(A sermon for Advent 4C–December 23, 2012–Luke 1:46b-55)

It’s been a pretty grim December. Snow turned to rain, the sky has been gray, lots of foggy days, and that’s just the bad weather news. Early in the month, I went to the 7-11 near my house for gas first thing in the morning and witnessed the arrival of some panhandlers. In Portland, there are organized teams of men and women who stand at busy intersections with signs, taking turns throughout the day. There are more than usual at this time of year. They drove up together. One man filled the gas tank of a car they left parked in the lot. Two went inside to buy coffee. They left the fourth member of their group to stand on the median strip. She was a very young woman, really little more than a girl. She was thin and looked tired, and she was inadequately dressed for the weather. Her sign read, “Out of work with a family to support.” A cigarette drooped on her lip.

I felt the tension between sympathy and suspicion as I drove away. How did she end up at the intersection? How did she end up in that condition?

“The Annunciation” — Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1898

Long ago and far away another young girl faced a crossroads in her life. She received a visit from an angel, and even though I like the sound of angels, the idea of a visit from one is fairly terrifying. After all, they always start by saying, “Fear not!” This angel asked Mary to take on an unbelievable task, a lot more dangerous than standing at an intersection. The angel asked Mary to become the mother of God’s child, to become the mother of part of God’s own self. It’s a mystical notion; we can’t understand it very well. Really, we may not want to think too much about the technicalities.

But in her hometown, within a few months, there would surely be people asking the question, “How did she end up in that condition?”

For Mary it was a matter of faith. She agreed to what the angel announced. “Here I am,” she said, “the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me as you have said.” In the song we read today, she sings praise to God and prophesies that all generations will call her blessed.

She sounds so accepting, but don’t be fooled into thinking she was passive. The words we read this morning are a call to revolution. Mary makes a claim that God has changed the world in the past and by coming into the world will change it again.

And she will be a part of it, nurturing the child who will grow into the man, Jesus. I often say I take comfort in knowing that God understands our challenges and our sorrows, because Jesus lived them. But God also knows the love of a mother because Mary gave it to Jesus. They blessed each other, the mother and the son. God received and gave real, human love, expressed in touch and tears and probably the feeling of being cautioned against bad behavior, and certainly the feeling of being held tight when the troubles are over.

God didn’t just love us from far away; God loved us up close.

And even though that time may seem far away, we can feel and be God’s up close love for one another.

Paper products are needed, too!

This church shows love, God’s love, in many ways. Just in the past few days, our church family has staffed the Community Food Pantry in Cumberland, gathered gifts for a family facing challenges here in North Yarmouth, and opened the Pet Pantry to people in need. The stars hanging behind me represent your financial gifts to the Food Pantry. We don’t do these things just because it’s Christmas. Your gifts to the Deacons Fund and your pledges to our church’s Local Mission make it possible for us to show love in practical ways throughout the year. There is nothing mystical about these material expressions of love.

It’s also not a mystical notion that our time together is coming to an end. Pretty much every route I take, every person I see, and every conversation I have has been mentally marked “possibly the last time.” So I have been paying special attention, drinking in the moments to remember later. As I try to say goodbye to each of you, I have to admit that while love never ends, the opportunities to express it are time-sensitive. Time can run out for showing it. Don’t let that happen. Tell the people you love how you feel. Better yet, show them.

And although it’s tempting to think, at Christmas, of the gift you ought to buy, there are other, better ways.

Yes, love is time-sensitive, but love is also outside of time. We still feel love from people who are gone, remembering their kindness to us and the ways they changed our world or changed the world for all people. I remember my grandmother the activist. You remember the teacher who cared about you. This church remembers blessed saints, like Ros and Gladys and Bud. We remember people of faith in the wider world who brought about change of just the kind Mary describes, opening schools to children of all races, bringing peace where there had been war, reminding us ever and always that God is on the side of the lowly and not the powerful. Our actions have the same power: to heal, to console, to encourage, to bless, and to change.

Love varies in its expressions. On Friday morning, fifteen of us gathered here for a time of remembrance. We lit the Advent Wreath; we prayed; we kept silence. Next door our neighbor watched the bell from her kitchen window, telling me later, “I knew more than one person had to be there. Thank you.” If you’ve ever rung the bell here, you know that it takes a good hard pull, and sometimes it rings twice even when you pull only once. Four people went up into the balcony to ring the bell while the rest of us witnessed. We heard the quiet movement of their feet as they shifted to let each other have a turn. Love varies, like their pulling on the bell rope. The way you show it may look or sound different than the way I show it, but it’s still love.

