An Advent Reflection -"Of Battles and Babies”

It has been some time since I last posted, but part of the problem has been getting blogger.com to recognize this blog as one that I have had since 2007, and that I was not trying to start a new blog. And another part of the problem is budgeting the time to just "get 'er done."

Thanksgiving is just a couple days away and the beginning of Advent is this Sunday. In doing some homework on this posting, I came across something that Billy Graham wrote some years ago:

The year was 1809, a time of the great Napoleonic Wars in Europe. During that year, there came into the world a host of heroes of the future: British Reformer, William F. Gladstone; the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson; American writer and jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes; Felix Mendelssohn, the composer; and Abraham Lincoln, born in Kentucky. But nobody was thinking about babies. Everybody’s mind was on the great battles being fought in Europe. Yet today we look back in hindsight and ask ourselves: “which was more important, the battles or the babies of 1809?” The day that Lincoln was born, one of the locals was asked what was happening in the village. The reply was, “nothing, nothing at all – except a new baby born over at Tom Lincoln’s place. No sir, nothin goin’ on ‘round here.”

(the Lincoln cabin where Abraham was born in 1809)>>>

As we move into this Advent Season of 2009, we are all called to be midwives in this period of time that is pregnant with possibilities. As pastors or laity, it has been placed upon us to prepare the way that Christ might be born again; to be for us a living hope.

Perhaps each Advent Season has its challenges for the church and the culture it strives to reach, but I cannot remember a time when this year of 2009 has posed so many challenges for the church and for our global community. Economic battles are before us, military battles still are being waged in Iraq and Afghanistan, theological and doctrinal battles continue in our churches and in the courtrooms. With all the battles to fight – whether it is 1809 or 2009 – who has time for babies?

In one of his earliest sermons, Frederick Buechner writes about the Innkeeper in Bethlehem, someone who could have been a midwife, who could have helped bring this Child of God into the world, but didn’t. “Later that night, when the baby came, I was not there,” the Innkeeper said. “I was lost in the forest somewhere, the unenchanted forest of million trees, a million other things to do …So, how am I to say it … when he came, I missed him.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was filled with sorrow at the tragic death of a family member in a fire in 1861. The Civil War broke out that same year, and it seemed this was an additional punishment. Two years later, Longfellow was again saddened to hear the his own son had been seriously wounded as a lieutenant in the Army of the Potomac. Sitting down to his desk, one Christmas Day, he heard the church bells ringing, and ringing. It was in this setting he wrote:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
And in despair I bowed my head
There is no peace on earth I said
For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep,
God is not dead, nor doth he sleep.
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.

In this Advent time, maybe we could spend less time thinking about the battles before us and more time honing our skills of midwivery – if indeed that is a word. God is not dead, nor does he sleep. God, I believe, weeps over our willfulness to do battle. Our politicians are more skillful at military strategy than in diplomacy or statesmanship. Peace on earth is a pandering comment more suited to greeting cards and beauty contestant responses than to a true and realistic expectation. Will there ever be a time, let alone in our lifetimes, when the child of which Isaiah prophesies will lead the hunter and the hunted into that peaceable kingdom? And I, ever the cock-eyed optimist, must answer "yes!" But what concerns me as I get older, but no less busy, is that I will have become like the Innkeeper - that I might be lost somewhere in a forest of a million trees, such that when he does come, I will miss the moment because of being too self-absorbed in things that really in the grand scheme of God's kingdom do not matter. What if … we in our churches and in our offices and in our schoolrooms, gave more thought to how a re-birth of Christ in our midst might change our perspective on the battles we face both now and in the coming year? With a Child of God to be born again into our midst, who has time for battles?

Jerry