Searching for Jesus

 Wednesday 12-30-20

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight oh Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Have you ever noticed that the rest of the world seems to forget about Christmas by about… 5 pm Christmas Day? All the decorations come down – and depressingly, the Valentine’s day candy is already out in the stores! Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the sheep, and even baby Jesus in the manger go back in the box to wait for next year… why we twiddle our thumbs and wonder how to pass this weird time between Christmas and New Year’s.

I mean, what IS time right now anyway? Jesus has gone from being a baby to 12 years old in a matter of days! Not quite a child but not yet grown up – and definitely too young to be wandering off by himself. Can you imagine what Mary and Joseph must have been feeling when they realized that they had left their son behind in Jerusalem? This is before text messaging, GPS, or the Amber Alert. To them, Jesus was truly lost, maybe even forever. 

Jerusalem is a huge city to get lost in – Mary and Joseph spent three whole days searching for him, probably panicking the whole time. When they found him in the temple, can you image the relief that flooded through them as they realized that he was safe? Joy and anger mixed together filled Mary as she admonished her son – “How dare you do that to us?!? We were so worried!” 

But Jesus’ answer blew them all away. “Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know that I would be in my Father’s house?” 

Driving up and down the freeway back and forth between Pennsylvania and Virginia these last few months, one billboard in particular caught my eye – It says “Concerned? JESUS (in all caps) can be trusted.” This makes me want to ask – can he though? He sneaks away from his parents as a tween and he grows up to cause trouble as an adult. And, it seems as though we constantly have to “find” him! Has anyone ever asked you if you’ve “found Jesus?” This makes searching for Jesus seem like a world-wide game of “Where’s Waldo.” It doesn’t seem fair - Can Jesus be trusted when he seems to constantly wander off, and is always in need of being “found”?

Even worse, it seems like when we need Jesus the most, when we desperately need comfort and hope, that’s when he seems the farthest away. Where IS Jesus during a year like 2020, not to mention during all the regular times our hearts get broken, such as the death of a loved one or news of an illness or layoff or other trouble? Where IS Jesus when life gets tough?

A ball of light will drop and the world calls it the New Year. We make resolutions and later break them. We make plans and have visions of the future that don’t always turn out as we expect them to. As my favorite evening prayer puts it – we are called to ventures we don’t know the ending to, paths yet to be trod, and we don’t know where we’re going.

But no matter where the dawning of 2021 finds you, whether on the main road you imagined, off the beaten path, seemingly lost on a detour, stuck in a rut or in the ditch, dawn will come and the light of risen Christ will shine upon you.

At Christmas we celebrate the arrival of Jesus, the of hope in our lives. He isn’t hiding, like in a game of hide-and-seek, behind the couch with the dust bunnies. He didn’t jump out the tomb that resurrection morning, never to be seen again. He wants us to find him. That is the exact reason why Jesus clothed himself in love so that we would recognize him, by becoming a human being – a tiny helpless baby – to live a life of love, finally ending in a loving act of sacrifice. 

How better to show us God’s love than to become one of us and to tell us in the flesh, to be born “in the usual way”? How better to show us that we are children of God than to meet us face to face, in all our smiles and tears, in our joys and sadness, in our hopes and fears. There was no better way to wrap us up in love than to come as a present, wrapped like one of us.  This love has been in front of us the whole time, wrapped in the form of a baby, almost completely unnoticed.

This gift of love that he has given us, in coming as one of us, surprised humanity so much that we didn’t see it for what it was. God gave to us everything– life and love and freedom and hope and peace - before we even knew that we needed it.

While we are searching so hard something to give us peace and hope in a troubled world, Jesus find us and holds us tight. We too become all wrapped up in the amazing and all-encompassing love of God, not just during the Christmas season, but on every day of our lives. So then let everything we do, be it singing carols or getting ready for a new year, be done in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus, who finds us when WE are lost.  Amen.

 

 

Xmas 2020: "When Love is Found"

 

Christmas Eve 2020

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

I have some very good friends who, during Advent, watch every single version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. That’s right, its’s Scrooge, Scrooge, Scrooge, all December long. However, there is only one version of “A Christmas Carol” that is in my person Christmas movie repertoire - “Jim Henson’s the Muppet Christmas Carol.”

