12.11.22 "Advent 3: Joy!"

 Isaiah 35.1-2; Luke 1.39-56

It all began with simple “Yes!” … 

The angel of the LORD came to Mary, with a suggestion, and Mary said, “Yes!”

And so it came to pass - that Mary, a young lady, perhaps no more than 14 or so, became the mother of Jesus … 

She said “Yes!” …

A friend of mine recently wrote - “Say yes until you have to say No!”

I celebrate with you today all those who have said Yes to life … who said, “Yes” to you … to me … 

In my senior year in Grand Rapids Christian High School, as graduation neared, my Bible teacher, the Rev. Morris Faber, invited the seniors to come to the front of his classroom and share some plans.

One after the other, this and that, and college and career, and all the dreams that a high school senior enjoys … and, then, it was my turn.

I told the class, I was going to Calvin College, and enrolling in the pre-seminary course … and with that, the class broke out into laughter … I mean, serious, raucous, uncontrolled, laughter, and I was laughing right along with them … I’m sure some thought it was a joke, but it was no joke. I had decided that I would be a minister.

Now, just some backstory - I was not what would have been recognized as “clergy” material … I’ll not bore you with the details, but it can be said, that if there were a picture of what a high school senior headed into the ministry should look like, it wasn’t me. 

So the class laughed, and so did I.

When the laughter died down, the Rev. Faber turned to me … all 5 feet, 5 inches of him - and said, “Tom, I believe you will do it.”

I’ve never forgotten that moment, as you can tell … that was in the spring of 1962 - that word of encouragement, the power of Yes, has stayed with me all these years.

Twenty years later, I was in Grand Rapids for some study, eating at a Russ’s Restaurant, a local chain famous for its hamburgers … and there, a few booths away, was the Rev. Faber and his wife. 

He was recognizable - small in stature with a gnome-like face … there he was, having lunch.

I left my table and walked over to them, introduced myself … the Rev. Faber looked at me with that thousand-yard stare common to dementia.

His wife explained to me, and I told her my story … then I thanked the Rev. Faber for his confidence in me. His wife thanked me for coming over, and I thanked the LORD that I had the chance to see him again, to thank him personally for his goodness … did he understand what I said?

Probably not … as I left, he picked up his hamburger and continued eating … his wife, with tears in her eyes.

A simple yes … 

Mary said it to the angel … the Rev. Faber said it to me … 

 

Say Yes until you have to say No.

I’ve been thinking about this for the last several weeks.

Yes is a dangerous word … it gets us into things we didn’t plan on, and sometimes into things where we don’t belong.

I’ve learned over the years to be a bit more cautious with my “Yes” … but on the other hand, caution needs to be thrown to the wind, and maybe more often than not.

One of the components of Yes is a simple trust in life … that life will provide the ways and means of getting something done … that God is involved in all of this … and, yes, we can do it … 

It may be difficult … ask Mary how easy it was to bear the child of our salvation … recalling what the Angel said to her, what the shepherds and wise men said … wondering what her son would become, and when he began his ministry, Mary’s concern:  his wandering, his preaching, threats against him … until finally, his arrest, a quick trial, and a public execution …

Yes opens the door to all kinds of things … and some of them will be downright difficult.

I think of Bonhoeffer and Barth in Nazi Germany … they said Yes to Christ, and No to Hitler … it cost Barth his job … he was deported to Switzerland, where he spent the remainder of the war years … it cost Bonhoeffer his life … he was hanged in the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, as the war neared its end.

The power of Yes …

Yes is the heart and soul of joy … 

It is Mary’s Sunday, we light her candle, and it’s pink … my thanks to Marjean Thomas and to Arlene Bennett for the light of the day … 

Mary’s Candle, Hail Mary, full of grace, the LORD is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death.

Joy is saying Yes to God!

But let me quickly make something clear … joy and happiness are not the same thing … they can run together, and often do, but there’s a difference … a difference between joy and happiness.

Happiness is circumstantial … I’m happy if the Dodgers win … I’m happy when my children are happy … I’m happy in the company of good friends … I’m happy on a vacation in Napa Valley.

Things can go terribly wrong, and they can, and they will … happiness will disappear like a splash of water on hot summer sidewalk … happiness is a variable … joy is a constant … 

Joy is deeper … less of the moment … more of a shaping, a long-term shaping of the soul … joy is quiet, calm, strong …  

Joy grows slowly … it requires a lot of Yes … 

Adults who come from difficult circumstances often look back to one or two people who loved them … someone saying Yes to them … so they made it … scars on the soul, scars on the body, but the power of Yes, the power of someone’s Yes in the midst of craziness and sadness … 

“You can do it!”

