Something Old, Something New

Trinity United Methodist Church – Orange, VA

It is a pleasure for me to be back here in Orange for this service today. This is the church I associate with Christmas because for all of my childhood this is where I was at Christmastime. All of those candlelight Christmas Eve services. All of the Christmas pageants. All of my friends. All of the adults here who were more than people my parents knew – they were like bonus parents. When I come here I am grateful to have had the opportunity to grow up in a place like this.

So here we are again and it is still Christmas. It’s a strange Sunday because we have the temptation to forget that Christmas continues for 12 days, even though we’ve been singing about the partridge in the pear tree for two months. And after all of the anticipation and tension and busy-ness of this last season, we probably just want to kind of catch our breath, don’t we?

Wednesday night – Christmas Eve – now that was the magic. I don’t know what your Christmas Eve looked like but it usually means last minute gift-wrapping, sneaking around the house with Christmas secrets, the candlelight service at church. And if you had young children in your house, you know that the excitement level was at fever pitch. Of all of our holy days, Christmas is the most kid-friendly.

Now, though, the presents are unwrapped, the food has been eaten (unfortunately), the football games have begun. There are more celebrations to come for some of us, but in the cold light of day there is a part of us that is ready to just climb back into something like normalcy and routine.

The mood of the Christmas story is changing in our bible readings for this morning, too. The shepherds and angels and starry nights in a borrowed manger are gone and now we find Mary and Joseph doing just what every good Jewish couple would do with a first-born son. They were taking the baby Jesus to the Temple to dedicate him to the Lord.

It’s known as the Presentation of Jesus and it probably would have occurred some forty days after his birth. Maybe Mary and Joseph were looking for some normalcy, too, after all the turmoil of Jesus’ birth…after all the strange witnesses to what that birth meant. They were following the rules of the Law, which were as old as the hills and as steady as stone.

What Mary and Joseph did not expect to find at the Temple were more witnesses to what God was doing in this little child. But there they were – Simeon and Anna.

Simeon was an old man and a good man. He was like those kindly old men who do not lament that the world has gone to pot since we got rid of home milk delivery but who look forward to something great yet to come. Like the Cubs winning the World Series or a bypass around Charlottesville. Something like that.

But what Simeon looked forward to was Israel’s salvation. Simeon knew the promises of the prophets who talked about a coming Messiah who would redeem the people from their situation. He was inspired by the Holy Spirit – like many of the prophets before him. The Holy Spirit spoke to him in remarkable ways and one of the things that was revealed to him was that he would see God’s Messiah before he died. So he waited.

He waited…until this day when Joseph and Mary brought their child to the Temple. There was nothing extraordinary about the scene to mark the child or his parents as different from anyone else. No angels overhead. No halo. It was just a couple bringing a sacrificial offering of two birds, which was the allowance in the Law for a poor couple.

Simeon, however, saw the child and knew that this was the one for whom he waited. He went to the couple and took the baby in his arms and he prayed a prayer to God. Old Simeon, the One who Waits, told God he was now ready for death because he had seen with his own eyes the promised Messiah, made flesh in the child in his arms. Something old met something new and God was praised.

Simeon wasn’t the only witness that day in the Temple. There was also an elderly woman inspired by the spirit of the prophets. Anna, 84 years old…widowed long ago. Anna also waited on God, praying continuously to God in the Temple.

She also saw the couple and burst forth in praise. She shouted out that this baby was the one who would redeem Jerusalem and Israel and all the nations. Something old met something new and God was praised.

So maybe Christmas is not just a kid-friendly holiday. Here we have two people who waited long years for the Savior and who became witnesses like the shepherds and animals and magi. Mary and Joseph were amazed. Simeon warned Mary about the struggles ahead, the grief that would come to her. But underlying it all was good news – God had come to young and old. God was here.

You might not know this, but I come from an interesting family. Carson Lee has no idea what he’s getting into. This clan of ours, like every family, I think…I hope, has its share of eccentrics. I’m one of them. But one of my favorite eccentrics was my Uncle Jim. Uncle Jim lived in Blackstone and in his later years if you went to visit him you would have to wind your way through his house that was piled from floor to ceiling with papers and books. He was a preacher, you see, and these were all bulletins and sermons and notes from his many years in the pulpit.

I rarely saw Uncle Jim. Usually it was just once a year at the family reunion. I was just a boy then and he was an old man who looked even older than he actually was because he had a long, white beard. But as unlikely a pair as we were – I can remember a couple of family reunions when I spent most of the time with Uncle Jim.

I can’t say I remember any great pearls of wisdom which he gave me, but he was a great storyteller and something about him spoke to me. I felt something rich was passing between us.

When Uncle Jim died, I inherited some of his books, one of which is his old Bible with his notes in it. Something I still pick up from time to time. In a way, Uncle Jim acted as a Simeon or an Anna to me – a witness to what God was doing in the world and how the long arc of time was full of the promise of God.

I’ll admit that Uncle Jim was a little odd, but I compare what I grew up with to the world I knew in the inner city when I did my ministerial internship in Dallas, Texas. In West Dallas it felt like a community without any senior citizens. It was a broken neighborhood populated by young people. If you grew old (and for some it really was an if) then you did whatever you could to leave. The result of this was that the wisdom of the elderly was lost to that community.

