DREAM

2^nd Sunday after Epiphany

January 20, 2019

Drawn In: Week 1

Genesis 1:1-2:3; Luke 4:13-21

            Before Disney adapted the fairytale of the Snow Queen into the hit movie “Frozen,” they released their version of Rapunzel’s story in a movie called “Tangled.” Instead of a prince, it is a young thief named Flynn who helps Rapunzel escape her tower. Their first stop is a shady tavern called the Snuggly Duckling Inn, where the other patrons recognize Flynn from his wanted posters.  In order to get them to release Flynn, Rapunzel asks them if they’ve ever had a dream and off starts one of the funnier songs in the movie. The guy with the hook for a hand has always dreamed of being a concert pianist. 

Another guy, who acknowledges he’s got some very weird physical features, dreams of making a love connection. Others dream of being a florist, an interior designer, a mime, a baker, and so on, all these activities you wouldn’t normally associate with these big, rough-looking guys. Rapunzel gets them all to recognize that everyone has a dream and Flynn is helping her to reach her dream of seeing the floating lanterns. The guys sneak Rapunzel and Flynn through a secret tunnel and encourage her to live her dream.

            There are times Disney gets it right, and everyone does have a dream. Whether you’ve thought about it in a while, or acknowledged it. or buried it, or lived it is up to you. But everyone has a dream, because that’s where everything starts. Mr. Patrick told me his grandfather had a dream for his family to be in church and that’s why he gave the land across the street for the first Lisbon UMC building. The village of Lisbon started as the dream of Caleb Pancoast in 1810.[1] Creation all starts with a dream. Before you make something, you have an idea for it. You may not know all the details or how exactly it’s going to turn out, but that’s because dreaming is large scale. Dreaming is big; it’s a vision. And we dream and have visions because we’re created in the image of God, our creator.

            In the beginning, God had a dream. “All creation began with the dream of God, the will and intention for life to exist in the void.”[2] God dreamt, and then God spoke, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And then there was sky and land and seas and vegetation and living creatures. Last, God made us, in his own image, and we were instructed to take care of the earth. In Ephesians 2:10, Paul says, “we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Other versions say “we are God’s masterpiece.” We were created in Christ Jesus to do good things, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. We are God’s dream come true.

            Jesus is also God’s dream come true. In Luke’s Gospel he begins his public ministry with this visit to Nazareth, his home town, where he goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath, as he usually does. Jesus volunteers to read the Scripture for the day and the scroll for Isaiah is handed to him. He skims down to Isaiah 61:1-2a, and reads, “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Jesus rolls the scroll back up and hands it to the attendant. Then he adds a line by saying, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”  In other words, this dream is now come true. The Spirit of the Lord is on me, to proclaim good news, to bind up the brokenhearted and heal the sick, to release those held in darkness, to proclaim this is the year that God is acting. And if you read a little bit further in Isaiah, Jesus was also sent “to comfort all who mourn and to provide for those who grieve… to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.” This is why Jesus came: to offer hope, to heal, to speak a good word, to banish the darkness, to proclaim freedom and release. A lot had happened to God’s creation since Genesis 1, a lot of water under the bridge, a lot of people not in healthy relationships with each other, with themselves, with God, or with the rest of creation. Jesus offers hope that it doesn’t have to be that way. That God’s dream can be restored.

            God provides for this restoration throughout Scripture. God’s dream takes the long view of things. Remember, dreaming is big, large scale. In Jeremiah 29:11-14, God says, “For I know the plans I have for you… plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you… and will bring you back from captivity.” Release for the captives, right there. God knows the plans he has for you. It’s similar to Psalm 139:16, where the psalmist tells God, “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” God’s got a plan for his dream, and it was written down a long time ago. In Isaiah 43:18-19, God says, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” There are lots of places where God says, “I’m making a way where there seems to be no way. I’m moving mountains. I’m opening windows. Don’t dwell on the past. Look at this new thing I’m doing!” God’s dream and creation always have room for re-creation, for redeeming, for being made new.

