Rev. Stephen Hinerman

Scripture: Luke 1: 39-45

Why Me?

Saturday morning, when I was getting up and going to the fridge to get my juice, I learned over to open the door, ready to reach in the bottom of shelf, and there, staring back at me from the bottom of the fridge door, were the smiling Christmas faces of Madison, Jason and Sydney Downs. Now, I don’t know how they got there – it’s not like we have pictures of the Downs kids all over the house, and while they are handsome children, the exact reasons my wife placed them on our fridge is beyond me, but there they were.  In all their Christmas card cuteness.

And I immediately thought of all the other pictures we got in the mail – of Adam and David Martin-Malugen, for instance, and I got the idea that when I got pies for Xmas I was going to put Kenny Rapmund’s picture right up there with the pies, since I learned that he and I shared this great love of all things pie.  It’s really wonderful to get all these snapshots at Christmas.

Now when I was a boy, we didn't have those cards featuring photos of family and kids. Oh, yes, we had cameras, and a strange things called “film” which you used to take to the photo shop and have “developed” – never mind, it’s a strange language to some of you. 

You see, when I was a boy, the Christmas cards were drawings or reproductions of paintings, and many of them were similar in theme – maybe a rural snow scene, or an angel blowing a trumpet, or most popular of all, a famous painting of the manger scene itself – of the baby Jesus surrounded by family and those shepherds and magi – that wonderful nativity scene. 

But you see, here’s the problem – the nativity scene doesn’t do it for me. It doesn’t resonate in quite the same way as those painting of Jesus on the cross, for instance. Maybe it’s the reason Easter has always been easier for me to think about and preach about than Christmas. I mean, I can see, in those paintings of Jesus or even the empty cross a whole Idea – that our sufferings often lead to new life, that our of turmoil and trial comes a new direction and a new hope. That is easier for me to understand that looking at a manger and a baby and trying to sort out what it means.

Maybe it’s because I never had a child, or never attended a birth, or maybe it’s because I have such ambivalent feelings about the whole idea of “Jesus saving the world as a perfect baby” … no matter what, Christmas as a day of great religious significance has always been more problematic to me, and looking at those Christmas cards of the nativity, well, I confess to you now, it’s always left me more than a little flat.

So I needed a new image, and today, in the scripture, I have found one.  It’s never been on any Christmas card I know, and I’m not aware of it being the subject of a great painting. But here it is – the image of two pregnant women, leaning forward, talking in excited and hushed tones to one another in an otherwise bare room, no men in sight.

At least that’s how Luke pictures it. Now I will tell you that no biblical scholar worth his or her salt thinks there is any historical truth to this scene. Most of them DO believe that Jesus followed John the Baptist for awhile, and was baptized by him, but that’s the extent of it, historically at least. But Luke takes that kernel and imagines a whole past based on that, and using stories from the Hebrew Bible as his guide, he creates an entire family for John. There’s Zechariah and Elizabeth, his parents, and the whole gospel begins with Zechariah in the Temple as an angel informs him that his old, barren wife will have a son – just like Abram and Sarah, and that this son will be a world changer. And like Abraham, Zechariah says “Why me?” to the angel, and doubts the whole thing.

Why me, indeed? There doesn’t seem to be anything spectacular about this guy, and yet, here he is, caught in the middle of a series of events that seem so big, so life changing, so universal, that who wouldn’t want to ask “Why me?”

And Elizabeth asks the same thing – “Why me?” when she finds herself pregnant and the bearer of this historic moment.

And Mary, who asks “Why me?” when Gabriel comes to her to tell her of the son growing in her. And she will soon learn, as we spoke about two weeks ago, that this birth would not only spark the world to a revolution, but it would find her heartbroken at the end. John will have his head cut off by the Romans, Mary’s son will be crucified by them. And who isn’t wise to ask “Why me?”

And so Mary, who we can imagine as baffled and confused as you might be, goes in search of the only other person who might understand. In Luke’s imagination, it is the moment where the Advent story reaches its climax. Because, to Luke, these two men – John and Jesus – were so connected in their adult lives that they surely must be connected as babies as well. And so, when Elizabeth, who must be struggling with all that is happening to her, and asking “Why me?” over and over, meets Mary, struggling with her own role in history and asking “Why me?” – why, what a picture, what a Christmas card that would be. Two pregnant women, maybe leaning back to take the weight better, and feeling their fetus’ jump and the recognition that something greater than they know is going on here. They are a part of something of God’s.