Most of you probably know the basic details of the original story – three Christmas Ghosts visit greedy and selfish Ebenezer Scrooge and teach him how to find the love he has lost. In this version, Michael Kane plays human Ebenezer Scrooge, surrounded the rest of the Muppets perfectly filling the roles, with Kermit as Bob Cratchet, the Great Gonzo as Charles Dickens narrating the tale, helped by his sidekick, Rizzo the Rat, as Himself. 

As kids, my siblings and I practically wore out our VHS copy of this movie. Fast forward in both years and technology, and thanks to the magic of streaming services, new generations can enjoy what gave me so much happiness as a kid. With one caveat.

The first time I streamed this movie as an adult, something was missing. About halfway through the movie, the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge the Christmas party where he met Belle, and it was love at first sight. Dissolve to a snowy landscape, a few years later, with the young couple discussing Scrooge’s desire to delay their wedding for yet another year.

In the streaming version, the movie cuts to Belle walking away when she realizes that Scrooge no longer loves her as much as he loves the idea of running a successful business. But I pause the movie and play the missing song that I remember from my childhood, a song that later movie editors decided was “too adult” and “too boring” for kids. This is Belle’s song, “When Love is Gone.”

The movie still makes sense without it…. But when “When Love is Gone” is GONE, we miss the actual transformation from Ebenezer Scrooge - the man - to THE Ebenezer Scrooge. Belle turns to him, tears streaming down her face, to say, “be careful or you may regret the choice you make someday.” And in that moment, he DOES have a choice – he can acknowledge the weight of his mistakes and try to make amends… or he can let his heart shrivel up, so he doesn’t have to feel the pain anymore. We all know what Ebenezer chooses.

I know lots of kids used this song it as a snack break or bathroom break, or pressed the Fast Forward button - and was it my favorite song THEN when I was a kid? No way. But now that I am an adult, I know that this song was simply waiting for me, to be there I needed it. It was like it was waiting to be found. It’s the song for when you’re watching nostalgic movies in your apartment by yourself, that first Christmas alone – post break up, post-divorce, post death of a loved one, post coming out or post transitioning. This year too, it is the song we didn’t know we might need for 2020 – watching Belle break up with Ebenezer, and sing about how her dreams of their future life being dashed – on Christmas eve no less – we’re right there with you!

Tonight we recall how, all those many centuries ago, another young couple had their wedding plans up-ended – not by slow business growth, but instead by angels, and a surprise pregnancy, by compulsory travel, a census, and taxes, and by the lack of room at the inn. Not at all the circumstances in which any parent wants their first-born child to arrive. Their feet ached, they were dusty and tired, frustrated that no one would make way for a woman in in active labor, uncomfortable with straw poking Mary as she pushed, and despairing that they only had rags and a cow feeding trough to put baby Jesus in.

When Martin Luther preached about Christmas, he relished describing the real and gritty details to his shocked parishioners: to a crowd picturing a sanitized version of the Nativity story (even in the 1500s) Luther would say “Who showed the poor girl what to do? She had never had a baby before…. It must have gone straight to her heart that she was so abandoned. She was flesh and blood, and must have felt miserable – and Joseph too – that she was left in this way, all alone, with no one to help… her eyes were moist even though she was happy.” *(Martin Luther's Christmas Book p. 32)

Every year, Christmas arrives with the lights and food and the songs and the gifts… But Christmas also comes with labor pains, loneliness, and in tears – both joyful and sad. Everyone remembers that one year they had “that Christmas” – the Christmas where everything went wrong. Grandma in the hospital, the kids got the bad stomach bug, travel plans were cancelled because of a big snowstorm.

It’s just that for 2020, we are ALL having THAT year….at the same time! And Christmas is right in the middle of the worst of it. Like Mary and Joseph on the night that Jesus was born - We too are tired, and worried, and making do with a bad situation.

In the year 2020, few good things DID happen, including one Christmas miracle. The original the lost song “When Love is Gone” WAS FOUND! When the song was cut, the original film was lost, and now, in my opinion at least, this movie gets another chance be whole again, not unlike our Ebenezer Scrooge.

When Scrooge wakes up in his own bed on Christmas morning, having been visited by those three spirits, he gets another chance to be whole again, as well. The ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future have been successful in their quest – Ebenezer has transformed back, from Scrooge to man, full of repentance and compassion and love.