            This is the God who made us, who created us to also be creative. Look at all the creativity here among us – we have people who make candy, people who make soap, we have knitters and crafters and woodworkers and bakers. We have people who restore broken things back to how they were created and people who take old things and make something new out of them. We have among us far more talents and skills than I am yet aware of even after a year and a half of living among you and walking with you. God draws us in, just as God creatively draws in all things. And when you’re drawn in to something larger, when you live as part of the larger grand creative work of God, when you’re connected, then you find creative inspiration and productivity.[3] Then we have new things happening in our midst. Then God can do his new thing, perhaps through you!

            Everyone has a dream. What is your dream? Where does your dream meet God’s dream? And, more likely than not, there’s scripture that goes with your dream. In Martin Luther King, Jr’s famous “I have a dream” speech he quoted from Amos 5:24, “let justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” and from Isaiah 40:4-5, “every valley shall be exalted, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all people will see it together.” That was, in broad strokes, his dream, for racial equality and justice.

If you ask me, I have two guiding scriptures, Isaiah 58:6-7, “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?” That was the Scripture that I tried to make come true when I served in Nicaragua, to say, “Today, this is fulfilled in your hearing.” The other one, that became important during seminary, is John’s vision from Revelation 7:9-10, “I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: ‘Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.’” It’s people from all different backgrounds, all worshipping God together; even while speaking different languages, still all worshipping together. It’s become a vision, a dream, for how do we all be the church together? Even when we disagree, even when we have different viewpoints or politics or preferences, we can still worship together. We can still be the church together.

            If you were to ask me about our church, knowing our values of hospitality and community, there are two Scriptures that come to mind. One is Hebrews 13:1-2, where we’re encouraged to “Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters. Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” I’ve been told, by the leaders of our church, that this is a place where everyone is welcome. Entertaining angels unawares, as the old King James puts it, because we welcome strangers, is a dream come true. Another Scripture for our church is Hebrews 10:24-25, “Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another.” I preached on this a while back, and I’m not giving you a second sermon today. Simply that encouraging each other, spurring each other on toward love and good deeds, and meeting together are also a dream come true.

            I have shared quite a few different dreams. Let’s go back to the question, what’s yours? Before we enter into silent prayer, I want to encourage you to dream, to put words or pictures to a dream, to write down your thoughts on your bulletin or elsewhere, to comb Scripture to find the verses that verbalize your dream. I have a song we’re going to play while we do this, and when the song is over, we will simply move into silent prayer, to offer up our dreams and thoughts and hopes to God. Afterward, I’ll invite you to join me in intercessory prayer with the response printed in your bulletin and then we’ll end together with the Lord’s Prayer. Let’s dream…

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon%2C_Maryland

[2] From Week 1, Dream, Drawn In: Living Out the Creative Life with God worship series by Dr. Marcia McFee

[3] Drawn In: A Creative Process for Artists, Activities, and Jesus Followers by Troy Bronsink, p. 7

High and Dry - Or Not!

Baptism of the Lord

January 13, 2019

Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

            What does the phrase “high and dry” bring to mind? Good things? Bad things? The origin of the phrase had to do with ships that were beached. They had run aground and then the tide went out, leaving them high, because they were up on land rather than down in the water, and dry, because not only were they out of the water but they had been for a while and could expect to stay there. In late December, after Christmas, of 2004 a 100 foot high tsunami in the Indian Ocean hitting especially hard into Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand . It was the 10^th deadliest natural disaster in recorded history.[1] I was in Thailand the following August for training with the mission agency before going to Nicaragua. One of the pieces of the training was learning how the mission agency and other groups were responding in the aftermath of the tsunami and we met survivors, heard miraculous stories, and saw the ruins. One of the most amazing sights was of this ship two kilometers, or a little less than one mile, inland. 

A picture of the picture I took of the beached ship, August 2005, Phuket province

It washed in with the tsunami, and there it was, high and dry, with no hope of getting back to sea on its own. This is what ‘high and dry’ has evolved to mean today, that you are stranded in a difficult situation and unable to do anything about it.

