Christmas 2024 - "In the Midst of the Muddle"

 

Saint John 1:1-14

I am always amazed when somebody remembers what I said once in a sermon.  Particularly because I can’t even remember what I said from one week to the next.  I have a hard time remembering what I have said in conversation from one day to the next.

Sometimes I ask my friends what I said, and their usual reply is, “You know, I really wasn’t listening.” I come away with the feeling that they haven’t heard a word I have said in years.

That is why a few weeks ago I was stunned when a good friend remembered over drinks that last Christmas Day I talked about the musical Mame and how one day she was one of New York City’s highest rollers with a gaudy wardrobe and a lifestyle is as outrageous as her behaviour.  

She was the personification of the roaring twenties right until October of 1929. If Auntie Mame was the representative of the glory days, she is also a symbol of the gloom.  One by one we see her garish treasures being removed from her apartment.  No longer able to live on her investments, which are all gone, she has to find a real job.  When she discovers that she is such a failure at this thing called work that she is even unable to sell shoes and her cupboards contains only shredded wheat, she pauses for a moment and announces.

“We need a little Christmas; right this very minute

Candles in the window; carols at the spinet

We need a little Christmas now!”

That conversation got me to wondering what the song for this Christmas might be and then, at a concert I attended, a friend sang “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

It comes from the musical Meet Me in Saint Louis and it comes again to a family who is distraught over their father’s decision to move from Saint Louis to New York. In the movie, on Christmas Eve, Judy Garland sings the song to cheer up her little sister.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Let your heart be light

Someday soon we all will be together

If the fates allow

Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

This year, and perhaps it is me, what stood out from that classic was the promise that “next year all our troubles will be miles away” and the realization that “until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow.”

The simple dictionary defination of “muddle” is to be “in a messy or confused state.”

And sometimes that is exactly where we are and not because we have consumed too many drinks last night that have been “muddled” but in a good way.

In his column last week in “The Dispatch” Jonah Goldberg reminded me of the scene in the movie Parenthood where Steve Martin is a stressed-out dad complaining about the burdens of life to his wife, played by Mary Steenburgen. She says, “What do you want me to do? Give you guarantees? Life is messy.” 

Martin replies, “I hate messy. It’s so … messy.”

Life is messy and the good news of today’s gospel is that we don’t have to muddle through it alone.

I always like to think of John the Evangelist, philosopher and theologian, staring up at the night sky and perhaps trying to make some sense of this Jesus story,

Yes, he had heard all about Mary and Joseph. Yes, he had heard the story of the shepherds and the angels. Yes, he had heard the story about the wisemen from the east.  But more than that he had heard the story of the life, death and resurrection of this man Jesus whom it seemed to him that the plot of the entire universe was caught up with.

You see, he’s studied the scrolls and the Torah and the words of the prophets. He’s studied the  works of Greek philosophy and has read all the poetry he can find trying to explain this Jesus but he just couldn’t find the words to describe him and what he meant.

Then it hits him.  How can he explain what happened? This is it! “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us ... full of grace and truth.”  

I love the way, Dr. Eugene Peterson paraphrased this in The Message. “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. (John 1:14)

Flesh and blood, living next door.  That means that Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us is in the messies we do not like helping us as we try our best to muddle through.  He is the light shining in the darkness helping us to find our way.

But, as Madeline E’Engle wrote in her book, A Ring of Endless Light.” “Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.”

But we don’t want that. 

As Dr. Scott Black Johnson observed once in a sermon.

I want the light to arrive and to win, and I want it to win big. I want the light to deal with the darkness in a way that is so overwhelming, so completely devastating, that I can switch channels at half-time because there is no way, no possible way, that the darkness is going to come out of the locker room to start the third quarter. 

(I don’t know this for sure but Dr. Johnson is a native of Duluth, Minnesota and a graduate of St. Olaf college so he’s probably a Vikings fan and, unlike Bears fans, doesn’t know the kind of darkness we endure.)

Instead of total victory, we get something painfully modest. The light came into the world, and the darkness did not extinguish it. The darkness was not able (at least, not immediately) to reach over and pinch out the flickering wick of the light.

What John is telling us in his Gospel is that most of all, Jesus is with us when we go through the darkness.  

As Dr. Tom Are said once, “This light does not destroy the darkness, but it is a word strong enough to keep you human in a world of inhumanity.”

That is what we need to know everyday when we are muddling through the mess and need a little Christmas.

We need to know that Jesus is our light in our darkness. In him we find someone who is with us in our deepest depths as well as our highest heights.

And John helps us to discover that he has been there all along, “at work in your life ... bringing creative hope in every dark moment.”

Not just our lives but our world. John wants us to know that Jesus story is not limited to “the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee...” or “those days when a decree went out from Ceasar Agustus” but goes back all the way to the beginning of time and will continue to be with us until the end.  

Jesus story is present in the midst of it all.  In the midst of the mayorship of Brandon Johnson of Chicago and J.D. Pritzger’s governor ship of Illinois.  Jesus is with us when transition from one president to another.  In the midst days of wars and rumors of wars and days of blessed sweet peace, Jesus is with us.

So, if you remember only one thing, I have said this Christmas remember this:  From the very beginning says John in his gospel Jesus has been with us in the midst of the muddle and the mess.  

In the midst of our messy and muddled life the message of Christmas is  Jesus is with us.  

There is no place where we’ve been that he hasn’t been. There is no place that we will go where he will not be. Jesus will be with us, “always and everywhere as near to us as our own breath.”

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.