Dancing with Joy

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Luke 24:36b-48:

When my 9-year-old nephew died ten years ago from a blood clotting disorder, his parents made the decision to donate his organs, which also included taking skin grafts to be used for burn victims. As it turned out, another member of our church had a close family friend living on the Navajo Nation whose grandson received critical burns on the same weekend and who was flown to UNM hospital where he ended up receiving skin grafts in treatment. Now we don’t think that he received any grafts from Wyatt, but for her it brought some potential joy, and I don’t use that word advisedly, out of a terrible situation for both families. That in the midst of tragedy and trauma, perhaps a little good could come out of. That there could be a little glimmer of light, hope and yes, even joy, in the midst of darkness. And that’s the thing about joy, that perhaps it might not be what we tend to think of it at all, and that is what we deal with today as we think about learning to dance with God in joy.

Now last week, after we talked about dancing in peace, and I said that we were doing joy today, someone asked if we were going to do all of the themes for Advent, which are hope, peace, joy and love. I responded that we weren’t because we weren’t going to do hope, although we might have been able to do so, but that it didn’t really come up in the lectionary readings for the Sunday’s after Easter, which is what I was using to find the themes. And I hadn’t really even thought about them being related to the themes of Advent, but there are, but I hadn’t really thought about them also being fruit of the Spirit, which they also are. So, I can’t say if it’s just coincidence, or the movement of the Spirit, or simply the thoughts swirling in my head, that led me to them. But they are connected, and they also connect with hope, joy especially, but joy itself stands out from those advent themes in particular. If you remember the candles that we light at Advent, there are four of them. Three are purple and one is pink. It is the pink candle that represents joy. And that stands out against the purple candles, a color which represents royalty, and also repentance. It gets those traditions from the much older traditions of the season of Lent, which ends with the celebration of Easter. Lent too is a time of preparation and repentance, although Advent has lost many of those characteristics, but the fourth Sunday in Lent is known as Laetare Sunday, which comes from the traditional Latin introduction to the mass from Isaiah which says Rejoice, O Jerusalem! The word rejoice is an imperative, a command, so comes with an exclamation point. And so, the temperament of Lent, changes in that service, and the color changes from purple to pink, or more technically, rose, which is why it is also sometimes called rose Sunday.

Abiding in the Fields

Here is my message for Christmas Eve. The scripture was Luke 2:1-20: 

They say that familiarity breed contempt. But what familiarity also breeds is comfortableness, as people are attracted to things that are familiar, and when things are familiar to us, and comfortable for us, we also tend to think we know them really well, so much so that we might stop paying attention to the details in the story. I think the same is true for the Christmas story. Most of us have probably heard that passage from Luke about the birth of Jesus for what seems like hundreds of times. I mean even if we only heard it every year in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, as it’s what Linus quotes from when he wants everyone to know the meaning of Christmas, we could have heard it at least 56 times since it’s debut in 1965. And when we stop paying attention because we know it, we can overlook things or even add things to it because it just has to be there, because we know it’s there. So, for example, we talk about Mary riding into Bethlehem on a donkey, but there are no donkey’s in the story, and definitely not Dominic the donkey. We have other barnyard animals in our nativity set. No mention of them in the story. We have three wise men arriving, and some of you may remember their names as Melchior, Gaspar and Balthazar, but not only are they not named, but we don’t even know how many there were. We say three because there were three gifts, but let’s be honest that men are not always the best at getting social etiquette correct, and so it’s entirely possible that some of them went in together on gifts, or maybe even had the temerity to show up without a gift at all. And then there are the parts of the story we just want to skip over all together.

Creating Christmas: Joy

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 and Luke 1:39-56:

Towards the end of his life, Henri Nouwen, a Roman Catholic priest, was still looking for some meaning or purpose to his life. Even though he was a world famous author and theologian and had taught at Notre Dame and Yale and Harvard, he still felt there was something missing. And so he left the academy behind and moved to a L’Arche community in Toronto to live with people with intellectual disabilities, some of them severe that require nearly 24 hour care. It was there that Nouwen was matched with Adam, to be his companion and care taker, of whom he said “"It is I, not Adam, who gets the main benefit from our friendship.” 

Nouwen would take members of the community with him whenever he traveled to speak around the world, and what he also found in this community was joy. He says that there were people there who radiated joy, not because their lives were easy, because they most certainly weren’t, but because they habitually recognized God’s presence in the midst of all human suffering, their own as well as others. And that is at the heart of joy, which we’ll get into, and so, Nouwen says, “The great challenge of faith is to be surprised by joy.” Let me say that again so you can let it sink in and begin to percolate in your mind, “The great challenge of faith is to be surprised by joy.”

Zephaniah: A Celebration

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Zephaniah 3:14-20:

In Star Wars: Rogue One, the lead female character Jyn Erso says about the rebellion, “We have hope. Rebellions are built on hope.” Of course, we have known that all along because what we know as the original Star Wars was later retitled Star Wars: A New Hope, but this was the first time that phrase had really been uttered in the movies about its necessity for the rebellion. If they didn’t have hope for the future, no one would join the rebellion, no one would dare to take on the empire, no one would risk their lives for something bigger than themselves because what would be the point? If there was no hope, why do anything? Why not just slink back into the woodwork, just keep on keeping on, seeking just to live one more day, and then the day after that. If there is no sense that things will get better, if there is no sense that things can get better, then there is no need to do anything. Thus, saying that rebellions are built on hope says that things not only can, but they must get better, that there is something better out there even if we cannot see it, even if it seems impossible, it’s still there.

Of course, long before we had the wisdom of George Lucas, we also heard the same thing from Paul who tells us “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God… For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” (Romans 8:18-25) That is also part of the message that we get with Zephaniah, that although he gives a prophetic claim not just of the coming destruction of Judah, but of the surrounding nations, that he closes with this truly remarkable message about God and about hope that we heard this morning.