I keep all kinds of strange objects in my office. There’s a wooden elephant given to me by a parishioner who wanted me to remember that she would never forget God or the mission experiences we had been on together. There’s a picture of a young girl standing amid piles of fruit in a Mexican home that dedicated one room to a being a fruit stand. That reminds me of two powerful trips I took to Cortazar, Mexico to work with the Methodists there.
Then there is a chunk of concrete. It’s a piece of a church in Piedmont, Alabama. I got it when I led a team of Volunteers in Mission to Alabama in the summer of 1994. Some of you will remember this story. On March 27 of that year, Palm Sunday, there were about 140 people gathered together for the 11 AM service at Goshen United Methodist Church. The children were doing a musical program that day and the procession had just begun.
At just that moment an F4 tornado was cutting a half-mile swath across the county. When it hit that church it lifted the roof right up and then crashed it and the walls down on top of the people inside. Twenty people died. More than 40 people died overall in three states during that storm. But it was the church that got our attention.
One of the children who died was Hannah, the 4-year-old daughter of Kelly Clem, pastor of Goshen Church. “This might shake people’s faith for a long time,” she said. “I think that is normal. But having your faith shaken is not the same as losing it.”[i] So the next Sunday, with the cameras from national TV networks there and her eyes still blackened from the collapse of the roof, Kelly Clem led her church in an Easter sunrise service in the parking lot next to the ruins of the church. Those of us watching shuddered. We professed belief in God. We knew that life triumphed even in the midst of death. But could we have done the same?
A few weeks later we took a mission team to Piedmont to work on houses that were being rebuilt in the wake of the storms. Kelly’s mom is from Virginia and she was on the trip with us. Kelly’s husband, Dale, is a United Methodist minister, too, and he’s the one who took us on a tour of where the church had stood. We walked through the parsonage next door, which was damaged, but not destroyed.
At the end he talked about a cross that had survived the tornado. Everything else in the church had signs of damage, but the cross that was being used for the Palm Sunday service had survived untouched. That was his sign of hope in the midst of all that inexplicable suffering. Yes, there was death and there was rubble, but there was still a cross to witness to something beyond death. That’s when I picked up my piece of Goshen church that still sits in my office.
Today is the day that Advent begins. A time of waiting on God and a time of looking for signs of a new day that will dawn. But Advent always takes us by surprise. We’ve just come from Thanksgiving and from Black Friday. Christmas songs are playing on the radio. Lights are in the windows. The Hamilton Men’s Class is cooking breakfast. These are signs of a great celebration.
In our scripture lessons for today, though, there are some very different images. In the Mark reading, Jesus talks about darkness and stars falling from the sky. In Isaiah, the prophet emphasizes the absence of God. Speaking for the people who are waiting on a God to deliver them from exile, Isaiah calls for God to tear open the heavens and come down with earthquakes to make the earth tremble. But Isaiah suspects that God is absent because of the people’s sin and a people living without God are no people at all.
So how do you describe such a people? “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away” [Isa. 64:6]. A filthy cloth. A leaf being blown in the wind. There’s not much to recommend a people who are far from God. Maybe it’s a little like having a tornado come through and take away everything that you’ve built your hope on.
There’s one more image that Isaiah uses. “We are the clay,” he says to God, “and you are our potter; we are the work of your hand” [Isa. 64:8]. It’s an old biblical image. You could say it goes right back to the opening chapters of Genesis. After all what was Adam before God got to work? Earth. Dirt. Clay. This pottery image goes way back.
We can imagine in our minds potters we know who go to work so carefully on a formless ball of clay. You can see her, can’t you?, bent over the wheel, arms up the elbows in the clay, hands immersed in mud. Then, almost magically, the clay begins to take shape in her hands, becoming what, when it’s finished, you know it was always meant to be. They are connected. Without the potter, the clay is a lump. With the potter, the clay becomes the bowl, the pitcher, the cup. This is the image Isaiah uses to describe us before God. If we’re going to see God…if we’re going to be redeemed from the situations that threaten to take away our hope…if we’re going to be changed and remade…if the world’s going to become better instead of worse, we’ve got to put ourselves before God like formless clay before the potter. For Christmas to come, you’ve got to give yourself to God to be remade into the thing God desires you to be.
