|
As a child there was always something about Christmas that was special, even magical. Today that magic is still very present, especially as we think of what an awesome event the birth of Christ was. This was not something God did on a whim, this was planned to perfection; what else would you expect! The magic of the season is not really magic, or at least as we think of it in our modern culture; the magic of Christmas is really the glimpse it gives us into a better way of being and a grounding in the fact that our lives are indelibly connected to God.
As a Congregation we have lived out this better way throughout the past year in welcoming our neighbors, learning to be uncomfortable when that is needed and bearing witness to the special Godly connections that are so prevalent in the life of this church. I hope that you have a truly magical Christmas and that it bears witness to the ways in which you are connected to God now and forever.
0 Comments
As we light the fourth and final candle of the Advent season, we light the candle of Peace. For me, peace is the most difficult theme of the four, not for reasons of attainability, but in what the word actually means. For me the difficulty goes back to John Lennon’s song “Imagine”, a great song, but something about the peace that he describes bothers me, yes, that “no religion, too” line. Of course it has to do with my view of religion, and that has a part, but really it has to do with an understanding that says that peace is an absence of (fill in the blank).
I totally understand where people see religion as one of the great impediments to peace. Most Americans quickly point their fingers to the Middle East. But there is an old adage that most of us learned in elementary school, “when you point your finger at someone else you have three pointing back at you.” The reality is that our politicians, on both sides, often use religion as a tool for rather than a directive for peace. From a Biblical standpoint, peace is as much as a state of mind as it is time without war. In the Old Testament, “peace is a greeting (1 Sam 25:6) and refers as much to health and wellbeing (Isa. 53.5 AV) as to the absence of hostilities (1 Kgs. 4:24-25; Ps 122).”[1] What is interesting is that the New Testament understanding of peace becomes a bit more complex as it becomes synonymous with “justice and righteousness.” One can see how health and wellbeing as well as the absence of hostilities has become the foundation of a Peace, which is linked with Social Justice and Righteousness. If I care for another, then I may have to fight in order to attain peace. According to Donald McKim, the theology of Peace “sees all Christian theology from the viewpoint of the peace that God establishes with the world in Jesus Christ (Acts 10:36, Rom. 5:1; Eph. 2:15) and that God desires as the primary mode for human relationships (Matt. 5:9; Rom. 12:18; 2 Cor. 13:11).”[2] But the motivation has rooted in the desire for the liberation of peoples, not the subjugation of one group by another. That is where discerning what are peaceful motives and what are not become very difficult, especially if those in power are making those determinations because they often are unable to see the justice through their desires. I can guarantee that nine out of ten people can name at least one obvious unjust law without any thought. When we look at what was behind that law, we often see either fear or a desire for power, never Justice or a true sense of peace. As you can tell, the problem with peace is very real and seemingly unattainable. If we take the John Lennon “Imagine” song we can see the peace he calls for could very well be a peace that worked for some and not others. When we listen to the politicians promising peace we find ourselves questioning their motives and often confused as to why the peace they purport usually turns into more war or violence. The Peace we are called to live in is deeply based in our faith and it is a call for equality and care for others. It reminds me of when Deacons are ordained in the Presbyterian Church; one of their tasks of care is to “give voice to the voiceless.” Peace is our relationship with God, and how we strive to create a world that is just, fair, and caring for all people’s wellbeing. In Christ, Bryan [1] John Sawyer, A Concise Dictionary of the Bible and it Reception, Westminster John Knox 2009 [2] Donald McKim, The Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms (2nd ed),Westminster John Knox: 2014 One of the ongoing themes of the advent season can be summed up best by Paul in First Corinthians 13:9-10 “For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.” For all of the aspects of Hope, Love, Joy, and now Peace, all of these expressions are temporal and incomplete. Yet they continue to be goals for how we are to live and grow as people and in our faith.
