18 December 2005

Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

The Church of the Redeemer

New Haven, Conn.

Scripture: Luke 1:46-56

A Child’s Christmas in Connecticut:

Innocence and Faith

Innocence is life lived with no regard for what it is we do not know. Innocence is living the bliss of ignorance. Most of our lives we try to live with a lot of regard for what we do know, a sophistication where we live the burden of knowledge. Living in innocence is a little like courage. Courage is also based on a certain disregard. In courage we disregard our fear and even some of what we know to be true. You have to have at least a little fear to disregard in order to be courageous. And you have to be a little ignorant—or at least act that way—to be innocent. If we ate all the apples on the Garden of Eden’s tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we’d, of course, know a lot, but we’d be without courage--and innocence; we’d be without faith.

You remember, I’m sure, the scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz,” and the lion. The scarecrow is endearingly innocent because he’s without a brain. The lion is all full of fear and no courage with which to meet it.

Now, we have a civilization that follows the yellow brick road towards brainy degrees, roaring red badges of courage, and of course hearts for the hollow men made out of tin!

“The Wizard of Oz” is a depression-based story of learning how to grow up, to leave childhood, to put on the armor of civilization and to realize that there isn’t any Emerald City but only maybe a better way to define Kansas: like it’s “heaven in your own back yard.”

This is of course the bad-news story of reality—with a tiny bit of hope for imagination. “The Wizard of Oz” (with a wizard that predates Gandalf and Dumbledore!) is a story book for growing up. Its message is: reality is something to deal with and try to recognize the goodness in bleak reality: what we can call “Kansas.”

But faith in God is a better story, and the innocence of Jesus more powerful than a wizard. Because in God, in Christ, we don’t have to have a different life to have a better life, and we don’t have to believe in the illusive idea of human progress in order to be a part of Pilgrim’s Progress, the way of Jesus.

The journey in faith is towards the promises of God—which, in faith, as Kierkegaard said, are already coming towards us. The journey of faith, one such as Mary’s, is not a progression toward more human achievement.

And this is good news because we don’t have to struggle. We just have to, or can, believe. We don’t have to struggle, for example, to make Christmas, to make Christmas happen, much less to make it better than last year’s, or as good as it “used to be.” After all wasn’t the first Christmas the best one ever?! How are we going to improve on the birth of Jesus Christ, the anointed one of God!?

Let’s let Kansas be Kansas, and not a black and white version of an emerald city. Let’s not exhaust ourselves re-erecting the discontents of civilization.

Let’s, rather, welcome our salvation today. Let’s have faith in what God is bringing forth and to fulfillment. Let us be like Mary, peacefully full of faith in the promises of God. The innocence of Mary is based on her faith in God’s future.

So, the Christian call is to move into life with the freedom and grace and purity of heart of a reborn innocent—a second innocence—but not because we are good children, but because we are forgiven, forgiven adults. To move into the present with the gift of “as if” innocence, we need to have looked starkly into the eye of God and see ourselves the way God sees us and then to accept God’s forgiveness for our past and to take on the tasks of redemption. None of us should trust our first innocence, our sincerity. But the way we were can be forgiven. Something must be done about our past if we are to be trusted now. And in Christian faith we are. AA knows this in its steps.

So now that does take care of guilt and the past. What about anxiety? What about the future? I owe the great spiritual thinker Thomas Merton for this insight into how the past and the future need to be in God’s hands if the present is to be lived within the innocence of Christ.

And clearly our faith has something to say about the future. As one promise of God is that our sins can be forgiven, another promise of God is that God will come again—that the future is in God, that God is good and coming into full being, and we are not making that come true all on our own—anymore than we can make Christmas come or be better.

So my Christmas call to childhood is not based on the illusion that we are really good little children at heart—even our kids would tells us that children are not all good—nor is my Christmas call to childhood, even in Connecticut, based on the increasingly impossible spin that progress is being made anywhere and everywhere. There is as much “not-progress” being made as progress.

I worked one summer in the so-called poor black areas of New Haven in 1968 recruiting students for an interracial high school experience—and New Haven looked better then, in many ways. It’s not that some progress doesn’t happen; it’s just that we don’t have to lie to ourselves about what is, what remains, nor “frantic” ourselves trying to “make” what can be.

Three of the most progressive voices in the world were silenced in that year of 1968: Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Thomas Merton, and progressive talk radio 1300 AM on your dial with Al Franken and Stephanie Miller haven’t really replaced those progressive voices—neither can the U.C.C.

But the good news of Jesus Christ hasn’t been silenced. If Mary had been listening to King Herod radio and watching Roman Empire T.V. news she would not have heard the Magnificat in her heart, nor pondered the promises of God silently within her. As God was bringing forth God’s very will within her faithful, trusting, innocent, courageous being. Mary could not have known all of what God was promising. Imagine Easter, so much she didn’t know. But she believed the promises of God.

Amen.[MSOffice1]