December 24, 2022
Christmas Eve
Friends,
Tonight is more meditation than sermon, more openness to the stuff which, like Mary, I cradle within and ponder, in the reaches of my heart.
If it happened here
as it happened there…
If it happened now,
as it happened then…
Who would have seen the miracle?
Who would have brought gifts?
Who would have taken them in?
I have travelled with those lines since before I was ordained.
I got the call late on Thursday, that I might be preaching tonight. For the rest of the day and through yesterday morning, I wondered where to set my hand in the Christmas story, where to make contact. The idea of “making contact” is a favourite preaching principle of mine.
While Barbara was at choir practice, I tried to think holy thoughts in contemplation of tonight, but my mind kept orienting and reorienting to the people of Ukraine. This will be an awful Christmas whether observed tonight or in another stretch of days. I thought, for example, about Zelensky’s astonishing Churchillian trip to the United States and that remarkable, stentorian speech “to the American people.” There were lots of images of people over here gathering stuff for people over there, an ambulance, in one instance, fully restored, ready to go, full of medical stuff, and eight giant pallets laden with items gathered, one at a time, by people loving our faraway siblings in God’s world.
I wasn’t sure where to put my hand. I slept on it. My mind wandered, some more, as it does at night. I got up and got the word. “We’re in plan B.” So I was sitting in my office, waiting for a sermon to manifest itself (unsuccessfully at that point), and I was staring at my office wall scanning a number of paintings, three by my father, one by my mother, a lesser known van Gogh print; a painting by my daughter Ruth showing her mom and me, hands together uplifted and a red heart between us (beautifully observed); and more. And then the lines came to me.
If it happened here
as it happened there…
If it happened now,
as it happened then…
Who would have seen the miracle?
Who would have brought gifts?
Who would have taken them in?
There was an artist, a painter, who was born in Ukraine in 1927. He was a year younger than my father. His family came to Canada, multiplied as families did, but struggled to get by in the dirty thirties. He learned English as a second language in school where people though him odd. He kept to himself. He matured. He worked, out west, up north. Eventually he found himself in nearby parts where his talent was confirmed. He traveled. Canada. England. Mexico. Ukraine (2x). He painted. And painted some more.
Much of his adult life saw him, a tortured soul, in and out of psychiatric care. Long spells in hospital. He could be quite detached from reality, suffering, cutting himself, a terrible plea for release. Life was sometimes awfully dark and in 1977, he died. He was only 50 years old. Cancer. He left a catalogue of at least 2,000 works. Perhaps more.
I used to visit a small house-gallery—I think it was in Niagara Falls—which housed some later works. There may have been a family connection. I don’t remember. Anyway, his name was William Kurelek, a self-described Ukrainian-Canadian. For much of his young adult life, Kurelek was an atheist, but he found his faith in the care he received in a hospital. I think it may have been while he was in England.
Many of his works thereafter had a devotional quality, some of them a little weird. Kurelek never did resurrection very well. He could do, and did, crucifixion, and it was dark. But he was, first and foremost, and especially in life’s last refrain, a person of the incarnation. “God is with us.” From images of Kuralek I touched the word Immanuel in tonight’s Gospel. Immanuel is a name found in the Book of Isaiah where it is more title, than name, per se. “Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is pregnant and shall bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel.”
Hebrew. Imma-nuél. God is with us. God is with us. It’s declarative. It’s confident. God is with us. And the name is first and foremost descriptive like some of the names of First People friends. The child will be called “God is with us.”It was William Kurelek who asked the questions I led off with.
If it happened here
as it happened there…
If it happened now,
as it happened then…
Who would have seen the miracle?
Who would have brought gifts?
Who would have taken them in?
Kurelek’s answer was a Northern Nativity published in the year before his death. I was in seminary when I first saw it—my grandmother gave me a copy–and my own children, knew it well. The book is subtitled “Christmas Dreams of a Prairie Boy. He was the prairie boy. It’s autobiographical and the questions were his questions, and he asks them, “If it happened here…” over and over, each time with a picture of the Holy Family woven into some place, some happening, in our time.
“He challenges us to think about our readiness and openness to Christ in the world around us.” Those words are carried in an inscription placed in this copy by the person who gave it to me, an artist herself, a friend who plumbed the same terrible well of darkness that Kurelek knew so well.
Discourse – Fuller version: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you.” (St Augustin)
So how do we answer the questions? Tonight reminds us that the truth of incarnation is at least as large as the truth of resurrection. You can’t get to resurrection except by way of the incarnation and God is with us. And God is with us. And God is inside. And outside, where we search.
There are lots of people who bear witness to the truth that God is with us this night. The people sending the ambulance come pretty close. The people who labour to get those who have no home to warmth and food and shelter … them, too. So, too, the people at the Working Centre who keep finding new ways to house the homeless. And there are those who give gifts to make things possible, many here among us, and even some who work at taking in the bedraggled and the weather-worn and the least among us.
The picnic table outside is a great start. It is the pier upon which one end of a bridge is built. But whither the other end? Where to that bridge?
Kurelek placed the holy family in familiar settings to remind himself and us of Emmanuel. Sometimes I see the Holy Family at that picnic bench. Sometimes I see them assembling outside the safe injection site. Sometimes I see them having turned a subway corridor into bomb shelter and a shed into a morgue.
God is with us is tonight’s story and we all participate, especially any weary and wondering souls who visit or sojourn here. You are welcome, this night. God is with us.
Merry Christmas.
May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in God’s sight. And let the church say “Amen.” R/ Amen.
André Lavergne, CWA (The Rev.)
Church of St. John the Evangelist, Kitchener