            The odd thing about ‘high and dry’ is that there are times it’s a good thing. You want to be high and dry during a flood or hurricane or tsunami. You don’t want to stay there forever, just until the water has calmed down. It’s like Noah and his family and the animals on the ark. That was a good time to be high and dry. When the waters went down, the ark was lodged in the mountains. When the land was dry, Noah, his family, and the animals all came out of the ark to go out into all the earth, down off the mountain. The thing about the times when high and dry is good, is that those times don’t last. They are temporary. And then it’s time to go back down to life, which is messy and hard and complicated.

            The passage we read from Isaiah 43 is one of my all-time favorites, in my top three favorite Scriptures. But before we get there, I want to look at Isaiah 42. In this section, Isaiah is speaking to God’s people in exile. They were forced to leave their homes in Israel and go to Babylon, where they have set up new homes and had children who don’t even remember Israel. Life may not necessarily be good in Babylon, but it is stable. It is what they know. The move to exile was a long time ago. The effects of the move, though, are still being felt. Isaiah 42 says, “This is a people plundered and looted, all of them trapped in pits or hidden away in prisons. They have become plunder, with no one to rescue them; they have been made loot, with no one to say, ‘Send them back.’”[2] The exiled people were high and dry. There was no one to rescue them. They’ve adjusted, made ‘high and dry’ into a new normal. Life is stable again.

            And then listen to the very next chapter, “But now, this is what the Lord says—he who created you, Jacob, he who formed you, Israel: ‘Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned;   the flames will not set you ablaze. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior… You are precious and honored in my sight… I love you… I am with you; I will bring your children… and gather you… everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.’”[3] Do not be afraid. It is time to come home. I know you’ve been left high and dry, but now.  Now it is time to rebuild. Now it is time to leave the stability of your life in Babylon and return to the rubble of your old home, or your parents’ home, or your grandparents’ home. Now you are no longer high and dry, without help. God has redeemed you. God has called you by name. God will be with you through the waters and the rivers and the fire. Now it is time to go down and get wet.

            And this is where baptism comes in. We use water for baptism. Whether a sprinkling or a full dunking, we baptize with water, water which washes away the old high and dry. Water, which calls you out of your temporary exile, which, in this case, gives you help, which you need not fear. In our baptism we are named as God’s own, forever. In our baptism, we become part of God’s family with a whole slew of brothers and sisters all around us. In our baptism, we step into the river and get wet.

            This year we read Luke’s account of Jesus’s baptism. In Luke’s version, there’s no conversation between John the Baptist and Jesus. John doesn’t try to talk Jesus out of it. Instead, Jesus’s baptism is tagged on at the end, almost like an afterthought. When everyone was being baptized, Jesus was baptized, too.  Nothing special about it, until the Holy Spirit comes out like a dove and descends on Jesus, with that voice from heaven, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” And the next thing Luke does, before Jesus is sent out into the wilderness for forty days, is to list off Jesus’s genealogy, from Joseph back to God. Matthew does this at the very beginning of his Gospel; Mark and John don’t include it at all. Luke puts it here, right after Jesus’s baptism. Jesus is baptized, the voice from heaven speaks. And Luke says, “Now Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry. He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli…” and so on, “…the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.” You and I are God’s children, also. In baptism we are named and marked as God’s sons and daughters, with whom he is well pleased. And then, just like Jesus, we are sent on our way.

            If you’re not high and dry, then you’re … down and wet, down and dirty, in the trenches. You don’t stay on the sidelines or up in the ivory tower. God doesn’t leave us high and dry but gets us wet in baptism and calls us to work and get involved. It’s the work of making things right again, of feeding the hungry and visiting the sick and clothing those who need clothes and welcoming the stranger. It’s the work of bringing love and hope and joy and peace to those people and places who desperately need to hear them, those who feel high and dry, abandoned. It’s the work of invitation for those who are tempted to stay in the stability of high and dry exile, yet whom God is calling to come home and rebuild. Rebuilding out of rubble is messy work. It’s not easy, as you figure out what can still be used and what needs discarding. You have to figure out how to graft the new pieces in with the old. You have to keep in mind what things looked like before while also keeping a vision of what you want things to look like in the future, and the future is not going to look like the past. When you bring in children and grandchildren who weren’t even there before the exile, you have to trust that they will respect and honor the generations who came before, even while adding their own touches.

