Creating Christmas: Hope

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Romans 8:18-25: 

When Congressional Medal of Honor winner and Hanoi Hilton survivor Admiral James Stockdale was asked who it was that had the hardest time as a prisoner of war, he said, “That’s easy. It’s the optimists.” He said that the optimists would think, “We’ll be out by Christmas,” but when that didn’t happen, it was “we’ll be out by Easter,” and then “We’ll be out by the 4th of July,” then “we’ll be out by Thanksgiving,” and then they were back to Christmas again. The constant crushing of their optimism, would lead to delusion and other problems.  It shattered their endurance, and Stockdale said, “I think they all died of a broken heart.” But, the ones who were most likely to make it through were the ones who went through the full cycle of grief, and then held onto the faith that they would prevail in the end. That they would make it out. They didn’t know when, and they hoped it would be sooner rather than later, but no matter what was happening to them in the prison camp, they had faith in the final outcome. The suffering could not be eliminated, but how they decide to approach it and think about it can make all the difference.

And so in hearing that, we have to understand that Admiral Stockdale was not arguing against hope, but against false optimism, because although we often talk about optimism and hope as being the same thing, they are in fact difference. Shortly before his assassination, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when asked about the move towards racial justice, he said that he was not optimistic, but he was hopeful. That is, you can have hope even when you have lost your optimism, and not false hope, but the hope that we will prevail in the end, or even more importantly that we know that God will prevail in the end. And so today as we begin our advent journey, making our way to celebrating the birth of Christ, we will begin looking at the four themes of Advent, which are hope, peace, joy and love, and as we already talked about in lighting our advent candle, today is hope. And we have to know, as Paul sort of tells us, we don’t need hope when things are going well, we need it when we are in trouble, when we are suffering, when we wonder what’s going on, and the exact same thing is true of Christmas. We don’t have Christmas because everything is great. We have Christmas because we live in brokenness.

If We Make It Through December

Here is my sermon for our Blue Chritmas service. The text was Romans 8:18-28:

There’s an old Merle Haggard song entitled If We Make It Through December. It tells the story of a man who has hit hard times after he has been laid off at the factory, but who is hoping for the best, and for better times. He says, “Now, I don’t mean to hate December, it’s meant to be the happy time of year, and why my little girl don’t understand why daddy can’t afford no Christmas here.” And so, he says, if only they can make it through December, everything will be alright. Occasionally you will actually hear that during this season being played along the other songs of the season, but it’s pretty rare, because it doesn’t really capture the feeling of the season that people think you’re supposed to have. It’s not holly, jolly and certainly not merry, and so I suspect if they played it too often people would start complaining. And yet, for many people it sums up their feelings a little too well, and I’m assuming for most of you as well, that you think, “If we can just make it through to the New Year, then things will get better. It won’t hurt as much.”

I’ve said this in year’s past, but I think this is the most important worship service we do every year, and yet it is the one I struggle with the most, because it’s the hardest one to sort of encapsulate what might need to be said, because that need is different for everyone of you, and I feel the need to try and say something, to try and give some level of comfort even in my inadequacies in doing so. I know some of you might think it’s because us preachers just can’t be quiet and if given the chance to talk, we have to fill up the space, even if just to hear ourselves talk. But honestly, it’s more out of fear. One year I am going to be strong enough to just come here and let us sit in silence for 10 minutes, but I’m not ready to do that yet, and maybe you’re not ready either. Sometimes we need to hear some words of comfort, some words of promise some words of hope in this time, in this moment, that at some point everything might be alright and so I hope that they are more than the words offered by the friends to Job in the midst of his suffering, because as long as they were silent, everything was okay. It’s once they began to speak that they got themselves into trouble, and perhaps that was because they then tried to give justification for why Job was suffering, rather than simply being present for him.

Gabriel's Message

Here is my Christmas Eve sermon.  The text was Luke 2:1-20:

I had a really hard time coming up with what I was going to say for this message.  Normally I have something roughly planned out for Christmas Eve by the time we hit Halloween, but this year nothing was coming to me and as we got closer and closer I finally did the smart thing and asked my wife what she thought I should preach on.  She asked what I had covered the past two years, see she’s not paying attention either, and I said two years ago I had talked about Joseph and the importance that people play in each other’s lives, and last year I had talked about the shepherds and the fact that they didn’t come up with excuses about why they couldn’t go see the baby, but instead followed God’s commands.  She said that it seemed like I had a little theme going, even if I hadn’t planned it, of covering the characters in the Christmas story and so she thought I should preach on Mary.  So following her advice, I decided to preach on the angels.  I don’t think I’m going to get a very good present this year.

Angels are a familiar part of the Christmas story.  There is the archangel Gabriel who makes first makes the announcement to Zechariah and Elizabeth about the coming birth of John the Baptist, and then makes the announcement to Mary that she will bear a child.  There are the angels who make the announcement to the shepherds in the fields, and we cannot forget angel second class, Clarence Odbody, in Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life.  I think my favorite portrayal of an angel is not in a Christmas story, but instead was done by John Travolta who portrayed that archangel Michael, in the movie of the same name.  A smoking, hard drinking, hard living, slob, with a rather colorful vocabulary.  Someone no one would ever believe was an angel if it weren’t for the two wings growing out of his back.  And you know that John Travolta is a really good actor when he, a scientologist, can play the leading messenger for God.

We actually don’t know very much about angels from the Bible.  Most of what people think about them, or think they know about them, comes from extra-biblical sources, some of them quite modern, and we could talk about them but then we’d have to end up talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pine.  But that is not to say that angels aren’t found in scripture because they are.  The first time we hear of an angel is after Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden, the entrance is guarded by cherubim who has a flaming sword, think of it as the world’s first light saber.  The cherubim are winged creatures who act sort of as guardians, and if you remember Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark correctly, they are the images formed onto the top of the ark of the covenant.  Later we will also hear about seraphim, who are winged creatures said to be found guarding God’s seat inside the Temple in the Holy of Holies.  If I remember correctly, it’s the cherubim that hang from the ceiling and the seraphim that come up from the floor, or maybe it’s reversed, I often get it wrong.  But while they are angelic like creatures, outside of the wings, these are not really angels as we typically understand them or think of them, or as they are found in the rest of scripture.