We often say that the amazing thing about Christmas is that God comes to us in human form. God becomes human in order to save us and this world from the effects of sin and destruction. We might also say that one of the side benefits of that incarnation is that we also have the opportunity to become human…to become what God intends us to be.
What are the things that make us human? Comparative biology tells us that there are about six traits that we have that make us distinctive from any other creature on God’s green earth. We laugh, we cry, we kiss, we have a big toe, we create TV shows like SpongeBob Squarepants. These are things that make us stand out.
We also have really big brains, though you wouldn’t guess it from Sponge Bob. Chip Walter, who has studied these things, says that humans have a unique adaptation to this condition. Walter says, “If we were born as fully formed and physically mature as the babies of contemporary great apes, human gestation would last not nine months, but twenty-one! This means that we are born a full year premature…Because our premature birth, we come into the world almost totally helpless. Our brains are small and underdeveloped; our limbs, fingers and toes are cartilage rather than mature bone. We are born nearly blind, our nervous systems are not even close to fully formed, and we continue to grow for approximately a third of our lives, years after other primates have reached their majority.”[ii]
Here’s the amazing thing, though. Other creatures come into the world with just about all of their ways of relating to the world fully established. Every platypus born into the world is born with all of their culture already established. Every baboon. Every hippopotamus. They are not going to change much after birth.
But humans! We have a highly adaptive brain that goes on changing. As Walter says, our brains “enable us to change our personal behavior in reaction to personal experience, and as a species, they keep us curious, playful, creative, and restless; in a word, youthful.”[iii]
That’s a biologist’s way of putting things. Here’s how I put that in theology: God has created human beings in such a way that we are born with the capacity to be transformed. I don’t know what sorts of sins a platypus gets into, but they really don’t need to be transformed and remade. They are born with what they need to be what they are supposed to be. We, however, not only CAN be transformed, we MUST be transformed and we are given everything we need to do it. We are not condemned to accept the world as it is or to accept ourselves as we are. We know hope and possibility and change even when everything around us seems to deny it. We can know that God has not abandoned us even when it seems the world is God-forsaken.
This is why in the midst of the Holocaust, even when their homes had been taken, their families separated, their loved ones killed, their neighborhoods and synagogues destroyed, Jewish culture survived. People sang and made music in the death camps. In the Warsaw ghetto people wrote articles for newspapers. People told stories to their children because they knew that eventually even the Nazis would pass and transformation would come.
So when Isaiah says that we are like filthy rags, like leaves in the wind we can say, “Yes, but we are also clay awaiting transformation. God can take us and remake us. A new day is coming and it belongs, not to the worst of us, but to God.”
So how much do our lives reflect this understanding? Does Advent say for us that we are proclaiming this new day that is coming or does it say that we are just going to do more – more of the same, only this time with more lights and glitter?
A few years ago a group of churches came together and said, “We are tired of Christmas being lost in a sea of seasonal stress and traffic. Let’s make Christmas counter-cultural again. Let’s start an Advent Conspiracy!” So these churches networked together and they committed themselves to four simple Advent rules. They were going to Worship fully, Spend less, Give more and Love all.
They challenged their congregations to give as much to the missions of the church as they spent on Christmas. Their cause was clean water and they put wells in places all over the world where more than a billion people don’t have drinkable water. They say that for only $10 spent in the right way, a child can have clean water for life. $10. That’s how much it costs for a mosquito net in our Nothing but Nets campaign. When’s the last time you felt that good about giving away $10?
So here’s where we are – with me challenging you to make Advent the scandalous time of expectation that it is meant to be. Couldn’t we take up those rules of the Advent Conspiracy? To worship fully – not just on Sunday morning but at every opportunity. With our Advent devotionals. With our Advent calendars. With our families around an Advent wreath or candle. With our friends.
