December 24, 2013
The Fourth Week in Advent

Here it is.  Christmas Eve at last.   The merchants' associations say that it has been a good year, and that millions of people have been doing their share to give the economy a boost.    It looks like lots of children will be happy when Santa Claus delivers the goods on Christmas morning.     Lights blink on outdoor displays up and down the streets of town, and there is a general feeling of good will in the air.   Over at the hardware store today, they will gather around the popcorn machine and remember old friends who aren't here this time around.      I will take a few minutes, sometime during the day, to read Paul Engle's nostalgic memory of an old Iowa Christmas, that starts,   "Every Christmas should begin with the sound of bells, and when I was a child mine always did. But they were sleigh bells, not church bells."

There are no sleigh bells this Christmas.   The snow that came a week or two ago is gone.   Christmas will come anyway, ready or not.  Tonight we will gather late in the darkness of this late moment of the year to remember a birth.   There will be candles to light, and some words to be said.   But what words can we say to add to this old tale, this one that still touches our hearts?    It is enough just to remember that once God came into the world, a raw baby nestled in a mother's arms.   It is enough to hope, even just a little, that he still comes. 

Hold Him

I am late for Christmas, again.
I am not ready
as the world wheels once more
to a new season.
The clock of history races forward
at a steady pace,
and I am caught sometimes
in a room of long ago,
where those I love have dwelt.
I linger just a bit too long,
listen for the echo of a voice,
or a wisp of laughter in the night.
I am a person of unfinished tasks,
my life strewn behind me
like blowing leaves.
I am not sure where I am going,
but this place of candles and old songs
still draws me toward a destiny
that haunts our world,
and it is Bethlehem.
So In my dreams, this silent night,
I race in to the stable, breathless.
By the time I arrive
the shepherds have gone,
the moon has set,
and there are no angels that I can see.
Then, just before I turn to go
I catch sight of the sleeping ones
in the shadows,
and something in me aches.
Quietly, I hear a voice, beckoning:
"Don't leave.
You can hold the child," it says.
"You can hold me."

 --Timothy Haut, December 24, 2013

December 23, 2013
The Fourth Week in Advent

Yesterday Phyllis and I got into the car and made a few Christmas shopping stops before getting back home in time for our church's Christmas Pageant dress rehearsal.   I usually do the narration--the Christmas story from Luke and the prologue of John--but by 5 p.m. yesterday I was coughing with the symptoms of a Christmas cold and my voice was wearing out, so Phyllis did the narration for me as I sat in the back and watched the tangle of shepherds, kings, and angels sort themselves into the nativity story.    There is a considerable amount of energy being expended by American children in these last days before Christmas, but there is also something good about having that energy filling the church.  This pageant has been performed here since 1942 on Christmas Eve, and so these kids will also someday look back on this activity as an important part of their own Christmas memory.

Of course, the nativity described in the Bible probably wasn't like this version of it.  There was no rehearsal, no warm sanctuary decked with greens and bows, no crowd gathering promptly at 5:30 on Christmas Eve to snap photos and watch the story unfold with adoration.   Among those who were present back then, there were no visions of sugarplums dancing in anybody's heads.    Jesus came into darkness and exhaustion, bearing an unlikely promise in a furious and desperate world.   Some of those who showed up in the stable that night were shepherds, simple men of the hillsides whose night had been interrupted by a startling visitation that left them "sore afraid." 

I think that you and I are the shepherds in this drama, not just an audience to an ancient pageant.   We tremble when our world is threatened with some change we cannot understand.  We are wary of fate's fickle twists and turns, because most of us feel like we are just barely hanging on as it is.    When angels enter the scene, we usually don't recognize them as benevolent--perhaps until long after our encounters with them we discover that the One who sent them has bigger, better purposes than we can understand.    We head off to Bethlehem, leaving our sheep--and our familiar life--back in the field.  After I watch the young shepherds traipse barefoot up the center aisle of the church, I will walk into the night and head for Bethlehem, too.