            God does not leave you high and dry. Even if you’ve settled into it, it’s not a permanent state of being. I mean, can you imagine if Noah and those animals had never left the ark? When the waters go down, you’ve got to go down, too. Down to the river to pray. Down to the river to work: to keep others from drowning, to remind others that they are not alone in the river and it shall not overwhelm them. Down to the river for baptism, joining God’s family, and today, re-membering that you’re part of God’s family. God gets us wet in baptism and then out of our baptism, invites us to join his work of making things right again.

            A poem by Howard Thurman recently made the rounds on social media among my clergy friends. It’s called “The Work of Christmas”:

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flocks,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among the people,

To make music in the heart.

This is what we are called to do by virtue of our baptism. Baptized with water and then sent forth to find, heal, feed, release, rebuild, bring peace, and make music. May it be so. Amen.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_and_tsunami

[2] Isaiah 42:22

[3] Isaiah 43:1-7

What Happens Next?

Epiphany of the Lord

January 6, 2019

Matthew 2:1-12

My 4 year old was a wise man in the children’s Christmas Eve service this year, so to prepare we read a book about wise men. I pulled out the one I had as a kid called “The Secret of the Star.” It ends, “Then silently, with singing hearts and wondrous news to bear, they journeyed to their own home lands to tell the people there about the Prince of Peace God sent to save people everywhere!” And it got me thinking, what happened after? Surely the wise men told people, like the shepherds did. We know “all were amazed at what the shepherds told them.” What about the wise men? Surely they told family, friends, and fellow travelers on the road. Surely their lives were different, too. After all, they went “home by another way.” They had met the living Christ and were changed by the encounter. Another children’s book about the wise men that came out last year, “Home by Another Way,” describes the star as the “tug they had been waiting for all their lives” and how they knew all their previous learning and studies didn’t matter anymore. They’d been changed after following the star. They’d been changed after meeting Jesus. But what happened after? The Bible doesn’t tell us. It continues on with Jesus’ story, not the wise men’s. Yet, surely life didn’t return to normal when they got back home, or did it? Was it like New Year’s resolutions that only last for a couple months? Or was it truly life-changing?

There’s an old saying that you can never go home again. The first example of this in print is a book by Thomas Wolfe called “You Can’t Go Home Again” that was published in 1940.[1] The main character is an author who wrote a successful novel about his hometown. When he returns to that town, he is not welcomed, because his family and friends felt exposed by the book. He then travels to New York, then Paris, then Berlin as Hitler is rising to power, and then back to America. You can’t go home again because while you’ve been away, home has changed, and you have changed. When the wise men returned home, what did they find? They’d been gone probably a couple years on this trip to follow the star wherever it led. Had they been presumed dead? Had their house been sold? Was someone else using their equipment for reading the stars? Did their pets remember them? Did their homes remember them? And were they remembered as eccentric old coots or a little more fondly? I know it’s all speculation. But my point is that the wise men changed on their journey to and from Bethlehem. And their homes in the East changed, too. What kind of new normal did they find? Did they go back to studying the stars? Or did they predate Paul in telling people about Jesus? What happened after they went home by another way?

It astonishes me that I have been home from Nicaragua for 12 years now. Many of you know that I served there with a mission agency for over a year before going to seminary and it was, in fact, from Nicaragua, that God called me to seminary. Me being here begins with God calling me to Nicaragua, following a different star. It was similar in some ways to the wise men, leaving home and country for God only knew how long. Packing up and saying goodbye. Arriving in a strange land where I’d never been before, met at the airport by people I’d never met before. Adjusting to a new life, new culture, new food. It was funny, my husband said something the other day that triggered a memory from Nicaragua that I had never told him before, and he’s heard just about everything. I even took him to Nicaragua 9 years ago to meet the people I served with and the family I lived with and to see the schools where I taught and the buses I rode. I lived, taught, and served in Nicaragua for 13 months, and then God sent me home. Home by another way, even. Home with rheumatoid arthritis. Home so sick that I barely remember that first month back in North Carolina. Home, and applying to seminary, something to which I had previously said No. Home, and not teaching. Home, and not working in a school. I was significantly changed when I returned home. And home was changed, too. My mom and stepdad had been empty-nesters for 4 months. My middle sister was married and moved out and my youngest sister had started her first semester of college. Some stores had closed and others had opened. A road had been widened. New houses had been built. Home wasn’t the same, either.

