Sermon preached January 31, 2010
Texts: Luke 4:21-30; I Corinthians 13:1-13
There’s nothing you do that can’t be done.
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game.
It’s easy.
All you need is……
All You Need Is Love
Familiar words to many of us. All you need is love – it’s easy. One of the Beatles, Paul McCartney, once said he was very glad that most of The Beatles songs were about peace and love. He continued that tradition in his solo career. One song of his popular when I was in high school was entitled “Silly Love Songs” - - - “love isn’t silly at all.” It isn’t, nor is it really easy.
Silly Love Songs
Let’s go back a couple of millennium. In Nazareth, a hometown boy is making a public appearance. Jesus is in the synagogue and “all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Yet apparently not all were amazed. “Is not this Joseph’s son?” Somehow, because he was familiar, his words seemed less eloquent, less amazing to some. He read Scripture and commented upon it, and the more he spoke, the more irritated the people became. Why should we listen to this guy. We know him. We know his family. One of the lessons of this story is that we can become immune to the power of something when it becomes too familiar, too well-known. We can become tone deaf to words we hear too often, immune to their power and potential.
There may be few better illustrations of that than the very familiar words from I Corinthians 13. Practically every wedding we attend in a church, or where a Christian clergy is officiating uses some of these words. I know I use them often in that context. We can buy posters and wall hangings and plaques with these words on them. But because they are so familiar, we risk missing their power. We risk making I Corinthians 13 some kind of silly love song. But love isn’t silly, and if we really listen, if we open our ears, our hearts, our minds, these words should shake us a little, should challenge us, should shape us and change us.
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. For someone who gets up in front of people to speak a lot, these words challenge. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. For someone who has spent a great deal of time reading, and thinking and learning, these words put learning in a different context, a challenging context. If I give away all my possession, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. O.K., so I haven’t given it all away, but I believe in service, in doing good, and these words challenge all of us who believe in doing good – doing it without love is dangerous.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. I appreciate the Contemporary English Version translation of the last phrase: Love is always supportive, loyal, hopeful, and trusting.
This is love, and when we read these words we should feel challenged to the depth of our souls. This is love, and when we read these words we should know that love wants to mess with us, to change us, to shake us up. This is love.
This is the love with which we are loved. It is fascinating that God makes no appearance in this chapter at all, nor is Jesus mentioned. But we need to read these words in the context of the letter of which they are a part, and this letter is written out of a sense that these people are recipients of God’s grace, God’s love (1:4), and that they have received this in relationship with Jesus as the Christ.
This is love. This is the love with which we are to live. Now living such love is challenging enough in our most intimate relationships. That’s why this chapter is a wonderful reading for weddings. In some ways, there are parts of love that may be even more challenging in our closest relationships. I don’t know about you, but little things can become irritants, and the chances for irritability seem greater at home. So love is a challenge even there.
But Paul was writing not for a wedding. He was writing for a church, a church like this church or any other church. And the church to which Paul was writing was having some problems. That remains true of churches today, but if you think we have problems sometimes, you should read this whole letter again. This church was mired in conflict. The very faith in Jesus Christ that brought this community of people together was being used to divide them. People began developing a hierarchy of spiritual gifts – these gifts made one more spiritual. A dangerous spiritual elitism was forming here, and if you were not among the spiritual elite, you might be excluded from parts of church life. The church was divided among rich and poor members. They would have a church meal, and in this part of the social hall was “the haves”, and they were eating and drinking becoming full and a little tipsy (this was not a Methodist Church); and in that part of the social hall were the people barely getting by, and sharing was not taking place.
Into that conflicted environment come these Spirit-inspired words from Paul. How do we measure deep spirituality – by love! How do we know the Spirit is working in our lives – when we grow in love. Nothing wrong with eloquent speech, or deep learning, or sacrificial giving – these are important, but without love they are next to nothing.
And this is love: patient, kind, rejoices in the truth, supportive, loyal, hopeful, trusting. Where love is active envy and arrogance and resentment and irritability are on the wane.
Listen. Hear. Hear not just with your ears, but also with your heart, your mind, your soul. We are in danger of making these words a silly love song, but love isn’t silly. It is true, all we need is love – but it is this soul-challenging, heart-stretching, Spirit-inspired and spirit inspiring love that we need. In the end, Paul says, “love.”
And while we are thinking about love, let's add the strong word about love that is also in the story about Jesus. The crowd was bothered by the familiarity of this Jesus. They were especially bothered by his reminder to them that the love of God opens arms wider than we are usually comfortable with. You might imagine that the hometown crowd wanted Jesus to say really nice things about them, how growing up with them helped make him such an amazing preacher. I hope he said some of those things in other places. Here Jesus reminds the folks that the God they worship has a love that reaches out beyond the usual boundaries. Elijah reaches out to a widow in Zarephath in Sidon – non-Jewish territory. Elisha heals the leper Naaman, a Syrian. The love with which we are loved challenges us, stretches us, inspires us to love widely and with abandon. In the end, love.
In 1181 in Assisi, Italy Francesco di Pietro Bernadone was born (1181-1226) into a wealthy family. Francesco enjoyed the privileges of wealth. While he was a kind person, he also appreciated fine food, fine clothes, laughter with friends. There was something in him that began calling him to a different kind of life. In 1205, a searching Francesco made a pilgrimage to Rome. There he witnessed incredible splendor and incredible poverty – poverty about which he knew little first hand. Something whispered to him that he needed to know more. Approached by a beggar on the street, Francesco asked if he might trade clothes with him and then he spent the day in Rome as a beggar. Something moves inside the heart of Francesco – love is stirring in new ways.
As he rides back home, Francesco confronts one of his greatest fears – leprosy. This is how one writer describes the situation at the time. Many lepers on the roads around Assisi were frighteningly and pathetically hideous, their skin discolored and their limbs crippled – they had often lost their hair, fingers, and noses; their bleeding or suppurating sores often gave off the stench of putrefying flesh (House, Francis of Assisi, 57). As he rides Francesco spies a leper. Since childhood, he has feared these people. He could simply ignore the man. He could, if he wished, drop a coin as he passed by. Love is stirring in Francesco, a love that will stretch him, that will open his arms wider than he ever imagined. Francesco comes upon the leper and dismounts. He reaches into his purse and hands him a coin. Francesco then takes the hand of the leper and kisses it. The leper gives him a kiss of peace in return. Days later, Francesco takes a large sum of money to the leper hospital and gathering all the inmates together, he distributes the money, kissing the hand of each. Years later, Francesco, St. Francis, would write that this was the time when God was inviting him to a new life. This is love – demanding, life-changing, energizing, soul-challenging, heart-stretching, Spirit-inspired and spirit inspiring love.
Sean Tuohy is a rich, successful Southern white man. He played basketball for Ole Miss, and married an Ole Miss cheerleader. He owns a chain of restaurants. He is a part of a growing evangelical Christian Church in Memphis. His former cheerleader wife, Leigh Ann, grew up with a firm set of beliefs about black people. Her father was a United States Marshall who loathed black people and wanted to pass that attitude on to his daughter. In 1973 when Memphis integrated their schools, Leigh Ann’s father pulled her out of the public school system. When she married Sean, a number of his former basketball teammates were present, some of them black, and her father asked, “Why are all these [niggers] here.”
Love does strange things. God’s love challenges and stretches. This family ended up welcoming into their home a young black man named Michael Oher, age sixteen, Michael - who hadn’t seen his father in years, whose mother was chemically-dependent, who had a sister he hadn’t seen in years, who had had seven addresses and gone to fifteen different schools in his sixteen years of life. He became a part of their family. A year into this unusual relationship, Leigh Ann would tell people who kept asking her about it, “I love him as if I birthed him.” [information from Lewis, The Blind Side, 65, 67-8, 140, 146]
This is love. If we had no other Scripture than I Corinthians 13, it should shake us and rattle us because it challenges us to the core. In the end, love: demanding, life-changing, energizing, soul-challenging, heart-stretching, Spirit-inspired and spirit inspiring love. It isn’t silly and it isn’t easy, but it is all we need. All you need is love. Amen.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Who Are You
Sermon preached January 24, 2010
Text: Luke 4:14-21
After last week, I thought I needed to begin with music that rocked out a bit.
The Who, "Who Are You
Who are you? That was the question his home town people were asking of Jesus – who are you? He chose to answer by quoting a Scripture from his tradition, Isaiah 61. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
With these words Jesus is saying important things about who he is and about the mission which he believes God has called him to. Jesus is a Spirit-person, someone who sought to embody God’s Spirit and to follow the winds of that Spirit. Spirit people tend to their relationship with God, they take time to care for their souls.
Jesus was a Spirit person with a mission, a mission to teach – to proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim release to captives and recovery of sight. Jesus mission went beyond teaching to enacting his teaching by healing and freeing people. There are inner and outer aspects to Jesus mission. He wanted to transform people’s lives from the inside – to free their souls, to help them see life more fully and truthfully, to heal their inner oppression. Jesus also pointed to God’s dream for the world, a dream of a world without oppression – a more just and peaceful world, a world in which the poor and sick were cared for. While he did not create this world completely, he taught that this was God’s dream for the world, the work of God’s Spirit in the world.
Who are you Jesus - - - a Spirit person who wanted to see lives and the world transformed.
The question, “Who are you?” is asked of us, too. It is asked of us as individuals and of us as a church. It is a question we should ask ourselves as a church, a congregation. Who are we?
The United Methodist Church of which we are a part says that the mission of the church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. That is an important part of who we are. We exist to make disciples of Jesus Christ, to make ourselves disciples, and to invite others into the journey of discipleship. We exist to work with each other and with God to make the world different, better. Again, there are inner and outer dimensions to this. We are Spirit people, too, and the Spirit of God is the Spirit of God as we know this in Jesus. As Spirit people, we are to tend to our hearts, minds, souls. We seek ways to be shaped inside by God’s love, God’s grace. But that is not all that being a disciple of Jesus Christ means.
Until 2008, the United Methodist Church said that the mission of the church was to make disciples of Jesus Christ – end of sentence. At that General Conference, the General Conference in Fort Worth the proposal came to change our official understanding of the mission of the church so that it would become – “to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.” While it sounds pretty uncontroversial, it was vigorously debated. People argued, rightly, that a complete understanding of being a disciple included working to transform the world. However, it can become too easy to hear that language of discipleship and think only of inner change. Who are we? We are people on a journey of inner transformation who seek to transform the world.
But making disciples is a broad notion. If we at First United Methodist Church are Spirit people seeking to make disciples and make a difference, we need to take the next step and ask ourselves, what does a disciple look like at First United Methodist Church? Where are we called, more specifically, given our gifts, graces and history, to focus on making a difference in the world? While these may seem like silly questions – what does a disciple of Jesus Christ look like here? – I don’t think they are. Donald Evans, a theological ethicist, in his book Struggle and Fulfillment writes, “Even the New Testament teachings of Jesus and about Jesus… sanction a wide variety of emphases in life and belief” (156). Different Christian communities emphasize different elements of Christian faith and tradition.
I can illustrate this easily by recent news stories. A couple of weeks ago Britt Hume on Fox News, speaking of Tiger Woods, said that Buddhism, which he believed Tiger practices doesn’t offer “the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith.” Hume encouraged Tiger Woods to become Christian. Is that the kind of disciple we seek to form here at First UMC. I don’t think so. While I believe Britt Hume offered his faith perspective in a well-meaning fashion, his words displayed an inadequate understanding of Buddhism and did not seem very sensitive to Tiger Woods as a person. Does he even know if Tiger is Buddhist? We want disciples who can share Christian faith, and share its resources of healing, forgiveness and new life, but we would want them to be respectful and knowledgeable about other religious traditions, and respectful of persons.
After the earthquake in Haiti, Rev. Pat Robertson offered a theological rationale for what had happened, noting that the Haitians had long ago made a pact with the devil that if the devil would help them get rid of the French, they would worship him. Since then, Rev. Robertson offered, Haiti has been cursed. Somehow the kind of disciples we want to produce here don’t see God as narrowly jealous and vengeful and peevish.