Just a Shepherd

When they come,
those angels I have imagined,
I would wear a white linen shirt,
and offer them a place to sit
before they had time to take wing,
all flame and flashing light
and wild words I could not understand,
breaking the wine glasses
on the well-set table,
setting the chandelier to rocking,
interrupting my peaceful world.
I am just a shepherd,
at home in a small corner
of a world too large for me.
You would come,
Mysterious Messenger,
before I could dress for the occasion.
You would find me out back of the barn,
or  at the drugstore buying cough medicine,
or in my safe bed, as I dream fitfully
and wait for morning.
You would say,
"Be not afraid."
And I would repeat that to myself,
even though I would be afraid,
as I high-tailed it to Bethlehem.

--Timothy Haut, December 23, 2013

December 22, 2013
The Fourth Sunday in Advent

"What's your sermon going to be about this week?"   Phyllis usually asks me this question about the middle of the week, thinking that I certainly will have my thoughts organized by then.   Surely there must be a plan, anyway, she thinks.   But sometimes not.    So my answer is always the same.  "I'm preaching about love."

After all, love is at the heart of the Scripture’s witness, at the core of anything we can possibly understand about the creator of the universe.   Some physicists even postulate, in a huge use of scientific metaphor, that love is what holds star systems, planets, moons, and constellations together.   Love is the gravity that binds the worlds of our own human constellations as well.      But the love we proclaim in this Christmas season is a power of a different sort.   It is not simply a gravitational force that pulls everything together, a warm feeling of attraction to those who appeal to us.   It is an act of will.   The divine will chooses to love what is unlovable, rebellious, distant.   It reaches out to us not at our best, but at our worst.

This weekend I performed a wedding.   The reception hall was decked out in garland and twinkling white lights, and on the wall the bridal couple's initials were formed out of pine cones.   They were a lovely pair who have been together eight years, and as they said their vows they looked at each other with that romantic gaze which says, "You are the most wonderful person I have ever known.   I love you."   I hope that they will always remember that moment.   But when the difficult times come and the romance fades a bit in some weary winter of their marriage, I hope that they will still choose to love each other, to be just and kind and humble to each other anyway.   I hope that love will still surprise them  in the dark corner of a stable or a wintry shepherds' field.     I pray that love will never let them go, no matter where their journey may take them.    Love is the greatest gift we can ever receive, the greatest thing we can ever give.  Love is what we must choose.  Love is what God chooses.    Always.

Love the Gift

Tune: Von Himmel Hoch
From Heaven Above to Earth I Come

Now is the year's festivity
The time of berried branch and tree
Of feast and gift and candle light
To mark a birth one holy night.

For this small child there seems no place
As humans venture into space
And probe the atom's mystery
Or search the secrets of the sea.

But still we come, from all the earth
To marvel at this manger birth,
And bend our hearts in quietness
As we our tender love confess.

O love, the gift on us bestowed,
The light upon our wintry road,
Be child and star and angel song
To guide us through our whole life long.

--Timothy Haut, December 22, 2013

December 21, 2013
The Third Week in Advent

My grandmother's parents came to this country from Germany at the end of the 19th Century and settled in the low hills of eastern Iowa, where there was rich farmland on which to build a new life.   But  that new life included some of the old traditions they carried with them from Europe.   Always, at Christmas, they cut down a pine or cedar tree that had grown on their own land and decorated it with candles clipped onto the branches.   After dark on Christmas Eve those candles were lit with great ceremony and with gasps from wide-eyed children, one of whom stood nearby with a bucket of water "just in case."

We no longer use candles on our tree.  Hundreds of little electric lights do the job instead.   Our grandchildren like colored lights, so that's what we have on ours.   Sometimes I sit quietly in the room with the tree at night, still something of a wide-eyed child who feels the wonder of Christmas.    We light the dark with  lights and candles at this darkest time of the year as a sign to ourselves that "the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it."