For unknown reasons, he is no longer able to reconcile with Belle. But he wastes no time seeking forgiveness and reconciliation with other people in his life, – his cheery nephew Fred, and his dedicated employee, Bob Cratchit, who  he had spent so much time pushing away He gives Bob a raise, pledges a generous donation to a homeless charity, and hosts a grand Christmas dinner, involving a huge turkey bigger than Tiny Tim.

Scrooge celebrates because is no longer lost; he was found. Among the food and his friends, Scrooge begins to sing with the melody of “When Love is Gone,” but instead with new words, and is joined by a chorus of new-found family - “the Love we FOUND, the love we FOUND, we carry with us, so we’re never quite alone.”

We’re not alone in being alone right now, we’re not alone in feeling lost and numb and trying to survive until the new year arrives. Though we may feel quite lost at the moment, we haven’t lost love, or lost Jesus, or lost Christmas this year. Christmas is not gone just because we cannot gather together as we used to, and light candles and sing in a dark sanctuary or gather and eat with all of our loved ones, or even if your gifts have not even arrived, or have gotten lost in the mail.

Jesus was born into just such a moment. Jesus – Son of God, Prince of Peace - arrives to unprepared and scared parents, and by visited first by rag-tag shepherds to be found in a manger, and later, out-of-town foreign dignitaries. He grew up, and found himself to be Public Enemy Number one, because he dared to show the love of God to those who the rest of the world considered lost. And at another time when Evil seemed to reign, when death seem to win, and all seemed lost… three days later, love was found again in the darkness of an empty tomb, having defeated the power of death itself. THOSE angels on THAT day said the women at the empty tomb – “why do you search for the living among the dead? You won’t find him HERE.”

Christmas looks different this year. But it isn’t lost. It isn’t dead. We can find it in the very places it always already always lived. In you. In your heart. In your home. In your actions and words. In generosity and selflessness. In welcoming the stranger. In caring for the sick and reaching out to the lonely. In upending the expectations of the world.

Do not search for Christmas here… because you’ve already found it. It was never lost. It was never gone. Because Love has been with you the whole time. Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

 

A Good Beginning

 Sermon 12-6-20

Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

You gotta love the Gospel of Mark. Straight and to the point. The “No fuss, no muss” gospel. The OTHER gospels of Matthew and Luke begin with versions of Jesus’s birth story. John starts with a Big Cosmic Poem, Genesis style. Mark? BOOM - We’re off and running from the get-go at a breakneck speed, and we never really get a chance to catch our breath through the rest of this Mark year.

You might even say …. If Mark were a song from a Disney movie, it would be that song from the animated version of Mulan, the one that goes - “Let’s get down to business!”

Now, if you are a child of the 80s and 90s like me, I apologize for getting that song stuck in your head for the rest of the day. If you did NOT absolutely LOVE this movie as a kid – even seeing it the theatres, as I did - let me refresh your memory. 

Mulan is the only child of a wounded war hero living in retirement in rural China, when an enemy threatens to bring the country to war, thus one man from each family is conscripted into the army. Mulan disguises herself as a boy to take her father’s place and shows up for her first day of Boot Camp, tiny magic dragon sidekick in tow. As she interacts with other characters and begins to train… things are not going well. Out of frustration, the general of the army breaks into song, Disney-style, to start the epic training montage.

“Let’s get down to business!” the general shouts as Mulan and her friends continue to fail miserably, and it seems Mulan’s military career is going to end as quickly as it began. Just as she is about to give up, Mulan solves an apparently impossible task in surprising way… which foreshadows how she uses her determination and creativity to later save China at the end of the movie. But, no spoilers!

It doesn’t matter if we’re watching a movie, listening to a catchy song, or reading the Gospel of Mark – we know that beginnings are important. They set the tone, and give us clues for what is to come. Beginnings give us a heads up for what to expect. And for Mark – it is to expect the unexpected.

In THIS telling of Jesus’ beginning, there are no sheep or shepherds, no angels or manger, no Joseph and Mary… not even a baby Jesus in sight. Mark gets right down to business, to usher in adult Jesus…… but first…  we get John the Baptist! Our first unexpected nativity hero, that big hairy bug-eating character that mysteriously appears to prelude the already grown up Jesus… who won’t even show up … until NEXT week.