It’s not only in West Dallas. Wherever children grow up in households without parents and grandparents or adults who care about them – and there are households like this is every community – when this happens children are denied something they need – contact with people whose life experiences can offer visions of hope. They are also denied knowing people whose faith has developed over many years and whose faith has been tried and tested by trials. It is a frightening experience to grow up in a world without elders.

Now, I realize that age doesn’t always imply wisdom. What’s that saying? ‘There’s no fool like an old fool’? But one of the things God has given us as a gift is the faithful experience of the older members of our community.

I don’t have to tell you that we live in a youth-obsessed culture. Music and movies are driven by youth interests and images. Products sell themselves as ways to deny or hide the effects of aging. Just like that neighborhood in West Dallas, it can sometimes seem that the elderly are invisible.

We also are resisting growing older. Robert Bly, the poet, has called us the "sibling society", a nation of people who are stuck in a kind of stagnating adolescence where there are fewer and fewer people willing to take on adult roles. Bly says that there are no elders to initiate people into adulthood - no people willing to spend the time needed to guide young people into a new role as adults bearing the responsibility for passing along our most precious traditions.

Simeon and Anna show us how much God values the experience of age and how often God uses that experience to bear witness to the good news of Jesus. We only have to look back at the stories of Joshua being mentored by Moses, Samuel mentored by the old priest, Eli, and Ruth with her mother-in-law Naomi, to see how the process has worked itself out throughout the Bible. Throughout our tradition there is this practice of mentoring and guiding people to deeper experiences of Christ’s love.

There have been a lot of studies in recent years about how young people find their way into a life’s vocation – a sense of belonging in their lives that is attuned to their gift’s and God’s call. I’ve been involved with these studies through the Board of Ordained Ministry as we have looked at how people are nurtured for ministry, but it’s a bigger question. How do we help people know who they are and who God is calling them to be?

Dori Baker lives in Altavista and has thought and taught and written a lot about youth ministry. In her latest book, Lives to Offer, she talks a lot about the value of intergenerational sharing in congregations. A curriculum of vocation, she says, might be envisioned as a “companioned walk shared by faithful sojourners in search of compelling ways to offer their lives in response to God’s call.”[i]

A companioned walk is what we initiate every time we baptize a baby in this congregation. It’s what we commit to when we welcome a child and promise with that child’s family to bring him or her up in the faith. It’s what we do when the church is at its best.

At Franktown we have been trying to incorporate more intergenerational events into our congregational life. One of the most significant of these has been our confirmation program which pairs youth with adults chosen by the congregation. Most of the confirmation process is done one-on-one with youth and adults meeting whenever they are able for 13 weeks. It is powerful for both and the relationships that are built up, we hope, will last. One of my favorite parts of the program is seeing confirmands and mentors sitting together in worship or meeting in the hallways of the church to plan their next get-together. It feels like what church is supposed to be.

Last spring I was conducting some interviews with church members as I was getting ready for a conference on calling congregations. One of those interviews was with one of the senior members of the church, a man who had been a school principal for a long time. As we were talking, he started telling the story of when his family home burned to the ground. He was a grown man at the time and his father was the only one living in the house. Fortunately his father got out safely, but most of the most important things the family owned went up in flames.

The father told his son, “I had two desks in the house that I wanted to give to you and now I won’t be able to do that.” I was wondering why he was telling me this story, this son who was now an elder in the church, but then I got it. He said his lesson from the fire was, “If you want to keep something, you’ve got to give it away.”

Like Simeon, like Anna, like Christmas, like our whole lives. If we want to keep the hope that makes this holiday good news for every person, then we have to give it away. Thanks be to God for communities where Jesus still comes and where people of every age experience the salvation of God.

Luke 2:22-40
Now when the days of their purification were fulfilled according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord, just as it is written in the law of the Lord that "all firstborn males shall be called holy to the Lord," and to give an offering according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, "a pair of turtledoves or two young doves."
Now, look, a man named Simeon was in Jerusalem and the man was righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel and the Holy Spirit was upon him. And a revelation had been given to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before seeing the Lord's Messiah. Now he came in the Spirit to the Temple, and the parents of the child Jesus brought him in to do according to the custom under the law. Simeon took him into his arms and praised God saying,
"Now you are dismissing your servant, Master,
according to your word, in peace;
For my eyes have seen your salvation
which you have prepared before all the peoples,
A light of revelation to the nations
and glory for your people Israel."
His father and his mother were amazed at what was being said about him. So Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother, "Look, this one is destined for the falling and raising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will opposes - and your very soul will be pierced by a sword - so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed."
Now there was also the prophetess Anna, daughter of Phanuel, from the tribe of Asher. She was of great age, having lived with her husband for seven years after her marriage and then as a widow to the age of 84. She did not leave the temple but worshipped there, fasting and praying night and day. At that hour she appeared, praising God and speaking about the child to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem.
And when they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their town of Nazareth. The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.

[i] Lives to Offer: Accompanying Youth on Their Vocational Quests, Dori Grinenko Baker & Joyce Ann Mercer [The Pilgrim Press: Cleveland, 2007], p. 6.

Becoming Human for Christmas: The Baby

Part of what it means to be human is to know that the world is always far greater than we will ever comprehend and the God is as close to us as our next breath. It’s something that we learn at Christmas because wondrous things happen at Christmas. Amazing things.

