by Connie Frierson
1 John 4:7-21
Well Beloved, every Christmas Season I experience something, something baffling and big and awesome, something that only seems to come in the cold and quiet of winter. I want to see if you experience this too. At some time on Christmas Eve or Christmas day or the week after Christmas or even on Epiphany, I get the sense that I need to think about why I am here? What is my purpose? What is supposed to drive my life? This is such a big question that I am not even sure if the question is why, how, what or who. It is the big question of our life. The question comes at funny times, here, in the busiest time of church and family, I might be up to my elbows washing greasy roasting pans in the sink. You know that dishwater that was once soapy, bubbly white and as you work just isn’t anymore. Well I will be scrubbing the worst of the pots, when I look up through my kitchen window and I think who am I supposed to be. Or I might be snatching up armfuls of torn wrapping paper off the living room floor and wonder how am I supposed to live. Or I might be letting the dog out for a short walk in the woods and there I stand with the house full of people and light at my back and the dark winter night before me, In that moment the nebula of the big question descends on me. Does anyone else here have those moments? Does anyone else experience this particularly in the snow and cold of winter and the warmth and the light of Christmas?
Well here we are in the last week of Advent, a time of reflection and preparation before the celebration of Christ’s birth. So now is a good time to prepare for that life question. Our Advent Candle this morning is the candle that symbolizes love. Our scripture passage speaks of God as love. God loving us. God sending his son. God, who is invisible, made love visible in Christ. How we love the invisible God by loving one another. This is a good place to start reflection on the big answer to the big question, the giant snowball question that is why, how, what and who all rolled into one.
People have been asking this question in different ways for thousands of years. The Heidelberg Catechism, that great masterpiece of theological reflection finished in 1562, asked the big question this way. “Q.1.What is your only comfort in life and in death?” Answer, that I belong body and soul to Jesus Christ, who paid the debt for sin, frees me from evil, protects me, gives me life and through the Holy Spirit makes me ready and willing to live for him. I paraphrased but that is the substance. It is masterful, true, and important. But we need a month of Sundays to puzzle it out. There is a simpler answer to the big question. A lawyer asked Jesus the big question like this, “What is the most important commandment?” This is a variation on the big question, “Jesus what is most important?” Jesus answered to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbor as yourself. If we are to prepare for the big question here is where we need to start, with Jesus’ answer, the Heidelberg Catechism, our scripture today from 1 John 4. These all give us the God’s answer when the big question comes to call some snowy moment in the next weeks. Love with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. Belong to Christ body and soul. Love one another. This is the answer to the big question.
My problem is that the answer to my big question is so big that I don’t know how to do it. Love with heart, soul, mind and strength, Love because God is love, Belong body and soul to Christ. Those answers are giant and enormous. Those answers are ginormous. I think our ginormous God can help us with this by thinking very, very small, thinking of babies and old men’s toes.
Those things don’t seem to go together do they, babies and old men’s toes? But when we are looking for the big answers we need to look for those moments when God is teaching us. A teachable moment came to me as I was reading A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. I think most of you have heard the title, or seen the movie, directed by Elia Kazan and many of you have read, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. The book is largely autobiographical and was written by Betty Smith. It recounts the experience and life and thought of a young girl, Francie Nolan growing up in about 1912 in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. In the particular passage I am thinking of Francie is at the day old bread store, waiting for the trucks to come in for the poor of Brooklyn to buy their bread cheap. Francie is waiting and sees the oldest man she has ever seen. This ancient bent over man is sitting in the sunlight by the bakery window resting. Francie sees what perhaps only an eleven year olds would notice. She looks down and she sees the old man’s shoes are broken open and Francie can see his calloused, narly toes through the broken shoes. Quite frankly Francie is repulsed. Those toes are gray and curling and dirty. Suddenly Francie has a new thought in her 11-year-old head, a kind of scary thought. Francie suddenly knows that this old man’s toes were once as treasured and beautiful and loved as her little brother’s toes. That this broken, older than old, man was once someone’s baby, someone’s treasure, someone’s beloved. And in her mind’s eye Francie sees him at all the stages of his life, kicking his legs in a stroller, toddling, playing ball, courting, becoming a father and provider, so useful and necessary in the meat and potatoes of life. But then Francie becomes frightened because she knows that she herself will become old and curled and calloused like that old man’s toes. This is a true moment, when we see past and present and future melding together, when we see our mortality, when we see others and see ourselves too. For Francie this was a big question moment. This was a moment to see life and death, the old man’s life and death, and Francie’s life and death.
