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.

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.

Fear Not

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 14:22-33:

In the third chapter, all the way back at the beginning of the Bible in Genesis, after Adam and Eve have eaten the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which was not actually an apple nor where they deceived by Satan, but after they eat, they hear God walking in the garden calling for them, and they run and hide from God. After God finds them he asks what they are hiding and for the first time in scripture we hear about fear. “We were afraid and so we hid from you,” they tell God, and the relationship between God and humanity is forever changed.  Something else important happens when fear gets introduced, and that is that blame and scapegoating also get introduced as a direct result. When God asks why they are afraid, Adam says don’t blame me, the woman made me do it, and Eve says don’t blame me, the snake made me do it, and the snake just shrugs his shoulders, which is probably the real reason that God removes its appendages and makes it crawl on its belly. Fear and blame and refusal to do something all come together at exactly the same time.

Today we embark on a new sermon series looking at what I am calling the nots of Jesus, fear not, doubt not, sin not, judge not, worry not.  These are the nots not only because Jesus says don’t do them, but also because they are issues that might cause us to tie ourselves in knots.  Andy Stanley has called these instructions the N Commandments because he said that Jesus considered them so important.  While I am not going to argue their importance, which is the reason I am talking about them, I am going to argue his use of the term commandments, because when Jesus was asked what is the greatest commandment, he said “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength,” and that the second in just like it, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  And then on his last night, according to the gospel of John, he said “I give you a new commandment that you are to love one another as I have loved you.” So unlike the commandments, which are lists of things you shouldn’t do, Jesus normally talks about what you should do, how you should be living your life, like the golden rule, which says “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That’s a positive statement of behavior, rather than a similar statement given by Rabbi Hillel who said “Do not do to others what is hateful to do.” So rather than being about what we should do, instead it’s about what we shouldn’t do.  And that certainly seems to be much more what we hear about from the church, or from Christians today, is a series of thou shalt not, or I cannot, so I thought it might be appropriate to look at some of the do nots that Jesus taught, which seem very different from what we might normally hear, and how they lead us to fulfilling what Jesus says are the greatest commandments.