O come, O come, Emmanuel. Amen.
If you had to summarize the Gospel into a single thought or sentence, what might you come up with? Many years ago, I remember that The Christian Century magazine published an article that asked leading authors and theologians to summarize the Gospel in seven words. There were some lovely and interesting responses such as: “God, through Jesus Christ, welcomes you anyhow,” “In Christ, God’s yes defeats our no,” and “God was born; we can be reborn.” It does take a bit of reflection and wordsmithing, but it’s an good exercise to really think about what are the most essential elements of faith.
Of course, I reserve the right to always change my answer, but for today, I think I would say something like – “Divine Love coming to us in peace.” Yes, I could spend the next 15 minutes unpacking that statement, but I’ll save that for another time. The essential bit of my sentence is the “coming to us” part. I think that we could ask the Psalmist and St. Matthew to do this exercise, they might come up with a similar sentence, or they would at least include this idea that faith is the story of God coming to us.
This is one of the unique and essential aspects of Christianity, that God comes to us. From Genesis through Revelation, we see this trajectory of faith – and it’s not about how we get from “down here” to “up there,” as unhelpful as those directional metaphors are. To be sure, a lot of Christians have been confused and misled on this, so it’s quite understandable if this sounds a bit shocking or surprising, but it’s all over Scripture, even in the prayer that Jesus taught us – thy kingdom come on earth, as it is in heaven. It’s not, “Take us from earth into heaven.” No, that’s not direction of Christian faith.
Faith is not about following the rules to gain entrance into heaven after we die. Following Jesus is not about punching our ticket aboard the heaven-express. The question of faith is not, “How do we get from here to there.” If we make faith about that, it becomes all about us – which is a natural thing for short-sighted and sinful people to do – to make everything about us. To put it plainly, Christianity is not a faith about what we have to do, it’s about what God has already done. This is why the word “should, ought, or must” really don’t belong in the Christianity vocabulary.
Jesus says, “Come to me all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” He did not say, “Here’s your assignment, I’ll give you a grade at the end of the semester and you either go to permanent detention or get an eternal summer break.” I don’t know what that is, but it’s not Christianity. That’s some twisted version of faith that is about control and manipulation, not Grace.
Grace though is scandalous. You tell people that Christianity is about what God has done and not what we have to do, and they start to lose their minds. “What do you mean I don’t have to do anything? There have to be rules, or this all falls apart!”
I’ve mentioned the author David Zahl before, he’s the director of Mockingbird Ministries, a grace-centric initiative that produces podcasts, articles, a magazine and hosts conferences. Mockingbird has been nothing short of transformative and has been a vehicle of salvation for me. The reason they chose the name Mockingbird is that a mockingbird has no song of its own; it simply repeats the song that it hears from other birds. They take this as their mission – not to be innovative or relevant, but simply to repeat that song of Grace that we hear all around us, if we have ears to listen. Mockingbirds don’t have to create their own song; they are given one to respond to.
That’s what Grace means and what Christianity is all about. We aren’t given rules as a ladder, but we are given opportunities to respond. And that’s where all of the things that we think we’re supposed to be doing are grounded – a response, not a requirement. First John says, “We love because he first loved us.” Again, notice the direction. It’s from God towards us, not us towards God. We receive then reflect; not do and therefore earn. The direction matters. The direction is the faith.
This clarity of direction helps us to hear the Good News proclaimed by Matthew as he portrays Jesus as the culmination of Isaiah’s prophecy – “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means God is with us.” It’s God with us, not us with God. In a nutshell, this is the essence of our faith: we don’t have to follow the rules to get to God, we don’t need to make ourselves worthy, we don’t even need to ask for God to show up. No, God comes to us, no matter how ready we are, how tidy we are, or how deserving we think we are. God loves us and love is always an attractive force, love brings things together, love embraces.
Throughout Advent, the sermons have all focused on the growing light of the Advent wreath. We’ve considered how light guides, purifies, and attracts over the past three Sundays. Today, on the fourth and final Sunday of Advent, we can think about how light warms. It’s like a campfire or fireplace. This is what God coming to us in Jesus does – it’s the warmth of light.
This morning’s Psalm, 80, has a line that is repeated several times that helps us to understand what this warmth is about – “Show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.” It’s a lovely sentiment, “countenance” isn’t a word we use often and it’s not the most helpful wording. A better translation that is closer to the Hebrew would be “shine your face upon us.” Like a mockingbird, I’ll keep repeating this – we’re asking for God’s face to shine on us, not for us to have eyes to see God or anything like that. The direction is from God to us, not us towards God. That’s the direction of Grace.
God’s face shining upon us – that’s the warmth of Emmanuel, of God with us. There are, of course, many ways to translate the word for “shining” – we could say brighten, kindle, illumine, beam. But there’s another way to capture the essence of this prayer for God’s countenance to illuminate us, and it combines both the idea of warmth and God’s face: smile. Smile upon us, and we shall be saved.
