To Say Yes....

To Say Yes….

A Sermon for Christmas Eve (Luke 2:1-20)

by Griff Martin

For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith

On Christmas Eve (Dec 24, 2017)

A prayer from the hymnist Phillip Brooks:

“O holy child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray;

Cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today.

We hear the Christmas angels, the great glad tidings tell;

Oh, come to us (be present here), abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel!”

Amen and Amen.

When I sat down to write the homily for this evening, I began with this question: Where are we this year? And it did not take much time at all until I had three words that I think best sum up exactly where we are this year: fearful, fatigued and fragile. 

2017 has been a hard year for a lot of people and as a result we are fearful, we have been living in a constant state of stress and anxiety and fight of flight. And because of that we are tired and we are so easily broken. Fear, fatigued and fragile.

But fearful, fatigued and fragile did not seem like the best title for the homily tonight, it’s like playing a tragic sad song at a funeral, it seems too obvious and it seems like tonight there should be more.

We can start there but where do we go. How do we get to hope and healing, to love which is the ultimate answer to all things?

Because when the world feels fearful and fatigued and fragile (and  even when we the very church feels fear, fatigued and fragile), we the church better be offering hope and healing, because if we are not, then what exactly are we doing? 

And I think there is one word that gets us there to the place of hope and healing: the word, yes.

Shonda Rhimes is a media empire unto herself- a screenwriter, tv producer and executive producer of many of America’s top rated shows. She became an overnight success several years ago and suddenly she was a really big deal. She was having a conversation with her sister Delores one day listing all the different invitations she was getting, listing them with great pride when her sister interrupted her with this: “Who cares? You are just going to say no anyway. You never say yes.”

And so began her year of yes, where she said yes to as much as possible, a year where she learned in her words: “The very act of doing the thing that scared me undid the fear, it made it not scary… yes changed my life, yes changed me.”

Yes will do that to us.

Will you marry me?

Do you want to have a baby?

Do you want a new job?

Do you want to go on this trip?

Do you want to follow your dream?

Yes will change you. 

But it is rarely our first response. No is our go to first response, no is where we often start. It’s in our very DNA and it’s our psychology because bad is stronger than good, meaning no is stronger than yes. So in our very competitive world where there have been constant threats to us and only the strongest have survived, where those who survived are those who knew their fears and paid attention to them, as a result of that our brain is trained to think in terms of no and potential fears. Which was good in terms of survival but bad in terms of everything else, in particular Christ following. 

If any one of us were placed in a fMRI machine, which is this “huge donut shaped magnet that can take a video of the mental changes happening in your brain” so placed there and then the word NO was shown to us, even for less than 1 second- “the video would show us a sudden release of dozens of stress producing hormones and neurotransmitters in our brains. These chemicals would immediately interrupt the normal functioning of your brain: impairing logic, reason, language processing and connection.”

Which is to say that no shuts things down. (Interesting to note that we tend to learn the word no way before the word yes). 

Thus the central rule of all improv comedy, it’s known simply as “yes and.” No shuts things down whereas yes and opens things up, yes and creates another reality, yes and accepts and expands . Think of an improv scene with two characters and one actor says to the other, “It’s really cold outside.” If the other actor responds,”No it’s not” we don’t have much of a scene, however if the actor responds “Yeah it is and where is your coat?” Well now we have a scene. 

No is a response that polarizes, it invites arguments, it asks for reaction, it shuts down, it stops community and creativity from occurring. 

No one likes to hear no and yet we hear it all the time, it’s one thing that toddlers get right when they stomp their feet and say “You always say no and I don’t like it!”

Whereas yes has just the opposite effect. Yes opens up new realities, yes invites collaboration and community and creativity, yes is an antidote to fear, yes moves things forward. 

And this story that we celebrate this evening is a big old yes. Everyone in this story says yes.

Mary says yes. As an unwed teenagers she says yes to a really big request: Risk your reputation, risk your family’s honor, sacrifice the future you have been planning, even possibly risk being stoned to death. And Mary says yes, let it be.

Jospeh says yes. When he hears that his fiancé is pregnant and this is not what he had planned, when marrying her will probably cost him a great deal in his community, when marrying her goes against the very religion of the day. And Joseph says yes.

The shepherds say yes. On this night when they are out alone, not even important enough to be in town for the big census, not even worth counting and suddenly angels, the likes of which they had never before seen are all around them and telling them the craziest news that God had been born in baby form. And they say yes and go running to find him.

The angels say yes. When God approaches them and says you are going to announce something crazy tonight. Go tell the world that I have been born as a helpless babe, that love now exists in a diaper, swaddled helpless baby and tell it to the shepherds. The angels say yes. 

Jesus, God incarnate, says yes. To this crazy plan that the only way we were going to figure it out was by seeing it lived, that the only way we could understand love was for love to be lived, that salvation had to be a hands on experiment and God said yes. 

This story, the very Incarnation, is God’s great and eternal yes to all of humanity.

And this yes opens up a new reality of God’s kingdom, of a new creative way of doing life, of true community, of salvation, a new way of loving. One of my favorite writers of the past year, Patrica Lockwood writes that love is the only argument you can win by saying yes. 

The entire Christmas story is a story of yes.

So how is Christ going to be born again this year? How are we going to be agents of hope and healing? How are we the good news the world-and we- so badly need?

We say yes.

We say yes to that question that has been growing in our hearts throughout the year, that thing we have been putting off because finally facing it will change our lives forever and it’s big and scary, but it is time for that that to be born… a new calling, a new job, a new relationship, a new education, a new home, a new way of doing church, a new way of ministry, a new way of Christ following.

We say yes to taking big risk, in the words of William Sloane Coffin, risking something big for something good.

We say yes to getting involved in really messy situations, yes to building community with Austin’s homeless, yes to wading into the messy conversations about race and poverty and gender, yes to forging new paths of light in this present darkness, yes to being a prophetic voice and speaking truth to power.

We say yes to love. Over and over we say yes to love.

We say yes to giving bait more away this coming year, yes to vulnerability, yes to being known, yes to community, yes to being present even when that is so hard.

We say yes to righting our wrongs however difficult that may be.

We say yes to letting Love Incarnate, letting Christ be born in us again and we say yes to Christ following in this world, wherever that will take us.

We say yes to whatever it is that God asks of us each and everyday because that is how we create a new reality, that is how we bring about God’s kingdom on earth. 

Like Mary, we say yes without even knowing how this will every come to be

Like Joseph, we say yes knowing this changes the future we had so carefully planned

Like the angels, we say yes when it does not make any sense.

Like the shepherds, we say yes even when it takes us from the place we know best.

Like Godself, we say yes even when Love is the riskiest calling of all.

Desmund Tutu, the great preacher and prophet, summed up most of faith with 8 simple words: “Without God we can’t, without us God won’t.”

God wants to be born again, love wants to be born again… and all it takes is our yes. 

So on this Holy Night, we are not simply celebrating an event that happened a long time ago, we are participating in a ritual, a story that happens time and time again. This night is not simply just a celebration because the last thing God really wants is a celebration of this story, God wants us to become this story… that God will celebrate.

And on this Silent Night if we are quiet enough we can hear God asking, “Who will? Will you?”

And God is just waiting for us to respond, Yes. 

And with that yes, may Love be born again. 

Amen and Amen.

(At the risk of changing tradition this evening, I am going to do just that. If all it takes is yes, then let’s say it. So as your candle is lit, I want you to verbally say it: yes. You know what God is asking to you do in your heart, how you can help love be born, how you can bring about the Gospel, Tonight answer God with a yes.)