Enough

 

Merry Christmas! Christ is born!

Read This! Luke 2:1-20

This is cute: The Story of when Jesus Was Born

I love Nadia Bolz-Weber’s description of what it’s like being a pastor. I’ve probably quoted it a hundred times. She says, “So often in the church, being a pastor or a "spiritual leader" means being the example of  "godly living." A pastor is supposed to be the person who is really good at this Christianity stuff — the person others can look to as an example of righteousness. But as much as being the person who is the best Christian, who "follows Jesus" the most closely can feel a little seductive, it's simply never been who I am or who my parishioners need me to be. I'm not running after Jesus. Jesus is running my ass down. Yeah, I am a leader, but I'm leading them onto the street to get hit by the speeding bus of confession and absolution, sin and sainthood, death and resurrection — that is, the gospel of  Jesus Christ. I'm a leader, but only by saying, 'Oh, screw it. I'll go first.'" 

So here I am. I am going first. 

I am not enough.

Even on a good day, even on a good year, even when I’m full of Starbucks and protein and yoga and meditation, I’m still not enough.

I’m disorganized. I procrastinate. Sometimes, I get a little emotional. I lose my patience and then I get sarcastic with my kids. The left front tire on my Honda is a little low, so instead of just taking it to the gas station to fill it up, I’ve been borrowing Dan’s car. I didn’t set out little treats for the Amazon delivery workers who are making Christmas happen for us this year. I rely too much on Amazon delivery workers, and not on local businesses, to make Christmas happen this year. 

But this year. This year, you all have deserved better. You need someone who is camera ready. Someone who can edit and lay music over videos and somehow link the powerpoint to the live stream. You need someone who can create community when we can’t be present in community. You need an exuberant extroverted personality to magnetically draw new people in. You need new programs, new things for people to do, new ways to invite people in. You need an entertainer. An event planner. A community organizer. A coordinator. You need a famous podcaster with a book deal or a YouTuber with a boom mike and tripod and one of those reflector cards that makes the lighting perfect. Maybe you need a lion tamer or a flying trapeze artist. You need someone who whitens her teeth.

This COVID business has done a number on our feelings of enough ness. 

We want to make up for all the things we’ve lost this year. And so, we try to be more. We try to do more. 

My son, Jonah, is devastated that we’re not visiting family this year for Christmas. And because he feels this way, I feel like I need to fix that feeling somehow. I need to do more in order to help him not feel this sadness and disappointment. So I’ve been Amazoning and Targetting and baking and decorating and cleaning and planning and grocery shopping and we even ate Chipotle on Tuesday night and got pizza delivered on Wednesday night, eating out TWO nights in a row, just to make up for the fact that we’re not going to Grandma and Grandpa’s this year. Maybe, if I do more, it’ll be enough. Maybe if I do more, it’ll make up for all the ways this year has let us down. 

I don’t know where that not enough voice comes from. But it’s an old voice. A voice that’s at least 2000 years old. 

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time there was a land, broad and wide, gorgeous and plentiful, where an emperor created a most powerful system of haves and have-nots, so much so, that 1% of the world’s population owned more than half of the world’s wealth.  This 1% controlled the land, the seas, and all of the resources the earth provided. And with this wealth, they began buy power. First, through rivers and rainforests, farmland and mountains. Through coal and oil, diamonds and corn. And then through credit default swaps and high frequency trading and social media sites. And as they amassed so much wealth, they needed people to retrieve it, to maintain it, to count it, and to offer themselves to it. And the people believed that if they worked hard enough, they, too, might become as powerful as they. 

And in those days, there came a decree from the emperor that every person should be counted, for they wanted to see what they would buy, how many taxes they’d have to pay, how many times they’d click on that link from the dying princess in Ethiopia who wants to give them all of her amassed wealth. And so all went to Facebook and Google and instagram and pinterest, and even the grandparents opened their old juno accounts and clicked.  And the ads came. Switch your cell phone plan and save. Update your insurance plan with our new low rates. We are calling you about your expired vehicle warranty. Win Christmas with this flashy electronic gadget. Free shipping on chinchilla lined black leather pants when you spend $100 on fingerless gloves and toe socks. 

And so they clicked. And they were counted. And they felt hollow and empty unless they clicked, like they didn’t count for much anymore. For the half a second it took to click, just as their pointer finger pressed down on the track pad, they felt like they were enough. And then poof, it was gone. Back to the doing and the buying and the list making and the comparing. They stopped reading books for fun. They forgot how to grill a really good steak. They felt awkward with eye contact. They couldn’t remember when to plant the tulips. They squinted under fluorescent lights and breathed stale conditioned air. They looked at all the pictures they clicked and they suddenly felt fat, and lazy, ugly and old. They began to think that the clicks were the only way that they could get any of it back.

And the emperors of power, maybe they thought they’d earned all their money, or maybe they kept their financial accounts in Switzerland or the Caribbean, maybe they thought they were the only ones who could really use the resources well, began to line the pockets of the civil servants with cash, with land, with sweatshops in India, with mediterranean cruises, with bought elections, with chinchilla lined leather pants.

But once, a long time ago, there was a young couple, getting ready for a baby, getting ready for a marriage, getting ready to start a life together, who travelled the eighty miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem, to be registered, to be counted. Mary left her Target nursery registry and her Honda Odyssey, her “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” she left the safest mahogany crib with properly spaced bars and without bumpers or blankets or teddy bears so as to prevent SIDS. She left her pump and her comfortable pajamas and her lanolin cream all behind. They didn’t even upgrade their cell phone plan from the local to the regional coverage.

