, or the teenagers won’t stop fighting each other, or fighting you. Remember this when the relatives don’t show up on time. When the new dress doesn’t fit.
At Christmas, we get to go back to the country of childhood, and speak our very first language. Embrace the self-helplessness of Jesus the babe in the manger, knowing that in this way, the grace of entrusting yourself to the mercy of God is yours.
And so Merry Christmas to all of you, and have a helpless New year.