My grandmother lived in Southampton County across the bay in a little house by the edge of a small forest. I loved going to visit Grandma. I always knew that when we got to her house after traveling, no matter how late it was, there was always going to be food. We would walk in and the house would smell like fried chicken or ham. There would always be homemade biscuits and damson preserves. And, if we were lucky, caramel cake, the kind that Mrs. Laura Dennis makes.

Back behind her house she had a big garden that she worked with her neighbor and behind that, at the edge of the woods, was a collection of farm animals. There was a chicken coop where she got eggs (and the fried chicken), two pigs, and a donkey. One time when I was there as a boy I spent hours trying to learn to talk to the chickens. They were fascinating to me.

Well, one Christmas we got to Grandma’s house on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. I was very excited. I spent the rest of the day trying to find things to do to kill time until dark. I went down to see the chickens. I even talked to the pigs and the donkey. I climbed the big tree in Grandma’s back yard. I ran back into the woods and practiced tightrope walking across a narrow tree trunk that had fallen over a creek. Finally it was night and after a great meal around Grandma’s table I went to bed.

I usually got to sleep in the front room of Grandma’s house in a big bed that took up most of a small room. It was a cedar four-poster bed and it was a lot bigger than my bed at home. I felt a lot older when I got to sleep in that bed.

It took me a long time to go to sleep that night, though. It was Christmas Eve! I kept thinking that I heard things outside. Do you know what I mean? And every time the house would creak I’d sit up in bed and listen.

Finally, after HOURS of this, I went to sleep. And I stayed asleep until 11:31. I know it was 11:31 because that’s what the clock said when I woke up with a start and looked at it. I didn’t know what had woken me up so I just listened and I heard a tap, tap, tap on the window. At first, I didn’t believe it was real, so I sat real still in the bed and there it was again – tap, tap, tap. I went over to the window and I slowly pulled back the curtain and there was a bright red cardinal tapping on the window with his beak. I tried to shoo him away, but he just tapped again like he was trying to get my attention.

Then I noticed that behind him there was a beagle from the house down the dirt road where my Grandma lived. The beagle was looking right at me and jumping up and down and letting out little yips. He also kept turning his head like he was beckoning me to go out there with him.

Now this is a strange thing to happen at 11:31 at night. Or 11:31 in the morning for that matter. And I couldn’t decide whether I was dreaming or not. But it was Christmas Eve and all kinds of amazing things happen on Christmas Eve, so I pulled on my sweatshirt and my jeans and I slipped on my tennis shoes and I tiptoed out through my Grandma’s front room. The moon was really bright so I could see my way without cutting on any lights. It was shining off the copper jello molds my Grandma kept on the wall of her kitchen. I opened the front door and went outside.

It was really bright out there. The light from the moon made all the trees seem like they were made of silver. The even cast moonshadows on the ground. The grass was glistening with frost like someone had scattered diamonds all around.

When I came around the corner to the window of my room, there were the cardinal and the beagle and now two other birds that I didn’t recognize. As soon as she saw me the beagle jumped up and yipped so loudly that I thought she’d wake up everyone else in the house. But no lights went on and the beagle started trotting towards the forest, turning around every so often to see if I was following. The birds were flying along behind. This had to be a dream, I thought.

We got back to the pens where the animals were kept and something strange had happened. The chickens had organized. At night they were closed into a coop that was in the middle of a fenced-in area. They had somehow climbed up one of the diagonal rails in the coop and had lifted the latch off the door. By the time I got there the door was wide open and all the chickens had lined up by the fence that surrounded the coop. There were three chickens standing on top of one another pushing up on the latch that kept that door closed. They opened that one, too, and they all poured out of the fence. This had to be a dream.

The pigs were lined up, too, waiting patiently by the gate to their pen. When I got to them, they looked up at me with their little pig eyes and I knew what they were expecting. So since everybody else was making a break for it, I figured the pigs should come, too. I opened the gate and out they came to join the chickens.

Then I looked and saw that, somehow, the donkey had gotten out, too. He was standing there looking at me with his sad, old donkey eyes. He gestured with his head towards his back and I knew what he wanted me to do. So I crawled up on his back and he started lumbering off down a path into the woods.

I looked back and all the animals were following him. The pigs were grunting and snorting. The chickens were all over the place, walking in and out of the legs of the donkey, jumping up on top of the pigs, clucking when they stumbled into each other. Every so often I saw the cardinal and the other birds in the trees. But they all seemed to know where they were going.

We walked back into a part of the forest where I had never been before. It was ten or fifteen minutes that we walked. We walked until we came to a clearing where the moonlight poured in from overhead like a bright star shining down on us. And in that clearing was the largest collection of animals I had ever seen. Every animal in the forest was there. White-tailed deer, otters, beaver, weasels, foxes, groundhogs, squirrels… skunks. And several animals from the houses around. There was a cow and some sheep and a couple of noisy goats. Birds and even some snakes. They were all gathered there in that clearing in the woods.

There was lots of commotion and confusion. All the animals seemed to be waiting for something. Then they all started to quiet down. I was still sitting on the donkey’s back and I said to myself, out loud, “What in the world is going on here?” And that donkey turned back towards me and said, “Shh.” Which was a little surprising to say the least.