What happened next? I continued down that same trajectory that God had started me on. I applied to and visited seminaries. I worked from home for the mission agency as an education consultant on a couple USAID projects. I started dating my husband.  I learned how to live with a chronic disease and began the process of getting it under control. While we’re not told the ‘what happens next’ for the wise men, that’s just as important as following the star itself. After the aha moment, after the life-changing event, after meeting Jesus, do you treat it as a new year’s resolution, 80% of which will fail by the second week of February,[2] or does life truly change? With some of these events, like a chronic disease, life has no choice but to change. I donated over half my shoes because it hurt too much to wear them. I bought my first SUV, because on bad days I couldn’t get up out of a low riding car. In seminary, I didn’t carry a bookbag or a shoulder bag. No, I wheeled around an office laptop carry-on suitcase and I knew where all the elevators were. I didn’t park in the yellow parking lot most of my classmates used, because it was a half mile walk from there. I parked in the other yellow lot with the business and law students because from there I could ride the shuttle to a stop much closer to the Divinity School. Life changed drastically, because there was no choice about it.

Some people meet Jesus and choose for it not to change their lives. They don’t want to change. They’d rather stay in the darkness. They don’t want to take the risk of being asked to give up home and hearth. Some of us have no choice but to change. Jesus touches you, sets his hand on you, appears to you and it becomes like the pearl of great price. Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.”[3] What will you do when you find a pearl of great value? What have you done in the past?

There was a saying in seminary about letting the Bible read you, rather than you reading the Bible. You can read about the wise men following the star and think, hey, cool story. Wonder if it really happened. That doesn’t tell me anything about how I should live today. Or, you can listen to this story in sacred text about learned men up and leaving their homes to follow a star that led them to Jesus, and then they went home by another way and the narrative of the story follows Jesus. The books may have their picture on the cover, the song title may be their name, “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” but this is all really about Jesus. It’s not about us. What happens next, what we choose to do after meeting Jesus is important. Because remember, we are part of God’s story. It’s not that God is part of your story. Your story does not exist apart from God. God knit you together in your mother’s womb, knew all the days of your life when none of them existed, written in God’s book.[4] Your story is part of God’s story. If there were to be a second book of Acts of the Apostles, what would your role be? Would you be in the background like Matthias, a follower holy enough to be chosen to replace Judas among the twelve disciples yet about whom nothing else is known? Would you be like Barnabas who sold his field and gave all the money to the disciples? Or would you be like Ananias and Sapphira who sold a piece of property and kept back a majority of the proceeds for themselves, only giving part of it to God’s work? Can you be full of grace and power, like Stephen, the first martyr? Can you go where God sends you? Can you share God’s love with the people God entrusts to you to love?

These last few questions, by the way, were how I got to Nicaragua. It was a bible study on Acts, where we were encouraged for each section to write what we read and what God said. God kept asking me these questions: Can you go? Can you do this? Can you be like Stephen? And Paul? And Barnabas? And I finally got the hint and said ok, God and began the process of discerning the particulars of what God was calling me to do. The story of the wise men and the star often gets flattened to sound like it wasn’t much of a discernment process. Yet in the books, they consult with each other. They verify with each other that they are reading this new star correctly. And they set off on a journey to see what they find, not knowing where they’re going, just knowing they can’t imagine not going. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime that they are not going to pass up. It’s the chance to be written into God’s story. You, we, are already part of God’s story. Lisbon is part of God’s story. What happens next? Is this the pearl of great price that is worth everything? Are you willing to risk everything? Or are you going to walk on by? And if you do decide it’s worth everything, what happens after that? You’ve inherited the kingdom of God, now you have to live it. I’m still talking about Nicaragua 12 years later. I don’t think about it as often as I used to, but I still have artwork up in my house. I still have a picture on my wall of my husband and me with my Nicaraguan family. I still pray for them and follow the news out of there. And amazingly, I don’t think anyone’s gotten tired of me talking about it. Because this is part of my story, which is part of God’s story. We don’t ever get tired of talking about or telling God’s story. And I’m sure the wise men didn’t, either.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can't_Go_Home_Again#Title

