In search of the Easter baby

Since Christmas time, my two-year-old daughter has been obsessed with the Baby Jesus. We have this colorful nativity set we bought in Mexico on our honeymoon. And we set it out each year underneath our Christmas tree, which happens to be a pygmy date palm because we live in Florida and we think it’s silly to ship in some northern pine tree only to watch it dry up and litter our patio with needles for 3 weeks. Our Christmas palm tree lives year round in a very large pot on our patio, and at Christmas time we string lights on it and decorate it with our favorite Christmas ornaments, including (but not limited to), this fabulous set of camels with bells on them. To me our Christmas tree is perfect, it is much like the trees one would actually find in Bethlehem, and frankly, I think people at the time of Christ’s birth would have been more likely to decorate with colorful camels than with nutcrackers and angels that really look like cute babies with wings.

After decorating the tree, and lighting the lights, we place Mary, Joseph and some of the animals beneath it on the mulch in the pot. Around behind the tree are 3 men, slowly progressing to bring gifts to a new born king. On Christmas morning, a baby magically appears before the adoring Joseph and Mary, along with many presents that we give to celebrate this baby’s birth. And there he stays until 3 kings from the east deliver gifts to him 12 days later (or until he is picked up by small, chubby fingers to be paraded around the house).

This year, being nearly 2, my own gift-from-God baby got a full dose of baby Jesus. We sang songs about him, we read stories about him, and we talked about his birthday for days before and after it happened. Baby Jesus was everywhere, and she was taken with him.

Then one day, after the dawn of a new year, after wise men had come and gone, and after I had returned to work, we announced that it was time to undecorated the Christmas date palm and return it to it’s former status as palm tree only. We removed the camels, we unstrung the lights. Finally, in a very formal ceremony, we removed Mary and Joseph and all the animals, and we put baby Jesus away until next year…or so I thought.

“Where is baby Jesus?” Became the almost constant question from my cute, inquisitive toddler. In church, she would point to where a banner once hung and say “where baby Jesus, Mommy.” We are a very liturgical family. I tried to explain to her “baby Jesus is gone, he is a man now.” But that didn’t stop the questions. “Where baby Jesus, mommy? Baby Jesus gone?” “Yes love, baby Jesus grew up.” “Where baby Jesus, mommy?” “We put baby Jesus away, we’ll see him next year.”

Soon it wasn’t a question of where baby Jesus was, she found him everywhere. “Ooooo, baby Jesus!” she squealed pointing to a picture of baby Hope, the daughter of a dear friend. “Mama, I got my baby” she would say, cradling her doll baby, or just about anything else she could cradle, singing “rock-a-bye baby”. “What’s your baby’s name?” I’d ask. “Is baby Jesus.” Came the instant reply. It got to be almost embarrassing “Baby Jesus!” she’d point and yell at any child under the age of 2 she encountered. She started donning towels, or blankets, or scarves on top of her head while holding her baby “I Mary, dis baby Jesus.” She’d explain.

This was all very cute for the month of January, but when February came, and Lent was looming, I began to get concerned. I was glad she loved the baby Jesus so much, but Christmas is just the beginning of a rich and wonderful church year that necessitates our recalling Jesus the grown man. I began trying as hard as I could to turn her attention to the fact in life that all babies grow up, and now we’re thinking about grown-up Jesus. As you can probably guess by now, it didn’t work. I might as well been talking gibberish for all she cared. Baby Jesus was now a shampoo bottle she played with in the bathtub as well as in the face of every infant she saw.

How could I explain to this child the miracle of Easter? How could I make that holiday as real and wonderful to her as the birth of the baby named Jesus? How could I tell her that this baby she loves so much would die? How could she have an Easter at all without that death and the miracle of resurrection? How could she experience new life in the Spirit when she was focused on the same old kind of life we see in every baby? How?!

And then it hit me. Jesus’ death and resurrection are about life. They are about birth. They offer new life to all. They wash us clean until we are in the same pure state we entered the world as babies. My baby sees that life in everything. My baby finds that baby everywhere she goes. For a very short time, my baby sees something so remarkable most adults can’t see it: that each and every baby proclaims the power of God. Jesus can live in any child, and my baby finds him there. For this year, at least, she knows the miracle of the living God each and every day when she finds Jesus all around her. Jesus is alive, just ask my baby, she’ll show you where he is.