And so, nine months pregnant, poor Mary waddled through the desert, trying to do as she was told, trying to do what is expected of her by the powers, trying to please the emperor in her own small way, trying to be counted, trying to click all the right links, trying to meet expectations and get an A+ in this mother-of-god-thing, trying not to make Joseph stop every fifteen minutes so she could pee.

And in that tiny town, it is said that Mary gave birth to her child. Without the retracting hospital bed or the ice chips from a plastic pitcher. Without chocolate pudding or that apple juice in those tiny little cups. No lanacane spray. No warm shower or heart monitors. Without a doula or a push present. Without an iv or a petocin drip. Without an epidural. Without the surgical team on standby just in case. Without those cute little onesies she’d ordered from that Etsy shop. She didn’t have a car seat or a college savings account. She didn’t have Waldorf inspired toys or one of those black and white mobiles to hang above the baby to stimulate his brain activity. No parenting classes. No high school diploma or practical degree. Without a room or a bed or even a chair to rest. 

She did have a kind of basement barn, a lower level where folks would keep their animals and tools and lists of things that must be done before the end of the week or before the in-laws come or before the rainy season. With the sound of people stomping above her, dust from the rafters falling with each heavy step, she looked around. And saw what she had.

She had her two hands. And a lot of pain. And moans. And swaying. And blood. And this barn for the hired hands and the beasts of burden. She had sweat and tears and a terrified almost-husband. She had a promise from an angel that she now wonders was all just a first trimester morning sickness delusion. 

And so she did what she had to do. She crouched down in the straw and felt for his head. The soft fontanel and birth waters and blood. And she pushed again. And then she caught her baby. 

Alone and terrified and anonymous in a strange town, a tiny speck of dust amidst the swirling universes, she caught her baby. And she breathed. And she smelled his head. And she rubbed his back until she heard him cry. And then she put him against her chest and showed him his food and thought, this is enough. It’s enough. I don’t have a crib or a video monitor or even a proper blanket. I have a manger, a trough where the animals are fed, and some strips of cloth, and exhaustion. And it is enough. It is enough.

And it was a kind of quiet joy.

And then a bunch of straggling shepherds come and interrupt this quiet joy. And they’re pumped. They’re psyched. They are through the roof. An angel told them that they’d see a baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laying in a manger. And that was enough to get them to leave their watch and bring their sheep and check it out. And then they saw it. Holy crap. The angel was right. There it is! The baby. Just a baby. And it was enough.

And striving to do and be and click all the things for all the powers didn’t seem so important anymore. Comparing ourselves to magazine photos and other’s savings accounts and fancy cars and parents who keep up with their blogs and their exercise and their date nights, begins to fade away. All the pastors with their white teeth and their rock bands and their smoke machines suddenly looked a little tacky. A little overdone. 

God became flesh through a young girl in a basement barn covered in straw and droppings and the wet exhales of sheep and donkeys. And it was enough. 

The fleshy power of the incarnation started the avalanche that someday, someday, will cancel out all the oppressive structures and negative self talk, and sense of failure and self doubts. All the need to amass more stuff, more accolades, more zeroes on our paychecks.

All the small things. All the small, inconsequential, fleshy, grounding, boring things of this world, suddenly had the smell of a new born’s head, a stroke of incarnation, the hint of a God become human, the kind of power that principalities and corporations and governments and terrorist groups will never have. 

The power of the incarnation. The power of enough.

And with that enough, Mary is more powerful than Caesar Augustus and Octavius and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and the whole Walmart corporation and even Jeff Bezos who has seen his wealth skyrocket even more in 2020 directly because of this pandemic. 

Mary became more powerful than all of them. More enough than all of them. Because she took what she had, which was so clearly not enough, and birthed God, who became not enough enough for it to be enough. The incarnation: God becoming not enough enough for it to be enough.

This incarnation became so powerful, in fact, that this fleshy, contracting, sweating, bloody birth began to pull a thread from the tangled sweater of corrupt power structures, so that with every cup of tea and quiet moment and trip to the park and sincere apology and trashy romance novel and potluck and smelly dog fart and mud pie and truce between enemies and up-cycle Etsy shop and roadside lemonade stand, there is enough. Enough for this moment. Enough for right now. Enough to participate in the destruction of the power systems. Enough to see God in all of it. Enough to count. Enough to build community. Even during a pandemic. Even while we sit at our own dining room tables. Even while all we have to connect us is technology. Even when clearly, our enough is not enough.

The incarnation of enough.

Jesus Christ. A tiny baby covered in amniotic fluid, landing with a gentle thump on a dirt floor covered in straw. Laid in a manger. In a barn. Below folks who are upstairs on the internet or switching the laundry or writing the dissertation or drinking the fifth or watching Wheel of Fortune, clicking, clicking, trying to count. Being counted. Trying to be enough. Not realizing that enough is so close, so near, so ready to be welcomed in to the world. 

It’s a quiet kind of joy that doesn’t seem so far away anymore. 

The power of the incarnation.

The power of the incarnation is the power to infuse every inch of our lives with the spirit of God. The power to upend every oppressive social and economic and political structure just by showing up, just by looking around, by refusing to buy what they are selling. By living in to the present moment, just as God has given to us, right here, right now. It is enough.

God came to us as enough. And that makes all of this, all of this heartache and brokenness and fear and loss of this year, enough. It’s enough.

Thanks be to God.