Today is the Winter Solstice--the shortest day of the year.   I have been getting up in the darkness for many weeks now.    My morning walk is on dark streets, illuminated by an occasional street light.  Today my heart felt lighter as I looked up at the moon over Rogers Pond, shining through the fog.   I cannot tell it yet by looking around.   But I know that the change is happening.   The days will now get longer.   I remind myself that we can't always tell the difference when the balance shifts in our lives.   But the hope is sure.    God's light shines.

Solstice

Winter comes,
and earth's long rest.
We gather
in candled darkness
to sing of a birth
hidden before memory--
a tale of a stable,
and the scent of straw,
and cattle restless, aware
of an unsettling in the old order.
In our darkest times
we sense it, too,
that though the placid moon
and unchanging stars
fill the night again and again,
there is another force
bending time, calling light
to favor the earth,
to stir us all to life once more.
Lord of the dark,
come.
Be solstice to our short days.
Turn the clock of the world again
when we are tired and lost.
Help us to believe—
in forgotten stable and shepherd's field,
in lonely rooms and fearful streets,
in beds of sickness and haunts of war—
the stirring of some promise
that glitters in us like a star,
like a candle on a tree,
like a winter moon's reflection
in our waiting hearts.

 

--Timothy Haut, December 21, 2013

December 20, 2013
The Third Week in Advent

 My wife Phyllis is a licensed rehabilitator of small mammals.  She has specialized almost exclusively in Eastern gray squirrels, of which there are a multitude around our house.   When she takes in small pink baby squirrels and tenderly nurses them to adulthood, they are released in the woods behind our house.   It is a joy to watch the excitement of these little creatures as they exit their cage door and begin to explore treetop playgrounds and a world of freedom.    For a while they come around, and while we are outdoors they may even jump on a lap or climb onto a shoulder.    Eventually they learn a healthier caution around humans.    But we still put out for them morning peanuts and corn, and we find joy in watching "our" squirrels throughout the year.

 It is said that the Eastern forest in the United States, from Maine to Georgia, was planted by squirrels.   I believe that could be true.  I am constantly finding peanuts growing in my garden--and walnut and hickory trees sprouting where I did not plant them.   It is the squirrels nature to spend much of its waking hours burying seeds that they can find in leaner times.   Squirrels can locate some of their buried treasures even under a foot of snow.   Others become trees.

 Faith is like that, too, I suspect.   Much of what we do is just planting seeds.   Raising our children, nurturing friendships, offering compassion to strangers, doing our little things to make a more just and peaceful world--all seeds.    Some of them actually grow.

A Squirrel’s Faith

You love small things, Lord.
We are coming close again
to that little stable,
where there must have been
a mouse in the straw,
a sparrow in the rafters,
a wee child helpless
in a young mother's arms.
It is an unfinished tale,
the germ of a truth
that would grow
and fill the universe.
So we take that kernel
and plant it, bury it somewhere,
in the ones we love,
or in a stranger, even,
anywhere there is fallow ground.
We tuck it deep inside
the folds of our own hungry hearts,
and wait
for the tree to grow.
Give us a squirrels' faith,
Lord.
Let the tiny thing we plant
be a seed
of your love.

--Timothy Haut, December 20, 2013

December 19, 2013
The Third Week in Advent

You can look out the kitchen window almost any time of day and see them--the other family we feed.   Earliest are the blue jays;  then a host of sparrows, chickadees, cardinals, and titmice fly to and from the feeder.  Underneath, on the ground, are the puffed up little snowbirds, and the mourning doves hungry on a cold morning.    And then come the occasional visits of the nuthatches and downy woodpeckers, and, my favorite, the wrens.    They are busy filling their little bellies, stoking their anatomical furnaces to help them get through these winter nights.   The only things that interrupt this constant feast are the invasion of  squirrels from time to time and the specter of a hawk who comes to inspect the situation, also looking to stoke its furnace.   And, of course, me.  