From National Geographic

Love is touch. I finally cried over Newtown when I was watching the news Monday night and saw the story about the Comfort Dogs. These trained therapy dogs, part of a Lutheran ministry, traveled from Chicago to Connecticut, and their job was simply to be present in the midst of grief and distress. Petting the dogs makes you feel better, said one little girl. National Geographic.com reports:

One boy confided in the gentle-faced golden retriever about exactly what happened in his classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary School that day—which his parents said was more than he’d been able to share with them. A little girl who hadn’t spoken since the shootings finally started talking to her mother again after petting one of the “comfort dogs.” Groups of teenagers began to open up and discuss their fear and grief with each other as they sat on the floor together, all stroking the same animal.[i]

Surely that is God’s up close love.

Love is real, and real love will turn our world upside down. It will move us where we never thought we would go. It will open us beyond all perceived possibilities. It will strengthen us for whatever comes our way.

God’s up close love changed Mary’s life. It put her in a condition she never expected: mother of God’s own self. She raised him with love, in the best way she knew how, and watched him go out into the world. Mary lived to see her son die, a hard reality no one wants for a mother. We’ve seen too much of it. But we still call her blessed. She opened herself to God and brought forth God’s child out of love.

Out of love, Jesus stood against the proud and for the lowly. He embraced the unacceptable. He stopped at all sorts of crossroads and intersections; he felt no tension between suspicion and sympathy. He talked to people we drive past regularly.

He showed us God’s love is real, up close.

God has done a great thing for us. In all generations, we are blessed. Amen.

(A sermon for Advent 3C — December 16, 2012 — Isaiah 12:2-6; Luke 3:7-18)

Joy. It’s a staccato word, sharp and short. I can remember the sound of it sung by a gym full of school girls, grades 4 through 12, performing a German carol for parents and friends. “How Great the Joy,” we sang, then echoed, “great the joy.” Then louder: “Joy, joy, joy!” And another echo, softer but just as emphatic: “Joy, joy, joy!”

From Principal Dawn Hochsprung’s Twitter account.

It’s a hard word to hear today. In my mind is a picture put up on Twitter just four days ago by a school principal. Rows of fourth graders are standing dressed for a concert, singing to their friends and their families. Their principal is dead now, along with five other staff members and twenty of the younger schoolchildren. We see their suffering and grief playing out live on television. There is no comfort to be had, only discomfort. How can we be joyful?

Experts will tell us how to care for our children. It’s okay to let them know we are sad, but we shouldn’t show so much emotion that we upset them. They need to count on us, so we need to mask our distress to comfort them. Teach them to follow each worried thought with a brave one.[i] (Easier said than done, I fear, for most of us.)

That’s all psychological advice, and it’s good as far as it goes. But my area is the theological. I want to know where God is in all this. Mr. Rogers, perhaps my favorite Wise Man, drew on his faith when he wrote,

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.”[ii]

So when terrible images are on the television, if you can’t spare your children, tell them to look for the helpers. Look for the people who are right there in the middle of danger and sorrow, helping the injured and the suffering. Look for the goodness and love and courage they are sharing. I believe that’s where we find God.

We also need to remember that little ones don’t perceive the world the way we do; they don’t understand permanence. They don’t understand death. We do. We understand death, and illness, and suffering and loss, each of us in our varying ways depending on our life experiences. We understand. And some things we can accept: the losses that come in the normal unfolding of a life. But some things we cannot accept. Some things we cannot understand.

A feeling of helplessness struck everyone who heard the news. We continue to read the minute details of the story – many of which turn out not to be true, by the way – because we’re trying to wrap our heads around it. We’re trying to comprehend how such a thing could happen.

We hear and read opinions that blame whole categories of people from the mentally ill to the autistic to divorced parents, when no one really knows yet what happened. We rush to judgment because that feels less painful than waiting for things to unfold, helplessly. We hear words that I consider blasphemous, such as people who call themselves Christian claiming that God allowed this to happen because we put God out of the schools. That’s an outrageous statement, but no more outrageous than the suggestion that this was part of God’s plan, or that God needed these children as angels in heaven. No. I do not believe this was God’s punishment or plan.

I do not understand how people can think such thoughts.

We wonder, what is wrong with people? What is wrong with this world?

I’m afraid it’s the same things that have been wrong with the world ever since God put people on it. The people of Israel listening to Isaiah were in an enormous mess. They had little hope. Their community had been divided by the invading Babylonians. As we’ve talked about recently, some of them were living under occupation at home while others had been carried off into exile. Families were divided. Who knows what happened to the children along the way, the ones too little to walk a long distance, the ones who cried and disturbed someone, even the ones who were not causing any trouble at all. Who knows?

We wonder, what is wrong with people? What is wrong with this world?