The only thing that can give hope and meaning to life and death is to see both life and death wrapped in God’s love and care. The great truth of God comes out when we see both babies and old men’s toes as being wrapped in God’s love. The thing that gives meaning to all the questions of life is to think that the old man, and the young girl Francie and you and I are loved. We are the beloveds. And we join in with God’s love when we love the old man with the narly toes and the baby he once was and frightened young Francie. “Beloved let us love one another, because love is from God.” We do not see the invisible God, but we see that beaten down old man sitting in the sunlight in the warm bakery. So we are to love God, by loving the one God puts in front of us. We have times of great insight when we see others as God’s beloved.
These are the things I think about in the snowy days of Advent. These are things to think and pray about in this time leading up to the celebration of God’s love come to earth; as a baby, as a boy in the temple, as a teacher and healer, as a broken and bleeding man on an ugly cross. The Beloved son helps us to see all the other Beloveds around us.
I would like to end this sermon with a hymn, In the Bleak Mid Winter. Matthew Ward sang this hymn last Sunday night at his concert here. I have included the lyrics in your bulletin. I had never heard the song before. But the hymn captured my winter reflections on the big question. Here are some things you may think about as Bruce sings; how cold things are before God’s love come into our lives, before love warms us, we are iron and stone; how even heaven could not hold God’s love that spills out to us in the coming of Christ; how Mary worshiped truly by kissing that baby head. Perhaps the question in the final verse is our big advent question. What other gift can we give the Christ Child, but the gift of love?
So beloved, kiss a babies head this Christmas. Wrap the elderly in the warmth of a sunny window. Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, because Christ came for love of us. We exist body and soul to return that love to Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Candle Messages: Happiness or Joy?
Luke 1:39-45
December 12, 2010
In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
You know, I’m not much of a baseball fan. Other than when the Pirates won the World Series in 1971, and again in 1980, no one in my family paid much attention to baseball. I think that to develop a passion for baseball it helps to grow up in a family that loves baseball.
Don’t get me wrong. I still loved it when the Pirates won the World Series, but I think I loved it as much for other reasons than just a love of baseball or a love of the Pirates. For example, one thing I loved about them winning the 1971 series is that my friends and I, all age 12, got to jump on our bikes and ride around town screaming, “We WON!” at the top of our lungs, and we weren’t going to get in trouble.
What I loved about 1980 series win is that at the time I was in college with a lot of people from Baltimore. And when the Pirates went down 3 games to 1 to the Orioles, the Baltimore fans got very obnoxious, including grabbing a friend of mine’s Terrible Towel and throwing it into the fire in the fireplace. It was really fun to see the smugness wiped off their faces when the Pirates won.
Still, I’ve always been the proverbial “jump-on-the-bandwagon” type of baseball fan. In fact, I was also a bit scared to play baseball. That’s an odd thing to hear me say because I loved playing physical sports lacrosse and hockey, and even backyard tackle football, sports that really do hurt. It’s just that the idea of standing still while someone whips a hardball in my direction,… well,… all I could ever think of while standing in the batter’s box was that the ball was really going to hurt if it hits me.
Despite my ignorance about baseball, there are a lot of things about baseball to really like. For example, my favorite sports movies are all baseball movies. For some reason, baseball plays well on the silver screen. Also, baseball legend has some great stories. And despite my lukewarm feelings about baseball, I was really touched this past week by the death of the great Cubs second baseman Ron Santo.
Those of you who follow baseball know that he was a great baseball player for the Chicago Cubs. Nine times he was on the all-star team, and he won five golden gloves for being the best defensive player in the league at his position. But it wasn’t his feats on the baseball field that made him great. It was how he lived his life that made him great. You see, he wasn’t supposed to be able to play baseball. At age 18, which was in the early 1960s, he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Treatments for diabetes at the time were nowhere near what they are now. The doctor told Santo to forget about playing baseball. His condition wouldn’t allow for it. Instead, he needed to focus on doing whatever he could to extend his life. He was told that if he was lucky he could live for 20 or 25 more years, but that was it.
