|
|
 |
|
 "HOLY DISSONANCE" Homily for Christmas Eve on Luke 2:1-20
Christmas is one of the most musically confusing times of the year. Do we sing "Frosty the Snowman" at church? Can we sing "Away in a Manger" at school? There are all these songs that we love to sing this time of year, but we have to stop and think about where and when we should sing them.
Last week I was at Kinko's doing some last minute Christmas preparations, and while I was standing in line I realized that I was listening to Elvis Presley and the Jordanaires singing "Here Comes Santa Claus" in a way that sounded like "You Ain't Nothin' but a Hounddog." That was kind of a hoot. But then as I'm checking out, I noticed that now it was the Beach Boys are overhead, crooning "We Three Kings of Orient Are" in five-part harmony.
There's just something right about Bette Midler singing "Mele Kalikimaka" when you're at a party or finishing up your shopping. But when you're waiting in line to buy an Xbox 360 or trying to get the last one of those flying screaming monkeys and you hear some rock star overhead saying "I have no gift to bring, pah rum pah pum pum," well, that becomes all too clear.
There are just some places where certain music doesn't belong. For example, on a hillside in The shepherds are out there this one certain night, minding their own business and just trying to do their job. They were working the night shift, and just like the folks who have to work all night at the VA or the prison or the fire station or at Wal-Mart, they were trying as hard as they could to stay awake. The sheep were finally quieted down, and the shepherds were gathered up around the campfire, drinking less-than-fresh coffee and probably telling the kind of jokes they wouldn't tell at home, so that by laughing they could keep the fear away. That was not ordinarily a place for sacred music, and they were not ordinarily the ones who would want to hear it.
But then there's this music they start to hear overhead. And this time it's not Elvis OR Bette Midler. It's angels. They're singing "Glory to God in the highest" in about the last place you'd expect, at about the last time you'd expect, to about the last people who'd ever thought they'd hear angels sing. And "Peace to God's people on earth." Glory and peace in the name of a Savior born not on a holiday, but on a work day, in a most ordinary time and place, entering the world in a place where the fire must be tended, where shadows lurk at the edge of the light, where fear grabs you and won't let go.
That time, you couldn't blame it on Kinkos. It was God who decided that it was time for musical whiplash. That night was when God chose to come close to the earth not in a beautiful and comfortable sanctuary, but in the back of an inn where people had come to turn in their 1040 forms. God revels in dissonance: in putting together things that have never been put together before. A Savior during the census. The singing of angels above the shepherds' fire. The eternal Word out behind the hotel, wrapped in baby's clothes. --------------------------------- Much more recently than that night two thousand years ago, Kathleen Bostrom was in the hospital. She was having a hard time recovering from surgery and found herself having to go back to the emergency room. The cacophony of sound was too much for her: the beeps of medical equipment, the cries of other patients, and the loud conversations of loved ones who were telling jokes in loud voices so that by laughing, they could keep the fear away.
That night in the emergency room, she was lying there, hooked up to so many machines that she couldn't move without help, and close to tears from the pain and the frustration. Amid all those beeping monitors and cries of pain and televisions blaring over one another, what was that? She could have sworn it was a different kind of music altogether. It was a soft and sweet and gentle song. But then it was gone. Maybe she had imagined it. Maybe all that medication had made her more delirious than she knew.
A few more hours of misery passed. She was still awake, and trying to block out the high definition sound of the woman wailing across the hall, and her angry roommate swearing on the telephone. There it was again. It was that strange and beautiful music again, gone almost as soon as it had begun.
The nurse came in to check her vitals. Bostrom asked the nurse, was it just me, or was I really hearing something very different over all of these other noises? The nurse was wrapping the blood pressure cuff her arm. She said, "Oh yes. It's a tradition here. Every time a baby is born in the hospital nursery, they play Brahms' Lullaby on the loudspeakers." And right then, for the first time since she had come to the ER, Bostrom said that for the first time, she smiled. She felt hope. And during the rest of her hospitalization, she listened carefully for that lullaby - new life breaking in where it was least expected, on a workday, on the edge of darkness, in the face of fear.
I suspect that tonight, you and I are not all that far removed from those shepherds. Some of us or our loved ones may yet have to go to work tonight or tomorrow. Some of us have laughed a little too loud already tonight, trying to keep our fears at bay. And for some of us, the noise and the pain are too much to bear. But friends, the good news of the Gospel is that God's Word doesn't wait until everything is prepared, until all is calm and all is bright. God knows that it's the dissonance that gets our attention.
Listen: do you hear it? Fortunately, it's not Elvis. It's even better than Brahms. Amid everything else going on within us and without us this night, in that loud and crowded emergency room that we call our life - there it is: hope in our darkness, the song of our salvation. A baby is born.
Amen.
--------------------------------------------------- Thanks to Barbara Lundblad and her article "Holy Dissonance" for the title to this sermon and the ideas for the shepherds on the hillside, found in The Living Pulpit, Oct-Dec 1995, vol 4 #4.
Kathleen Bostrom's story about her hospitalization can be found in The Presbyterian Outlook, |