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/new-years-resolutions-courses-2016-12

[3] Matthew 13:45-46

[4] Psalm 139:13, 16

"Calm and Bright"

Christmas Eve 2018

Luke 2:1-20

            I am not fooled. Y’all are not here tonight for the sermon. You hope to hear a good word, yes. But this is one worship service where the sermon is not a big draw. You’re here for the candlelight and the carols. You’re here for the familiarity and the feeling of warmth and family. You’re here to make sure God is still speaking, God is still entering history; God is still speaking to you and is still willing to enter your history and your life. What makes this time of worship especially beautiful is that it’s dark outside but the church is lit up. There is a light shining in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it. This time is beautiful because when we sing “Silent Night,” we will dim the electric lights, so that our candles can be better seen. There is darkness in the world, and in our lives, so the little candle we each hold is a promise, a reminder that “the people walking in darkness have seen a great light and on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned,” as says the prophet Isaiah. The candle is a light shining in the darkness that the darkness cannot overcome, as is found in the Gospel of John. We come tonight to be reminded that there is hope, that there is light. We come for the calm and bright.

            This year is the 200^th anniversary of “Silent Night” and we’ve been commemorating that in a worship series this Advent. Each of the four Sundays we focused on a different verse and now we’re here on Christmas Eve, the night when we will finally sing the whole song. This won’t just be about peace or hope or joy or redeeming grace, it’s about all of them. While we’ve tried to tease them apart this Advent, the truth is they all go together. The first Sunday I shared about the Christmas Truce of World War I. In 1914, on the Western Front, the two sides agreed to a ceasefire in honor of the holiday. One day of peace. During that time of quiet, the soldiers could hear each other singing “Silent Night, Holy Night,” each in their own language. They recognized they were singing the same Christmas carol and came out of their trenches and met up in no man’s land, to sing together and play soccer and exchange small gifts. One day of peace became one day of joy and love and probably even hope. This is what Christmas carols like “Silent Night” can do. They can reach into our lives that are troubled with pain and despair and offer the incredible promise of hope. Perhaps this Christmas can be a ceasefire from our own sources of conflict.

God came at Christmas in the tiny, vulnerable package of a baby so that we might have hope and courage in the dark and in the pain. This is why we gather, so that God might enter our lives even now. No wonder we grow quiet. The first Christmas probably wasn’t silent and calm, with all the noises of the animals and the baby and the bustle of people all around and Romans guards. Yet somehow we get from the hustle and bustle and endless to-do lists to a time when “all is calm, all is bright.” It’s not escapism and it’s not denial. It’s simply allowing worship of Jesus Christ the newborn baby to be first. It’s remembering that this baby is King, and is in charge. It’s remembering why this baby came, to be a light in the darkness, to be the redeeming grace we so desperately need.

There’s another Christmas carol called “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” that’s based on a poem called “Christmas Bells” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem begins, “I heard the bells on Christmas Day/ Their old, familiar carols play,/ and wild and sweet/ The words repeat/ Of peace on earth, good-will to men!” It starts off nice and sweet, right? Here’s a little of the backstory: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s wife died in 1835. He remarried in 1843, and then she died in a house fire in 1861. Shortly thereafter, his son was wounded in the Civil War. With war raging, and bearing so much loss, he woke up on Christmas day 1863, right in the middle of the Civil War and wrote this poem. One of the middle stanzas says, “The cannon thundered in the South,/ And with the sound/ The carols drowned/ Of peace on earth, good-will to men!” And the last two stanzas, the end of the poem, “And in despair I bowed my head;/ "There is no peace on earth," I said;/ "For hate is strong,/ And mocks the song/ Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"// Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:/ "God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;/ The Wrong shall fail,/ The Right prevail,/ With peace on earth, good-will to men."”