So what do disciples of Jesus Christ look like here at First UMC? In answering this questions I am relying on my own thoughts and observations and on feedback from our recent church conference. Disciples of Jesus Christ here at First UMC are welcoming and inclusive – we work to keep barriers from getting in the way of community here – barriers of age, race, background, orientation. Disciples of Jesus Christ here are committed to growth – we see life as a journey. Disciples of Jesus Christ here want to bring out the best in each other, affirm our gifts. Disciples of Jesus Christ here ask questions – we want a faith that appeals to head, heart and hands, one that is open to mystery and complexity. Disciples of Jesus Christ here really want to make a difference in the world. We are very United Methodist in that. If anything, I think we can be tempted to short-change the inner parts of discipleship. I want to keep ever before us statements like this from Donald Evans: The variety of issues in adult life should not be evaded. The person who is immersed in political activism or progressing in meditation may also be struggling against a terrible inner despair. (Struggle and Fulfillment, 158)
Disciples here have a deep desire to make a difference in the world. We are compassionate and seek to grow in that compassion and live more compassionately. We are socially conscious and seek to not only help the hungry but change systems so that there is less hunger in the world. The toughest question we need to ask again and again is knowing that there is always more good in the world that needs doing than we can do, where is God calling us with our gifts, graces and history to work to make a difference. We have identified some areas like our ministry with Lake Superior Elementary School, our participation in the CHUM Gabriel Project, our work with the kids from Northwoods Children’s Home, our music program which involves a range of persons from children to adults and styles from contemporary to classical to jazz. We always need to ask what next and what more.
Who are we? I have been trying to answer that question a little bit, and we need to keep asking that. As we grow in our self-understanding as a congregation we will find new ways to grow in making disciples and making a difference. One final note. We can paint a nice picture of who we are, but we know that we won’t always live up to that picture. We see life as a journey and sometimes we stray along the way. We are also a community of faith that trusts in God’s love, grace and forgiveness. God accompanies us all along the way as we seek to make disciples of ourselves and others and as we seek to make a difference in our world.
Who are we? We are disciples of Jesus Christ.
Who are we? We are Spirit people tending to our inner lives.
Who are we? We are Christian seekers on a spiritual journey.
Who are we? We are a welcoming and open people.
Who are we? We are a compassionate people.
Who are we? We seek justice and a better world.
Who are we? We are First United Methodist Church, a people on a journey of making disciples and making a difference and we welcome any who wish to join us along the way. Amen.
Text: Luke 4:14-21
After last week, I thought I needed to begin with music that rocked out a bit.
The Who, "Who Are You
Who are you? That was the question his home town people were asking of Jesus – who are you? He chose to answer by quoting a Scripture from his tradition, Isaiah 61. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
With these words Jesus is saying important things about who he is and about the mission which he believes God has called him to. Jesus is a Spirit-person, someone who sought to embody God’s Spirit and to follow the winds of that Spirit. Spirit people tend to their relationship with God, they take time to care for their souls.
Jesus was a Spirit person with a mission, a mission to teach – to proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim release to captives and recovery of sight. Jesus mission went beyond teaching to enacting his teaching by healing and freeing people. There are inner and outer aspects to Jesus mission. He wanted to transform people’s lives from the inside – to free their souls, to help them see life more fully and truthfully, to heal their inner oppression. Jesus also pointed to God’s dream for the world, a dream of a world without oppression – a more just and peaceful world, a world in which the poor and sick were cared for. While he did not create this world completely, he taught that this was God’s dream for the world, the work of God’s Spirit in the world.
Who are you Jesus - - - a Spirit person who wanted to see lives and the world transformed.
The question, “Who are you?” is asked of us, too. It is asked of us as individuals and of us as a church. It is a question we should ask ourselves as a church, a congregation. Who are we?
The United Methodist Church of which we are a part says that the mission of the church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. That is an important part of who we are. We exist to make disciples of Jesus Christ, to make ourselves disciples, and to invite others into the journey of discipleship. We exist to work with each other and with God to make the world different, better. Again, there are inner and outer dimensions to this. We are Spirit people, too, and the Spirit of God is the Spirit of God as we know this in Jesus. As Spirit people, we are to tend to our hearts, minds, souls. We seek ways to be shaped inside by God’s love, God’s grace. But that is not all that being a disciple of Jesus Christ means.
Until 2008, the United Methodist Church said that the mission of the church was to make disciples of Jesus Christ – end of sentence. At that General Conference, the General Conference in Fort Worth the proposal came to change our official understanding of the mission of the church so that it would become – “to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.” While it sounds pretty uncontroversial, it was vigorously debated. People argued, rightly, that a complete understanding of being a disciple included working to transform the world. However, it can become too easy to hear that language of discipleship and think only of inner change. Who are we? We are people on a journey of inner transformation who seek to transform the world.
But making disciples is a broad notion. If we at First United Methodist Church are Spirit people seeking to make disciples and make a difference, we need to take the next step and ask ourselves, what does a disciple look like at First United Methodist Church? Where are we called, more specifically, given our gifts, graces and history, to focus on making a difference in the world? While these may seem like silly questions – what does a disciple of Jesus Christ look like here? – I don’t think they are. Donald Evans, a theological ethicist, in his book Struggle and Fulfillment writes, “Even the New Testament teachings of Jesus and about Jesus… sanction a wide variety of emphases in life and belief” (156). Different Christian communities emphasize different elements of Christian faith and tradition.
I can illustrate this easily by recent news stories. A couple of weeks ago Britt Hume on Fox News, speaking of Tiger Woods, said that Buddhism, which he believed Tiger practices doesn’t offer “the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith.” Hume encouraged Tiger Woods to become Christian. Is that the kind of disciple we seek to form here at First UMC. I don’t think so. While I believe Britt Hume offered his faith perspective in a well-meaning fashion, his words displayed an inadequate understanding of Buddhism and did not seem very sensitive to Tiger Woods as a person. Does he even know if Tiger is Buddhist? We want disciples who can share Christian faith, and share its resources of healing, forgiveness and new life, but we would want them to be respectful and knowledgeable about other religious traditions, and respectful of persons.
After the earthquake in Haiti, Rev. Pat Robertson offered a theological rationale for what had happened, noting that the Haitians had long ago made a pact with the devil that if the devil would help them get rid of the French, they would worship him. Since then, Rev. Robertson offered, Haiti has been cursed. Somehow the kind of disciples we want to produce here don’t see God as narrowly jealous and vengeful and peevish.
So what do disciples of Jesus Christ look like here at First UMC? In answering this questions I am relying on my own thoughts and observations and on feedback from our recent church conference. Disciples of Jesus Christ here at First UMC are welcoming and inclusive – we work to keep barriers from getting in the way of community here – barriers of age, race, background, orientation. Disciples of Jesus Christ here are committed to growth – we see life as a journey. Disciples of Jesus Christ here want to bring out the best in each other, affirm our gifts. Disciples of Jesus Christ here ask questions – we want a faith that appeals to head, heart and hands, one that is open to mystery and complexity. Disciples of Jesus Christ here really want to make a difference in the world. We are very United Methodist in that. If anything, I think we can be tempted to short-change the inner parts of discipleship. I want to keep ever before us statements like this from Donald Evans: The variety of issues in adult life should not be evaded. The person who is immersed in political activism or progressing in meditation may also be struggling against a terrible inner despair. (Struggle and Fulfillment, 158)
Disciples here have a deep desire to make a difference in the world. We are compassionate and seek to grow in that compassion and live more compassionately. We are socially conscious and seek to not only help the hungry but change systems so that there is less hunger in the world. The toughest question we need to ask again and again is knowing that there is always more good in the world that needs doing than we can do, where is God calling us with our gifts, graces and history to work to make a difference. We have identified some areas like our ministry with Lake Superior Elementary School, our participation in the CHUM Gabriel Project, our work with the kids from Northwoods Children’s Home, our music program which involves a range of persons from children to adults and styles from contemporary to classical to jazz. We always need to ask what next and what more.
Who are we? I have been trying to answer that question a little bit, and we need to keep asking that. As we grow in our self-understanding as a congregation we will find new ways to grow in making disciples and making a difference. One final note. We can paint a nice picture of who we are, but we know that we won’t always live up to that picture. We see life as a journey and sometimes we stray along the way. We are also a community of faith that trusts in God’s love, grace and forgiveness. God accompanies us all along the way as we seek to make disciples of ourselves and others and as we seek to make a difference in our world.
Who are we? We are disciples of Jesus Christ.
Who are we? We are Spirit people tending to our inner lives.
Who are we? We are Christian seekers on a spiritual journey.
Who are we? We are a welcoming and open people.
Who are we? We are a compassionate people.
Who are we? We seek justice and a better world.
Who are we? We are First United Methodist Church, a people on a journey of making disciples and making a difference and we welcome any who wish to join us along the way. Amen.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Roll Out the Barrel
Sermon preached on January 17, 2010
Text: John 2:1-11
I have spoken of the transforming power of God’s Spirit and Christian faith. Here is some evidence. (Play the first part of “Beer Barrel Polka”).
The Andrews Sisters "Beer Barrel Polka"
You see, until this week, I had absolutely no polka music in my personal music library. None. Zip. Nada. Then I came up with this sermon title and I was just going to use it as a title, but during the course of the week I have had enough people ask me about the song that I sought it out to play it. But now my whole self-understanding is in the midst of transformation. I am now a guy who owns polka music – “Polka Till You Drop.” Could colorful suspenders and funny little hats be far behind?
Now to say I had no polka music in my library is not to say that I had never heard the music before. My growing up years had more than their share of polka music. As a kid I attended a lot of weddings of my dad’s cousins – he was the oldest of fifty some. Most were Catholic weddings, about ninety minutes long, I think – where you had the wedding followed by a mass. The service seemed kind of long, but that was only part of the day – later in the afternoon, family and friends gathered, often in the church school gym, for a meal, and in the evening there was dancing - - - and yes, we danced the polka. It was a lot of fun, though I never bought any polka music until just this week!
Thinking back on all this, you know, there seemed to have been a disconnect between the church and the school gym – serious stuff here, fun stuff there. But I think that in our lives and in our faith, we need to see the two intertwined, we need to seek joy, to welcome joy, in the midst of our deep and serious work.
The challenges in our world are many, deep, painful and we take them seriously. We grapple within with wounds from our past, with patterns of behavior that don’t serve us well but are hard to break, with patterns of thought that create in us more stress and heartache than is necessary. A few weeks ago I confessed to my struggles with “awfulizing” – taking a minor disappointment or setback and making it a sign of the apocalypse. After church, many others confessed to that same struggle.
We grapple in our world with challenges that can leave us breathless. On the weekend when we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. we need to acknowledge the on-going struggle in our society with racial reconciliation. The evidence that we are not where we need to be is all around: Harry Reid, Senate Majority leader quoted in a recently published book as remarking that President Obama was more electable because he was a light-skinned black and spoke well; former governor of Illinois, Rob Blagoavich saying in an interview that he was “blacker than Obama.” What does that mean? We are still trying to figure out how to live together amidst our difference. Then, of course, there is Haiti - - - 50 plus thousand dead from an earthquake, bodies being bulldozed into mass graves because that it all that is possible, the entire thing almost too devastating to comprehend.
Still joy – that’s one of the issues our gospel reading puts before us – extravagant, overflowing joy, joy rooted in trust in God – trust being the essence of faith. As I was thinking about the development of this sermon earlier in the week, here it was that I was going to fly into joy, yet I must confess my heart is heavy today, my heart and soul are not quite at the “taking flight” stage. This week we celebrated the lives and mourned the losses of Nath Beck and Barbara Ballou. Since December 1, I have led such times of celebration and grieving (funerals/memorial services) seven times. The depth of the tragedy in Haiti has hit close to home. Since they moved to Duluth, I have had the pleasure of getting to know April and Judd Larson, she the pastor at First Lutheran and he the interim pastor at Our Savior’s Lutheran. Thursday it was announced that their son, Benjamin, a seminary student who was in Haiti to work with a Lutheran Church there, lost his life in the earthquake. I can only dimly imagine their grief and sorrow.