So I shushed. Everything got quiet and I saw that the animals had arranged themselves in a circle and that the sheep were escorting another creature into the middle of the circle. It was the wisest, most respected member of the forest community. That’s right. It was an old possum.

The possum got up on its hind legs and looked around at all of the animals. The moon shone down on his pink nose and eyes so that he seemed to almost glow. Not even a twig stirred in the wind. Everyone was looking at the possum.

“Welcome, brothers and sisters of the forest,” the possum said. “Give thanks. Light and life have come again. It’s Christmas!”

You never heard such a racket then. All of the animals cheered and brayed and snorted and shouted…they actually shouted!…“Merry Christmas!” I saw a bunch of bees appear and they started buzzing together. And it was like a song.

I leaned down to the ear of the donkey and asked, “What’s going on?”

The donkey was very patient with me. “It’s midnight,” he said in a deep, donkey voice. “This is the hour when the baby Jesus was born. And who were the first to see the baby?”

“The shepherds?” I guessed.

“No, it was the animals! The animals in the mangers were the first to see what God was doing and ever since then, at midnight on Christmas Eve, the animals have been able to speak and to tell what our ancestors told us about that first Christmas. So the birds sing and the bees sing and we shout with joy for the new-born king. We used to do it in Latin but we haven’t done that since Vatican 2.”

“But…”

“Shh…Old Possum is ready to tell the story.”

So he did. The Possum told about how the angel had come to Mary to tell her that God had not forgotten the earth, had not forgotten the people. The angel told her that she was going to have a child and that child would be the savior of the world. Even though she was just a young woman at the time and even though she couldn’t even understand all that the angel told her, Mary had said, “Yes, let it happen as you say.” She had welcomed the child and, after a dream, so did Joseph, the man to whom she had been promised in marriage.

But when they came to Bethlehem that night so long ago, there was no place for them to rest. Every inn was full. The humans could not make space for the travelers and the baby that was about to be born.

So the animals made room. Like Mary, they welcomed the gift that God was giving to the whole world. And the baby was born among cattle and birds in a stable. They lent their feeding trough to be the baby’s first crib.

“And on that first Christmas,” Possum said, “at midnight, when the baby was born, the cows knelt down.” I looked over at the cow who had come, and sure enough, she was kneeling. “And the donkeys knelt down.” Here the donkey knelt and I got off to stand next to him. “And the birds sang a song of praise to God.” The cardinal and the other birds began to sing. I think they were singing, “Joy to the World.”

“All the creatures began to speak. While they were talking and singing, a group of shepherds stumbled into the stable. They said, ‘We heard the news! We were out in the fields and we saw angels. We heard about a baby that was born to save the world…to bring peace on earth. And we ran all the way. Who ever heard of such a thing? A baby to bring hope once again! And we get to be witnesses!’

“Of course it was ridiculous. Shepherds as witnesses? Even their sheep know how unreliable those characters were. But the angels came to them to tell them what we already knew: that God who made the creatures with wings and the creatures with hooves…the God who made trees and mountains and marshes and bays…this God was now found in the flesh…in a baby…in a manger…in the arms of a young woman who looked in wonder at singing sheep and preaching possums. Oh, yes, we possums were there, too, hanging from the rafters.

“So we come here once more to tell the story. We who have always been what we were made to be, come to give witness to the good news God has for all the world, humans included…God has become human so that they can be what they were made to be, too…forgiven, loved and freed.” And it was hard to read his beady eyes but I believe as he said this he was looking right at me.”

Then all the creatures knelt and bowed in whatever way they could – (this was particularly difficult for the snake) – and they sang once more, “Joy to the world, the Lord has come, let earth receive her king.”

Later, as we were walking back to my Grandma’s house, I was riding on the donkey’s back again. “Why did you get me tonight? Why did I get to come?” I asked the donkey.

It was one of the chickens who answered. “Because you tried to talk to us. Every human who looks deeply enough at the world knows that there are things to learn in every corner of it. Even chickens know the glory of God. The world is full of the glory of God. But you humans seldom stop to see it. Or to ask a chicken where to find it.”

I grabbed hold of the donkey’s mane and held on tight because I was getting sleepy and didn’t want to fall off. I dozed off and on as we made our way back through the woods. By the time we got back to the pens, the animals were no longer speaking my language. The pigs grunted. The chickens clucked. The cardinal chirped. And the donkey brayed.

I slipped off the donkey’s back and headed back across the field to my Grandma’s house. I came quietly through the front room by the oil stove. I heard my sisters breathing softly in their sleep in the next room. I looked at the ceramic manger scene my grandma kept by the Christmas tree. I had never noticed the cow there before. Then I went off to bed. It had to be a dream, didn’t it?

To tell you the truth, when I woke up the next morning I forgot all about it. There was so much commotion and presents and flashbulbs going off. But it all came back to me over breakfast. No. It had to be a dream, didn’t it?

I threw on my jeans and my sweatshirt and my tennis shoes and ran down to the animal pens. There were the chickens clucking behind their fence. The pigs were in their pen rooting in the mud. And there was the donkey looking at me to see if I’d brought him a carrot.

Everything looked the same as it always did. The world was just the same as it always was. But then I looked at the donkey and you can say I’m crazy if you want to but I know that donkey winked at me. And when I walked past the chickens it sure sounded like they clucked in such a way that they were saying, “Jesus is born.” And when I walked back into my Grandma’s house, it sure seemed like it was heaven. Thanks be to God.

