Waiting in the Dark Part 4: The Bending of the Morning Light

You don’t mess with tradition! At least, you don’t and expect to have an easy time of it. No where is this more true than with family traditions at Christmas. Things are done a certain way year after year. There’s a special bread that gets baked. There’s a particular dish which is served every Christmas Eve. There are special rituals around decorating the tree. The list goes on and on, and it varies from house to house. But within a given house, within a given family, you don’t mess with those rituals.

My mother understands this. When I was growing up, decorating the Christmas tree was always a family affair. One evening around this 4th Sunday in Advent, Mom would bring out the boxes of ornaments, and we’d gather in the living room, and one by one we would pick up the ornaments. Some of them had stories around them, and those stories would be told as the ornaments were placed on the tree. Certain ornaments were connected with certain people: there was an angel ornament that my sister put on the tree; and an elf ornament that I always put up. We had our ritual. And it worked fine, as long as we were all under the same roof. But by the mid-1970’s we three kids were away at different schools, and one year my brother and I didn’t get home until Christmas Eve. So Mom and Dad, honouring the tradition, had left the tree undecorated until we were all home.

Unfortunately for Mom, that was the year that I just assumed that Mom and Dad would decorate the tree on their own, because after driving home on slippery roads all the way from northeast Ohio, getting to Chicago just in time for church on Christmas Eve – another family tradition – and finally getting home later that evening, all I wanted to do was sit in the living room with a Santa Claus mug filled with hot chocolate – yet another tradition – and gaze at the lights of a fully decorated Christmas tree. Imagine my shock, then, when I stepped into the living room, and saw a bare Christmas tree. No one had decorated it! Why? Because Mom thought that she was honouring the tradition: the whole family decorates the tree. But I had remembered a different tradition: the tree was always decorated before Christmas Eve. There was a clash of traditions. Not to mention a clash of obsessive-compulsive personalities. It was not a happy Christmas Eve in the Ervin home.

You don’t mess with tradition! Unless you’re King David. In which case you do whatever you darn well feel like doing. David had decided that he wanted to build a temple for God. This had never been done before. When the Israelites had been in the desert for 40 years, they’d led a nomadic existence. Their place of worship was a tent-like structure called a tabernacle. It was a practical arrangement for a people who were on the move; going wherever God led them. But once David had established his kingdom, he decided that it was time for more permanent structures: a palace for the king and a temple for God. Thus began a great debate within the Israelite community: do we maintain tradition and worship God in a tent, or do we break with tradition and build a permanent home for God? You can see this debate right in the pages of scripture, where several points of view have been edited together, and the debate within the community seems now to be going on the head of the Prophet Nathan. The poor guy seems as conflicted as Tevye, the father caught between tradition and innovation in Fiddler on the Roof. Remember how he approached so many key decisions? “On the one hand…on the other hand.” That’s what Nathan seems to be doing, except that it’s really the community which is having the debate; a debate which continued in various forms for centuries. On the one hand, there were the establishment people who supported David: “We will build God a house and Jerusalem will be established forever.” On the other hand, there was the prophetic minority: “Did God ask to have a house built for him? We are a people on the move. When God decides to move, we have to be ready to pull up stakes and following God. The only suitable house for God is a tent, not a temple.”

So who spoke for God? Which side of the debate got it right? A temple or a tent? The answer, perhaps, is to be found in John 1:14: “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” Except that a more literal translation would read, “The Word become flesh and tented among us.” The Word, of course, refers to Jesus the Christ. When God came to us in human form – when God offered us the definitive revelation of the divine nature – God did so in a way which reflected the tradition of that prophetic minority: not a temple, but a tent; not a permanent establishment, but a flexible community. Indeed, the Word became flesh not even a proper house, but in a humble stable.

The definitive manifestation of the eternal was not to be found in something created with human hands; and certainly not in some magnificent temple. God transcends all of our efforts to pin down the Holy in a creation of our own making.

That’s why we continue to wait. God is always doing something new. God is always popping up in surprising ways. Biblical faith is about waiting to see what God is up to now, and then pulling up our stakes and going to wherever God is leading. If we wait in the dark, it’s a darkness brought on sometimes by our own stubbornness; by our insistence that “I know how things are done; they`re going to be done my way because that’s the way that things have always been done!” But the notion of God’s Word becoming flesh and tenting with us calls for a greater degree of flexibility. Sometimes, at first light, we’re called to strike the tent and journey into a new day.

I referred earlier to the angel ornament that my sister put on the Christmas tree. It was a glass angel. A small, beautiful, glass angel. And one year I accidentally knocked it off the tree. And it shattered! There was anguish and tears and I probably cried almost as many as she did. But later this week, on Christmas Day, when my wife and I pull into my sister’s driveway and step into her living room, we will see a whole tree decorated with beautiful glass angels. Out of the shattered pieces of that ornament, an angel collection was created, and a new tradition was born.

Shattered expectations give rise to new creations. That’s the way it is with a God who is flexible and innovative and always on the move. That’s the way it is when the Word becomes flesh and pitches a tent among us. Amen.

Text: 2 Samuel 7:6
Preached by Bruce D. Ervin
21 December 2008