Still, this is the text for today, and still I think joy has something powerful to say. Because of Jesus, there was joy in Cana at a wedding feast. The dancing continued. Because of Jesus in our lives, there can be joy even in a tragic world; there can be joy even as we seek to be healers in a wounded world. Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983) was an Orthodox priest , teacher and writer. In his journals, Schmemann wrote: I think God will forgive everything except lack of joy…. Joy is not one of the “components” of Christianity, it’s the tonality of Christianity that penetrates everything. Hyperbole? Yes, but the point is well taken – the basic tone of Christian faith is not dour determination, it is not passive piety, it is joy - - - joy even in a tragic world. John 2 invites us to say “yes” to gladness and joy, even as Jesus said “yes” to Mary when she asked his help in keeping the party going. We can find joy because we trust that the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus is still at work in the world working toward healing, reconciliation, compassion, care, beauty, justice, and love. Jesus is still at work in the world and no earthquake, however devastating, no action however hurtful, no injustice however widespread, can finally defeat this tenacious gracious Spirit of God. We say “yes” to gladness and joy, when that joy is flying and dancing. When our hearts are aching we say “yes” to a joy that soothes and sustains us. And we need joy for that. Joy sustains us in difficult times. Joy helps us get through. Joy awaits us on the other side of disappointment and sorrow and joy can be part of the healing process.
Always, always, always we need to connect the church which takes God’s call to healing and hope seriously with the dance in the gym that celebrates life and nurtures joy.
Let me quickly suggest three possibilities for keeping that connection strong – the connection between the seriousness of our faith and the joy of our faith.
Pay attention. Take time. Notice. Life is often hard. Tragedy strikes. We will be disappointed in life often. Psychoanalyst Michael Eigen writes, “it is not possible to live without injury” (Conversations, 55). He also writes, “we live from wound to wound and joy to joy” (Coming Through the Whirlwind, 179). Joy is there. There is beauty in the world. We need to slow down and take the time to notice, and to celebrate it. We don’t deny the tragedy and pain in the world. I never related well with the Christians I would sometimes see on television who would say something like, “Since I met Jesus my life has been just wonderful.” Life is sometimes painful and difficult for people of faith, but what our faith gives us is an assurance that God is still at work for good in the world and we can see that if we pay attention – take time to notice beauty and goodness and generosity and kindness and caring. Such noticing is a form of prayer
Create small joys. Sustaining joy is fed by the small joys we can create in our lives. You may have noticed that I talk about music, maybe too much, but music is a source of small joy for me. Sometimes it does my soul good to “get lost in rock and roll and drift away” (Dobie Gray). The music that creates joy for me can be mellow: Springsteen, “Lonesome Day;” Dylan, “Shelter from the Storm;” The Beatles, “In My Life,” Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Dear Prudence;” Miles Davis, “Blue in Green,” “My Ship,” “Miles Ahead;’ John Coltrane, “Naima,” “After the Rain.” It can be raucous: Louis Armstrong, “West End Blues;” Brubeck, “Take Five;” The Who, “Behind Blue Eyes,” “Pinball Wizard.” No polka music yet on this list that almost always guarantees me joy. Poetry, too, functions as a source of joy for me. We can create small joys for others. Think of the small joy that comes with a kind word, a gentle smile, a warm embrace, giving a helping hand. Creating small joys is also a form of prayer.
And when we are trying to tackle significant issues like poverty, racism, injustice, violence, may joy be our tonality. I have always liked the quote attributed to the anarchist Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” God invites us to work with God in transforming the world. It is serious stuff, but it can be done with joy – connecting the sanctuary with the dancing in the gym.
So Jesus shows up at a wedding and creates more joy – wildly extravagant joy. Jesus shows up in our lives and lets us know the importance of joy, and give us the ground for it – the on-going work of his Spirit in the world. We trust that. As followers of Jesus, we know its gonna be all right, even when it is hard. Roll out the barrel. Amen.
Text: John 2:1-11
I have spoken of the transforming power of God’s Spirit and Christian faith. Here is some evidence. (Play the first part of “Beer Barrel Polka”).
The Andrews Sisters "Beer Barrel Polka"
You see, until this week, I had absolutely no polka music in my personal music library. None. Zip. Nada. Then I came up with this sermon title and I was just going to use it as a title, but during the course of the week I have had enough people ask me about the song that I sought it out to play it. But now my whole self-understanding is in the midst of transformation. I am now a guy who owns polka music – “Polka Till You Drop.” Could colorful suspenders and funny little hats be far behind?
Now to say I had no polka music in my library is not to say that I had never heard the music before. My growing up years had more than their share of polka music. As a kid I attended a lot of weddings of my dad’s cousins – he was the oldest of fifty some. Most were Catholic weddings, about ninety minutes long, I think – where you had the wedding followed by a mass. The service seemed kind of long, but that was only part of the day – later in the afternoon, family and friends gathered, often in the church school gym, for a meal, and in the evening there was dancing - - - and yes, we danced the polka. It was a lot of fun, though I never bought any polka music until just this week!
Thinking back on all this, you know, there seemed to have been a disconnect between the church and the school gym – serious stuff here, fun stuff there. But I think that in our lives and in our faith, we need to see the two intertwined, we need to seek joy, to welcome joy, in the midst of our deep and serious work.
The challenges in our world are many, deep, painful and we take them seriously. We grapple within with wounds from our past, with patterns of behavior that don’t serve us well but are hard to break, with patterns of thought that create in us more stress and heartache than is necessary. A few weeks ago I confessed to my struggles with “awfulizing” – taking a minor disappointment or setback and making it a sign of the apocalypse. After church, many others confessed to that same struggle.
We grapple in our world with challenges that can leave us breathless. On the weekend when we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. we need to acknowledge the on-going struggle in our society with racial reconciliation. The evidence that we are not where we need to be is all around: Harry Reid, Senate Majority leader quoted in a recently published book as remarking that President Obama was more electable because he was a light-skinned black and spoke well; former governor of Illinois, Rob Blagoavich saying in an interview that he was “blacker than Obama.” What does that mean? We are still trying to figure out how to live together amidst our difference. Then, of course, there is Haiti - - - 50 plus thousand dead from an earthquake, bodies being bulldozed into mass graves because that it all that is possible, the entire thing almost too devastating to comprehend.
Still joy – that’s one of the issues our gospel reading puts before us – extravagant, overflowing joy, joy rooted in trust in God – trust being the essence of faith. As I was thinking about the development of this sermon earlier in the week, here it was that I was going to fly into joy, yet I must confess my heart is heavy today, my heart and soul are not quite at the “taking flight” stage. This week we celebrated the lives and mourned the losses of Nath Beck and Barbara Ballou. Since December 1, I have led such times of celebration and grieving (funerals/memorial services) seven times. The depth of the tragedy in Haiti has hit close to home. Since they moved to Duluth, I have had the pleasure of getting to know April and Judd Larson, she the pastor at First Lutheran and he the interim pastor at Our Savior’s Lutheran. Thursday it was announced that their son, Benjamin, a seminary student who was in Haiti to work with a Lutheran Church there, lost his life in the earthquake. I can only dimly imagine their grief and sorrow.
Still, this is the text for today, and still I think joy has something powerful to say. Because of Jesus, there was joy in Cana at a wedding feast. The dancing continued. Because of Jesus in our lives, there can be joy even in a tragic world; there can be joy even as we seek to be healers in a wounded world. Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983) was an Orthodox priest , teacher and writer. In his journals, Schmemann wrote: I think God will forgive everything except lack of joy…. Joy is not one of the “components” of Christianity, it’s the tonality of Christianity that penetrates everything. Hyperbole? Yes, but the point is well taken – the basic tone of Christian faith is not dour determination, it is not passive piety, it is joy - - - joy even in a tragic world. John 2 invites us to say “yes” to gladness and joy, even as Jesus said “yes” to Mary when she asked his help in keeping the party going. We can find joy because we trust that the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus is still at work in the world working toward healing, reconciliation, compassion, care, beauty, justice, and love. Jesus is still at work in the world and no earthquake, however devastating, no action however hurtful, no injustice however widespread, can finally defeat this tenacious gracious Spirit of God. We say “yes” to gladness and joy, when that joy is flying and dancing. When our hearts are aching we say “yes” to a joy that soothes and sustains us. And we need joy for that. Joy sustains us in difficult times. Joy helps us get through. Joy awaits us on the other side of disappointment and sorrow and joy can be part of the healing process.
Always, always, always we need to connect the church which takes God’s call to healing and hope seriously with the dance in the gym that celebrates life and nurtures joy.
Let me quickly suggest three possibilities for keeping that connection strong – the connection between the seriousness of our faith and the joy of our faith.
Pay attention. Take time. Notice. Life is often hard. Tragedy strikes. We will be disappointed in life often. Psychoanalyst Michael Eigen writes, “it is not possible to live without injury” (Conversations, 55). He also writes, “we live from wound to wound and joy to joy” (Coming Through the Whirlwind, 179). Joy is there. There is beauty in the world. We need to slow down and take the time to notice, and to celebrate it. We don’t deny the tragedy and pain in the world. I never related well with the Christians I would sometimes see on television who would say something like, “Since I met Jesus my life has been just wonderful.” Life is sometimes painful and difficult for people of faith, but what our faith gives us is an assurance that God is still at work for good in the world and we can see that if we pay attention – take time to notice beauty and goodness and generosity and kindness and caring. Such noticing is a form of prayer
Create small joys. Sustaining joy is fed by the small joys we can create in our lives. You may have noticed that I talk about music, maybe too much, but music is a source of small joy for me. Sometimes it does my soul good to “get lost in rock and roll and drift away” (Dobie Gray). The music that creates joy for me can be mellow: Springsteen, “Lonesome Day;” Dylan, “Shelter from the Storm;” The Beatles, “In My Life,” Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Dear Prudence;” Miles Davis, “Blue in Green,” “My Ship,” “Miles Ahead;’ John Coltrane, “Naima,” “After the Rain.” It can be raucous: Louis Armstrong, “West End Blues;” Brubeck, “Take Five;” The Who, “Behind Blue Eyes,” “Pinball Wizard.” No polka music yet on this list that almost always guarantees me joy. Poetry, too, functions as a source of joy for me. We can create small joys for others. Think of the small joy that comes with a kind word, a gentle smile, a warm embrace, giving a helping hand. Creating small joys is also a form of prayer.
And when we are trying to tackle significant issues like poverty, racism, injustice, violence, may joy be our tonality. I have always liked the quote attributed to the anarchist Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” God invites us to work with God in transforming the world. It is serious stuff, but it can be done with joy – connecting the sanctuary with the dancing in the gym.
So Jesus shows up at a wedding and creates more joy – wildly extravagant joy. Jesus shows up in our lives and lets us know the importance of joy, and give us the ground for it – the on-going work of his Spirit in the world. We trust that. As followers of Jesus, we know its gonna be all right, even when it is hard. Roll out the barrel. Amen.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
All Wet
Sermon preached January 10, 2010
Texts: Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3: 15-17, 21-22
One of the things I appreciated about the old television show, All in the Family, was the way it would address religious themes from time to time. One such episode was about baptism, and it aired in February 1976 (season six, episode 22, 23 February 1976). Archie, the deeply committed Protestant who never went to church himself, is determined to have his grandson Joey baptized. His son-in-law, Michael, does not want this for his child as he is committed to being non-religious. Archie concocts a plan to take Joey to the church with his wife, Edith, while they are babysitting. Edith wants nothing to do with this plan, even after Archie tries to convince her. “You gotta use force, that’s the Christian way.” Foiled temporarily, Archie is undeterred. He sneaks off by himself with Joey, and then the pastor at the church refuses to baptize the baby, Archie takes matters into his own hands and baptizes Joey himself, ending with a memorable benediction – “I hope that took, Lord, cause when I get home they’re gonna kill me.” In his views about and method for baptism, we might say that Archie Bunker was “all wet” - - - pun intended.
In my first pastorate there was a woman about my age who was going through a transition in her faith. We had a number of conversations and it became clear to her that her theology fit more comfortably within the local Baptist Church. She decided to join that church, and even though she had already been baptized in that United Methodist Church, and, in fact, was twelve when she was so baptized, the Baptist pastor told her she would need to be baptized again with a “believer’s baptism.” I thought his theology was all wet – pun intended.