Originally given April 10, 2006

Lamentations 1:1-2, 6-12

The Deserted City

1How lonely sits the city
that once was full of people!
How like a widow she has become,
she that was great among the nations!
She that was a princess among the provinces
has become a vassal.

²She weeps bitterly in the night,
with tears on her cheeks;
among all her lovers
she has no one to comfort her;
all her friends have dealt treacherously with her,
they have become her enemies.

⁶From daughter Zion has departed
all her majesty.
Her princes have become like stags
that find no pasture;
they fled without strength
before the pursuer.

⁷Jerusalem remembers,
in the days of her affliction and wandering,
all the precious things
that were hers in days of old.
When her people fell into the hand of the foe,
and there was no one to help her,
the foe looked on mocking
over her downfall.

⁸Jerusalem sinned grievously,
so she has become a mockery;
all who honoured her despise her,
for they have seen her nakedness;
she herself groans,
and turns her face away.

⁹Her uncleanness was in her skirts;
she took no thought of her future;
her downfall was appalling,
with none to comfort her.
‘O Lord, look at my affliction,
for the enemy has triumphed!’

¹⁰Enemies have stretched out their hands
over all her precious things;
she has even seen the nations
invade her sanctuary,
those whom you forbade
to enter your congregation.

¹¹All her people groan
as they search for bread;
they trade their treasures for food
to revive their strength.
Look, O Lord, and see
how worthless I have become.

¹²Is it nothing to you,^* all you who pass by?
Look and see
if there is any sorrow like my sorrow,
which was brought upon me,
which the Lord inflicted
on the day of his fierce anger.

I got a “warm fuzzy feeling” reading today’s passage from lamentations as I prepared to speak to you. Okay, I know that sounds strange. So I thought about it for a while, and I realized that this passage reminded me of lent.

I just love lent with all of its penitentiality and sin-loathing. I just love the opportunity to reflect for 40 days on just how bad I’ve been! No, I’m serious. And that’s probably even more strange. But let me explain. I realize now that this passage draws me back to my first lent as a Christian. I was then a catechumen, which is a word I’d never heard before I got to Sewanee. A sophomore in college, I was preparing for my baptism. And I was at that time lamenting the last 18 years of my life. Years I spent walking away from God.

In many ways, I can relate to what Jeremiah is saying as he looks out at his Beloved, Jerusalem, now burned, destroyed, empty. “Jerusalem sinned grievously, so she has become a mockery” Simply substitute “Jackie” for “Jerusalem” and that is how I was feeling about my life that first lent. As I had come to know Jesus and become more familiar with the Bible, I was becoming more and more uncomfortable with the person I had been for so long.

Jeremiah, I have read, was sitting under a small knoll just outside the walls of Jerusalem.
This spot where he sat looking out upon the devastation of the ruined city has become known as “Jeremiah’s Grotto.” The hill he sat under is now called “Golgotha.”

As I journeyed through my own past of sin and self-destruction that lent, I was walking with Jesus toward that same hill. Not literally, of course. But I was learning the story of Jesus more fully and making it a part of my own story.

I remember Palm Sunday, and the dramatic reading of the passion in church. The congregation played the crowd, as I think is standard practice. Suddenly the moment came for us to call out “Crucify him!” and - I - was –stunned! My heart was pounding and it was all I could do to keep from yelling: “Please don’t crucify him, I love him!” I had never really known before then what Easter was, and suddenly it was as if I was actually living through the events that led to the very first Easter.

These memories of my first lent are so meaningful and important in my Christian life. That journey of sorrow and repentance was bringing me ever closer to the knowledge of hope and love that can only be found in our living savior.

I love lent, it is a time to walk through the wasteland of our sinfulness. As our holy lent draws to a close this year, we are approaching the very place Jeremiah sat lamenting: - the foot of the cross.- There we too can sit and cry out about the desolation and destruction in our lives and in the world. And there we can leave our sin and agony.