This Sunday we have the very special story of when the angel goes to visit Mary. For many reasons this is a pivotal moment in the birth narrative since it is where Mary comes to her acceptance she will be carrying a very special baby. While we can speculate that there was a whole lot more conversation than what is recorded, we know that the story highlights three important things. First, that God favored her. This does not mean that God saw her as divine or super human, but that she was one who could handle and care for a very special person. Biblically speaking, the choice of Mary was not random; there were certain criteria that had to be filled. She had to have the right lineage, be at the right age, and the time and place also had to be right, or as the modern adage goes “all the stars had to be aligned.” Unfortunately, many people have made the argument that Mary is somewhere between human and God. This is problematic because part of the choice of Mary was her humanity and, more importantly, her innocence. Think back for a second to the story of the garden, innocents end with divine knowledge (the fruit of the tree). Mary’s innocence and purity allow Christ to enter the corrupted world in the least corrupted way possible. Second, Mary was not the only one chosen in this plan. Elizabeth, the mother of John had been tapped to bear a son who would prepare the way. This means that Mary was not alone in her journey; in fact, we know at one point she went to be with Elizabeth. This is important, because when God tasks us with things that are more than we can even fathom, it is never tasked without help. Throughout the birth narrative, we see that consistently God places help along the way. Though not always in the way one might expect, God always is providing the help and encouragement that Mary needs to complete her role. Third, and maybe most importantly, we are reminded: “nothing will be impossible with God.” This goes back to what Paul often alludes to in that we are only able to partially see what God has in store for us. When faced with the question of how this can happen, the reality sets in that God is bigger and more powerful than we can imagine, which means that he can make things happen that otherwise would not. All of this is to say that Mary represents another picture of the partial witness to the fullness of God. That the love she showed and the perseverance through her fear and worry give us another partial glimpse into the fuller understanding of God. I am not really big on liturgical colors or really anything connected to the High liturgical traditions. I take the viewpoint that all too often ceremony and ritual draw people away from faithfulness more then towards it because people become far more interested in correctness than faithfulness. Obviously, I am not as fervent as he was, as I often will use liturgical tools as part of worship but never to the point where they become the driving force of worship.
In the late eighties and early nineties, as the secular world began to expand the Christmas season, picking up on trends like Black Friday and pushing the season longer, churches responded with a resurgence and refocus on Advent. Unfortunately, in some churches pastors took this to an almost ascetic extreme, barring any talk or discussion of Christmas during the Advent season. I remember a debate early in my ministry with another pastor on the issue. She was almost in tears because of her conviction that we lessened the meaning of Christmas by celebrating it too early. I really understood where she was coming from, especially with the realization that the Christmas many people celebrate has very little to do with the Christmas message. At the Gathering last week we talked about this a little bit, pointing out that if we listened to the culture, Christmas is all about getting whatever you want, namely new toys, jewelry, clothes, etc. If it were not so sad, it would be kind of funny that we have taken a holy day that is really about giving up things of this world to welcome the Christ Child into something that is about acquiring more things in this world. So we can understand wanting to make the church a respite from a world that has taken one message and made it something completely different. And in many Presbyterian Churches, as well as others, you won’t find a lot of Christmas things around until Christmas Eve. As you may have seen and read, I do not go so far as to exclude Christmas from the bulk of the Advent season. In fact, I embrace Christmas as an integral part of the Advent season with a very important distinction: that the Advent we celebrate incorporates the fact that Christ has already come, and now we are called to prepare for the next coming. This means that we are called to outwardly give thanks, but inwardly reflect on how we are being true and faithful to God. So I utilize Advent in the same way as Lent to set a side a few weeks out of the year to emphasize something we should be doing year round and asking ourselves what we are really doing with this gift from God. As a tool of faith, I find it very helpful when not taken in the extreme, where its own asceticism becomes a barrier in its own right. In Christ, Bryan I am not really big on liturgical colors or really anything connected to the High liturgical traditions. I take the viewpoint that all too often ceremony and ritual draw people away from faithfulness more then towards it because people become far more interested in correctness than faithfulness. Obviously, I am not as fervent as he was, as I often will use liturgical tools as part of worship but never to the point where they become the driving force of worship.
In the late eighties and early nineties, as the secular world began to expand the Christmas season, picking up on trends like Black Friday and pushing the season longer, churches responded with a resurgence and refocus on Advent. Unfortunately, in some churches pastors took this to an almost ascetic extreme, barring any talk or discussion of Christmas during the Advent season. I remember a debate early in my ministry with another pastor on the issue. She was almost in tears because of her conviction that we lessened the meaning of Christmas by celebrating it too early. I really understood where she was coming from, especially with the realization that the Christmas many people celebrate has very little to do with the Christmas message. At the Gathering last week we talked about this a little bit, pointing out that if we listened to the culture, Christmas is all about getting whatever you want, namely new toys, jewelry, clothes, etc. If it were not so sad, it would be kind of funny that we have taken a holy day that is really about giving up things of this world to welcome the Christ Child into something that is about acquiring more things in this world. So we can understand wanting to make the church a respite from a world that has taken one message and made it something completely different. And in many Presbyterian Churches, as well as others, you won’t find a lot of Christmas things around until Christmas Eve. As you may have seen and read, I do not go so far as to exclude Christmas from the bulk of the Advent season. In fact, I embrace Christmas as an integral part of the Advent season with a very important distinction: that the Advent we celebrate incorporates the fact that Christ has already come, and now we are called to prepare for the next coming. This means that we are called to outwardly give thanks, but inwardly reflect on how we are being true and faithful to God. So I utilize Advent in the same way as Lent to set a side a few weeks out of the year to emphasize something we should be doing year round and asking ourselves what we are really doing with this gift from God. As a tool of faith, I find it very helpful when not taken in the extreme, where its own asceticism becomes a barrier in its own right. In Christ, Bryan The theme for worship this week is Love. As you may guess, they all build on each other and without the previous it would be hard to experience the next. Without Hope it would be impossible to experience the Love that God has for us, mainly because we would not be able to reciprocate that Love because we would lack the trust or possibly even the ability to recognize it.