Yet when we are honest with ourselves we might admit that baptism is a bit of a puzzle. We can wonder why such a simple act carries with it so much feeling and creates so much controversy and debate. We wonder, but we are also grasped with wonder by baptism. There is something special about this simple act of being touched by water, something about it that marks our lives. We are often baptized not long after we come into the world, and next week again we will baptize a young child. When our life here is ended, baptism is also present. The beginning words to our traditional funeral liturgy make reference to baptism. “Dying, Christ destroyed our death. Rising, Christ restored our life. Christ will come again in glory. As in baptism ___________ put on Chirst so in Christ may _________ be clothed with glory.” Baptism marks our lives from beginning to end. It is significant, yet its significance is shrouded in mystery.
This morning, I don’t want to take away all the mystery from baptism. Part of the power of art or ritual is that there are mysterious and indefinable qualities that touch us deeply. Still, a modicum of understanding is also helpful so on this day when we read about the baptism of Jesus, let’s reflect for a few moments on baptism.
What is baptism about? What makes it meaningful and significant?
God welcomes. Actually, part of Archie Bunker’s theology of baptism makes a little bit of sense. “Every kid needs to be something.” Every human being should know they are something, that they are special, that they matter just because they are. Baptism is the way the church, in the name of the God we know in Jesus, communicates that. When the pastor extends arms to hold the child, or extends hands out to an adult, it is symbolic of the way God reaches out to all. “I have called you by name, you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1). The words spoken at the baptism of Jesus – “You are beloved” are spoken to each of us. When the community welcomes the baptized person, it extends the welcoming of God, and I love the way we do that here with children with a quilt to match our words of welcome.
God accompanies. “Do not fear, for I am with you” (Isaiah 43:5). Just as we are made of water within, and surrounded by water on this planet, so God is with us within and without. God rejoices with us in our joys – tears of joy, a water image. God wills and whispers our well-being. God cries with us in our sorrow – another water image. God is with us in the difficult times – “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you” (Isaiah 43:2). When we lose our way, God forgives and helps restore us – an image of cleansing, yet another water image.
All this happens by God-with-us, by the presence of God as Holy Spirit. In some Christian traditions, there is a claim made that God’s Spirit needs to come in a different way – that there is a strong distinction between water baptism and baptism in the Holy Spirit. While we don’t deny that God’s Spirit can touch our lives more or less powerfully throughout our lives, we affirm that as in Jesus’ baptism, the Spirit of God comes into our lives meaningfully and powerfully at baptism.
This is pretty powerful stuff. How do we expect a little child, someone without words, to understand it? We don’t. Nor do we really expect the adults baptized to fully understand it. While I understand the logic of believer’s baptism – that a person should be willing and able to accept faith for themselves as a condition of being baptized, I disagree with a major premise – that baptism is most about understanding. There is something beyond our full comprehension about God. God’s grace is not dependent upon our intellectual ability, but is there for us before our awareness of it and beyond our full comprehension of it. That’s the logic behind our church’s practice of infant baptism.
Baptism reminds us that God in Jesus Christ welcomes us, accompanies us along life’s journey – beginning to end - - - rejoicing with us, weeping with us, whispering to us direction for our well-being and the well-being of the world, forgiving us, and giving us new starts and second chances. We are God’s all wet people – not all wet in the manner of being mistaken or all wrong - - - but all wet in that baptism marks our lives from birth to death. We are God’s all wet people dedicated to living out our identity and the vows made at our baptism.
Those vows are powerful guidelines for our lives. “Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world and repent of your sin?” Weird question, I know – but when I think of racism, of all the oppressive things human beings have done to one another based on religion, skin color, ethnic identity, orientation I can relate to something like “spiritual forces of wickedness” and “evil powers.” I also see how people get caught in patterns of behavior that do harm to themselves and others. We can get caught up in forces of wickedness and harmful behaviors and need to turn – that’s what repent means.
“Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?” God gives us freedom and power – will we use it for good? That’s the challenge to God’s all wet people.
“Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior, put your whole trust in his grace and promise to serve him as Lord in union with the Church which Christ has opened to all people?” We miss the mark from time to time and need forgiveness, the forgiveness taught and shared by Jesus. We trust in God’s grace experienced in Christ. We pledge our lives to being Christlike, and we do that together with others.
United Methodist Bishop and former dean of the Chapel at Duke Divinity School Will Willimon tells the story of growing up in South Carolina. When he would leave the house, his mother would say to him, “Will, remember who you are.” Today, remember who you are – God beloved, all wet with the waters of baptism, pledged to use our freedom and power well.
It is said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. Well, the journey of our life in faith begins with a splash, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to send ripples of love, freedom, compassion, care and justice from that moment on. Amen.
Texts: Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3: 15-17, 21-22
One of the things I appreciated about the old television show, All in the Family, was the way it would address religious themes from time to time. One such episode was about baptism, and it aired in February 1976 (season six, episode 22, 23 February 1976). Archie, the deeply committed Protestant who never went to church himself, is determined to have his grandson Joey baptized. His son-in-law, Michael, does not want this for his child as he is committed to being non-religious. Archie concocts a plan to take Joey to the church with his wife, Edith, while they are babysitting. Edith wants nothing to do with this plan, even after Archie tries to convince her. “You gotta use force, that’s the Christian way.” Foiled temporarily, Archie is undeterred. He sneaks off by himself with Joey, and then the pastor at the church refuses to baptize the baby, Archie takes matters into his own hands and baptizes Joey himself, ending with a memorable benediction – “I hope that took, Lord, cause when I get home they’re gonna kill me.” In his views about and method for baptism, we might say that Archie Bunker was “all wet” - - - pun intended.
In my first pastorate there was a woman about my age who was going through a transition in her faith. We had a number of conversations and it became clear to her that her theology fit more comfortably within the local Baptist Church. She decided to join that church, and even though she had already been baptized in that United Methodist Church, and, in fact, was twelve when she was so baptized, the Baptist pastor told her she would need to be baptized again with a “believer’s baptism.” I thought his theology was all wet – pun intended.
Yet when we are honest with ourselves we might admit that baptism is a bit of a puzzle. We can wonder why such a simple act carries with it so much feeling and creates so much controversy and debate. We wonder, but we are also grasped with wonder by baptism. There is something special about this simple act of being touched by water, something about it that marks our lives. We are often baptized not long after we come into the world, and next week again we will baptize a young child. When our life here is ended, baptism is also present. The beginning words to our traditional funeral liturgy make reference to baptism. “Dying, Christ destroyed our death. Rising, Christ restored our life. Christ will come again in glory. As in baptism ___________ put on Chirst so in Christ may _________ be clothed with glory.” Baptism marks our lives from beginning to end. It is significant, yet its significance is shrouded in mystery.
This morning, I don’t want to take away all the mystery from baptism. Part of the power of art or ritual is that there are mysterious and indefinable qualities that touch us deeply. Still, a modicum of understanding is also helpful so on this day when we read about the baptism of Jesus, let’s reflect for a few moments on baptism.
What is baptism about? What makes it meaningful and significant?
God welcomes. Actually, part of Archie Bunker’s theology of baptism makes a little bit of sense. “Every kid needs to be something.” Every human being should know they are something, that they are special, that they matter just because they are. Baptism is the way the church, in the name of the God we know in Jesus, communicates that. When the pastor extends arms to hold the child, or extends hands out to an adult, it is symbolic of the way God reaches out to all. “I have called you by name, you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1). The words spoken at the baptism of Jesus – “You are beloved” are spoken to each of us. When the community welcomes the baptized person, it extends the welcoming of God, and I love the way we do that here with children with a quilt to match our words of welcome.
God accompanies. “Do not fear, for I am with you” (Isaiah 43:5). Just as we are made of water within, and surrounded by water on this planet, so God is with us within and without. God rejoices with us in our joys – tears of joy, a water image. God wills and whispers our well-being. God cries with us in our sorrow – another water image. God is with us in the difficult times – “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you” (Isaiah 43:2). When we lose our way, God forgives and helps restore us – an image of cleansing, yet another water image.
All this happens by God-with-us, by the presence of God as Holy Spirit. In some Christian traditions, there is a claim made that God’s Spirit needs to come in a different way – that there is a strong distinction between water baptism and baptism in the Holy Spirit. While we don’t deny that God’s Spirit can touch our lives more or less powerfully throughout our lives, we affirm that as in Jesus’ baptism, the Spirit of God comes into our lives meaningfully and powerfully at baptism.
This is pretty powerful stuff. How do we expect a little child, someone without words, to understand it? We don’t. Nor do we really expect the adults baptized to fully understand it. While I understand the logic of believer’s baptism – that a person should be willing and able to accept faith for themselves as a condition of being baptized, I disagree with a major premise – that baptism is most about understanding. There is something beyond our full comprehension about God. God’s grace is not dependent upon our intellectual ability, but is there for us before our awareness of it and beyond our full comprehension of it. That’s the logic behind our church’s practice of infant baptism.
Baptism reminds us that God in Jesus Christ welcomes us, accompanies us along life’s journey – beginning to end - - - rejoicing with us, weeping with us, whispering to us direction for our well-being and the well-being of the world, forgiving us, and giving us new starts and second chances. We are God’s all wet people – not all wet in the manner of being mistaken or all wrong - - - but all wet in that baptism marks our lives from birth to death. We are God’s all wet people dedicated to living out our identity and the vows made at our baptism.
Those vows are powerful guidelines for our lives. “Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world and repent of your sin?” Weird question, I know – but when I think of racism, of all the oppressive things human beings have done to one another based on religion, skin color, ethnic identity, orientation I can relate to something like “spiritual forces of wickedness” and “evil powers.” I also see how people get caught in patterns of behavior that do harm to themselves and others. We can get caught up in forces of wickedness and harmful behaviors and need to turn – that’s what repent means.
“Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?” God gives us freedom and power – will we use it for good? That’s the challenge to God’s all wet people.
“Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior, put your whole trust in his grace and promise to serve him as Lord in union with the Church which Christ has opened to all people?” We miss the mark from time to time and need forgiveness, the forgiveness taught and shared by Jesus. We trust in God’s grace experienced in Christ. We pledge our lives to being Christlike, and we do that together with others.
United Methodist Bishop and former dean of the Chapel at Duke Divinity School Will Willimon tells the story of growing up in South Carolina. When he would leave the house, his mother would say to him, “Will, remember who you are.” Today, remember who you are – God beloved, all wet with the waters of baptism, pledged to use our freedom and power well.
It is said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. Well, the journey of our life in faith begins with a splash, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to send ripples of love, freedom, compassion, care and justice from that moment on. Amen.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
One Way or Another
Sermon preached January 3, 2010
Texts: Isaiah 60:1-6; Matthew 2:1-12
“We Three Kings” may be the traditional soundtrack to the story of the wise men, but I think this song could also serve as a soundtrack to the story. Play: “The Seeker” The Who
The Who, "The Seeker"
The Magi, the wise men are religious seekers. The wise men were trying to find one way or another, in one place or another, wisdom, the Divine, the Spirit, God. They followed a star that led them to Jesus, found him, then returned home.
Being a religious seeker is nothing new, I guess. Yet seekers have gained in prominence in recent years. In the Pew Forum survey on religious affiliation in the United States released in 2009, the fastest growing group was persons unaffiliated with any faith tradition (16.1% of the population). But interestingly about a third of that group identifies themselves as “religious unaffiliated.” 70 % of the unaffiliated believe in God and a whopping 92% believe in God. Religious seeking seems a growing phenomenon. While doing some research for this sermon I found an on-line blog written by a twenty-something woman in which she wrote: “I’ve been thinking and searching a lot lately for something to believe in. I need something to understand, something to place confidence in.” That is pure seeker language.
To those who are seeking, the Christian faith offers Jesus, the Jesus the seeking wise men found years ago. The essence of Christian faith is that God can be found in the life and teaching of Jesus, that the essence of God is love, and that the life of Jesus also serves as a model for what living in response to God is like. Christian faith offers resources that are true to life – love heals and our world needs healing, love runs into roadblocks because it threatens what is unloving (notice the fear of Herod in this story), love triumphs (after the crucifixion, resurrection). Christian faith offers resources that are true for life, helping us live more lovingly. “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.”