I was talking to a friend of mine Friday. Their mother had gone in three months ago for a routine surgery and never came out. Now, she travels back and forth to New Jersey to try to get the house ready to sell, while her own house moves towards foreclosure. “I keep asking,” she said, “Why me?”

I will tell you that in the last nine months, there have been a few times in this job that I have said that as well, as some new crisis or revelation hits.  It’s a human thing – “Why me?”, “Why us?” “Why now?” I would be very surprised if you haven’t said those very questions at one time or another to yourself in this past year; it is the most common and the most powerful question we ever ask, I think.

And yet, this picture, of these two women – they probably can’t count of the men much at this point, and they are alone in what they’ve heard and how they’ve heard it – they are in this room and suddenly, miraculously, their “Why me?” is answered, Elizabeth leans to the side and says, “Now I understand why it’s me – now that we are together, sharing this moment and sharing our own confusion and our own anxiety, now that we are in this room, and our bodies jump in unison – now I know why it’s me.  Because, of course, it isn’t me at all.  Because it’s beyond me, beyond even the two of us. Because there is something else going on here that is sweeping us along, something greater than I and you and these walls of this humble house.

This is Advent, and this is the Advent picture that makes sense to me.

We celebrated our 50th anniversary as a church last Spring and for a year, we had a black and white photograph up in the narthex of that first year. I think of it as their Christmas photo, though I suspect it was taken in summer or fall. It was a picture of a room full of white men in suits and ties, all with apparently the same haircut.  And very well dressed white women, all in similar – but never the same – hats, and Elsie’s hat just peaking over someone else’s. And if we’d had photo Christmas cards, they could have sent it out, saying “Merry Christmas” or “Season’s Greetings” inscribed.

But I would imagine there were times where the real question, the real message they felt, was “Why us?” “What are we doing here?” “Where is all this going?” I mean, I would have to ask Elsie, but if I were in a new church, I would imagine that there were more than a few moments where you would be asking yourself, “What have I gotten myself into here? What are we supposed to do now? Where in the heck is this all leading?”

Of course, you don’t put that in a card – you don’t send out a photo card at Christmas saying “Why me?” or “Where are these people going?” but you can’t help, nowadays and then, to think it sometimes. Particularly when something new is happening – say the starting of a church, or the anniversary of the death of a loved one, or, maybe most auspiciously, at the birth of a child.

And yet, when I look at you out there today, look at the pictures I could take for our card, that if we sent a LCC Christmas card. Why sure, then as now, there are lovely families we could shoot – just as lovely as those Down’s children. We could have three generations of Donaldsons, and we could have three generations of Robertsons/Culleys.  But let’s see – why here we have a Buddhist – here a Jew – here an African American couple who were married at this church … Jackie and Carol and Avery, and Rory and Erin and…

What would that first year, that 1959 church, make of it all? I would bet some of them would be pretty horrified, some of them might wonder what the world has come to, what the heck happened to this church in 50 years. If I showed them pictures of the last three Associate Ministers, and said to them, “Well, we had ONE heterosexual male in the three”, why, can you imagine their reaction.  Some of them might have said, “Wait a second – we never signed up for that!  Why on earth us? Why here?”

But I know one of them who would simply say, proudly, “You see, this is why us! Because even if we didn’t know how it would happen, even if we were in the dark about “Why us,” even though we hadn’t a clue, we were part of something bigger than ourselves, because we were making history, we were making God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, creating a place where people, regardless of who they were and how they were created, could come and talk to one another in a humble room. Where someone who was Buddhist and Jewish and Christian could sit back and feel the spirit of what they have in common jump within them. Where we learn about race, and sexual orientation, and how to embrace while still creating at atmosphere where we feel safe.

Because, you see, the answer to “Why me?” is that it never is about “me”.  No, there is something bigger afoot, something grander, like a plan, a vision, a world that appears before our eyes, like a Christmas photo that tells a story that says, “This is what is possible in the world.”

Now I know “Why me?” Now I know.