|
December
7, 2003 (Jimmie Johnson) Malachi 3:1-4 See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight--indeed, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the LORD in righteousness. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD as in the days of old and as in former years. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Luke 3:1-6 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'" ----------------------------------------------------------------- I received this week a cut-out cartoon and a brief note from one of you. The cartoon is an ink drawing of God. God is sitting in a chair upon a cloud, stars twinkling around God in heaven. Below is the earth. There’s a look of displeasure on God’s face or, at the very least, parental concern. The caption underneath reads: “Don’t make me come down there.” The handwritten note accompanying the cartoon said, “Jim, the way things are going in the world, we may need him to come down here after all.” What did you hear in the cartoon and brief note? Because I know the man, I heard a restrained nod toward the supernatural aspect of our faith. He and I are a lot alike in this regard. If Benny Henn represents one end of the belief pole regarding Christianity and supernatural claims, then our church member and I reside at the opposite end from the Rev. Benny. My friend and I share a restrained belief regarding supernatural involvement on God’s part. We are pretty cautious on the side of believing God intervenes. We believe God does, but we just don’t know how and disbelief the silliness that many believers propose. When it comes to knowing God’s ways, we barely know our own. But what I know and you don’t is that my note sender is one of the many new grandfathers in our congregation. So, what I really heard in the note was a yearning, a yearning born in the awareness that planet earth is really in trouble and we need help. The world of his little tiny granddaughter is a wilderness world with treacherous mountains blocking the horizon and valleys so low you don’t want to walk them by yourself. Also, the pathways we humans have made for ourselves in this wilderness seem to lead nowhere but into even deeper trouble. Our hoped-for salvation through science and technology and education and production is a road that has brought us not salvation but fear and terror. Yearning is what the new grandfather is feeling. Yearning is something you feel in your heart.Yearning is not the experience so much of wanting something for yourself but wanting something for others, especially the little ones, the weak ones, the easily overlooked ones, the helpless ones. If you are yearning for something for you alone, it is called desire, not yearning. I know him well enough to know that neither he nor I will ever embrace a silly supernaturalism that is unrestrained by thoughtfulness. He nor I will ever go literal again. We belief in the Word of God that speaks through the words of the Bible. We simply don’t equate the two. There are the glory and mystery of the Word for which he and I both yearn. But the Word and the words are not the same. Where are you on the “yearning meter” this morning? I am not talking about lusting, nor coveting, nor wanting. Secretly most of us are “off the charts” in those categories. “Yearning” is a spiritual desire. It is a desire for meaning. It is a prayer that hopes for peace for the babies and wellness, too.Whether it be within the walls of buildings where the mighty meet to decide our common fate or in the rooms of our homes where we live, it is a yearning that people would stop hurting and begin loving and live at peace. This is the perfect time to be yearning. For worship during this time of the year places before us the claims of the supernatural. It is pretty difficult to “out supernatural” the idea that God will come to us. Advent says God is getting ready to show up. Getting ready “to come down here” if you find the spatial image helpful. And as long as I don’t have to be literal, I still enjoy the symbol of God coming down and am helped by the metaphor. Our Christian faith expressed in Advent says, “Children, you won’t have to make me come down, I desire to be with you.” Interesting, isn’t it? Christian faith says we are not the only ones yearning. Heaven is yearning, too, yearning for us so much that even our yearning for God is a gift from outside ourselves. The whole idea of God coming to us isn’t so much because we are bad as much as because God yearns to be in the midst of all this with us. This is the core supernaturalism of our faith. And I believe it. All of us do, even as we go on to pray after saying, “Lord, I believe.” the words “help thou my unbelief.” God is getting ready to show up, but God will always catch us off guard by coming among us in the least expected way, truth, and life we could ever imagine. Actually, we could never imagine it. Neither could the prophet Malachi nor John the Baptizer. They imagined