Luke 2:1-20
In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid; for see - I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger."
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,
"Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace among those whom he favors!"
When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us."
So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

Becoming Human for Christmas: Joy

So here’s my question for those of you with iPods or one of those portable music devices: Do you have a playlist for times when it hurts so bad that it feels good? Have you got songs that are just so deep with emotion that they make you cry and even so it feels right? If you’ve got a playlist like this, you know what I’m talking about.

When I was in college I worked part-time as a disc jockey in a country music station and that’s when I discovered the “hurts so good” song. I can remember days when I would come back to the house where I was living and throw a Ricky Skaggs record on the turntable. (For those of you too young to remember such things, a record was like a vinyl .mp3 file that you kept in a cardboard sleeve – very primitive). The needle would etch itself down into the groove of that record and there would be Ricky singing, “You got your heart broke and running from the reason.” Or maybe it was George Jones singing, “He stopped loving her today.” Man, it felt just like George knew what I was feeling and that needle was settling right into my soul to pick up every note.

Lisa Stevens knows about that kind of music. A lot of you have heard our own Lisa sing and she is a master of that soulful music that goes right into the heart of pain and finds the note of grace there. It’s impossible for me not to feel better after going on an emotional journey with Lisa through one of her songs.

I’m going here today because the theme of the day is joy and what I want to ask with you is: Do you have to be happy in order to be joyful and do they have to be the same thing? Because I don’t think that they are. Being joyful is about knowing that our hope, our promise, our life is in the God who comes to us in Jesus. No matter what our present circumstances – that is what keeps us looking around at the world in wonder. Joy is also one of those things that make us truly human.

Eric Wilson thinks we’re addicted to happiness. He’s an author who wrote a book recently and it’s called Against Happiness. You might think to yourself, “What kind of title is that? Against happiness? Who could be against happiness? It’s un-American! After all, the Declaration of Independence says that we’re all about life, liberty and the pursuit of…happiness! And if you don’t take Thomas Jefferson’s word for it, then take Bobby McFerrin’s. He’s the one who told us, ‘Don’t worry, be…happy!’”

Wilson doesn’t mind you feeling happy some of the time, but he’s worried that as a culture we’ve replaced some deeper, more difficult emotions with an emphasis on being shiny, happy people. He says we have “a collective yearning for complete happiness” and if we can’t achieve that state we will medicate ourselves to get it.

He doesn’t deny that there are mental conditions that require treatment. Depression and mental illness are devastating conditions. I’ve struggled with depression myself. But sometimes, Wilson wonders, do we neglect what we need to see just below the shiny surface? To put it in Christmas terms – do we put up an extra strand of Christmas lights and tinsel so that we don’t have to consider what’s lurking in the poverty of the manger?

Wilson points out that some of our greatest artists developed their greatest works in the midst of hard times. John Keats, the poet, wrote to his brother in 1819 and said, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?” George Frederic Handel wrote The Messiah, one of our favorite Christmas pieces, from a period of emotional distress. Wilson asks, “If we can only be happy, are ‘we merely trying to slice away what is probably an essential part of our hearts, that part that can reconcile us to facts, no matter how harsh, and that also can inspire us to imagine new and most creative ways to engage with the world?’”[i]

Ann Robertson is an author and a United Methodist pastor in Massachusetts and she believes that Christians have a different way to look at this. The Bible doesn’t say, “Don’t worry, be happy.” The Bible says, “Rejoice.” And to take it a little further, Paul says, in the First Thessalonians passage for today, “Rejoice always.”

Robertson tells the story of a friend of hers who was going through a very difficult period in her life. She had a son in prison, another on the verge of a breakdown, a husband in the hospital and she herself was depressed. “But she never told a soul in her church and expended all of her energy putting on this cheery front at work because she thought that to reveal her depression would be a bad witness for her faith.”

That’s wrong, Robertson says, because it confuses what faith is and what Christians are supposed to do with those rough places in our lives. “Happiness,” she says, “is the great feeling that you get when everything is going smoothly. Joy is what God gives you in the midst of trouble when you put that trouble in God’s hands.” She goes on to say that when we put ourselves in the service of something bigger than ourselves, when we live out of the knowledge that we are in God’s hands, we know that life is bigger than the things we struggles with. As she puts it, “When it finally becomes more important to be an instrument of God’s peace than it is to be comfortable and have what we want for ourselves, we are on the threshold of joy.”[ii]

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that joy is one of those things that get richer as you get older. I’m sorry to tell that to you young folks, but I think it’s true. When I was younger I had a semblance of joy at times. A puppy’s slobbering greeting, a trip to the amusement park, a lover’s kiss, a road trip with good friends – all of these things were hints of what joy could be. Now I see that these things take on new meaning in the light of God’s love. Joy is knowing that those transient experiences can never be taken away. Joy is knowing, even in the depths, that God’s new day is coming.

Joy is also appreciating the incredible immensity of God’s love in the present instance…in the here and now. Friday night I was coming out of Machipongo onto Rt. 13 and I was not thinking of anything other than what the traffic was like and how I was going to turn into it. And I looked left down towards the Trading Company and then I turned right and, God have mercy on me, there, just above the gas station was the most amazing moon I have ever seen. Surely that moon had never been in the sky before. It was huge and orange and why every car on the road didn’t stop to consider it, I do not know. The whole character of the universe changed when I looked at that moon. It was joy – entirely unexpected and out of all proportion to the circumstances.