“I believe in you!”

Isaiah 35.1-2; Luke 1.39-56

God is saying Yes to us all the time.

I have found it to be true: joyful people are joyful because they tend to say Yes to life’s requirements … they learn the important lessons of trying something new … they learn the important lessons of failure … they can say Yes to the incomplete, the unexpected, the less-than-perfect realities of life.

Something worth doing is something worth doing badly … playing the piano, running cross-country, writing an essay, or learning how to dance.

The first piano recital may go well, but afterward, the budding pianist will rehearse it all over again … the weak spots, the missed notes, and so on.

Running cross-country, you may come in last.

A baseball star hits 330 … which means only one hit per three at-bats … two-thirds of the time, there’s no hit. 

Learning to dance is no easy task.

The piano player goes back to work … the baseball player talks to the coaches … and Mary is the Mother of Jesus.

It’s all begins with a simple Yes …

Hallelujah and Amen!

December 16, 2018 - Palms Westminster - "Do Not Let Your Hands Grow Weak"

Zephaniah 3.14-20; Luke 3.7-18

My granddaughter and her parents live in Amsterdam, and during the winter months, it’s cold and damp.

Her folks picked her up from school the other day, on a cold and blustery day, and asked if she had played outside. “Yes,” said said. 

And, then, they asked: “Were you cold?

She replied, “No! Now I’m hardy!”

Well, she’s learning to be Dutch, learning to be hardy, because the Dutch have battled the waters to make a land … 

With dikes and dams and the latest in engineering, they’ve learned to work together; they’ve learned to be hardy.

As the Dutch put it: “God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland.”

So, here we are, the Third Sunday of Advent.

Zephaniah says:

Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!

And why exult? … because:

The LORD has taken away the judgments against you, he has turned away your enemies. The king of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more.

On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands grow weak.

Because we have work to do!

The love of God is never a call to lay down and snooze … to blow off the problems of our world and simply say: “God will take care of us” … no, we’re called to put our hand to the plow and not look back … we’re called to take up our cross and go to work … Jesus says, Come, and follow me … go where I go, do what I do, be as I am … love as your Father in heaven loves … let your light shine before others, so they can see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven … you are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

When God created the heavens and the earth, and created you and me, and put us into the garden - it wasn’t to lay around and dream sweet dreams …

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.

And when it became obvious that help was needed, God created the woman, to be a partner in the work.

Everyone is called, everyone given a task … everyone has to work.

How many of you have ever kept a garden?

It’s a lot of work.

We prepare the earth … we buy the best seed … we plant with care … we pull the weeds and put on the fertilizer … we water and then we watch the miracle of growth occur … 

When God created us, it wasn’t just for a wee bit of a plot to manage, but the whole wide world … the fish of the sea … the birds of the air … every living thing that moves upon the earth.

God gives the world to us … and gives us the responsibility to care for it.

The whole wide world … that’s why God created us to work together … that’s why gives us the ability to form communities, to build nations … to care for one another … to provide for the weakest of the community … so that no one is left behind, no one abandoned … 

We do this together … 

Yesterday at a wedding, I read 1 Corinthians 13, and thinking about today’s sermon, these words hit me hard:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 

Whether it be a preacher in a pulpit, a parent with children, or the president of a nation: life requires truth …

To work together, we have to tell the truth … lies disrupt, lies distort, lies destroy … truth builds up, truth encourages us to work well with one another, even if the truth is hard.

Truth builds bridges, not ditches.

Truth builds highways, not walls.

Notice how the Apostle Paul put it?

Love takes no pleasure in wrongdoing … and, then, rather than saying “love rejoices in doing right,” Paul says, Love rejoices in the truth.

Ought we not in this place to be concerned about the truth? 

Jesus said, I am the way, the truth and the life …  

Of all the places on the face of the earth where truth has to be central, it has to be in the church of Jesus Christ … 

Where truth counts all the time, where lies of any kind have no place: the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, the lies we tell about others, lies about science and creation and immigrants … religious lies, spiritual lies, lies about who’s damned and who’s saved … who’s naughty and who’s nice.