This can be confusing at times because even in the Bible our English translations water down the word “love” by being incomplete in its translation. In the New Testament the world we translate as Love is really two different words with important differences in their use. First there is “philo” love. This is a temporal love and is used to describe the love that people have between one another, whether that is familial, friendly, or romantic, though we must note that romantic love is not depicted in the New Testament except in passing. Even when romantic love is expressed there is a pointer that highlights a certain incompleteness to that type of love. The second type of love is a much deeper type of love. This love is exclusive to the one God who loves us in a way that goes beyond human understanding. Unbound by anything temporal, the agape love is fundamentally different than the “philo” love and can only be seen by humanity through the act of submission on the part of the follower and God. In other words, we can experience Agape love by giving ourselves over to God and thus being truly open to that love. Now this is not to say that we cannot give or receive agape-like love, but even when we get close to the agape love, our human ways make us fall short. Though we should not feel like failures or that we are missing out because we cannot share that love, only that when we experience the Agape love of God it will be larger and fuller than anything we could ever experience from another person. Personally, I think this is important, especially as we think about love in the advent season. As we spoke last week, hope gives us the knowledge that there is something more, that when we have hope we have a powerful weapon against darkness and fear because of that knowledge. Love is the same. As painful as love can be in this world, God’s love is a far more perfect love, where there is hope and truth. So Hope and Agape love are connected in very fundamental ways, and for the record, so are peace and Joy, which come the next two Sundays. As you continue the journey of Advent, think of times when you have felt an agape-like love, a love that is deep and full yet almost transcendent, then imagine what that would be if it were even more! Now you might get a glimpse of the Love we will be talking about this Sunday. Yours in Christ, Bryan Jesus has this cousin named John we have all heard of if you have been around the church for a while. John was a strange one. He dressed funny, probably smelled bad, and his politics, well, let’s just say that people would call him a bit more than just an agitator. There is a lot that John did not care about. Money, material things, and so on would be among the evils he would see in the world. I think if he would be around today, he might look upon us with a great deal of pity and desire to help us all find our way to a better way where we could once again connect with God without distraction.
This is the essence of what he is doing before Jesus starts his ministry. The world of John and Jesus was one that was not too unlike today. While the toys and tools are different, the Roman empire was wealthy and stable and the Middle East was the trade crossroads of the world. A very important piece of land, it also made for some very wealthy and powerful people. From accounts and writings it is easy to see that people were enamored by power and money or if they had neither of those, fear. For people of the book this is problematic because the Bible is pretty clear that one should order themselves according to their faith in God or if you really get into it, their fear of God. But God was treated as an aside. Even within the religious community, God and Faith were being used as a tool of power, not some spiritual or hopeful expression. So a lot of work was going to need to happen in order to help people find their way. So, as prophesized, we have John, who comes before the people to get the people to seek ways that they may become more connected and connecting them through the act of baptism to a life which is ordered and directed by God. This is important because John is priming the people for what is to come, namely Jesus. Moreover, John is getting people to look inside themselves and recommit their lives to God. Preparation is an important aspect of the Advent season. While we know that Christ has come, we also know that He will come again. We also know that throughout the year we find new and different ways to fall away or even to fall into patterns that we know to be wrong or misguided. Even worse, we often find ourselves succumbing to the magnetic reality of power, material things, and/or fear. So we remember John and his call to get our act together and order our lives to be with God. In a very real way, as Micah says, we should look introspectively and ask if we are really seeking Justice, Loving Mercy, and walking humbly with our God in all aspects of our lives. |
AuthorRev. Dr. Bryan James Franzen Archives
September 2018
Categories |
RSS Feed