On Friday we will recall that Jesus died there on that hill. Jesus’ death was sad, it was ugly. He was broken and destroyed, naked and dirty just as Jeremiah saw Jerusalem that day 600 years earlier. But even as Jeremiah sat weeping, God had the salvation of the world in mind. On that very hill, the most bittersweet event in the history of humankind would take place. Jesus would die, but with his death He would take our sins, our broken, destroyed lives and make us all new and clean. He was the sacrifice that would make us right with God once more.

What I didn’t understand that Palm Sunday is that Jesus had to die. And while his death was sad it was also glorious. Jesus needed to die so that we can rejoice in his rising again on Easter morning, so we can rejoice that we have a living savior, so we can rejoice in God’s saving sacrifice, so we can rejoice that our sins are washed clean, so we can rejoice that we have eternal life.

I love lent, it gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling.

Open my eyes

John 9:1-8

A Man Born Blind Receives Sight

9²³⁴"As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’ When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, ‘Go, wash in the pool of Siloam’ (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see."

Recently I've come to a new understanding of this text. In July I began working for an agency that serves the blind and the visually impaired. Throughout the history of mankind there are about 20 accounts of people who were blind for most or all of their lives having their eyes restored to normal. But all of these stories bear similar characteristics. Instead of becoming joyous for receiving sight, these people sink into a depression and rely on the skills they developed while blind to help them interact with their world.

Modern science has an explanation for why this happens. In the brain are cells called neurons. According to wikipedia, neurons "are electrically excitable cells in the nervous system that process and transmit information". These cells are instrumental in processing the images our eyes take in and helping the brain interpret them. By the age of 4 or 5, all brain neurons are permanently assigned to the task they will do for the rest of our lives. The neurons that help us interpret images do things like help us see motion, give us depth perception and help us differentiate the subtle differences in faces and facial expressions. If your brain neurons are not assigned to these tasks in the first years of your life, you will never perceive these things. Neurons cannot be reassigned to a new task as adults, though they may be able to be reassigned at a young age, so someone who loses their sight as an infant may be able to use those vision neurons for other tasks.

What this means is that in the 20 or so cases of miraculous eye restorations that have been recorded by humans over the centruies, the person could not see. Yes, their eyes could now take in images, but their brains could not interpret those images. They sank into sadness, because what should have made life easier was actually a burden. They were bombarded with unintelligible sensory experiences. I suppose it would be like how it feels to be in a room full of people speaking a language you've never heard before: it all sounds like noise, but it makes no sense, you can't even distiguish a single word.

What is truly amazing about the miracle John records is that it's very clear that once the man's eyes are opened he can see. In other words, Jesus has changed not just his eyes, but the very wiring of his brain. I only came to understand this a few months ago myself, and suddenly this miracle took on a whole new meaning for me.

Certainly I knew in a very real way that Jesus can heal things that seem impossible to heal and restore us to the state we were intended to live in. But in a way I could never fully relate to this miracle. Sure I could say that I was born blind in some way, in a way that I didn't know Jesus, but truthfully that's an analogy that's unfair to blind people. Really blindness is not ignorance. I know many people who do not have vision but who are amazingly aware of what is around them. So now that I understand a little more about what it takes to see, I realize that this miracle does in fact apply to me, and it applies directly to you as well.

Opening the eyes of this man was only half of the miracle (and I might argue the lesser half). The other half was that he could see. That means that Jesus transformed his mind and the way it works, which is scientifically speaking, impossible. Eyes have been restored by men, but the minds could not be changed. In a way I knew that Jesus transforms minds, but I knew in a distant way. Now I see deeply how this miracle applies directly to my own life. When I met Jesus, and he healed me, he changed the way I thought and perceived. I went from being an angry person who rejected God, a hopeless person without joy, and almost instantly I was transformed. Suddenly I was happy, joyful and unable to deny that God not only existed, but worked directly in my life. In an instant my mind was transformed. And it was my mind, because it has taken years for my heart and my will to conform to what my mind knew in an instant.

When Jesus enters our lives and we seek His healing, He transforms us to the very core of how we work, understand, move, live, breathe and encounter the world. That is the true miracle, and it is for everyone, not just those with some seemingly insurmountable difference. When I met Jesus, I was dead in the very core of my heart. And now I am alive. Praise God for the miracle of my own healing.