This sermon was preached for Pageant Sunday, December 20, 2021 for a joint online service for St. Andrew's and St. Michael's. The texts for this sermon were pageant scriptures, including Luke 2:1-20.
Thank you to each and every child and teen who was part of this year’s pageant production, and for the parents behind the scenes. Your re-telling of this sacred story is a powerful witness to the ways this narrative will continue to be retold in every language and medium, in circumstances joyful and sorrowful, from generation to generation.
Thank you.
Perhaps because this year’s pageant was shorter than I’m used to, or perhaps because this has been a year marked by absences of all kinds, but this year I noticed the parts of the story that we often leave out of our various pageants.
Mary, for instance, fast forwards from learning about her miraculous conception right to the night of the birth of her child. We get to skip over her morning sickness, the slow ballooning of her belly, the twinges in her back. The wisemen, too, jump from their far east home to the manger bed in the span of a church aisle. The rest has been lost to time.
And thank God. Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s perfectly alright that we’ve left out the more boring details. But there is a danger in that. If we aren’t careful, we can fool ourselves into thinking that God is—was only present in the big, memorable moments, the ones worth writing down and reenacting.
When we look back on this year, what will we say about this time? Maybe we’ll start with that fateful Friday the thirteenth in March, when our kids were pulled from school. I know we’ll remember the ones we lost. I hope we’ll talk about this week in Advent when the vaccine trucks rolled out all over this country and nurses danced in the street. I hope we’ll name it as the beginning of the end. And I pray that this tale will end with all of us, back together, with hugs and smiles and communion and so much shared food.
And when we tell the story of 2020 in years to come, what will we leave out? Perhaps we’ll leave off recounting all those hours spent standing in six-foot-apart lines in our masks or idling in Zoom waiting rooms. The washing and re-washing our hands, the long, lonely, isolated days of nothingness.
In God’s hands, those days and those hours were not wasted. More than any other time of year, Advent calls us to remember that the waiting is holy. The space between spectacular events is sacred, too.
One of the greatest ironies of 2020 will always be that the more we all did nothing, the more we contributed to a greater something – a giant global movement to keep one another safe. The more we stayed home, declined invitations, and cancelled plans, the more we sacrificed for love. Those empty evenings and blank social calendars were not a waste, but a witness to a great collective action to save each other’s lives.
God was in those moments, all of them. We may not have had the bandwidth to feel gratitude for each moment as they went by. We may not have been able to summon the wherewithal to honor them as precious at the time. But God has. God is treasuring up and pondering all these things in God’s heart, just as Mary did.
God is in the ordinary and in the moments we forget. In the shuffling of feet, and clinking of keys, and brushing of teeth, God acts behind the scenes, shaping us for a greater purpose. Just because we do not remember the quotidian and the humdrum does not mean we are not being profoundly formed by it.
Perhaps you, too, have known the heartbreak of watching a loved one descend into memory loss and dementia. And if you have, then I hope part of you also knows this to be true: Even the things that have been forgotten are still real, still true, still make us who we are. They are still held in God’s heart, long after they have slipped our minds.
So what do we do with the frustrating, the boring, and the forgettable moments of 2020?
We can bless them, we can thank them, and we can let them go. In doing so, we entrust them to God. We free ourselves to tell our stories the way we’d like, the way that makes them worth retelling. And we can know that we’ll never fully grasp the wholeness, and the greatness of the story that’s still playing out in all our lives.
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