Core Values: Caring and Compassionate

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Colossians 3:12-17:

One of my favorite movies is Groundhog Day, and I watch it at least once a year on February 2, Groundhog Day, a moment where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather. And of course it’s sort of ironic that I do the same thing every year on Groundhog Day, because what the movie is about is Phil Connors, a weatherman, played brilliantly by Bill Murray who has to relive the same day over and over and over again. Every day is Groundhog Day. And when he starts out realizing that there is not tomorrow, Phil gives into a hedonistic lifestyle. But what he finds out is that this lifestyle doesn’t bring him satisfaction or true joy. In fact, it leads to him being miserable, which is probably best summed up by an exchange with his producer, played by Andie McDowell, whom he thinks he loves, or at least lusts for, and she says “I could never love you, because you’ll never love anyone but yourself,” to which Phil responds, “I don’t even like myself.” Not being satisfied, he then tries to end the endless cycle of being in the same day, which also doesn’t work, and finally there is a change and he begins to improve himself, not to impress others, but to make himself better, which also leads him start helping others.

At the beginning of the film he keeps walking past a homeless man asking for money, and he pretends that he doesn’t have anything, until eventually he is buying him meals and trying to help him survive through the night. Every day he goes to the same spot to save a young boy falling out of a tree, and performing the Heimlich maneuver, so that he endless repeat of the same day is helping people all day long. In many ways, the movie is a metaphor for Christian conversion. Moving from the ways of the world, to the ways of God. Moving from being self-centered and thinking only about ourselves, to becoming caring and compassionate towards the world, giving of ourselves for the needs of others. I think it’s a great metaphor for the core value that we look at today that we have identified as a congregation, and that is being compassionate and caring.

Blue Christmas: Snow on Snow

Here is my sermon for our Blue Christmas Service. The text was Isaiah 9:1-6 and John 1:1-5, 10-14:

We, as a culture, have an obsession, or at least a seeming obsession, with having a white Christmas. The last report I saw said Albuquerque has a 4% chance of having a white Christmas, that is either having it snow, or having snow on the ground come Sunday.’ We have this obsession with a white Christmas even though it doesn’t match the reality for large parts of the world, including Bethlehem. Someone I went to seminary with was from the southern hemisphere and she said it wasn’t until she was a teenager that she understood why all the Christmas images had snow on them because of her Christmas took place in the middle of the summer, whereas we have Christmas in winter. But this idea of a white Christmas came around long before Bing Crosby’s immortal White Christmas was recorded. In fact, according to Ian Bradley, an expert on Victorian hymnody, he has said that In the Bleak Midwinter, which was written in 1872, “has probably done as much as anything to give generations of children the impression that the birth of Jesus took place in the snow.”  Although not as popular today, this hymn used to be one the Christmas standards, and to give some indication of that, the house where Gustav Holst, best known for writing the Planets, wrote the tune is known as Midwinter Cottage in honor of this connection.

For the season of Advent, we have been looking at the hymns of Advent and Christmas to see what they teach us about our faith and the meaning, and need for Christmas, and I thought that In the Bleak Midwinter was the appropriate song for this evening’s service.  There is something beautiful and magic about snow and the environment it creates. The author John Milton said of snow and Christmas, snow was nature covering herself with a veil to hide any ugliness from the Christ child. Snow covers everything and gives the world that soft edge while simultaneously absorbing noise to add the serenity and peacefulness that we associate with the Christmas season, or at least that we say we want in the Christmas season. But that beautiful image of snow is not what Christina Rosetti is talking about in this hymn. Instead she is talking about the ugliness and coldness of winter, the deadness, of frozen ground, and whipping winds and snow piling up snow on snow. This is not the winter wonderland that we like to sing of at this time of year. This is the bleak mid-winter, the end of February when winter has lost all its appeal, the snow is no longer beautiful, but a burden, when you are stuck up inside and you can’t wait for spring to arrive.  It feels like Bill Murray’s weather prediction from Groundhog Day about winter: “It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be gray, and it’s gonna last you the rest of your life.” This is not “it’s the most wonderful time of the year,” this bleak midwinter is the dark night of the soul.