So we who are Christian, who have found Jesus, are our seeking days done? I don’t think so. There is still something of the adventurous spirit of the seeker that should be ours. One might say that Christian faith gives us a map, but the territory remains open for exploration, for adventure, for seeking. As Christians we are also seekers, not unaffiliated seekers, pure seekers, but seekers nonetheless. We realize that the God we know in Jesus Christ can be explored for a lifetime.
There is an old story about a billboard that read: “Jesus is the Answer.” Underneath someone had spray painted, “What’s the Question?” As Christians we say, “Jesus is the answer,” but we also know that the questions change, we change, and how Jesus is the answer changes along with that. American philosopher and psychologist William James has this wonderful line that I deeply appreciate. “Experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas” (in “Preface” to The Meaning of Truth).
One testimony to being Christian and seeker can be found in the life and work of Marcus Borg. One of Borg’s well known books is entitled Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, a title that itself combines being Christian and seeker. In that work, Borg relates his own story about being a Christian and a seeker, his own story about how one can “meet Jesus again for the first time.”
Borg was raised in North Dakota, in a Scandinavian Lutheran home and church. He grew up with a very traditional picture of Jesus, a picture he held firmly too throughout childhood. Jesus was the divinely begotten Son of God who died for the sins of the world and whose message was about himself and his saving purpose and the importance of believing in him. (6).
In his early teen years, Borg began to have doubts about God, and these doubts filled him with anxiety, guilt and fear. He prayed to believe simply and easily. He left for college at a Midwestern Lutheran school “with a conventional but no longer deeply held understanding of the Christian faith.” (7) A religion course in his junior year proved very helpful. It introduced him wonderful intellectual resources for studying religion and Christian faith. It was a rich and rewarding experience. “But it didn’t help me believe. Rather, it provided a framework within which I could take my perplexity seriously” (8). Borg followed college with seminary at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and there his deep interest in Jesus reemerged through study of the New Testament. He read about all the work that scholars had been doing on the gospels, and his picture of Jesus was reformed.
In his mid-thirties, Borg had another series of experiences which shaped his Christian faith, experiences he describes as “nature mysticism” and moments of “radical amazement.” “They fundamentally changed my understanding of God, Jesus, religion and Christianity” (14). I no longer see the Christian life as being primarily about believing. The experiences of my mid-thirties led me to realize that God is and that the central issue of the Christian life is not believing in God or believing in the Bible or believing in the Christian tradition. Rather, the Christian life is about entering into a relationship with that to which the Christian tradition points, which may be spoken of as God, the risen living Christ, or the Spirit (17). Christian and seeker – Borg’s wife says of him: “he has been looking for Jesus all his life” (6).
Awhile back I read a simple phrase which continues to move me to deeper reflection, something written by a man named Kirk Bingaman where he discusses “the supreme choice facing every person of faith, namely, whether or not to update and transform our psychical image of God” (in Pamela Cooper-White, Many Voices, 23). Even when we find Jesus, there remain opportunities to meet him again for the first time, to update and transform our inner/psychical image of God.
My own life is a testimony to the fact that one can be both a Christian and a seeker. I was baptized as an infant and grew up in the church, though my family was not the most active family in the United Methodist Church of my youth. I made a more active and conscious commitment to the Christian faith at age 14. I was well-formed and well-schooled in a more traditional, conventional, evangelistic form of Christian faith, one I was learning more about outside my United Methodist Church. Like Marcus Borg, I, too, began having doubts and questions about this Christian faith – for me those developed in high school and continued in college. In a theological statement about the church issued in 1999 (Called to Love and Praise) by The British Methodist Church, they noted “our understanding of ourselves as human beings, of human history, and of society has been deeply influenced by thinkers such as Darwin, Marx, and Freud.” In college, I encountered some of these thinkers, and others, who challenged my simple faith.
Yet I could not and did not abandon it. Rather, I took my questions with me to seminary. There three streams in particular reshaped and recast my faith – made it stronger but also made it different - - - theology in general, biblical studies, and process theology. In seminary, I fell in love with the Bible in a remarkable way. When I could see it as both a human and Spirit-inspired document, it opened it up to me. The rich scholarship on the bible makes it much more lively and interesting. It is a book of which we can ask questions, not a simply an answer book. It gives some answers, but provokes even more questions. Process theology gave me a tremendously helpful framework for thinking about how God is connected with all of life and influences all of life.
Seminary was not the end of my seeking days. I became a pastor. Before officiating at my first funeral, I can count the number of funerals I had attended on one hand. Even with those, my family had really shielded me from death. Now I encountered it first hand. My first funeral was for a fifty some year old man who died of brain cancer leaving a wife and five children, the youngest of whom were twins in junior high school. That was about three weeks into my ministry, and within the first five weeks there had been three funerals. I have had to learn about grief and pain and tragedy through this – and I have officiated at funerals for persons from just under two to over 102. - - - five in the month of December.
A couple of years later I remember watching the movie Sophie’s Choice. It is a gut-wrenching story about the Holocaust. I read William Styron’s novel and realized that somehow I needed to grapple with radical evil in the world. I needed to think more deeply about Christian faith and such evil. What particularly struck me is that the Holocaust happened in a country steeped in the Christian tradition, a country which had a vibrant intellectual life. Germany has been a center of theology and biblical studies, and while some theologians and church people stood strongly against Nazism, others said nothing. Some of the anti-Semitism which fed Hitler’s ideology has long roots with Christianity. Faith cannot simply be in the head, not matter how sophisticated the thinking. It must shape/transform the heart, the soul, all of life so that we are kinder and gentler people.
Other experiences and forms of thought have shaped how I understand Christian faith: being a husband and a parent, death in my own family, rediscovering poetry while working on my Ph.D. through the Voices and Visions series on PBS, or rediscovering jazz, again through a PBS series. In both those cases, I had encountered poetry and jazz in college, but they were more tangential interests until they were rekindled. The same could be said for Buddhism and psychoanalysis. A couple of years ago I was asked to teach a course on peace for the United Methodist Women’s School of Christian Mission. One book I read on world religion made me think that there were elements of Buddhism left unexplored from my college days, and I have found the conversation between that tradition and my Christian faith deeply helpful. I was a philosophy and psychology major in college, but had not thought much about psychoanalysis until about a year or so ago when I read Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death. Again this conversation is enriching my spirituality and theology as a Christian.
Toward the end of his long poem “Little Gidding”, T.S. Eliot pens these lines:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
That’s what it means to be a Christian and seeker, to keep finding fresh insights and resources for living within Christian faith. Anglican priest Andrew Shanks writes, “the truth that belongs to the poetry of faith is not exactly a matter of correctness. Far rather, it is the truth of a true challenge: to imagine more, to feel more, to think more – in short, to love more. And so to be inwardly changed.” (What is Truth? 5). Truth in the deepest and most interesting sense is a journey, is a way, and Christians name that way Jesus.
Joan Chittister, in her memoir Called to Question distinguishes between religion and spirituality – both have value, but for Chittister “spirituality” is the life, the heartbeat, while religion the outward form. “Spirituality is a commitment to immersion in God, to the seeking that has no end…. Religion, the finger pointing at the moon, is not the moon…. [To get us there] we need a spirituality of the search.” (24)
We have searched for a home one way or another, a spiritual home for our wandering hearts and souls. As Christians we have found this in Jesus, but what we discover if we dare is that this home has countless rooms, fascinating hallways, walk-in closets, hidden basements which are there for the exploring as our own lives change. It is also a home full of windows, windows which allow us to see the world from all kinds of different angles and which let the light in in countless ways. Welcome to the spirituality of the search.
Texts: Isaiah 60:1-6; Matthew 2:1-12
“We Three Kings” may be the traditional soundtrack to the story of the wise men, but I think this song could also serve as a soundtrack to the story. Play: “The Seeker” The Who
The Who, "The Seeker"
The Magi, the wise men are religious seekers. The wise men were trying to find one way or another, in one place or another, wisdom, the Divine, the Spirit, God. They followed a star that led them to Jesus, found him, then returned home.
Being a religious seeker is nothing new, I guess. Yet seekers have gained in prominence in recent years. In the Pew Forum survey on religious affiliation in the United States released in 2009, the fastest growing group was persons unaffiliated with any faith tradition (16.1% of the population). But interestingly about a third of that group identifies themselves as “religious unaffiliated.” 70 % of the unaffiliated believe in God and a whopping 92% believe in God. Religious seeking seems a growing phenomenon. While doing some research for this sermon I found an on-line blog written by a twenty-something woman in which she wrote: “I’ve been thinking and searching a lot lately for something to believe in. I need something to understand, something to place confidence in.” That is pure seeker language.
To those who are seeking, the Christian faith offers Jesus, the Jesus the seeking wise men found years ago. The essence of Christian faith is that God can be found in the life and teaching of Jesus, that the essence of God is love, and that the life of Jesus also serves as a model for what living in response to God is like. Christian faith offers resources that are true to life – love heals and our world needs healing, love runs into roadblocks because it threatens what is unloving (notice the fear of Herod in this story), love triumphs (after the crucifixion, resurrection). Christian faith offers resources that are true for life, helping us live more lovingly. “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.”
So we who are Christian, who have found Jesus, are our seeking days done? I don’t think so. There is still something of the adventurous spirit of the seeker that should be ours. One might say that Christian faith gives us a map, but the territory remains open for exploration, for adventure, for seeking. As Christians we are also seekers, not unaffiliated seekers, pure seekers, but seekers nonetheless. We realize that the God we know in Jesus Christ can be explored for a lifetime.
There is an old story about a billboard that read: “Jesus is the Answer.” Underneath someone had spray painted, “What’s the Question?” As Christians we say, “Jesus is the answer,” but we also know that the questions change, we change, and how Jesus is the answer changes along with that. American philosopher and psychologist William James has this wonderful line that I deeply appreciate. “Experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas” (in “Preface” to The Meaning of Truth).
One testimony to being Christian and seeker can be found in the life and work of Marcus Borg. One of Borg’s well known books is entitled Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, a title that itself combines being Christian and seeker. In that work, Borg relates his own story about being a Christian and a seeker, his own story about how one can “meet Jesus again for the first time.”
Borg was raised in North Dakota, in a Scandinavian Lutheran home and church. He grew up with a very traditional picture of Jesus, a picture he held firmly too throughout childhood. Jesus was the divinely begotten Son of God who died for the sins of the world and whose message was about himself and his saving purpose and the importance of believing in him. (6).
In his early teen years, Borg began to have doubts about God, and these doubts filled him with anxiety, guilt and fear. He prayed to believe simply and easily. He left for college at a Midwestern Lutheran school “with a conventional but no longer deeply held understanding of the Christian faith.” (7) A religion course in his junior year proved very helpful. It introduced him wonderful intellectual resources for studying religion and Christian faith. It was a rich and rewarding experience. “But it didn’t help me believe. Rather, it provided a framework within which I could take my perplexity seriously” (8). Borg followed college with seminary at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and there his deep interest in Jesus reemerged through study of the New Testament. He read about all the work that scholars had been doing on the gospels, and his picture of Jesus was reformed.
In his mid-thirties, Borg had another series of experiences which shaped his Christian faith, experiences he describes as “nature mysticism” and moments of “radical amazement.” “They fundamentally changed my understanding of God, Jesus, religion and Christianity” (14). I no longer see the Christian life as being primarily about believing. The experiences of my mid-thirties led me to realize that God is and that the central issue of the Christian life is not believing in God or believing in the Bible or believing in the Christian tradition. Rather, the Christian life is about entering into a relationship with that to which the Christian tradition points, which may be spoken of as God, the risen living Christ, or the Spirit (17). Christian and seeker – Borg’s wife says of him: “he has been looking for Jesus all his life” (6).
Awhile back I read a simple phrase which continues to move me to deeper reflection, something written by a man named Kirk Bingaman where he discusses “the supreme choice facing every person of faith, namely, whether or not to update and transform our psychical image of God” (in Pamela Cooper-White, Many Voices, 23). Even when we find Jesus, there remain opportunities to meet him again for the first time, to update and transform our inner/psychical image of God.