Hold onto this image: when God looks at you, God smiles. God is not scowling, or rolling eyes, or looking past you. God sees you and smiles. God smiles because you are God’s beloved. You are not an accident, but with the same intentionality that God created the stars and earth, God created you. And just as God looked at all God had made and called it “good,” God looks upon you and, with a smile, says “Good.” As we often pray, to God all hearts are open and from God no secrets are hid – God sees us, all of us, and smiles upon with a brightness more brilliant than the sun and a mercy that is more purifying than any forge.
And if we could receive this treasure of God’s smile, it can change everything. No longer do we worry if we are good enough; no longer do we worry about making ourselves worthy; no longer do we compete with each other. God smiles upon us with compassion, with love, with mercy, with peace, with healing. I’d encourage you this week to sit with that image – let God smile upon you.
Once we have received this smile, we then reflect it to the world. That’s the thing about light; it wants to be shared. Again, it’s like a mockingbird; we don’t have to manufacture the light, kindle the flames, or charge the batteries, we just reflect what we have received. It could be as simple as smiling at strangers we see, but it might also be the deeper work of smiling instead of screaming, as we seek to forgive as we have been forgiven. We can smile because we have been smiled upon.
In a world that can feel cold, lonely, and harsh, the warmth of God’s smile can be as powerful as a candle in a dark room. The smile of God, when received and reflected onto our faces is a sure and certain gift of mercy, transformation, and love.
I’ll close with a story that demonstrates the warmth that the Gospel that comes into the coldness of our lives and how we can repeat that same old song of Grace when given the opportunity. It was 1968 in Vietnam and two young Marines, both from Massachusetts, were on patrol, fording a stream. As he was wading through the muddy waters, Ed Kochanowski was carrying mortars that had to be kept dry. His friend and fellow Marine, Paul Grasso, mounted the steep bank and turned to help pull Kochanowski out of the water. But between the mud and holding the mortars above the water, Kochanowski needed something for leverage, so he extended the handle of his M-16 towards Grasso to grab and pull him up by.
Just as Kochanowski was at about at the top of the bank, a shot rang out and Grasso, gravely wounded, fell onto the bank. Kochanowski assumed they were under fire, but soon realized that he had, accidentally, killed his fellow Marine, Paul Grasso, who was 20 days short of his 20th birthday.
Kochanowski told the reporter at the Boston Globe, where this story is recorded, that he took it hard. Really hard. He says, “They had to take my weapons away, my grenades.” A doctor offered to send him back home, but Kochanowski was a Marine and wasn’t going to quit. He eventually found himself back on the front lines when an explosion knocked him out about a month after the incident on the riverbank and he got sent to a military hospital in Philadelphia where he learned that half of his squad was killed in that firefight.
He said that the survivor’s guilt was like a wet, heavy blanket. His chest was almost always tight and had trouble breathing. So he started drinking to make the pain go away, but that only led him deeper into depression. The story continues as we might expect, addiction and divorce, until one day, Kochanowski prayed a prayer. He said, “Lord, if you’re there, I’ve been looking for you for a long time.” He said it wasn’t so much a conversion that followed, but a healing which he described as, slowly but surely, being born again.
Kochanowski had gone through the Twelve Steps of AA, but knew there was one more step needed for healing – he had to find Paul Grosso’s family and tell them what happened on that riverbank in Vietnam. He had gone to the cemetery on Memorial Day, but kept his distance from the grave; he never could summon what it would take to approach the Grosso family. He wanted to, but he just couldn’t.
As those of you with military experience understand better than I do, the Marines never told the Grosso family what happened – and the family says that their grief was compounded by the lack of information. Ray Grasso, Paul’s brother, said that the family had no closure, which became its own sort of pain.
Well, earlier this year, Ray Grosso’s daughter borrowed his van for a short move and it ended up getting scratched and dented pretty bad. So Ray took the van to a local body shop to get an estimate on the repairs. Ray Grosso handed the guy working the counter the vehicle registration. And that guy, Ed Kochanowski, immediately recognized the name. He swallowed hard and asked, “Did you have a brother who was a Marine that was killed in Vietnam.” Ray was taken aback, but quietly answered, “Yes.” Kochanowski said, “I think we need to step outside.”
Ray Grasso was confused by all of this, but went outside with Kochanowski who looked at him and said, “It was me. I’m the one.” Ray immediately understood and the two men fell into each other’s arms, sobbing. After a few minutes, Grasso pulled back and said “I want you to know, I hold nothing against you. We never blamed you. Never.”
Kochanowski went to on explain what happened that day in1968 and they again embraced. Ray Grasso told the reporter, “After hearing his words, I knew one thing. This man didn’t need more punishment. He needed peace.” And the Grasso family has given Kochanowski that in abundance. Ed Kochanowski has become an adopted member of the Grasso family, often a guest in their home.
Ed Kochanowski, through the process of recovery, came to know that God’s love was smiling upon him, and that prepared him for that fateful moment when Ray Grasso came to the counter. He didn’t have to say anything other than to hand him the repair estimate. But he responded with what he had received – the truth that God’s love can heal all broken things. And the Grasso family certainly didn’t need to respond with mercy and the warmth of friendship, but they did. The warmth of God’s love saved Ed Kochanowski, and it made healing possible for both him and the Grasso family.
O God of hosts, smile upon us, and we shall be saved.