Santo was devastated, but he also didn’t let the doctor define his life. He kept playing baseball, while also self-monitoring his disease. He kept it hidden from others, knowing that the team probably wouldn’t understand, nor support him, if they knew. Despite the threat and burden that diabetes posed to his life, he never let it get him down. He was known for always being filled with joy as both a teammate and a leader. He never complained no matter what he faced.
After baseball, he became a color analyst for Cubs baseball. He was an effervescent figure. In an age when analysts were supposed to be calmly critical, he was a homer. When the Cubs did something great, he cheered. When they didn’t, he pouted and moaned. He wore the love of the Cubs on his sleeve. Over time the ravages of diabetes led to him have eye surgery, heart surgery, and twelve leg surgeries. Finally, they had to amputate both legs below the knee because of chronic circulation problems. Again, he never complained and never let it dim his spirit. The first spring training after his amputations he showed up with Cubs colors wrapped around his prostheses, and joyfully asked how people like his legs.
When Monsignor Daniel Mayall did his funeral last week, he said of Santo that he embodied three virtues: joy, hope, and courage. And of these three the greatest was joy. As he said, “Joy was a virtue for Ron… joy was a part of his life, every day and every season. …Ron Santo was a joyful man.”
When he died last week at age 70, it wasn’t from diabetes. It was from complications of bladder cancer. He died not as a victim of disease, but as a man of joy. He exuded the kind of joy that we hear about in our passage for this morning. Think about the joy of Elizabeth and Mary in our passage. They were in situations that didn’t necessarily evoke joy.
Elizabeth was older. Today she might be considered somewhat young, depending on who you are. She was probably in her mid-forties or early fifties, but she was clearly past normal childbearing age for that day. In an age when the life span was the early fifties, she was old. Think about what it would be like for you if you were in your sixties or seventies today and got pregnant. Would you be joyful? You’d be scared, but she was filled with joy. Mary was at the other end of the spectrum. She was probably in her mid- to late teens. She was pregnant before marriage. Typically a woman in that situation would be quietly dismissed by her fiancé and left to fend for herself. She would also be rejected by her family because of the disgrace she would have brought on them. But she wasn’t scared. She was filled with joy.
Elizabeth, Mary, and Santo all displayed an attitude that is so essential to being a Christian, an attitude that many Christians have a hard time with. We are called to joy, but the problem is that we keep pursuing happiness, and that pursuit gets in the way of our joy. We have all been brought up on the belief of the Declaration of Independence, which says that we all have a right to the pursuit of happiness. And I agree with that belief. But I also know that the pursuit of happiness doesn’t necessarily lead to a sense of joy. There’s a difference between happiness and joy.
What’s the difference? Happiness is brought on by external events. We are happy because of what is going on around us. We are happy when we buy a new car, but as soon as the new car smell goes away, our happiness fades. We are happy when the Steelers or Penguins or Pirates win, but happiness fades if the win wasn’t dominating enough, or till after the next loss. We are happy whenever we get something new, or when something good happens to us, but we aren’t necessarily joyful.
Joy is different. Joy is an internal condition that is a by-product of real faith. We have joy because we sense God with us, and this joy is there no matter what is taking place around us. Joy is something we can feel, even when bad things are taking place. I’m not saying that we are joyful because we are ill, fired from our job, or struggling in our marriage. But we don’t let those things diminish our interior joy for long. Being joyful means that even if someone close to us dies, we can still find good and beauty in life. Being joyful means that even if we become ill, we still find reasons to smile and find what’s good in life around us—the love of others, the abilities of the doctors. Joy comes from within. Happiness comes from without. Joy persists. Happiness is temporary.
Let me give you an example of the difference between the two. Do you remember the Steelers-Buffalo Bills game from two weeks ago? We eventually won in overtime, but it was close. We could have lost. At one point in overtime, the Bills’ young receiver, Stevie Johnson, got free in the end zone. The ball was thrown to him, and he was wide open. The ball hit him right in the hands for an easy catch, but he dropped the ball. He sat dejected in the end zone for a while, and then went on the bench and sulked. Later he tweeted on Twitter the following message to God and his fans: “I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO..”
