Blue Christmas: Joy Comes in the Morning

Here is my sermon for our Blue Christmas service. The text was Isaiah 40:1-11 and Luke 1:67-79:

This is a picture of a painting that hangs in my office and I really like it. It was painted by Irma Fath, who was a member of the last church I served, and she was largely self-taught. We have two other of her paintings of New Mexico landscapes that hang in our dining room. But when Irma was 94, I believe, she was diagnosed with cancer, and she decided she had had a good life and didn’t seek any treatment. In a memorial service here earlier this fall I talked about that there used to be a Christian concept called the art of dying. It encouraged people to think about their mortality, not as an act of morbidity, but to think about it as an act of faithful living, to plan how they wanted to die in order to be an example of the Christian faith and the promise of eternal life. It’s not really practiced or talked about today because as a culture we want to ignore the whole idea of death and grief and push them to the side. But as deaths go, Irma had a good death’s journey and a good death. And in one of the last times I saw her she said she wanted me to pick out one painting that I liked and take it, and this is the one I chose.

And what I really like about this painting, first is that it looks cold, and I love cold weather, but it’s also because of the question this painting poses to me. I don’t know if it’s already winter and this woman is stopping to pause and look at these beautiful flowers outside of this shop, sort of being reminded of the beauty of the flowers and the promise they remind her of a spring to come. Or is it already spring, and thus appropriate to have flowers sitting out, and she is out in one of those cold snaps we always get that reminds us that winter is not done with us yet. And so there is this tension of the cold and dark of winter and the life and beauty and warmth of spring all sort of tied up together here in this moment. It’s that tension that’s tied up in this night.

Fearless Living

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Luke 1:26-33, 46-55

When it comes to fear, Halloween is sort of an amazing holiday when we look at it from a 30,000 foot level, because what we do is to turn on lights and invite all the gremlins and goblins to come into the light and then rather than shrieking in fear, we instead ooh and awe over their costumes and tell them how great they look, maybe even how scary they look, and then give them candy and send them off to be bathed in someone else’s light. How great is that? What if the world acted like that all the time? Because normally we shrink in fear, we turn off our lights and lock the door to the gremlins of the world, or those who are different, those who don’t meet the standards we want them to have. We keep them at arms distance and away from us and we fear them. But a holiday that is in some ways to celebrate the fear in actuality works to overcome it, which was part of the purpose. And Christmas is working to try and do the same as well, because the refrain we continually hear from the angels in their proclamation about the coming of Jesus the messiah is do not be afraid, and so that is our theme for this Advent season of learning how not to be afraid.

And so last week we heard the story of the announcement to Zechariah that his wife would become pregnant in her old age and give birth to a son who would become John the Baptist. And even though he has been praying for this to happen, it doesn’t seem he actually believed it would happen because he questions Gabriel about the reality of it. And because of that questioning he is struck silent, unable to speak for the nine month pregnancy of his wife Elizabeth. But the other piece of his story is that we are told that when he sees the angel Gabriel as Zechariah is serving in the Temple that he is terrified. And Gabriel’s response? “Do not be afraid.” And so then let’s compare that against today’s passages.

Fearing God

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Luke 1:5-20:

After I had moved to New Mexico, I went back to visit my parents and Phoenix and went to the local Christian bookstore that I used to frequent, and in their best seller section was a book entitled The Joy of Fearing God. An interesting title. And so when I got back to Santa Fe, I went to a Christian bookstore there, and not only was it not in their bestseller section, they didn’t even have it in stock, which confirmed for me that Santa Fe was a little more enlightened than Phoenix. But they did order it for me. Now in the book of proverbs, which is part of the wisdom literature and we will be looking at that after the new year, in the 9th chapter we hear a famous phrase that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. That was the passage that the author was basing his book on and using our understanding of fear as being afraid that “someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.” But is that the understanding of God that we are to have, or the way that we are to approach a relationship with God thinking that God is dangerous, a threat or likely to hurt us? There is certainly some scriptural witness to that, at least on the part of humanity.

In Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, although they don’t eat an apple nor are they tempted by the devil, they hide. After God finds them and asks them what they are doing, which is actually the first real interchange we have between God and humanity, we also get the introduction of the idea of fear because Adam tells God that he heard God walking in the garden and he was afraid. And why? Because he was afraid of being punished for doing what he was told not to do. That matches that definition of fear, and what also comes out of this interchange in the idea of blame and scapegoating. But that becomes the way that some people begin to view God, that is through a sense of fear of punishment or danger. And yet we also continue to see God try and counteract that.