“Joy,” the theologian Karl Barth said, “is really the simplest form of gratitude.”[iii] It is the thanks our soul gives when it is aware that life is a gift. This takes us back to the difficult adverb that Paul gives us in the letter to the Thessalonians – Rejoice always. How is it that we can always be rejoicing? Is it any easier than the other things Paul asks of the Thessalonians? He also tells them to pray without ceasing and to give thanks in all circumstances.
I think they must all be related. We are made in such a way that our souls give glory to our God – to quote Jesus’ mother, Mary. If we had not been so dehumanized by the terrors of the world we would know that more fully. Rejoicing, praying, giving thanks – these are the things our souls do in their natural state. It takes an effort to close ourselves off to them, but we have all made that effort and have done it pretty effectively.

So when Paul is saying, “Rejoice always,” maybe it’s just another way of saying, “Remember who you are. Remember that you don’t just talk about Jesus because it’s a neat story to tell. Remember that Jesus was not just a great man like other great men. Remember that his birth was not just a remarkable scene fit for reproduction by Hallmark cards and bathrobe shepherds. Remember that Jesus was not just a great teacher, a great healer, a great storyteller.

“Remember that Jesus was the living Word come down from heaven. Remember that he was the one sent to restore us to the possibility of life, even though we had become accustomed to sin and death. Remember that he was the word made flesh, God become human, the hopes and fears of all the years met in this one unique, unrepeatable form. Remember that you are who you are, that you can become what God made you to be, that you can be truly human because of this Jesus. Remember that our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus. Rejoice always because you are always living in the light of what God has done in Jesus.”

When Suzanne and I lived in England for a year it was the first time I had ever spent Christmas or at least some part of the Christmas season, apart from my family. We didn’t have much that year. Our tree was about two feet high and we had decorated it with oranges and popcorn we had gotten from a bag at the grocery store. We didn’t pay attention when we bought it but it was actually white cheddar cheese popcorn which, it turns out, was really messy to string and really gross to leave on your tree long-term.

When Christmas Day came we gave each other small gifts and then we traveled to the house of some other Americans who were in England in the same church program that took us there. It was as simple a Christmas as I ever celebrated, but even in our homesickness, I experienced deep joy because I knew that we were there because of something bigger than any of us. We were there because of the love of Jesus and in that love we had confidence. I was confident that home was not just in Virginia. Home was in the God of Jesus Christ. In that confidence, in that joy, I will always rejoice. Thanks be to God.

1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 (NRSV)
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil. May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.

[i] Eric G. Wilson, “The Happiness Addicts Missing Out on a Melancholy Miracle,” theage.com.au, 3/1/2008, http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/the-happiness-addicts-missing-out-on-a-melancholy-miracle/2008/02/29/1204226981533.html.
[ii] Anne Robertson, “Joy or Happiness?”, sermon delivered at St. John’s United Methodist Church, 1999, http://www.stjohnsdover.org/99adv3.html.
[iii] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III.4, [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1961], p. 376.

Becoming Human for Christmas: Hope

The Rev. Kathleen Baskin-Ball

Since duck hunting season has come around again I guess it’s as good a time as any to tell this story. The tale is told about a man who gets a new bird dog and he goes out to train it the first time and he finds out that, lo and behold, this dog can walk on water. He can’t believe how fortunate he is but he knows no one will ever believe it.

So he goes to his most pessimistic friend and invites him out hunting. Doesn’t say a word about what his new dog can do. They’re out there on the marshes one day and it’s a great day for duck hunting. The weather is cold and wet and dark. A great day for duck hunting.

A flock of ducks go by, they shoot, and one of the ducks falls out of the sky. The dog knows exactly what to do. It jumps off the bank onto the water, walks right on over to where the duck is without so much as getting his paws wet, gets the duck and brings it back. This goes on all day long. Every time they shoot a duck, the dog walks across the water to retrieve it. And the man who owns the duck doesn’t say a word about it. Pretends it’s as natural as can be. But the pessimist doesn’t say a word either.

Finally, at the end of the day, the man can’t stand it anymore and he asks his friend, “So, did you notice anything about my new dog today?”

His friend says, “Yeah, I sure did. Your dog can’t swim.”

That story leads me a little ways in the direction I’d like to go today. In this season of Advent as we’re headed toward the coming of Jesus in the flesh, we’re talking about what it means for God to become human and for us to become human. Last week we talked about formlessness and how one of the things that marks us as truly human is the necessity of our being transformed. Like clay before the potter, we have to place the messiness of our lives before God to be remade into the thing God wants us to be.

Today I want to spend some time thinking about hope, and I want to say that another mark of being truly human is to live with hope. To look forward to what God is doing in the world. And to see the miraculous things that are already at work in the world because of the love we know in Jesus Christ. If, like the pessimist, we can only see what’s wrong with the world, we haven’t gotten the eyes that will allow us to see that ultimately something is terribly, terribly right with the universe, because God has come to redeem it.