Of all the many lies being told these days, none larger, and none more threatening to God’s creation, than the lies revolving around climate change …  

Our best scientists all agree, thousands and thousands of scientists all around the world, agree, that climate change is real, and it’s related to human activity … 

And it’s all about God’s good earth … 

Many years ago, an elder said to me, and this was in the day when nuclear war seemed so close, “So what,” said the elder; “If we all die, don’t we just go to heaven?”

His question caught me off guard; I don’t know what I said, but his question made me think … and one day, I put it in the form of a story.

A man stood at the pearly gates, and said to St. Peter, “Well, here I am?” 

And St. Peter said, “I have to turn you away?”

The man blustered: “I went to church, I prayed, I read my Bible, I witnessed to others.”

But St. Peter said: “You didn’t care about God’s good earth. What makes you think you’ll care about God’s good heaven.” And St. Peter turned him away.

God created the heavens AND the earth … the earth is precious to God … and it must precious to us, too.

We didn’t know better when it all began … we burned coal and chopped down the trees … we ripped up the soil and dumped our waste into lakes and streams.

But we know better now … God has been good to us: giving us women and men who are called, by the Spirit of God, to study God’s world … 

And they’re telling us, some of the them are shouting at us …

The release of carbon into the atmosphere along with the loss of forests is creating a change in our climate, and the outcome is already evident, all around the world, and it’s going to get worse if we fail to join hands and join efforts to make the needed changes … to keep on caring for God’s good earth.

Zephaniah said: Do not fear, O Zion, do not let your hands grow weak

Like the Dutch: it’s time to be hardy.

Build the dikes and the dams.

Learn new ways of taking care of God’s good earth.

Pay attention to those who tell the truth.

Think carefully, think critically, pray a lot.

Be informed by the truth, and formed by the Spirit of God.

Today, here, at Palms Westminster, the Third Sunday of Advent: shout aloud for joy and never for a moment let your hands grow weary … 

Hallelujah and Amen!

The Bethlehem Road

Isaiah 64.1-9; Mark 13.24-37

Advent One

Palms Westminster Presbyterian Church

Today is the first step … along the Bethlehem Road … it’s Advent … the first Sunday of Advent … the first of four Sundays that take us along the Bethlehem Road.

The Star above … Wise Men from the East, Shepherds in the field, and the angels who sing to them … to Bethlehem we go … 

God is waiting for us, calling us … to make the journey …

Mary and Joseph are already there …

The powers that be ordered Mary and Joseph, and everyone else, to return to their hometowns, to register for taxation … everyone was on the move, and nothing seemed right … all was topsy turvy, the bad guys in charge, and in just such time, and in just such a place, the Son of God is born.

The Bethlehem Road … we’re on it today.

To find goodness and beauty … to find hope and peace … and there, before the manger, to lay down our gifts, our lives, our dreams, our love … all that we are, and all that we hope to be.

In Bethlehem, we find our true selves …

And what’s our true self?

We are children of God, and that means we’re brothers and sisters with one another … and that means we take care of one another.

We have no self without other selves connected to us … “no man is an island” said the poet John Donne. 

We’re created to be with each other, and for each other … every human being is family for us … remember when God questioned the Cain about his brother’s whereabouts, and Cain petulantly asked, “What, am I my brother’s keeper?”

And the answer, “Yes, of course, you are. You are your brother’s keeper.”

We’re all in this together … it’s sin that divides and sets us apart … it’s sin that tells us we’re exceptional and have certain rights over against others … nothing is more painful to watch than a person who believes they’re better then others … it’s a giant ego, we say … and such thoughts are the worst when those thoughts infect nations … as we saw in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia … all of those nations thought they were “exceptional” and what a world of suffering their pride created.

On the Bethlehem Road, we learn the truth about ourselves … we’re all exceptional, because we’re loved of God … and every nation is named by God … everyone and every nation has a place in the scheme of life, and only when we see how deeply connected we are to one another, only then do we learn who we are, what life is all about, and what we have to do.

There have been times in our nations history when this part of the Christian story held sway, and people and churches and synagogues and government took care of one another … and then there are times, when we’ve forgotten how to take care of one another, and then we fought a Civil War because some thought slavery was a good idea … and these days, I fear for our nation, that we are quickly becoming a nation ruled by self-interest and self-glory … led by people who are quick to grab all the clothing off the rack before anyone else has a chance to get even a coat or a pair of pants …

That’s why we need to make this journey to Bethlehem, to find our true selves … to find mercy and kindness and to guide our nation to a better place … to promote peace and not war … to share and not to take … to tell the truth and not use lies and alternate facts to hurt one another.