This is why we are here tonight. To hear those bells peal out louder than hate and despair. To be reminded that there is hope. To be reminded that conflicts will end. To be reminded that the darkness does not prevail because the light will always shine in the darkness. To be reminded that we can be calm even in the midst of the storm and bright even in the midst of darkness. And we hold the light for others whose candles have been lost. You can always find the light here. You can always find the calm and bright here. There is a light shining in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it. God is still speaking in the carols and in the candlelight, offering that incredible promise of hope. This is why we come. This is why we are able to grow calm and quiet during this time of worship.

Let Us Sing (HOPE)

4^th Sunday of Advent

 December 23, 2018

Isaiah 9:6; Matthew 2:1-12

            The first Star Wars movie that came out was subtitled “Episode IV: A New Hope.” It was the middle of a story, whose beginning wasn’t told until twenty years later. Can you imagine if George Lucas had started with Episode I, “The Phantom Menace,” instead? The franchise probably wouldn’t have taken off like it did. Instead, he started with Episode IV, which he called “A New Hope.” He introduced the saga with a movie about hope.  Episode IV opens with despair, as Darth Vader and the stormtroopers board Princess Leia’s ship, kill many of her men, and take her prisoner. The droids, C-3PO and R2D2, escape with the plans for the Death Star and the message for Obi Wan Kenobi. In that message Leia tells Obi Wan, “You’re our only hope,” and we learn that the hope actually lies with Luke, not Obi Wan. In the midst of despair and everything going wrong, where do you find hope? As Christians, our hope is also in a person, only instead of a Jedi Knight, it’s the Savior of the universe, Jesus Christ, whose birth we will celebrate tomorrow. Advent isn’t just a season about anticipation and preparation, it’s also a season about hope. Hope because even “in the bleak midwinter,” the Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ, came. There is always hope.

            While I’ve preached before about hope, one thing I came across this time around was about hope’s relationship with fear. Dr. Marcia McFee, who designed the worship series we’ve been using this Advent, included a comment for this week that perhaps “the opposite of fear is not simply ‘calm,’ but rather it is hope. Hope serves as defiance against despair.”[1] In the face of despair, you need hope. However, in the face of fear, you also need hope. You need the hope that you will get through this. You need the assurance that God has brought you this far and will not let you go now. That’s why our hope is always in God. Yet Dr. McFee also included this comment, “If people can’t access their hope, they live by their fear.” If you can’t access your hope, if you forget about your hope, if you’re kept from your hope, if you, for some reason, keep yourself from your hope, if you don’t dare to hope, then you cannot live hopefully. Instead, you live fearfully. You let yourself get caught up in the fear story. And there is enough fear and scarcity out there already. We talked some about that last week. Fear of missing out. Fear of running out. Fear of not enough. No. I heard an acronym for fear this week that I really like. Fear, F E A R, is False Evidence Appearing Real. Fear is something that’s not true, tricking you into thinking it is. Fear of not enough. No, there is enough. Fear of missing out. No, there are so many opportunities out there. Fear of dying. No. We Christians believe in the resurrection and in eternal life. We believe that death is not the end. We put our hope in God’s abundance. In God we trust, and will not fear. In God we hope, and will not despair.

            A wonderful sign of hope is singing. The fourth verse of Silent Night says, “with the angels let us sing, Alleluia to our King.” This is a sign of hope in the face of fear. While the prophet Isaiah said the child born to us will be called the prince of peace, that was also a name given to Caesar Augustus, the Roman Emperor when Jesus was born. The wise men, themselves sometimes called Kings of the Orient, seek a newborn King. King Herod hears the news and is troubled and terrified. He’s worked hard to secure his kingdom. There can’t be another King. Yet, “with the angels let us sing, Alleluia to our King.” We sing to our King, King Jesus. It’s a sign of hope. The government isn’t king. The weather isn’t king. No political party is king. No country is king. Capitalism isn’t king. Amazon isn’t king. Jesus is King. Singing Alleluia to our King gets our priorities back in line. God is God and we are not. Sing to God. Sing in the face of despair.