John, in the wilderness, could see the trouble, and he tried to get people right with God. He spoke a hard word. It must have been a bad time for people to be willing to listen to his preaching. He didn’t hesitate to tell the people, and especially the religious leaders, exactly what he thought. He called them cowardly, like vipers that skitter away when their nest is threatened. He called them hypocritical, willing to rest on the reputation of their ancestors. He called them unproductive and unrepentant and unacceptable. A tree that bears no fruit, John tells them, will be cut down.

When they asked him what they should do to please God, he gave them the sort of practical recommendations that we seem almost obvious. Share with those in need; don’t cheat people; don’t abuse your power. It sounds so simple, but we know it’s hard. We struggle to get it right, and when we look around at the world, we see so many people getting it wrong.  We’re living in the short, dark days of the year. We’re living in the hard, sad darkness of tragedy. It’s an act of faith to keep putting one foot in front of the other. It’s an act of faith to believe we are moving toward God’s future, toward the intentions held for us by the One who knows us best of all.

And that is the place where our hope lies, even on the darkest, longest night of the year, or the darkest, longest night of our lives. God doesn’t give up on us. That’s our hope. That well is deep. That hope is eternal. We point to it year in and year out in Advent. We light our candles and remember, but we also light our candles and hope in the future and pray for peace. Today we stand at the well of salvation and try to draw up a little joy. It feels like a long way down as we let out the rope. We sing of joy, but we don’t do it blithely, unknowingly or childishly. We  sing of joy emphatically, to encourage one another.

So hear me:

Even when the things we do and the culture we create and the news we make don’t coincide with love and hope and peace and joy, God does not give up on us. God wants more from us, but God does not give up on us.

So we don’t give up either. No. Here’s what we do:

• We pray for one another, even for our enemies, even for the ones who commit the destructive acts.
• We pray especially hard for those who have lost their children, or their mother, or their teacher.
• We look for the helpers, as Mr. Rogers wisely said, and remember how much goodness there is even at the same time there is so much brokenness.
• We give any help we can our own selves. We look around us to see where the needs are right here.
• We come together and sing our joyful praise that there is a God who loves us even in the midst of terrible loss, and we do it on behalf of those who are too sad or too angry or too shocked to do it for themselves.

This is not sweet and easy work. There is nothing sugar-coated about joy. Christian joy is not an emotion, like happiness. Christian joy is a condition of the spirit. It is emphatic, and it is fierce. Isaiah promised the Israelites, far from home and in despair, that a better future was coming. And it came. He promised they would draw water from the well of salvation, and they would do it with joy. And they did. That saving well is deep, and we draw the water from it together. It comes up from a serious, deep-down place. It’s a well of belief in the God who made us and loves us. It’s a well of belief in God-made-man, God who loves us enough to come and dwell among us, with skin on, in Christ Jesus.

It’s a story of joy, but it is not sugar-coated either. “Joy joy joy” we will sing, sharply and resoundingly. “Joy to the World!” We will sing it emphatically! “The Lord is come!” God knew very well what sort of world God’s own self would come into, a world where people treated each other badly and treated children even worse, but God still came. God is still coming. This is the promise of Advent; there is discomfort now, but there will be joy. Amen.

(A sermon for Advent 1C–December 2, 2012–Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36)

An eggnog latte in the red cup.

Yesterday I turned the calendar over to December. We’ve survived Black Friday and Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday. I have stopped shaking my head when the Starbucks barista hands me the red cup. Those blow-up Christmas decorations are to be found in people’s yards again: Snowmen and Snow Globes and even Abominable Snow Monsters. These are signs of our 21^st Century American Christmas.

Things are in chaos at our house as we prepare to move. Lucy and I have made a tough, but smart, decision not to have a tree this year. But later today, we will arrange my grandmother’s nativity set on the mantle, finding a safe place to tuck Baby Jesus away until Christmas Eve. It is the sign to us that no matter how many other things we need to do in the next few weeks, how many boxes we need to pack or bags of old clothes need to make their way to Goodwill, Christmas is truly coming.

Here in church we also have practices that are familiar to the season. Advent is the season that asks us to hold back our Christmas celebration for a few more weeks, to prepare for the incarnation, the in-breaking of the divine into human life. We are preparing for more than a gift exchange. In our church and in our families, we’re preparing to celebrate what it means to us to be part of Christ’s family.

If the Advent wreath is being lit, Christmas is only a few weeks away. If we are hearing the words of prophets who spoke of a savior, then the gospel stories of Jesus’ birth will soon follow.

Today we hear from Jeremiah. He spoke to a community in turmoil, literally divided by the invading Babylonians. As if in slow motion, the attackers split the community, forcing a large portion of the population to captivity in Babylon at the same time they occupied Jerusalem. Those who stayed behind lived under foreign rule in their own land. They saw the Temple destroyed. The exiles struggled to worship God faithfully while living far from their holy place.