when God left heaven to show up on earth, everyone would know and see and all would be transformed. This is the beauty of the manger’s corrective. The coming of God, if Jesus is the clue of clues, is never going to look nor sound as we would imagine. This is what worship will confront us with for the next 6 Sundays. From now until January 4, we are going to be showing up here to marvel at the news that in lives as barren as ours, in a world as wilderness-like as ours, God still has plenty of game. We worshipers this time of the year know we are in a wilderness. All the merchandising and spending and consuming cannot deny our reality. We know our lives don’t radiate with God’s light and God’s joy. We know our world looks abandoned by God. We read papers. We listen to cable news. We know what happens sometimes to little babies and young teens and old people. We know humanity is stalked by our own ruthless, animalistic brutality. And we know sometimes nature, itself, goes haywire and a randomness causes birth defects, mental illness, cancer and on and on. All evil is not explainable by human free will. It is there in the thickness of creation and cannot be ignored nor attributed to humanity. It will require an accounting from God someday. So, we are like John the Baptizer “in the wilderness.” We are also like John the Baptizer in that in the wilderness we have something to say: “Prepare the way of the Lord.” To those who live in Exile, in the wilderness, lost and wandering, God is making a way. Yes, it is a supernatural belief. But it is not escapist, wishful thinking nor adversarial to reason. It simply invites us to see there is more going on than what empiricism, science, reason can take in. It also reignites our yearning just when cynicism is about to gobble up hope. God will show up. This is why worship this time of the year means so much to me. Right at the point when I am asking if there is a God, right at the point of my asking if this God were to show up how would I know, how would I see such salvation, along comes Advent, and through the hymns, the prayers, the scripture readings, I find myself immersed in the experience of yearning. The hymns we sing are restrained. They speak of desire, of waiting, of hoping. The scripture lessons all speak to people living in exile, people suffering from despair. Being a worshiper this time of the year clarifies for me that in order to hear John’s message of repentance and preparation as good news, then I must be aware and acknowledge that I am in the wilderness with its darkness. It takes a certain amount of courage and conviction to admit to yearning. In order to see the fragile light of Christmas, one has to first become accustomed to the dark. In order to see the stars in highest heavens, one must sit for a while in the darkness here on earth. This is what we city dwellers so easily forget. Because of so much artificial light around us, we have difficulty seeing the stars. Out into the darkness of the wilderness, we see how much easier it is to see the stars again. It’s because of the darkness, not in spite of the darkness. Church sometimes is accused of being the place where the worst about us and the world is all brought up. Well, okay, but the church can also be seen as an island of honesty amid a society where there is so much falsehood and deceit and artificiality. To all whose horizons are blocked by mountains of despair, to all whose lives have fallen into a dark valley, to all who seem wandering around on a curving, meandering, apparently meaningless path continuing to circle in and out of the same hurts, defeats and emotional addictions, keep looking, keep yearning, and together we will see the salvation of God. God, I am glad to be a part of this church and churches like it, thoughtful churches, churches which understand the true humbleness of supernaturalism and reject spectacular religion! God’s greatness is not antithetical to our smallness and weakness and yearning; rather it embraces it all and includes it. Jesus in stinky diapers is the proof.
|
First Presbyterian Church • 1100 Austin Avenue • Waco, TX
76701 • (254)752-1665
Questions, comments, or broken links? Please email the webmaster at bgilliam@firstpreswaco.org.
Unless otherwise
stated, all material contained in this web site is Copyright © 1999-2005
First Presbyterian Church of Waco, Texas. Right is hereby granted
for any congregation or governing body of the Presbyterian Church
(USA) to copy and use this material only as long as proper credit
is given as to its source. The scripture quotations contained within
are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Copyright © 1989
by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of
Churches of Christ in the United States of America, and are used
by permission. All quotations from the Book of Confessions are reprinted
by permission and are Copyright ©1996 by the Office of the General
Assembly, Presbyterian Church (USA).