My own life is a testimony to the fact that one can be both a Christian and a seeker. I was baptized as an infant and grew up in the church, though my family was not the most active family in the United Methodist Church of my youth. I made a more active and conscious commitment to the Christian faith at age 14. I was well-formed and well-schooled in a more traditional, conventional, evangelistic form of Christian faith, one I was learning more about outside my United Methodist Church. Like Marcus Borg, I, too, began having doubts and questions about this Christian faith – for me those developed in high school and continued in college. In a theological statement about the church issued in 1999 (Called to Love and Praise) by The British Methodist Church, they noted “our understanding of ourselves as human beings, of human history, and of society has been deeply influenced by thinkers such as Darwin, Marx, and Freud.” In college, I encountered some of these thinkers, and others, who challenged my simple faith.
Yet I could not and did not abandon it. Rather, I took my questions with me to seminary. There three streams in particular reshaped and recast my faith – made it stronger but also made it different - - - theology in general, biblical studies, and process theology. In seminary, I fell in love with the Bible in a remarkable way. When I could see it as both a human and Spirit-inspired document, it opened it up to me. The rich scholarship on the bible makes it much more lively and interesting. It is a book of which we can ask questions, not a simply an answer book. It gives some answers, but provokes even more questions. Process theology gave me a tremendously helpful framework for thinking about how God is connected with all of life and influences all of life.
Seminary was not the end of my seeking days. I became a pastor. Before officiating at my first funeral, I can count the number of funerals I had attended on one hand. Even with those, my family had really shielded me from death. Now I encountered it first hand. My first funeral was for a fifty some year old man who died of brain cancer leaving a wife and five children, the youngest of whom were twins in junior high school. That was about three weeks into my ministry, and within the first five weeks there had been three funerals. I have had to learn about grief and pain and tragedy through this – and I have officiated at funerals for persons from just under two to over 102. - - - five in the month of December.
A couple of years later I remember watching the movie Sophie’s Choice. It is a gut-wrenching story about the Holocaust. I read William Styron’s novel and realized that somehow I needed to grapple with radical evil in the world. I needed to think more deeply about Christian faith and such evil. What particularly struck me is that the Holocaust happened in a country steeped in the Christian tradition, a country which had a vibrant intellectual life. Germany has been a center of theology and biblical studies, and while some theologians and church people stood strongly against Nazism, others said nothing. Some of the anti-Semitism which fed Hitler’s ideology has long roots with Christianity. Faith cannot simply be in the head, not matter how sophisticated the thinking. It must shape/transform the heart, the soul, all of life so that we are kinder and gentler people.
Other experiences and forms of thought have shaped how I understand Christian faith: being a husband and a parent, death in my own family, rediscovering poetry while working on my Ph.D. through the Voices and Visions series on PBS, or rediscovering jazz, again through a PBS series. In both those cases, I had encountered poetry and jazz in college, but they were more tangential interests until they were rekindled. The same could be said for Buddhism and psychoanalysis. A couple of years ago I was asked to teach a course on peace for the United Methodist Women’s School of Christian Mission. One book I read on world religion made me think that there were elements of Buddhism left unexplored from my college days, and I have found the conversation between that tradition and my Christian faith deeply helpful. I was a philosophy and psychology major in college, but had not thought much about psychoanalysis until about a year or so ago when I read Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death. Again this conversation is enriching my spirituality and theology as a Christian.
Toward the end of his long poem “Little Gidding”, T.S. Eliot pens these lines:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
That’s what it means to be a Christian and seeker, to keep finding fresh insights and resources for living within Christian faith. Anglican priest Andrew Shanks writes, “the truth that belongs to the poetry of faith is not exactly a matter of correctness. Far rather, it is the truth of a true challenge: to imagine more, to feel more, to think more – in short, to love more. And so to be inwardly changed.” (What is Truth? 5). Truth in the deepest and most interesting sense is a journey, is a way, and Christians name that way Jesus.
Joan Chittister, in her memoir Called to Question distinguishes between religion and spirituality – both have value, but for Chittister “spirituality” is the life, the heartbeat, while religion the outward form. “Spirituality is a commitment to immersion in God, to the seeking that has no end…. Religion, the finger pointing at the moon, is not the moon…. [To get us there] we need a spirituality of the search.” (24)
We have searched for a home one way or another, a spiritual home for our wandering hearts and souls. As Christians we have found this in Jesus, but what we discover if we dare is that this home has countless rooms, fascinating hallways, walk-in closets, hidden basements which are there for the exploring as our own lives change. It is also a home full of windows, windows which allow us to see the world from all kinds of different angles and which let the light in in countless ways. Welcome to the spirituality of the search.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
New Year New You
Sermon preached December 27, 2009
Texts: I Samuel 2:18-20, 26; Colossians 3:12-17; Luke 2:41-52
Woody Allen’s 1977 Academy-Award winning film Annie Hall is about a man named Alvy Singer, played by Allen, and his relationship with a woman named Annie Hall, portrayed by Diane Keaton. After a series of ups and downs Annie and Alvy have a difficult conversation about the state of their relationship.
Annie Hall clip
Annie: Let’s face it, I don’t think our relationship is working.
Alvy: I know, a relationship, I think, is like a shark, you know, it has to constantly move forward or it dies. I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.
There is wisdom in that for our faith. Our faith should continue to move forward, to grow. When it doesn’t, it can become stale. It can seem too small for our lives. Our Scriptures encourage growth in faith as they describe Samuel and Jesus. “Now the boy Samuel continued to grow both in stature and in favor with the Lord and with the people.” “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” Growing older is inevitable. Growing in our faith is intentional.
And the church exists, in important part, to help those who are a part of it grow in faith. Another way to say that is to say that the product of the church is people. The church exists to help people, whether or not they are a part of the church – so we reach out to feed the hungry, to clothe those with inadequate clothing, to house those without housing, to care for the sick and dying, to establish justice, to strive for peace, to share the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ. One “product” of the church is a better life for others. Another product of the church is changed lives among those who call our church “home.” We want to mess with your lives if you become part of the church. We want to see people’s lives shaped, formed, transformed by the love of Jesus. Another “product” of the church is those changed lives. Of course those two goals are interconnected. As people’s lives are changed, formed, shaped by God’s love in Jesus, they will reach out to make a difference in the world. One of the ways our lives are shaped and formed in love happens as we reach out to others.
Our faith needs to move forward, to grow, and as one year turns to the next seems like a good time to consider how we might like to help our faith grow, how we might like to shape our lives in cooperation with God’s Spirit in the coming year, how we might like to be more deeply formed in faith. I want to suggest that there are a number of ways we can more deeply be formed in Christian faith, be more open to God’s Spirit. I want to briefly discuss these broad categories and offer us some time for reflection on how each of us might choose to be formed more deeply in faith in the new year.
I think we can be more deeply formed in faith and grow in faith as we seek to reweave the past into our lives. In his novel Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner writes, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” (Act I, scene 3, p. 80) There is deep truth there. We carry the past with us, and while we cannot change the past, we can rework it, see it differently, reframe it – and doing so helps us grow as people of faith. If I use some of my energy to hold on to a past wrong done me, I have less energy for the present and the future. Some past wrongs need to be rectified. Some need to be let go. There is a huge difference within between saying “someone hurt me and I can’t be whole until they get their due” and saying “someone hurt me and it is unfair but I am not going to be trapped by this forever.” Only you know when it is appropriate to take which stance in your life, but as we begin the new year and you seek to be a new you as a person of faith, is there something in the past that needs to be rewoven into the present? Jack Kornfield, therapist and spiritual teacher once wrote, “forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past” (The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness and Peace, 25). We may not be able to change the past to make it better but we can reweave it into our present. Is there some place where you need to forgive to free yourself in this new year?
We are formed in faith and grow in faith as we enlarge our territories. There was a very popular Christian book published ten years ago now, The Prayer of Jabez. Maybe some of you remember it. It seemed helpful to some. Jabez was a minor character in I Chronicles chapter 4 who managed a few more lines in a long list of names than others. A pastor named Bruce Wilkinson took the prayer of Jabez (Oh that you would bless me and enlarge my territory, that your hand would be with me, and that you would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain) and made it into a small cottage industry. Part of the prayer was for enlarging one’s territory. Wilkinson has an interesting view of that part of the prayer. If Jabez had worked on Wall Street, he might have prayed, “Lord, increase the value of my investment portfolis.” (31) I am not sure that this is a very good interpretation of the prayer of Jabez, but Wilkinson is on to something with that idea of enlarging our territory. We grow in faith as we learn new things, as we take on new tasks and responsibilities in our lives. As we stretch ourselves we find God in new ways. As we begin the new year and you seek to be a new you as a person of faith, where would you like to learn more or what new task or responsibility might God be inviting you to consider in your life?
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist stream of Christianity, believed that people were formed more deeply in faith and grew in faith by following three general rules. These have been updated by Bishop Rueben Job. The rules are: do no harm, do good, stay in love with God. I would like to use some of Bishop Job’s words to expand on each of ways of being formed more deeply in faith.
To do no harm means that I will be on guard so that all my actions and even my silence will not add injury to another of God’s children or to any part of God’s creation…. I will determine everyday that my life will always be invested in the effort to bring healing instead of hurt; wholeness instead of division; and harmony with the ways of Jesus rather than with the ways of the world. When I commit myself to this way, I must see each person as a child of God – a recipient of love unearned, unlimited, and undeserved – just like myself. (31) As we begin the new year and you seek to be a new you as a person of faith, where would you like to grow in your ability to heal rather than harm, grow in your determination to see others as beloved of God?
Doing good, like doing no harm, is a proactive way of living. I do not need to wait to be asked to do some good deed or provide some needed help. I do not need to wait until circumstances cry out for aid to relieve suffering or correct some horrible injustice. I can decide my way of living will come down on the side of doing good to all in every circumstance and in every way I can. I can decide that I will choose a way of living that nourishes goodness and strengthens community…. (37-38) Taking appropriate care of self and living selflessly are not opposites. Rather they are each essential elements of a healthy and productive life(46). As we begin the new year and you seek to be a new you as a person of faith, where would you like to grow in doing good, in nourishing goodness and strengthening community? Where might you need to take better care of yourself?
Staying in love with God is the foundation to all of life. It is in a vital relationship with God that we are enlivened, sustained, guided, called, sent, formed and transformed…. Only living in the healing, loving, redeeming, forming, and guiding light and presence of God will bring the redemption, healing, transformation and guidance that is so desperately needed. (48-49) We may name our spiritual disciplines differently, but we too must find our way of living and practicing those disciplines that will keep us in love with God – practices that will help keep us positioned in such a way that we may hear and be responsive to God’s slightest whisper of direction and receive God’s promised presence and power every day and in every situation (55). As we begin the new year and you seek to be a new you as a person of faith, where do you need to hone your spiritual disciplines in order to stay in love with God?
I’ve suggested some ways our lives are formed and our faith deepened. It is often helpful to keep before ourselves a picture of the direction of this new you that we want to work with God to create in our lives. One wonderful picture of the kind of people we try to produce as the church is found in Colossians 3. Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another… forgive each other…. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together…. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. I like the way Eugene Peterson renders this passage in The Message. So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive and offense…. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.
That’s the new you for the new year we want to produce here, helping each other along the way. As you reflect on the ways that new you can be formed, what one thing would you like to do in the new year to be more Christ-like, to wear love more consistently? I would invite you to use the blank space on the bulletin to write down one or two, but no more than three things you would like to do this year to grow in faith, to be more deeply formed in faith. You don’t need to share it with anyone else, but keep it in a place where you can look at it from time to time, just to see how you are doing.
A woman asked her spiritual teacher, “Is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened?” “As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.” “Then of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?” “To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.” (deMillo, One Minute Wisdom, 11)
A shark moving forward, a new wardrobe knit out of love, the sun rising in our lives - - - it is a new year, a good time to consider how we can work with God to cultivate a new you. Amen.
Texts: I Samuel 2:18-20, 26; Colossians 3:12-17; Luke 2:41-52
Woody Allen’s 1977 Academy-Award winning film Annie Hall is about a man named Alvy Singer, played by Allen, and his relationship with a woman named Annie Hall, portrayed by Diane Keaton. After a series of ups and downs Annie and Alvy have a difficult conversation about the state of their relationship.
Annie Hall clip
Annie: Let’s face it, I don’t think our relationship is working.