They wondered why God let this happen to them.

They listened to Jeremiah, because God spoke through him. But the words of Jeremiah were not comforting. He almost seemed to enjoy pointing out the things his people had done wrong, the ways they had separated themselves from God.

But after many chapters of hard words, Jeremiah offered the people a promise:

33:14 The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.

33:15 In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.

33:16 In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: “The LORD is our righteousness.”

Jeremiah shared God’s promise of a savior, a “righteous Branch” to spring up for all the house of David. Jeremiah’s words were a sign that there was still something to hope for, that all was not lost. Someday, somehow, there would be help. There would be justice. There would be righteousness. There would be safety. The Righteous Branch would bring protection.

The Christmas stories in Luke and Matthew tell us of signs in the sky. The angels the shepherds saw, the star the magi followed, did not bring them to an armed camp or a palace but to a manger, to a baby wrapped in whatever his mother could find to keep him warm. This was the Righteous Branch? Our hope is in the helplessness of a baby who grew up to be a wandering storyteller.

Maybe we can see why the people wanted a captain or a King instead. Where was Jeremiah’s winner? The faithful expected a Righteous Warrior prepared to swing his branch like a sword and defeat the foes. His victory over earthly powers would prove their God was the real one. His strength would put the oppressors in their place. His justice would be swift and righteous and sweet.

The itinerant preacher painted pictures of the future that were considerably less comforting. We come to these texts in Advent, too, and they feel out of tune with the season of insistent jollity. We are getting ready for the baby in the manger, or the presents under the tree, and here comes Jesus predicting the end of the world. It’s a scary scenario, isn’t it? He speaks of signs in the sun and the moon and the stars, great storms, and fear and foreboding all around us.

His speech doesn’t have the same special effects as the movie “2012,” with its visuals of Los Angeles falling into the ocean. (You’re not really expecting the end of the world when the Mayan calendar runs out on December 21^st, are you?) But he points to the kinds of natural events and collective anxieties that people around him knew well. An eclipse of the sun or the moon created fear. An unusually powerful storm made people wonder if things would ever be normal again. War, disease, drought all counted as signs of God’s disfavor.

‘Tis the Season of the End of the World.

Or maybe just the end of the world as we know it.

I’m going away, he is saying, but I am coming back again. For the people listening, his going away would have seemed like the end of the world, surely, and his return, even in a cloud of glory, was not exactly a source of comfort and joy.

Perhaps the itinerant storyteller is reading his audience when he shifts gears. He gives them the big picture, but then he brings it back to his more accustomed mode of teaching, the parable. Maybe he can see they need a way back to the ordinary world. Even in the everyday things we see, there are signs of what is to come. The fig tree was one of the last to get its leaves each spring, and Jesus reminds us that some signs point us to what ought to be obvious, even when it isn’t! The fig leaves point to summer. You know what it looks like.

Change is coming, sisters and brothers, says Jesus. It won’t always be the way it is now. I’ll be arrested and things will look terrible, but just for a little while. Keep watching, I will be with you.

Change is coming, people of Israel, says Jeremiah. You won’t always be in exile, and the Babylonians will go home, and it will get better. Hold on, God is with you.

Change is coming, people of North Yarmouth Congregational Church. Listen up! Pay attention! Christmas is almost here.

What are we hoping for? We have seen signs: visions of Powerball winnings and credit card bills and trips to the Apple Store for an iPad Mini dance in our heads. But these are the signs of our 21^st Century American Christmas. They weigh us down with the expectations of society, the demands for gifts and cards and attendance at parties.

What do we really hope for this Christmas, down underneath the wrapping paper and the gift cards and the eggnog lattes…and maybe the eggnog, too? We’re probably not focused too hard on end-of-the-world hopes, visions of being snatched to heavenly safety when everything implodes.

No, it’s more likely we’re focused on what’s right in front of us. We may hope for renewed health, or peace of mind. We may hope someone will see what’s best for him, or how much we really love her. We may hope God will point us – clearly – in the direction we are meant to go.

Those are individual hopes, but they are hopes for the world, too.

We hope God will point the world in a better direction.

But God did, already. We’re just taking our own sweet time reading the signs, as Jesus said we would. We fail to notice them because we get caught up in the things of this world.

So let’s try, for the little while of Advent, to see them.

Be alert for the signs:

• Doors opening to families with nowhere to spend the night;
• And shining lights that guide us in the darkness;
• And Good News shared by angels in ordinary clothing.

This Advent, look for the One who came, and is coming, to change the world.