            Acts 16 tells the story of one of the times the apostle Paul was put in prison. This time it was because he commanded an evil spirit to come out of a slave girl. Now, that spirit had enabled the enslaved girl to predict the future and her owners made a great deal of money off her fortune-telling. When the owners realized their hope of money making was gone, they dragged Paul and Silas before the authorities, accusing them of advocating customs unlawful for Romans to accept or practice. The authorities had them flogged and thrown in prison. What did Paul and Silas do in prison? They prayed and they sang hymns to God. I remember this because a previous pastor at my sending church in North Carolina preached about this. Her sermon was about hymns you can take to jail with you. In the face of despair, what hymns can you sing? In the face of fear, can you dare to sing “Amazing Grace” or “How Great Thou Art”? Or maybe “O come O come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel”[2]? Here I am, God. Please come save me. God, you are great and your goodness endures forever. What hymn is a sign of hope for you? What song could you manage to get out in order to defy the darkness? One way to spark hope is by singing. Try it sometime. It doesn’t matter how you sound, because that’s not the point. The goal is to “spark hope.”[3]

What are some other ways to spark hope? Call out fear as fear. Name is as false evidence appearing real. Remind yourself that God is in control. Remind yourself that you can do this. Remind yourself that there is hope, there is always hope, in God our Creator and Redeemer and Sustainer. “A mighty fortress is my God, a bulwark never failing.”[4] Or maybe it’s “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land.”[5] Or how about: “What have I to dread, what have I to fear, leaning on the everlasting arms? I have blessed peace with my Lord so near, leaning on the everlasting arms. Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms; leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.”[6] The hymns are full of hope in the face of fear and despair.

When I saw this fourth Sunday was about hope and I was supposed to preach about hope, my first thought was again? Another sermon about hope? I’ve done lots of sermons about hope. I told my husband and he replied, “You preach about hope all the time.” And the question changed to: How do I do a different sermon on hope? What’s new? What do we need to hear? And, why do I seem to constantly preach about hope?

I preached about hope all the time at my previous appointment. One church averaged 20 people in Sunday worship. They’d gone through many splits, many church dramas and divisions. We had some newcomers come in, but not at the same rate that older members moved away or moved on to heaven. They desperately needed to hear hope.

At the other church, we had about an even rate of newcomers and older members moving away or moving into heaven. Church attendance was around 45 while I served there. But there was some old church drama that hadn’t been dealt with. The church office is in the parsonage, but it used to be in the church building. I found the old church office. It had simply been abandoned. There was still trash in the trash can. There was still a calendar on the wall from the last year it had been used. It was bizarre. That happened a few pastors back. Then the pastor immediately before me, two weeks before moving day, committed suicide in the backyard of the parsonage and died inside the house. His mom found him two days later. That church desperately needed hope as well. And there I showed up 8 months pregnant and with a two year old, literally with the new life they so desperately needed.

            Y’all know your own story. Mostly. Actually, the story you tell about yourself is important, especially whether you cast yourself as the victim or as the heroine.[7] What’s the story you tell yourself about what happened? If you can change the story, what would happen? What do you want the story to be? Now, the story isn’t over yet. What steps do you need to take to change how that story ends?

            This is why I preach hope. Too many of us cast ourselves as the victim when we could be the heroine. Too many of us think fatalistically, as if we don’t have a choice. The truth is we do have a choice. We have the choice of how we view things and how we move forward. That’s hope. Make sure you’re telling yourself the right story. Make sure you’re telling yourself the story of Jesus. “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! O what a foretaste of glory divine! Heir of salvation, purchase of God, born of his Spirit, washed in his blood. This is my story, this is my song, praising my Savior all the day long; this is my story, this is my song, praising my Savior all the day long.”[8]

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[1] “Calm and Bright:200 Years of Silent Night” worship series sermon fodder

[2] UMH 211

[3] Phrase borrowed from http://www.churchesforsoh.org/mission

[4] UMH 110

[5] UMH 127

[6] UMH 133

[7] Much of this from https://coaching4todaysleaders.com/whats-the-story-youve-been-telling/

[8] UMH 369