This is a man who has pursued happiness, but not joy. A joyful person would have recognized that this was just a game, and that he has a lot to be grateful for: having the talent to be a world-class athlete, having the ability to make millions of dollars for catching a football, being cheered on by tens of thousands of fans, and having more opportunities to make game-winning touchdowns. Like Johnson, though, we can confuse happiness and joy.
A mature faith, a faith really rooted in trusting God, being open to God, and serving God, doesn’t depend on events for joy. A mature faith has joy in all circumstances. And it realizes that we face a choice: will we react with joy or something else to life around us? Remember, reacting with joy doesn’t mean ignoring pain. It means having joy in God despite pain, turmoil, struggles, and grief.
Do you pursue happiness in your life, or do you cultivate joy? Your answer makes all the difference in what you experience in life.
Amen.
December 12, 2010
In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
You know, I’m not much of a baseball fan. Other than when the Pirates won the World Series in 1971, and again in 1980, no one in my family paid much attention to baseball. I think that to develop a passion for baseball it helps to grow up in a family that loves baseball.
Don’t get me wrong. I still loved it when the Pirates won the World Series, but I think I loved it as much for other reasons than just a love of baseball or a love of the Pirates. For example, one thing I loved about them winning the 1971 series is that my friends and I, all age 12, got to jump on our bikes and ride around town screaming, “We WON!” at the top of our lungs, and we weren’t going to get in trouble.
What I loved about 1980 series win is that at the time I was in college with a lot of people from Baltimore. And when the Pirates went down 3 games to 1 to the Orioles, the Baltimore fans got very obnoxious, including grabbing a friend of mine’s Terrible Towel and throwing it into the fire in the fireplace. It was really fun to see the smugness wiped off their faces when the Pirates won.
Still, I’ve always been the proverbial “jump-on-the-bandwagon” type of baseball fan. In fact, I was also a bit scared to play baseball. That’s an odd thing to hear me say because I loved playing physical sports lacrosse and hockey, and even backyard tackle football, sports that really do hurt. It’s just that the idea of standing still while someone whips a hardball in my direction,… well,… all I could ever think of while standing in the batter’s box was that the ball was really going to hurt if it hits me.
Despite my ignorance about baseball, there are a lot of things about baseball to really like. For example, my favorite sports movies are all baseball movies. For some reason, baseball plays well on the silver screen. Also, baseball legend has some great stories. And despite my lukewarm feelings about baseball, I was really touched this past week by the death of the great Cubs second baseman Ron Santo.
Those of you who follow baseball know that he was a great baseball player for the Chicago Cubs. Nine times he was on the all-star team, and he won five golden gloves for being the best defensive player in the league at his position. But it wasn’t his feats on the baseball field that made him great. It was how he lived his life that made him great. You see, he wasn’t supposed to be able to play baseball. At age 18, which was in the early 1960s, he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Treatments for diabetes at the time were nowhere near what they are now. The doctor told Santo to forget about playing baseball. His condition wouldn’t allow for it. Instead, he needed to focus on doing whatever he could to extend his life. He was told that if he was lucky he could live for 20 or 25 more years, but that was it.
Santo was devastated, but he also didn’t let the doctor define his life. He kept playing baseball, while also self-monitoring his disease. He kept it hidden from others, knowing that the team probably wouldn’t understand, nor support him, if they knew. Despite the threat and burden that diabetes posed to his life, he never let it get him down. He was known for always being filled with joy as both a teammate and a leader. He never complained no matter what he faced.
After baseball, he became a color analyst for Cubs baseball. He was an effervescent figure. In an age when analysts were supposed to be calmly critical, he was a homer. When the Cubs did something great, he cheered. When they didn’t, he pouted and moaned. He wore the love of the Cubs on his sleeve. Over time the ravages of diabetes led to him have eye surgery, heart surgery, and twelve leg surgeries. Finally, they had to amputate both legs below the knee because of chronic circulation problems. Again, he never complained and never let it dim his spirit. The first spring training after his amputations he showed up with Cubs colors wrapped around his prostheses, and joyfully asked how people like his legs.