To spend less. We make a mockery of this season every time we spend more than we have, winding up with more debt, more burdens and more stress, rather than more joy. Spending less is good not only for your wallet, but for your soul, too.
To give more. To support those ministries that do so much in our community. To give our time to the food bank. To visiting those in need. To teach. To bake. To increasing racial reconciliation. To give more to making our community a better place for all of its citizens.
Finally to love all. To love all of God’s children and all of God’s creatures – starting with the people right around you. Nothing is going to change the world more than experiencing and showing love. Worship fully. Spend less. Give more. Love all. It’s a conspiracy, because we know that God’s new day will come and we want to be ready.
It was not easy for Kelly and Dale Clem to look ahead after the tragedy that struck them in 1994. They could have looked inward and let their loss and grief define the rest of their lives. They could have held God at a distance and allowed those deep questions of “Why?” to determine the shape of their lives. But they didn’t. All of those teams of United Methodists going to work in Alabama made a difference.
"We received and welcomed hundreds of volunteers, to help us rebuild our homes and lives," said Dale. "It wasn't easy to be a receiver, but what a blessing it was to see how God was moving through the United Methodist Church to help us and our community get back on our feet. I want to give back just a portion of what I have received."[iv]
Dale said that as he and Kelly went to be missionaries to Lithuania, where they served for several years, representing the gospel of Jesus in a place that had not heard that message in many, many years. They have now returned and are serving churches in Alabama once again, but they continue to speak to groups and write about their experiences. For them, as for so many people of faith, the formlessness of the world is an opportunity for God to do a new thing. All we have to do is be open to the redeeming God will do in making us human for Christmas. Thanks be to God.
Isaiah 64:1-9 (NRSV)
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence—as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence! When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence. From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him.
You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed. We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us and have delivered us into the hand of iniquity. Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are your people.
Then there is a chunk of concrete. It’s a piece of a church in Piedmont, Alabama. I got it when I led a team of Volunteers in Mission to Alabama in the summer of 1994. Some of you will remember this story. On March 27 of that year, Palm Sunday, there were about 140 people gathered together for the 11 AM service at Goshen United Methodist Church. The children were doing a musical program that day and the procession had just begun.
At just that moment an F4 tornado was cutting a half-mile swath across the county. When it hit that church it lifted the roof right up and then crashed it and the walls down on top of the people inside. Twenty people died. More than 40 people died overall in three states during that storm. But it was the church that got our attention.
One of the children who died was Hannah, the 4-year-old daughter of Kelly Clem, pastor of Goshen Church. “This might shake people’s faith for a long time,” she said. “I think that is normal. But having your faith shaken is not the same as losing it.”[i] So the next Sunday, with the cameras from national TV networks there and her eyes still blackened from the collapse of the roof, Kelly Clem led her church in an Easter sunrise service in the parking lot next to the ruins of the church. Those of us watching shuddered. We professed belief in God. We knew that life triumphed even in the midst of death. But could we have done the same?
A few weeks later we took a mission team to Piedmont to work on houses that were being rebuilt in the wake of the storms. Kelly’s mom is from Virginia and she was on the trip with us. Kelly’s husband, Dale, is a United Methodist minister, too, and he’s the one who took us on a tour of where the church had stood. We walked through the parsonage next door, which was damaged, but not destroyed.
At the end he talked about a cross that had survived the tornado. Everything else in the church had signs of damage, but the cross that was being used for the Palm Sunday service had survived untouched. That was his sign of hope in the midst of all that inexplicable suffering. Yes, there was death and there was rubble, but there was still a cross to witness to something beyond death. That’s when I picked up my piece of Goshen church that still sits in my office.
Today is the day that Advent begins. A time of waiting on God and a time of looking for signs of a new day that will dawn. But Advent always takes us by surprise. We’ve just come from Thanksgiving and from Black Friday. Christmas songs are playing on the radio. Lights are in the windows. The Hamilton Men’s Class is cooking breakfast. These are signs of a great celebration.