In a way, this is John the Baptist’s training montage. He’s out there in the wilderness, shouting at the crowds, hearing confessions, absolving sins, and baptizing people in the river. If Mark were a Disney musical, John’s song might go something like – “Let’s get down the business…. To prepare the way! Did they send me sinners, when I asked for saints? You're the crookedest bunch I ever met, but you can bet before we're through: People, I’ll … certainly… baptize you!” …Something like that.

And people came. They came in large crowds – imagine that! – not to the city square or palaces of power, but out to the desert, in the middle of a barren land, isolated from everything. They come out, to see a preacher in strange garments, who packed a bug lunch, and tell them all the bad things they ever did, and to be dunked in the churning, sandy water of the Jordan river. Not exactly where we would expect to find the beginning of the Jesus story.

In a way, it feels very 2020 to listen to Mark this year. Maybe not the crowd part, but the isolated, “in the wilderness part.” Much of 2020 has felt like wandering in a wilderness, lost and not knowing our way around, scraping up resources to survive, lonely and uncomfortable. Not at all what we are used to. Perhaps at times in our own lives, we have felt as though we were in our own personal wildernesses, but this year – we’re all here, and there is a crowd of us wandering and lost, wondering where God is.

There are plenty of wilderness experiences that show up in the Bible too, beside this one populated by John the Baptist. Hagar fled and nearly despaired here in the wilderness. The Israelites wander for 40 years here before entering the promised land. Elijah rested under a broom tree here. Jesus will later be tempted here. Every time, Wilderness is a place of testing and of struggle…

But it is also a place where God is sure to show up. It’s where stories begin, and lives are changed. It’s where hope is planted, and where it – eventually – blooms. It’s where crooked and difficult paths are made clear and put to rights.

And sure enough, Mark alerts us in his beginning, of what is to come – Get ready, because ready or not, God is going to show up right here in the wilderness. In the isolation and the suffering. Not in the well-worth paths, but in the uncharted, difficult terrain of life, where the only way to go is forward.

We can’t go back to the way things used to be, and yet, we’re still unsure of the way through the wilderness we find ourselves in, even now, all these months later. Right now, we’re still not quite sure exactly what God is getting us ready for. We’re probably not “ready” in the sense that we’re not what others’ might consider “successful” or “thriving” … especially in this hot mess that we have called the year of our Lord 2020.  Forget writing that novel or picking up a new hobby. Forget getting a live tree or even decorating at all. For some of us merely surviving this holiday season will be a huge accomplishment.

Reay or not, Jesus arrives anyway, without decorations or live Christmas trees. Jesus did not wait until the world was “ready” in order to arrive. Jesus worked with what he had – and began his ministry at just the right time, and used just the right people to make it happen – in this case, a loud hairy preacher man in the desert, and later on, men and women who were beautifully flawed and beloved.

Jesus will arrive, not when we’re ready, but when Jesus is needed, right here and now in our wilderness. He begins his work in us, not waiting to use us when we are finally “ready” - he’s going to use as we are, beautifully flawed and beloved.

A good beginning can happen any time…. in December, in the middle of Advent, in the middle of the pandemic. Things often get started in the wilderness. We are ready as we are, where we are, and any time is a good time to begin. Likewise, we, like John, are called and drawn into “getting down to business.” … the Advent business.

We CAN’T sit on our hands and wait until WE think we are “ready” to “Get down to business…. The Advent business begins with us now, where sin, death, and suffering are defeated…. We are about the business of defeating the inequality and injustice that oppress us. The business of leveling out the uneven paths, the business of confessing and repenting of sins, where forgiveness flows, where peace rules nations and families. And there is no time like the present to begin, even if we don’t know where exactly this journey will take us. It may even take us to places like Vienna, Virginia.

I began my time with you as one of your pastors earlier this week. Perhaps this is not the beginning we expected when God began this work with all of us many months ago, not getting to meet all of you in the way we all thought. In a way, not unlike in Mark, I’m appearing in the wilderness with you, midstream, with my midwestern accent and my Philly habits, 9 months into a pandemic, weeks before a Christmas like we’ve never had before, and all ways this season has made us feel lost and afraid.

But, as the Holy Spirit is at work in Mark - ready or not, here we are. Together, we can continue to figure out what it means to forging a new path through this wilderness, side by side. Together, we can, and we WILL, get down do business, the business of pointing to where Jesus is showing up… and now is a GREAT time to begin. Thanks be to God. Amen.