Alvy: I know, a relationship, I think, is like a shark, you know, it has to constantly move forward or it dies. I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.
There is wisdom in that for our faith. Our faith should continue to move forward, to grow. When it doesn’t, it can become stale. It can seem too small for our lives. Our Scriptures encourage growth in faith as they describe Samuel and Jesus. “Now the boy Samuel continued to grow both in stature and in favor with the Lord and with the people.” “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” Growing older is inevitable. Growing in our faith is intentional.
And the church exists, in important part, to help those who are a part of it grow in faith. Another way to say that is to say that the product of the church is people. The church exists to help people, whether or not they are a part of the church – so we reach out to feed the hungry, to clothe those with inadequate clothing, to house those without housing, to care for the sick and dying, to establish justice, to strive for peace, to share the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ. One “product” of the church is a better life for others. Another product of the church is changed lives among those who call our church “home.” We want to mess with your lives if you become part of the church. We want to see people’s lives shaped, formed, transformed by the love of Jesus. Another “product” of the church is those changed lives. Of course those two goals are interconnected. As people’s lives are changed, formed, shaped by God’s love in Jesus, they will reach out to make a difference in the world. One of the ways our lives are shaped and formed in love happens as we reach out to others.
Our faith needs to move forward, to grow, and as one year turns to the next seems like a good time to consider how we might like to help our faith grow, how we might like to shape our lives in cooperation with God’s Spirit in the coming year, how we might like to be more deeply formed in faith. I want to suggest that there are a number of ways we can more deeply be formed in Christian faith, be more open to God’s Spirit. I want to briefly discuss these broad categories and offer us some time for reflection on how each of us might choose to be formed more deeply in faith in the new year.
I think we can be more deeply formed in faith and grow in faith as we seek to reweave the past into our lives. In his novel Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner writes, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” (Act I, scene 3, p. 80) There is deep truth there. We carry the past with us, and while we cannot change the past, we can rework it, see it differently, reframe it – and doing so helps us grow as people of faith. If I use some of my energy to hold on to a past wrong done me, I have less energy for the present and the future. Some past wrongs need to be rectified. Some need to be let go. There is a huge difference within between saying “someone hurt me and I can’t be whole until they get their due” and saying “someone hurt me and it is unfair but I am not going to be trapped by this forever.” Only you know when it is appropriate to take which stance in your life, but as we begin the new year and you seek to be a new you as a person of faith, is there something in the past that needs to be rewoven into the present? Jack Kornfield, therapist and spiritual teacher once wrote, “forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past” (The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness and Peace, 25). We may not be able to change the past to make it better but we can reweave it into our present. Is there some place where you need to forgive to free yourself in this new year?
We are formed in faith and grow in faith as we enlarge our territories. There was a very popular Christian book published ten years ago now, The Prayer of Jabez. Maybe some of you remember it. It seemed helpful to some. Jabez was a minor character in I Chronicles chapter 4 who managed a few more lines in a long list of names than others. A pastor named Bruce Wilkinson took the prayer of Jabez (Oh that you would bless me and enlarge my territory, that your hand would be with me, and that you would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain) and made it into a small cottage industry. Part of the prayer was for enlarging one’s territory. Wilkinson has an interesting view of that part of the prayer. If Jabez had worked on Wall Street, he might have prayed, “Lord, increase the value of my investment portfolis.” (31) I am not sure that this is a very good interpretation of the prayer of Jabez, but Wilkinson is on to something with that idea of enlarging our territory. We grow in faith as we learn new things, as we take on new tasks and responsibilities in our lives. As we stretch ourselves we find God in new ways. As we begin the new year and you seek to be a new you as a person of faith, where would you like to learn more or what new task or responsibility might God be inviting you to consider in your life?
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist stream of Christianity, believed that people were formed more deeply in faith and grew in faith by following three general rules. These have been updated by Bishop Rueben Job. The rules are: do no harm, do good, stay in love with God. I would like to use some of Bishop Job’s words to expand on each of ways of being formed more deeply in faith.
To do no harm means that I will be on guard so that all my actions and even my silence will not add injury to another of God’s children or to any part of God’s creation…. I will determine everyday that my life will always be invested in the effort to bring healing instead of hurt; wholeness instead of division; and harmony with the ways of Jesus rather than with the ways of the world. When I commit myself to this way, I must see each person as a child of God – a recipient of love unearned, unlimited, and undeserved – just like myself. (31) As we begin the new year and you seek to be a new you as a person of faith, where would you like to grow in your ability to heal rather than harm, grow in your determination to see others as beloved of God?
Doing good, like doing no harm, is a proactive way of living. I do not need to wait to be asked to do some good deed or provide some needed help. I do not need to wait until circumstances cry out for aid to relieve suffering or correct some horrible injustice. I can decide my way of living will come down on the side of doing good to all in every circumstance and in every way I can. I can decide that I will choose a way of living that nourishes goodness and strengthens community…. (37-38) Taking appropriate care of self and living selflessly are not opposites. Rather they are each essential elements of a healthy and productive life(46). As we begin the new year and you seek to be a new you as a person of faith, where would you like to grow in doing good, in nourishing goodness and strengthening community? Where might you need to take better care of yourself?
Staying in love with God is the foundation to all of life. It is in a vital relationship with God that we are enlivened, sustained, guided, called, sent, formed and transformed…. Only living in the healing, loving, redeeming, forming, and guiding light and presence of God will bring the redemption, healing, transformation and guidance that is so desperately needed. (48-49) We may name our spiritual disciplines differently, but we too must find our way of living and practicing those disciplines that will keep us in love with God – practices that will help keep us positioned in such a way that we may hear and be responsive to God’s slightest whisper of direction and receive God’s promised presence and power every day and in every situation (55). As we begin the new year and you seek to be a new you as a person of faith, where do you need to hone your spiritual disciplines in order to stay in love with God?
I’ve suggested some ways our lives are formed and our faith deepened. It is often helpful to keep before ourselves a picture of the direction of this new you that we want to work with God to create in our lives. One wonderful picture of the kind of people we try to produce as the church is found in Colossians 3. Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another… forgive each other…. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together…. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. I like the way Eugene Peterson renders this passage in The Message. So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive and offense…. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.
That’s the new you for the new year we want to produce here, helping each other along the way. As you reflect on the ways that new you can be formed, what one thing would you like to do in the new year to be more Christ-like, to wear love more consistently? I would invite you to use the blank space on the bulletin to write down one or two, but no more than three things you would like to do this year to grow in faith, to be more deeply formed in faith. You don’t need to share it with anyone else, but keep it in a place where you can look at it from time to time, just to see how you are doing.
A woman asked her spiritual teacher, “Is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened?” “As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.” “Then of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?” “To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.” (deMillo, One Minute Wisdom, 11)
A shark moving forward, a new wardrobe knit out of love, the sun rising in our lives - - - it is a new year, a good time to consider how we can work with God to cultivate a new you. Amen.
I Can't Go On, I'll Go On
Sermon preached on Christmas Eve December 24, 2009
Scripture Readings: Micah 5:1-5a; Isaiah 9:2-9; Luke 2:1-20
It is good to be together on Christmas Eve. I hope you are having a wonderful or have had a wonderful day and I hope it continues throughout the day tomorrow.
Christmas is a special time, and we love to hear stories that makes us smile or laugh or bring tears of joy – stories of sweetness and goodness and light. Often the stories are about children. We love to hear about how they miss certain elements of the story. There was the little girl, who, in explaining the Christmas story to her mother said that the angels came to share the news about the birth of Jesus while shepherds washed their socks at night. A family returning home from a Christmas pageant began to talk about what they had seen. The father thought it might be good to make sure the children got the main message so he asked, “Who was that baby in the manger?” His four year old daughter said, “Wayne!” “Wayne?!?” “Weren’t you listening Dad, it said so in that song – a wayne in a manger. (Dick Van Dyke, Faith Hope and Hilarity, p. 70, 71). That’s why choir directors always tell you to enunciate! Not long ago a pastor friend of mine shared with me about the Christmas pageant at his church where the young boy who played the innkeeper learned his part very well, but when crunch time came he couldn’t bring himself to say “no” to Mary and Joseph as they stood before him. So when they asked if there was any room at the inn, his compassion took over and he said, “Sure, come on in.”
A few times this fall and early winter I have heard stories about gold coins dropped in Salvation Army kettles: November 27 a gold South African krugerrand worth about $1,000 in a kettle in Southeast Pennsylvania, December 4-5 three gold coins worth about $1,000 each dropped into various kettles in the Denver area, December 17 a Canadian gold coin worth hundreds of dollars in a kettle in Ohio.
When I think back on Christmas I remember Christmas Eve at my Grandmother’s house, 212 ½ E. Fifth Street. Our family would gather – aunts and uncles and cousins. Parking was always interesting because she lived in an alley. We ate around this long, heavy, wood dinning room table drinking from green glass ware. There was food and laughter and cards, and after a time we opened presents from our grandparents – presents my grandma often bought at Daugherty Hardware. We stayed late, coming home well after midnight, and by that time all the street lights were flashing. Little Joe on KDAL was playing Christmas music and it seemed like magic. Even the street lights were different.
Stories of sweetness and goodness and light – those are the stories we like to hear at Christmas, and it is how we read the Christmas story itself. Mary and Joseph always seem idyllic and at peace. The innkeeper turns them away, but always with a gentle, sorrowful voice, never a harsh tone. You never get the sense that they panicked a little when they had no place to stay, didn’t complain once about having to sleep with animals, nor did they mutter if they stepped in what the animals might leave behind. In fact, we read a fairly disinfected story – the animals really don’t do that kind of thing here. We imagine that the night is a little cool, but we don’t usually picture those bone-chilling, teeth-chattering winter winds we know about. It is night, but we picture a beautifully clear and starry night – maybe with a few snowflakes gently falling. How it is both clear and snowy, I don’t know.
The Christmas story as a story of sweetness and goodness and light, that’s how we like it. And that’s o.k. Among my favorite Christmas stories are O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” – a sweet story about a young married couple each secretly selling their prized possession to buy a Christmas gift for the other; It’s a Wonderful Life – where Jimmy Stewart/George Bailey avoids jail and Clarence gets his wings; A Charlie Brown Christmas – where Charlie discovers the true meaning of Christmas by rescuing a scraggly tree; and The Homecoming: a Christmas Story – where father gets home through a storm and John Boy gets the paper and pencil he wants to nurture his writing talent. Stories of sweetness and goodness and light.
But if all we hear are these stories, if the Christmas story itself is nothing more than sweetness and light, I am concerned that it might become disconnected from our more complicated lives. The day I began to work on Christmas Eve services, December 9, was a bitterly cold, blustery day. The wind was whipping across the parking lot as I looked out of the window in my office. Can Christmas connect to lives where such bitter winds sometimes blow? I worry that we make Christmas breakable, fragile as a crystal angel hanging from a tree or fragile as a snow flake. We treat fragile ornaments with great care, taking them out only once a year and packing them tightly away when the holiday is over. Fragile snow flakes melt quickly. Will we let the Christmas story disappear as well when the calendar turns into a new year? Is it too sweet and good and light to carry us through darker days and tougher times, for we will have such times?
When you read the story again it is not all sweetness and light. The Christmas story is about angels and shepherds. It is also about an unplanned pregnancy. It is a story about a people under imperial rule. Mary and Joseph are made to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem by order of the Roman Empire and there seems something just a little bit cruel in making a pregnant woman travel a distance for purposes of taxation and a census. It is a story about a young family with no place to stay. It is about a birth outside – amidst the hay and mess and smell of animals. This story connects to the whole of our lives – the sweetness and light, the harder days, the chill winds. The story speaks good news, a word of hope, not just as icing on the cake when all is well. It speaks good news and a word of hope amidst the harsh realities of life. In the words of Isaiah, “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness – on them light has shined.” The Christmas story acknowledges the difficulty of the world, and the light of hope that comes into a sometimes harsh world.