In our scripture lessons for today, though, there are some very different images. In the Mark reading, Jesus talks about darkness and stars falling from the sky. In Isaiah, the prophet emphasizes the absence of God. Speaking for the people who are waiting on a God to deliver them from exile, Isaiah calls for God to tear open the heavens and come down with earthquakes to make the earth tremble. But Isaiah suspects that God is absent because of the people’s sin and a people living without God are no people at all.
So how do you describe such a people? “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away” [Isa. 64:6]. A filthy cloth. A leaf being blown in the wind. There’s not much to recommend a people who are far from God. Maybe it’s a little like having a tornado come through and take away everything that you’ve built your hope on.
There’s one more image that Isaiah uses. “We are the clay,” he says to God, “and you are our potter; we are the work of your hand” [Isa. 64:8]. It’s an old biblical image. You could say it goes right back to the opening chapters of Genesis. After all what was Adam before God got to work? Earth. Dirt. Clay. This pottery image goes way back.
We can imagine in our minds potters we know who go to work so carefully on a formless ball of clay. You can see her, can’t you?, bent over the wheel, arms up the elbows in the clay, hands immersed in mud. Then, almost magically, the clay begins to take shape in her hands, becoming what, when it’s finished, you know it was always meant to be. They are connected. Without the potter, the clay is a lump. With the potter, the clay becomes the bowl, the pitcher, the cup. This is the image Isaiah uses to describe us before God. If we’re going to see God…if we’re going to be redeemed from the situations that threaten to take away our hope…if we’re going to be changed and remade…if the world’s going to become better instead of worse, we’ve got to put ourselves before God like formless clay before the potter. For Christmas to come, you’ve got to give yourself to God to be remade into the thing God desires you to be.
We often say that the amazing thing about Christmas is that God comes to us in human form. God becomes human in order to save us and this world from the effects of sin and destruction. We might also say that one of the side benefits of that incarnation is that we also have the opportunity to become human…to become what God intends us to be.
What are the things that make us human? Comparative biology tells us that there are about six traits that we have that make us distinctive from any other creature on God’s green earth. We laugh, we cry, we kiss, we have a big toe, we create TV shows like SpongeBob Squarepants. These are things that make us stand out.
We also have really big brains, though you wouldn’t guess it from Sponge Bob. Chip Walter, who has studied these things, says that humans have a unique adaptation to this condition. Walter says, “If we were born as fully formed and physically mature as the babies of contemporary great apes, human gestation would last not nine months, but twenty-one! This means that we are born a full year premature…Because our premature birth, we come into the world almost totally helpless. Our brains are small and underdeveloped; our limbs, fingers and toes are cartilage rather than mature bone. We are born nearly blind, our nervous systems are not even close to fully formed, and we continue to grow for approximately a third of our lives, years after other primates have reached their majority.”[ii]
Here’s the amazing thing, though. Other creatures come into the world with just about all of their ways of relating to the world fully established. Every platypus born into the world is born with all of their culture already established. Every baboon. Every hippopotamus. They are not going to change much after birth.
But humans! We have a highly adaptive brain that goes on changing. As Walter says, our brains “enable us to change our personal behavior in reaction to personal experience, and as a species, they keep us curious, playful, creative, and restless; in a word, youthful.”[iii]
That’s a biologist’s way of putting things. Here’s how I put that in theology: God has created human beings in such a way that we are born with the capacity to be transformed. I don’t know what sorts of sins a platypus gets into, but they really don’t need to be transformed and remade. They are born with what they need to be what they are supposed to be. We, however, not only CAN be transformed, we MUST be transformed and we are given everything we need to do it. We are not condemned to accept the world as it is or to accept ourselves as we are. We know hope and possibility and change even when everything around us seems to deny it. We can know that God has not abandoned us even when it seems the world is God-forsaken.