In Bethlehem, we find our true selves.

In Bethlehem, we find one another … and that’s always the way it is when we find ourselves … we find one another … 

The closer we move to Bethlehem, the closer we become to others … who are on the road to Bethlehem … many roads, from many different directions … everyone of good faith, whatever their faith, is on the road to Bethlehem … every religion, every faith - Jew and Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu, Sikh and Christian … each in our own way, on the Bethlehem … and the closer we move toward Bethlehem, the closer we move to one another …

Here, in a big city, how close we are to one another … that’s why I love big cities … our neighbors are the world, and the world is our neighbor … the food we eat is different, the ways we dress and talk, the ways we worship god … all different, all wonderfully different … and that’s why we need each other … not one of us is complete by ourselves … no one faith tradition has all the truth, but only a part of it … Christians need to talk with Jews, and Jews with Muslims, and Muslims with Buddhists, and Buddhists with Sikhs … we all need one another to fulfill our own unique calling from God.

On the Bethlehem Road.

And along the way, the poor and the oppressed, the lost and the lonely … God asks us, “Do you see them, too? along the road? 

You can walk, but maybe they can’t … some have been set upon by thieves and left to die beside the road … some are orphans and some are widows who haven’t the means … some of them are strangers in our midst; they belong nowhere and have no home … can you see them on your way to Bethlehem?

Help them, carry them, provide for them … as the Samaritan did for the injured man on the Jericho Road …  “leave no one behind” is the only way for us to follow Christ and be faithful to our calling.

With helping hands and kindly words, we lift one another … and again and again, we remind this nation what it means to be a godly nation, not just with words printed on our money, or in phony prayer breakfasts that look good and stink to high heaven because of their hypocrisy … white washed tombs, said Jesus, beautiful on the outside and full of death inside.

We have to help our nation recover its senses, it’s purpose, it’s character … to leave no one behind, to provide for one another, with fair taxes, and ways and means so that the rich don’t get richer at the expense of the poor, and the poor don’t get poorer because the rich simply don’t care.

The rich and powerful rarely make the journey to Bethlehem - they don’t have the time or the interest, because they know that Bethlehem would change their lives, and they don’t want that kind change. They know it, and they fear it.

But we can do it, we have do it, we have to do it for them, and we have to show them their true selves, we have to help them see those beside the road … 

I’m an American … a proud and grateful American … and I’m a Christian, too … a Christian who wants this nation to recover its sense and regain its purpose … I want America to be great again … but right now, we’re not on a path to greatness; we’re on a highway to disaster.

As for credentials?

For better than 50 years, I’ve been a student of the Bible [sounds like the Apostle Paul] … I’ve read theology … I have a doctorate … I’m well-read in American and world history … if credentials mean anything, I have them … but it’s Christ finally to whom I appeal, on behalf of our nation - we’ve lost our way … our incessant wars, our failure to deal with poverty … the hideous forces of racism and misogyny … an administration mired in doubt and deceit … a tax plan that will hurt millions of Americans … our failure to deal realistically with immigration … the propaganda of fear paralyzing our moral compass … 

America is in the grip of unholy forces, economic and religious … standards of truth compromised … millions of Christians lost, because they have lost touch with Christ … they have traded away the Christ of Bethlehem for King Herod in his palace!

Only on the road to Bethlehem can life be found, only there, do we find ourselves, and only there, find one another.

In Bethlehem, we find ourselves found of God.

It’s not me, LORD; it’s you!

All of this begins with God … in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth … in the beginning, it was the love of God that said, “Let there be light.”

God is always first … the first to speak, the first to act, the first to love … and God is always last … the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, and everything in between.

Jesus says, “You didn’t choose me, I choose you!”

Which is why I love infant baptism … there’s no chance here for anyone to say, “I chose Christ” … because none of us ever choose Christ … it’s Christ who chooses us, and no better image of this grace, this mercy, than infant baptism.

Because it always starts with an infant … the infant Moses … and infant Samuel … and the infant Jesus … God is always the God of good beginnings, good endings … and even in the middle, in the muddle, good things … at work in all things for good.

We discover the mystery of faith on the Bethlehem Road.

We find ourselves … and we find one another.

On the Bethlehem Road.

Hallelujah and Amen!