Open the door, no matter how gently, and they erupt in a flurry of wings, high-tailing it into the treetops and bushes until all is quiet again.   I want to plead with them, "Don't go.   I will not hurt you.   I am the founder of your feast!"   Or, in the  beautiful King James Version words of Luke 12, "Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom!"   But this little flock, outside the window, does nothing but eat and be afraid.   Perhaps, come Spring, other urges will kick in.   But for now, these creatures cannot be aware of the good things that I could offer them.   For instance, they have no appreciation at all of the tenor singing his haunting solo from Handel’s Messiah which is, at the moment, filling my living room.

It is that beautiful moment at the beginning, when the lone voice cries from the wilderness to a lonely, fearful flock of a world,  "Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, says your God!"   Every time I hear it, I hold my breath, feel a sense of hope and wonder, trust that the promise is true.    To all of us in exile, to all who ever are afraid, to every little flock, let the first word, and the final word, be "Comfort ye!"

Comfort Me

They are not much,
these little creatures
of feather and bone,
holding out against the cold.
So they gather together
for this simple feast,
peck at the sunflower seeds
and millet and corn
as if they were all the world,
as if they were the kingdom's treasure.
And then a sound:
a door creaks, slams,
a hawk cries somewhere,
the wind fells a branch,
and they are gone.
Today they are ruled
by hunger and fear,
and sometimes I am no different.
But somewhere is a song,
a message of consolation, tender joy,
in this wilderness of ours
where birds, and sheep, and we poor souls--
all flocks abiding in the fields of winter--
miss hearing the glory of it.
Lord, open our ears,
open our hearts
to the comfort of your kingdom.
Comfort me.

--Timothy Haut, December 19, 2013

December 18, 2013
The Third Week in Advent

Today syndicated advice columnist Amy Dickinson repeated her annual Christmas challenge to put “A Book on Every Bed.”    This project was inspired by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough, who recalled that every Christmas morning during his childhood, he and his siblings awoke to the gift of a wrapped book on their beds, delivered in the night by Santa.   Ms. Dickinson believes that a book is one of the most precious and enduring gifts that any child can receive.    So do I.

I remember the earliest books of my childhood, like Dr. Seuss's classic  The King's Stilts.   I read all of the Hardy Boys mysteries I could get my hands on.   And my adolescent mind was transformed by a dog-eared library copy of the Science Fiction Omnibus.    I remember the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 because there were books on my shelf that I hadn't read yet, and the threat of nuclear war might mean I would never get to read them.    So I stayed up half the night with a flashlight reading!       The words on the printed page still have the ability to challenge and inspire me, to transport me to other cultures and universes, to stretch me to deeper understanding, even to bring me to tears.    I want this gift for my granddaughters, for all the children of the world.

Novelist Sarah Smith once said, “I believe God is a librarian. I believe that literature is holy...it is that best part of our souls that we break off and give each other, and God has a special dispensation for it, angels to guard its making and its preservation.”     Perhaps so.  No wonder that John the evangelist, grasping for a way to explain the birth of Jesus, asks us to imagine a book, or a story, or a song, or a poem.   "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,"  he muses.     It is a reminder of how worlds are made by every author, including the Divine One, a story to be written on our hearts--and how, when that happens, it comes to life.

Words

"In those days
a decree went out
from Caesar Augustus"
the story begins.
And the words
give birth
to this story I know,
that I have told over and over
so that it is now written
in the most secret place in me
where worlds dwell.
It is by heart
that I tell this story,
and in words they live again:
a Galileean carpenter and his betrothed,
a babe in swaddling clothes,
those poor shepherds face-down
on the earth, sore afraid
of wild-winged angels overhead.
Lord, you are the Word I hear,
the Word that burns in me,
the Word I must repeat.
But of all the words
that you may speak, sing, be,
I hear these:
Yes.
I love you.
Amen.

--Timothy Haut, December 18, 2013