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.

Resurrection: Death and Grief

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was John 11:17-35:

So, let my start by saying that today’s message is going to be a hard one, or at least one that we all cry about, because as we conclude our sermon series on resurrection stories we deal with the issue for which we most want resurrection, loss. After all, the reason for the season in which we started this series, Easter, was because of the death of Jesus and his resurrection from the dead. As an Easter people, our faith is grounded in the reality of resurrection. We believe that hope is possible even in the worst of circumstances, in the darkest moments of our lives, that even in the valley of the shadow of death, that God is with us and that God is there not only to comfort us but to even bring about miracles.

Mary and Martha, who are sisters, send word to tell Jesus that their brother Lazarus is ill. We are also told that Jesus loves Lazarus, but Jesus does not immediately leave but instead stayed on the other side of the Jordan, where John had been baptizing people. Then Jesus tells the disciples they are going to head back to Judea, and he says that he is going to wake up Lazarus, which confuses the disciples as they think he is merely asleep, and so Jesus has to be more direct and tells them that Lazarus has died, and then Thomas makes a usual statement and says, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” It’s not clear whom Thomas is speaking of, Lazarus or Jesus, but presumably he is saying that they know Jesus life is at risk, and so their lives are also at risk, and he is making a pledge that they will die with Christ. Which of course they don’t, but they go with Jesus and when they arrive they find that Lazarus has already been dead for four days. Now this little bit of information is significant because it was believed that the spirit, the soul, or someone who had died would stay around the body for three days, for the hope that they were only slightly dead, but by the fourth day the body has already begun to decay and to stink, and so the soul then goes away, and so what we are being told here is that everyone has given up, that there is no hope for a miracle, which is where today’s passage begins.