Last week we spent some time with Isaiah and I want to go back there again today. In the passage we read last week we had those strange images of Advent – the filthy rag and the dried up leaf. Today the passage gives us some images that are a little easier to handle. Remember that Isaiah is trying to bring good news to the people of Israel in exile. They have been carted off to a foreign land. They’ve lost everything they held as sacred—the land, the Temple, and their king in the line of David. Jerusalem, the holy city, has been destroyed. They are being oppressed by the great Babylonian Empire. And Isaiah’s first words are, “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” This is a God who is going to redeem them from their suffering.

Isaiah offers a vision of a grand highway stretching across the desert to take the people back home. They will not have to go home the long way following the course of rivers. They will not have to worry about mountains and valleys impeding their travel. They will not have to worry about potholes and detours. This road is going straight through the desert to take them home. And what do we call this road? The highway of God. And when the nations see this caravan going home they will know that our God is a mighty God.

It’s good stuff, isn’t it? Just what you’d want to hear if you were living in exile far from home. But then Isaiah follows it with this strange phrase that doesn’t, at first, sound like hope: “All people are grass,” he says. “They don’t have any more staying power than a flower in a field. Here today and gone tomorrow. Surely the people are grass.”

But before you go start singing “Blue Christmas” let’s think about what Isaiah is saying. Is he really saying that we are hopeless creatures who wither into insignificance? Is he saying that ultimately nothing really matters because ultimately we fade away? Is he saying that God gets a kick out of our humiliation, out of saying “Respect my authority” because you are puny little creatures? Or is he saying something much deeper and much more hope-ful?

Listen to the next verse: “The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.” That’s where he’s going with the grass thing. Our lives have meaning and purpose and direction and hope because they are connected to God’s story… and if we’re going home it’s not because of anything we’ve done…it’s because of what God will do for us and with us and in spite of us…for no good reason except pure love.

Hope for Christians is built on this notion that our gifts and our talents are only of use when they are placed in the service of something larger and we are constantly bumping up against that something larger, which can make us feel small and insignificant. But the response Isaiah calls for is not depression. It’s not to think of ourselves more lowly than we ought to think. It’s not to hang our heads in despair and to approach our lives with downcast eyes. The response he calls for is this: Look at yourself. See that you are limited, that your power to sustain yourself will ultimately fail. But also see yourself in the light of the one who is to come. See that your story does not end with fading flower and withering grass. See that your hope is not placed in your ability to achieve liberation and success. See that your worth is not determined by what you can earn monetarily or by what power you can exercise over others. See that suffering and oppression are not what God intends for the creation. See that you are like grass and flowers and that God loves you for that!

That’s a little bit of a paraphrase but you get the picture. And its because God spoke with tenderness and hope to the downtrodden people of Israel in exile that John the Baptist picks up on his words in the Mark passage. To the people who came to the desert to see this strange prophet, John says, “God is still making a highway through the desert. We still need to be ready for the one who is coming to save the people. God has still not abandoned the people of God. And when God comes, you will see yourself in a whole new light. So get ready. Be baptized. Prepare for the coming of the Lord.”

What does hope look like for Christians? It looks like Jesus. It looks like people who put themselves in the footsteps of Jesus and try to model their lives after him. It looks like people going to Russia through our Children’s Hope Chest program and spending a week with orphans they would never have known and never have had a relationship with had it not been for the love of Jesus. It looks like people who write those same children notes and support them monetarily from the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Small things in the grand scheme of things, but how about that hope that it brings and the good news it proclaims.

I’ll tell you what else it looks like for me. It looks like one of my first colleagues in ministry, Kathleen Baskin-Ball. In the summer of 1989 we both went into ministry in the inner city of Dallas. I was beginning my seminary internship as the youth coordinator for a United Methodist-related community center. She was going to start a new congregation in the abandoned church next door.

Neither one of us knew what we were doing or what to expect. Both of us were just learning Spanish and we were working in a heavily Latino neighborhood. Kathleen was single at the time, only about 30 years old. She was idealistic and charismatic and she loved everybody.

Our paths crossed a lot that year. We were working with many of the same youth and they formed the nucleus of her new church community. I remember the meeting in her house when we started talking about a name for the new congregation. Nueva Esperanza – New Hope United Methodist Church. I remember one cold, cold night near Christmas when the two of us were the guitarists as we walked through the streets of West Dallas singing with members of that congregation as we went door to door in a celebration of Las Posadas – a Mexican tradition remembering the journey of Mary and Joseph to find a room in Bethlehem.

Kathleen was never satisfied with doing ministry from a distance. Actually, it was what worried me about her. West Dallas was not an easy place to live. It was the same neighborhood that produced Bonnie and Clyde back in the 1930s and it was still a troubled place with a lot of poverty, a lot of drugs, and a lot of despair. But Kathleen did not want to serve a church in a neighborhood where she did not live, so she moved in.

She bought a house near the church – she was probably the only single, white woman in the neighborhood. She says the experience opened her eyes to realities of life that she could not have seen before that. It took a toll on her. But she was convinced, as she said later, that it was only by loving deeply and opening herself to the pain that comes from loving deeply that she could begin to experience hope. “When it’s not convenient, when it costs us and we still take the time to listen to another’s heart and we love deeply, hope emerges,” she said.[i]

What happened in that neighborhood was hard on Kathleen, but you know what? Hope emerged through her ministry. Youth went to college who would never have gone. People came to know a powerful God in an impoverished part of the city. And 5 years after she came to an empty church building, 130 members were a part of the Nueva Esperanza congregation, most of them Hispanic.