When Monsignor Daniel Mayall did his funeral last week, he said of Santo that he embodied three virtues: joy, hope, and courage. And of these three the greatest was joy. As he said, “Joy was a virtue for Ron… joy was a part of his life, every day and every season. …Ron Santo was a joyful man.”
When he died last week at age 70, it wasn’t from diabetes. It was from complications of bladder cancer. He died not as a victim of disease, but as a man of joy. He exuded the kind of joy that we hear about in our passage for this morning. Think about the joy of Elizabeth and Mary in our passage. They were in situations that didn’t necessarily evoke joy.
Elizabeth was older. Today she might be considered somewhat young, depending on who you are. She was probably in her mid-forties or early fifties, but she was clearly past normal childbearing age for that day. In an age when the life span was the early fifties, she was old. Think about what it would be like for you if you were in your sixties or seventies today and got pregnant. Would you be joyful? You’d be scared, but she was filled with joy. Mary was at the other end of the spectrum. She was probably in her mid- to late teens. She was pregnant before marriage. Typically a woman in that situation would be quietly dismissed by her fiancé and left to fend for herself. She would also be rejected by her family because of the disgrace she would have brought on them. But she wasn’t scared. She was filled with joy.
Elizabeth, Mary, and Santo all displayed an attitude that is so essential to being a Christian, an attitude that many Christians have a hard time with. We are called to joy, but the problem is that we keep pursuing happiness, and that pursuit gets in the way of our joy. We have all been brought up on the belief of the Declaration of Independence, which says that we all have a right to the pursuit of happiness. And I agree with that belief. But I also know that the pursuit of happiness doesn’t necessarily lead to a sense of joy. There’s a difference between happiness and joy.
What’s the difference? Happiness is brought on by external events. We are happy because of what is going on around us. We are happy when we buy a new car, but as soon as the new car smell goes away, our happiness fades. We are happy when the Steelers or Penguins or Pirates win, but happiness fades if the win wasn’t dominating enough, or till after the next loss. We are happy whenever we get something new, or when something good happens to us, but we aren’t necessarily joyful.
Joy is different. Joy is an internal condition that is a by-product of real faith. We have joy because we sense God with us, and this joy is there no matter what is taking place around us. Joy is something we can feel, even when bad things are taking place. I’m not saying that we are joyful because we are ill, fired from our job, or struggling in our marriage. But we don’t let those things diminish our interior joy for long. Being joyful means that even if someone close to us dies, we can still find good and beauty in life. Being joyful means that even if we become ill, we still find reasons to smile and find what’s good in life around us—the love of others, the abilities of the doctors. Joy comes from within. Happiness comes from without. Joy persists. Happiness is temporary.
Let me give you an example of the difference between the two. Do you remember the Steelers-Buffalo Bills game from two weeks ago? We eventually won in overtime, but it was close. We could have lost. At one point in overtime, the Bills’ young receiver, Stevie Johnson, got free in the end zone. The ball was thrown to him, and he was wide open. The ball hit him right in the hands for an easy catch, but he dropped the ball. He sat dejected in the end zone for a while, and then went on the bench and sulked. Later he tweeted on Twitter the following message to God and his fans: “I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO..”
This is a man who has pursued happiness, but not joy. A joyful person would have recognized that this was just a game, and that he has a lot to be grateful for: having the talent to be a world-class athlete, having the ability to make millions of dollars for catching a football, being cheered on by tens of thousands of fans, and having more opportunities to make game-winning touchdowns. Like Johnson, though, we can confuse happiness and joy.
A mature faith, a faith really rooted in trusting God, being open to God, and serving God, doesn’t depend on events for joy. A mature faith has joy in all circumstances. And it realizes that we face a choice: will we react with joy or something else to life around us? Remember, reacting with joy doesn’t mean ignoring pain. It means having joy in God despite pain, turmoil, struggles, and grief.
Do you pursue happiness in your life, or do you cultivate joy? Your answer makes all the difference in what you experience in life.
Amen.
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