Irish author and Noble prize winner Samuel Beckett captures something of this feeling of living in a challenging, difficult world in his plays and novels and perhaps no better than in the ending of his novel The Unnamable the entirety of which seems to be some kind of interior dialogue – a conversation of a person with himself or herself. It ends this way: you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. Something inside of us, a spirit, a life urge, something I believe put there by God, moves us toward life in all its fullness. But there are days when putting one foot in front of another is about all we can muster, days when discouragements pile up, when we know grief and sorrow, when we fail, when we fail ourselves. I know, not the kind of Christmas story you came to hear, but that’s the point. The depth of the Christmas story is that it acknowledges the tough times, the difficult days, the “I can’t go on” feelings, and tries to open us again to life so that we go on – and more than just go on, truly live. Christmas is sweetness and light, but not simply sweetness and light. It is sturdy and not fragile.
Joan Chittister says this beautifully in her book Gospel Days. Christmas reminds us that God gives us one chance after another in life to become new again, to let things grow in us, to birth in ourselves fresh and different ways to God. (December 9) One chance after another, light, hope, fresh starts – that’s what Christmas is about. That’s what Christmas is about when everything is sweetness and light, that’s what Christmas is about when things are difficult – a God of new life who finds ways into our lives and our world.
When our son David was ten, we were living in Dallas, Texas and I was a youth minister at a Ridgewood Park United Methodist Church. On a December Sunday, returning home from the children’s Christmas program, David tripped while entering our apartment. We were coming in through the patio area, through a sliding glass door. David tripped and fell toward the door, and reflexively put his hand out to break his fall. What broke was the glass in the door. He was cut, badly. Julie said we needed to go to the hospital, and of course, I asked if she was sure. Dumb question. We rushed David to the emergency room, where doctors examined his lacerated wrist – tendons appeared to be torn along the top of his wrist. I remember all of this pretty well, but what I had not remembered until last Sunday when David shared this during Soul Kitchen was that as doctors were cleaning his wound and picking out shards of glass I asked him if he wanted to hear a Christmas story. “Yes.” So while the doctors worked on him, I told him the story “The Gift of the Magi” – that story about a young married couple at Christmas. Jim’s most valuable possession was a pocket watch, which he kept in his pocket on a string. Della’s most valuable possession was her beautiful hair. Della sells her hair to buy Jim a lovely watch chain, and Jim pawns his watch to buy Della a beautiful set of combs for her hair. The author, O. Henry, compares the wisdom of their gifts, given in love, to the wisdom of the Magi, the wise men. It is a tender, touching Christmas story full of sweetness and light, but the story fit a more difficult circumstance – just like the Christmas story itself.
Into this world that is beautiful and bleeding, wonderful and wounded, comes a God who gives us one chance after another to become new again, to let things grow in us. That’s the Christmas story in all its toughness and tenderness.
As I wrap up, let me share with you a brief poem written by the late Brazilian Catholic Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.
It’s Midnight Lord
The Spirit is breathing.
All those with eyes to see,
women and men with ears for hearing
detect a coming dawn;
a reason to go on.
They seem small, these signs of dawn
perhaps ridiculous.
All those with eyes to see,
Women and men with ears for hearing
uncover in the night
a certain gleam of light;
they see the reason to go on.
Christmas is about the Spirit breathing. It is about small, perhaps ridiculous signs of dawn in a midnight world. It is about one chance after another, when it may seem like every last chance has come and gone. It is about new beginnings even when endings seem the only thing in sight. It is about new birth, even amidst the deaths in life that we experience. It is about glimmers of light, even if they need to find their way through the smallest cracks under the door. It is about hope and courage to go on, to add your light to the world, the light God gave you to shine. Christmas is a story about joy and light and goodness meant for even the toughest times because it is about the God of life who comes near in every time. Amen.
Scripture Readings: Micah 5:1-5a; Isaiah 9:2-9; Luke 2:1-20
It is good to be together on Christmas Eve. I hope you are having a wonderful or have had a wonderful day and I hope it continues throughout the day tomorrow.
Christmas is a special time, and we love to hear stories that makes us smile or laugh or bring tears of joy – stories of sweetness and goodness and light. Often the stories are about children. We love to hear about how they miss certain elements of the story. There was the little girl, who, in explaining the Christmas story to her mother said that the angels came to share the news about the birth of Jesus while shepherds washed their socks at night. A family returning home from a Christmas pageant began to talk about what they had seen. The father thought it might be good to make sure the children got the main message so he asked, “Who was that baby in the manger?” His four year old daughter said, “Wayne!” “Wayne?!?” “Weren’t you listening Dad, it said so in that song – a wayne in a manger. (Dick Van Dyke, Faith Hope and Hilarity, p. 70, 71). That’s why choir directors always tell you to enunciate! Not long ago a pastor friend of mine shared with me about the Christmas pageant at his church where the young boy who played the innkeeper learned his part very well, but when crunch time came he couldn’t bring himself to say “no” to Mary and Joseph as they stood before him. So when they asked if there was any room at the inn, his compassion took over and he said, “Sure, come on in.”
A few times this fall and early winter I have heard stories about gold coins dropped in Salvation Army kettles: November 27 a gold South African krugerrand worth about $1,000 in a kettle in Southeast Pennsylvania, December 4-5 three gold coins worth about $1,000 each dropped into various kettles in the Denver area, December 17 a Canadian gold coin worth hundreds of dollars in a kettle in Ohio.
When I think back on Christmas I remember Christmas Eve at my Grandmother’s house, 212 ½ E. Fifth Street. Our family would gather – aunts and uncles and cousins. Parking was always interesting because she lived in an alley. We ate around this long, heavy, wood dinning room table drinking from green glass ware. There was food and laughter and cards, and after a time we opened presents from our grandparents – presents my grandma often bought at Daugherty Hardware. We stayed late, coming home well after midnight, and by that time all the street lights were flashing. Little Joe on KDAL was playing Christmas music and it seemed like magic. Even the street lights were different.
Stories of sweetness and goodness and light – those are the stories we like to hear at Christmas, and it is how we read the Christmas story itself. Mary and Joseph always seem idyllic and at peace. The innkeeper turns them away, but always with a gentle, sorrowful voice, never a harsh tone. You never get the sense that they panicked a little when they had no place to stay, didn’t complain once about having to sleep with animals, nor did they mutter if they stepped in what the animals might leave behind. In fact, we read a fairly disinfected story – the animals really don’t do that kind of thing here. We imagine that the night is a little cool, but we don’t usually picture those bone-chilling, teeth-chattering winter winds we know about. It is night, but we picture a beautifully clear and starry night – maybe with a few snowflakes gently falling. How it is both clear and snowy, I don’t know.
The Christmas story as a story of sweetness and goodness and light, that’s how we like it. And that’s o.k. Among my favorite Christmas stories are O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” – a sweet story about a young married couple each secretly selling their prized possession to buy a Christmas gift for the other; It’s a Wonderful Life – where Jimmy Stewart/George Bailey avoids jail and Clarence gets his wings; A Charlie Brown Christmas – where Charlie discovers the true meaning of Christmas by rescuing a scraggly tree; and The Homecoming: a Christmas Story – where father gets home through a storm and John Boy gets the paper and pencil he wants to nurture his writing talent. Stories of sweetness and goodness and light.
But if all we hear are these stories, if the Christmas story itself is nothing more than sweetness and light, I am concerned that it might become disconnected from our more complicated lives. The day I began to work on Christmas Eve services, December 9, was a bitterly cold, blustery day. The wind was whipping across the parking lot as I looked out of the window in my office. Can Christmas connect to lives where such bitter winds sometimes blow? I worry that we make Christmas breakable, fragile as a crystal angel hanging from a tree or fragile as a snow flake. We treat fragile ornaments with great care, taking them out only once a year and packing them tightly away when the holiday is over. Fragile snow flakes melt quickly. Will we let the Christmas story disappear as well when the calendar turns into a new year? Is it too sweet and good and light to carry us through darker days and tougher times, for we will have such times?
When you read the story again it is not all sweetness and light. The Christmas story is about angels and shepherds. It is also about an unplanned pregnancy. It is a story about a people under imperial rule. Mary and Joseph are made to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem by order of the Roman Empire and there seems something just a little bit cruel in making a pregnant woman travel a distance for purposes of taxation and a census. It is a story about a young family with no place to stay. It is about a birth outside – amidst the hay and mess and smell of animals. This story connects to the whole of our lives – the sweetness and light, the harder days, the chill winds. The story speaks good news, a word of hope, not just as icing on the cake when all is well. It speaks good news and a word of hope amidst the harsh realities of life. In the words of Isaiah, “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness – on them light has shined.” The Christmas story acknowledges the difficulty of the world, and the light of hope that comes into a sometimes harsh world.
Irish author and Noble prize winner Samuel Beckett captures something of this feeling of living in a challenging, difficult world in his plays and novels and perhaps no better than in the ending of his novel The Unnamable the entirety of which seems to be some kind of interior dialogue – a conversation of a person with himself or herself. It ends this way: you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. Something inside of us, a spirit, a life urge, something I believe put there by God, moves us toward life in all its fullness. But there are days when putting one foot in front of another is about all we can muster, days when discouragements pile up, when we know grief and sorrow, when we fail, when we fail ourselves. I know, not the kind of Christmas story you came to hear, but that’s the point. The depth of the Christmas story is that it acknowledges the tough times, the difficult days, the “I can’t go on” feelings, and tries to open us again to life so that we go on – and more than just go on, truly live. Christmas is sweetness and light, but not simply sweetness and light. It is sturdy and not fragile.
Joan Chittister says this beautifully in her book Gospel Days. Christmas reminds us that God gives us one chance after another in life to become new again, to let things grow in us, to birth in ourselves fresh and different ways to God. (December 9) One chance after another, light, hope, fresh starts – that’s what Christmas is about. That’s what Christmas is about when everything is sweetness and light, that’s what Christmas is about when things are difficult – a God of new life who finds ways into our lives and our world.
When our son David was ten, we were living in Dallas, Texas and I was a youth minister at a Ridgewood Park United Methodist Church. On a December Sunday, returning home from the children’s Christmas program, David tripped while entering our apartment. We were coming in through the patio area, through a sliding glass door. David tripped and fell toward the door, and reflexively put his hand out to break his fall. What broke was the glass in the door. He was cut, badly. Julie said we needed to go to the hospital, and of course, I asked if she was sure. Dumb question. We rushed David to the emergency room, where doctors examined his lacerated wrist – tendons appeared to be torn along the top of his wrist. I remember all of this pretty well, but what I had not remembered until last Sunday when David shared this during Soul Kitchen was that as doctors were cleaning his wound and picking out shards of glass I asked him if he wanted to hear a Christmas story. “Yes.” So while the doctors worked on him, I told him the story “The Gift of the Magi” – that story about a young married couple at Christmas. Jim’s most valuable possession was a pocket watch, which he kept in his pocket on a string. Della’s most valuable possession was her beautiful hair. Della sells her hair to buy Jim a lovely watch chain, and Jim pawns his watch to buy Della a beautiful set of combs for her hair. The author, O. Henry, compares the wisdom of their gifts, given in love, to the wisdom of the Magi, the wise men. It is a tender, touching Christmas story full of sweetness and light, but the story fit a more difficult circumstance – just like the Christmas story itself.
Into this world that is beautiful and bleeding, wonderful and wounded, comes a God who gives us one chance after another to become new again, to let things grow in us. That’s the Christmas story in all its toughness and tenderness.
As I wrap up, let me share with you a brief poem written by the late Brazilian Catholic Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.
It’s Midnight Lord
The Spirit is breathing.
All those with eyes to see,
women and men with ears for hearing
detect a coming dawn;
a reason to go on.
They seem small, these signs of dawn
perhaps ridiculous.
All those with eyes to see,
Women and men with ears for hearing
uncover in the night
a certain gleam of light;
they see the reason to go on.
Christmas is about the Spirit breathing. It is about small, perhaps ridiculous signs of dawn in a midnight world. It is about one chance after another, when it may seem like every last chance has come and gone. It is about new beginnings even when endings seem the only thing in sight. It is about new birth, even amidst the deaths in life that we experience. It is about glimmers of light, even if they need to find their way through the smallest cracks under the door. It is about hope and courage to go on, to add your light to the world, the light God gave you to shine. Christmas is a story about joy and light and goodness meant for even the toughest times because it is about the God of life who comes near in every time. Amen.
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