Kathleen went on to many other things. She served two other churches and they both grew, the latest to 1500 members. She married and had a boy named Skyler. She was well-respected in the North Texas Conference and led their delegation to our General Conference last summer.

About two years ago, she got a diagnosis of cancer and the prognosis was not good. I listened to a couple of her sermons this week and in the more recent one from this summer I could still hear her vibrancy and faith and liveliness, but her voice was weakened and hoarse. She didn’t want to pull back from her church family and she didn’t. She kept on preaching hope. She kept on believing that God would be faithful to the promise of life.

Just a few weeks ago she preached her last sermon and last Saturday she was receiving people in her home, just as she had in West Dallas, against everyone’s best judgment. But she was not going to stop loving deeply now. So there she was hugging people and comforting them when they had come to comfort her. Then on Tuesday she died. My friends in West Dallas called me that day and we remembered nothing but joy.

I am grateful for the witness that people like Kathleen offer. They remind me that our hope is not built on everything going right. We don’t look forward to the future because it promises to be Easy Street. We look forward to the future because God is already there and because Christ has promised to come again to help be truly, fully, deeply human.

This period of the year is a rough one for many, many people. We too often use our winter eyes to understand who we are. We feel overwhelmed and perplexed. In the midst of all that you will face in the week to come, remember that God comes to those in need, and when we identify those places in our lives and in our world where we feel that need, we are ready to welcome and meet the God who has chosen us, for no good reason but overwhelming love. Thanks be to God.

Isaiah 40:1-11 (NRSV)
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins.
A voice cries out: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken."

A voice says, "Cry out!" And I said, "What shall I cry?" All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the LORD blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.

Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, "Here is your God!" See, the Lord GOD comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.

[i] Kathleen Baskin-Ball, “Longing for More: Hope,” sermon, Dec. 9, 2007, Suncreek UMC, Allen, TX, http://www.suncreekumc.org/worship/sermons.asp.

An Eastern Shore Advent

ADVENT GREAT THANKSGIVING – 7 Dec 2008

The Lord be with you.
And also with you.
Lift up your hearts.
We lift them up to the Lord.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
It is right to give our thanks and praise.

It is right to give you thanks and praise,
Great God of the Coming Dawn,
For in each new day you surprise the earth with splendor.
Your Spirit moves across the face of the waters
And brings forth life.

At the dawn of all things
in a garden you worked the earth.
Elbow deep in mud you fashioned us,
gifted us,
gave us work to do.

Made from the earth,
Made by your hand,
We forgot who we were
We forgot who you were
And we tried to remake ourselves.
We rejected your love and fell into sin and death.

Yet even in our darkness you continued to speak light and life.
When we were slaves in a foreign land
You brought us ought of our oppression,
led us through the waters to
and washed us up on the shores of a new life as a chosen people.

As your people,
we sometimes sought you and often strayed
But you were faithful to your promise and to us,
and called yourself by our name.
The God of Israel did not abandon the people Israel
And you spoke of a day to come
when you would come once more to save.

And so we who live on the edge of this land
Look across the waters to the horizon.
We come to live on the edge
Of your new and promised day.
And we raise our voices with all the saints as we proclaim,

Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord, God of power and might
Heaven and earth are filled with your glory
Hosanna in the highest!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest!

Blessed are you, and blessed in your Son Jesus Christ our Lord,
Whose coming was announced by wilderness prophets
and who arrived to the song of angels
in the choir stall of a manger.

In Jesus you not only took our name but our flesh.
He was the One promised
He announced the new day and the acceptable year
When blind folks would see
And poor folks would rejoice
When captives would be set free
And the oppressed would once more walk upright in liberty.

In stories he spoke of waiting bridesmaids and prodigal sons,
With tears and compassion he brought a dead man to life
and gave a woman at a well the living water she sought.
With anger he overturned tables and challenged the powerful.
On the cross he revealed the power of weakness
and in the emptiness of the tomb
he gave us a glimpse of your tomorrow
that does not end in death.

On the night when he was betrayed
he sat at a table with his friends.
He took bread,
blessed it,
broke it,
served it to them, and said,
“Take this. Eat it.
It is my body, given for you.
Do this to remember me.”

In the same way he took the cup,
Blessed it, served it to them, and said,
“Drink from this every one of you.
This is my blood
poured out for you and for many
for the forgiveness of sin.
Do this to remember me.”

And so we remember.
And so we offer our praise and thanks
and our very selves
As a holy and living sacrifice
in union with Christ’s offering for us.
As we proclaim the mystery of faith:

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

So we await your new day.
So we call on you to send your Holy Spirit on us once more
And on this parched and thirsty land
And on these elements of bread and wine.
Let them be for us once more Christ’s body
and let us be for you once more Christ’s body
redeemed by his blood.

Make us one with Christ,
one with each other,
and one in ministry to all the world,
until Christ comes again and we feast at his table.

With all the saints who share your name and our flesh,
we raise this song,
until we hear in fullness the harmony of heaven.
God of the Dawn,
Christ of the new Day Coming,
Spirit who is Ever Present,
we wait for you this day,
your day.

Amen.