Silenced By God

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Luke 1:5-25:

Time is a strange thing, because although we measure it in seconds, and minutes and hours, and days and years and even longer, and we can say how long each of these things are, it turns out that these are not actually set amounts of time, because time changes We all know that time is not constant. It can go long, or it can be slow. In fact, Einstein’s theory of relativity even says that the length of time varies depending upon which relatives we are around. If we want them to go away soon, then time goes slowly, and if we want it to last longer, then it goes too quickly. Or at least I think that’s what the theory of relativity is about. But, that’s when we have to understand that there are two different types of time. There is Chronos time, that is the time measured by the clock, or sequential time, this is what we normally mean when we talk about time. Then there is Kairos time, which is about God time, about those thin moments in life, when we encounter the divine, when time slows down. It’s a time that often comes with waiting, or as Paul says its about the fullness of time, and that’s what the season of Advent is about, a season of waiting and preparation.  And, as I say nearly every year, there is not a war on Christmas, which doesn’t start until December 25, and then we have 12 days of celebration, there is a war on Advent. I think some of that is because waiting is hard to do because time is not a constant. For those of you who are a little older, do you remember when you were a child, how long it took for Christmas to arrive? And the closer you got to it, the longer it seemed to take, time slowed to a crawl. Now it just seems to fly by, except when it doesn’t, and we see something very similar in the story of Zechariah.

The passage begins by telling us “In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly order of Abijah.” Does that introduction sound familiar to other parts of the Bible? That’s right the prophets, so right at the start, Luke is making a connection to the historicity of Judaism. Abijah is a descendent of Aaron, who was the brother of Moses, and the head of the priestly class, and he represented one of 24 divisions into which the priesthood was divided under king David. We are then also told that his wife Elizabeth was also a descendent of Aaron, so this is a family that has some historic connections although they are not at the top of the social circle. Additionally, we are told that both are righteous and blameless before God, which means they are following all of the commandments and regulations of God. Luke gives us that information as well so that those who were not familiar with those terms will understand what that means. And yet, Elizabeth is also barren, or without child, which she says has brought disgrace upon her, and by default on Zechariah. And so, we have a juxtaposition of ideas here.

Zechariah: This is a King?

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Zechariah 1:1, 9:9-12:

When President Trump was deciding on cabinet picks, he said that one of the criteria he was using was to find people who, in his words, looked the part. He wanted them to look like they came from central casting so that people would believe they could do they job because they looked like they could do it. That’s not an unusual position, although it’s probably not stated as bluntly as that. One of the things Prince Charles was always going to have a problem with was the fact that he doesn’t look very king like. Now Prince William, who inherited some things from his mother, he looks like a king. We do the same thing as we see movies where Harrison Ford is plays the role of president, but we do not cast Danny DeVito as president. We have an idea of what rulers, leaders, important people are supposed to look like.  In scripture, we are told, when God is deciding to make David the king of Israel, that God looks at what people are like on the inside rather than on the outside to decide if they are worthy or not, and so David is being chosen over others, but then what are we immediately told about David? That he is a good-looking guy. We still do the same thing, after all, we cast Harrison Ford as president but we do not cast Danny DeVito. It’s true even in the church. The clergy who get appointed to the largest churches are all men, an important issue to be considered, and they tend to be tall and they tend to have been jocks in high school, and quarter backs of the football team in particular. That is, they look the part. They match what we want to see in important leaders. But what if the one we are looking for, what if the king does not look like or match what we expect them to be? Will we accept them as such? Or will we seek to change them to become we want them to be rather than who they are and perhaps even who we need them to be?

The prophet Haggai, who we heard from last week, and Zechariah have many similarities. The first is that they are contemporaries with each other, including both beginning their prophetic careers in the same year, 520 BCE. This is the second year of King Darius, the leader of the Persian empire who is ruling over Judah after the people return from the Babylonian exile. Malachi, the last of the 12 Minor Prophets who we will hear from next week, also prophesies during the Persian Empire, so the last 3 books in the 12 all take place roughly during the same time period. Unlike Haggai, we are given a genealogy about Zechariah although there are some questions about it. In Zechariah, we hear that he is the son of Berechiah and the grandson of Iddo, but in the book of Ezra, we are told that Zechariah is the son of Iddo. Because often the superscriptions, which are the lists of genealogies appear to be later additions to the works, not things the prophets included about themselves, we don’t know which is correct.