This is why in the midst of the Holocaust, even when their homes had been taken, their families separated, their loved ones killed, their neighborhoods and synagogues destroyed, Jewish culture survived. People sang and made music in the death camps. In the Warsaw ghetto people wrote articles for newspapers. People told stories to their children because they knew that eventually even the Nazis would pass and transformation would come.
So when Isaiah says that we are like filthy rags, like leaves in the wind we can say, “Yes, but we are also clay awaiting transformation. God can take us and remake us. A new day is coming and it belongs, not to the worst of us, but to God.”
So how much do our lives reflect this understanding? Does Advent say for us that we are proclaiming this new day that is coming or does it say that we are just going to do more – more of the same, only this time with more lights and glitter?
A few years ago a group of churches came together and said, “We are tired of Christmas being lost in a sea of seasonal stress and traffic. Let’s make Christmas counter-cultural again. Let’s start an Advent Conspiracy!” So these churches networked together and they committed themselves to four simple Advent rules. They were going to Worship fully, Spend less, Give more and Love all.
They challenged their congregations to give as much to the missions of the church as they spent on Christmas. Their cause was clean water and they put wells in places all over the world where more than a billion people don’t have drinkable water. They say that for only $10 spent in the right way, a child can have clean water for life. $10. That’s how much it costs for a mosquito net in our Nothing but Nets campaign. When’s the last time you felt that good about giving away $10?
So here’s where we are – with me challenging you to make Advent the scandalous time of expectation that it is meant to be. Couldn’t we take up those rules of the Advent Conspiracy? To worship fully – not just on Sunday morning but at every opportunity. With our Advent devotionals. With our Advent calendars. With our families around an Advent wreath or candle. With our friends.
To spend less. We make a mockery of this season every time we spend more than we have, winding up with more debt, more burdens and more stress, rather than more joy. Spending less is good not only for your wallet, but for your soul, too.
To give more. To support those ministries that do so much in our community. To give our time to the food bank. To visiting those in need. To teach. To bake. To increasing racial reconciliation. To give more to making our community a better place for all of its citizens.
Finally to love all. To love all of God’s children and all of God’s creatures – starting with the people right around you. Nothing is going to change the world more than experiencing and showing love. Worship fully. Spend less. Give more. Love all. It’s a conspiracy, because we know that God’s new day will come and we want to be ready.
It was not easy for Kelly and Dale Clem to look ahead after the tragedy that struck them in 1994. They could have looked inward and let their loss and grief define the rest of their lives. They could have held God at a distance and allowed those deep questions of “Why?” to determine the shape of their lives. But they didn’t. All of those teams of United Methodists going to work in Alabama made a difference.
"We received and welcomed hundreds of volunteers, to help us rebuild our homes and lives," said Dale. "It wasn't easy to be a receiver, but what a blessing it was to see how God was moving through the United Methodist Church to help us and our community get back on our feet. I want to give back just a portion of what I have received."[iv]
Dale said that as he and Kelly went to be missionaries to Lithuania, where they served for several years, representing the gospel of Jesus in a place that had not heard that message in many, many years. They have now returned and are serving churches in Alabama once again, but they continue to speak to groups and write about their experiences. For them, as for so many people of faith, the formlessness of the world is an opportunity for God to do a new thing. All we have to do is be open to the redeeming God will do in making us human for Christmas. Thanks be to God.
Isaiah 64:1-9 (NRSV)
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence—as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence! When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence. From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him.
You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed. We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us and have delivered us into the hand of iniquity. Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are your people.
[i] Rick Bragg, “Piedmont Journal”, The New York Times, 4/3/1994, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9407E5DE103FF930A35757C0A962958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all.
[ii] Chip Walter, Thumbs, Toes, and Tears: And Other Traits that Make us Human, [New York: Walker & Co., 2006, p. 34.
[iii] Ibid., p. 36.
[iv] Dale & Kelly Clem: Telling the Missionary Story, http://www.awfumc.org/news_detail.asp?TableName=oNews_PJAYMY&PKValue=7.
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