December 14, 2008 - "Re-Gifting Joy"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Advent III
December 14, 2008
W. Gregory Pope

Series: Re-Gifting God’s Gifts
RE-GIFTING JOY

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126 or Luke 1:47-55
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28

When Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman get together on film I have to see it. (My oldest daughter thinks Jack Nicholson is just too creepy. And as far as I know, she hasn’t even seen “The Shining.”)

Nicholson and Freeman recently teamed up in “The Bucket List” as two guys who meet in the hospital and learn about the same time that they are both terminally ill. Nicholson is a spoiled wealthy old man miserable with his existence. Freeman is a middle class auto mechanic who can answer every question on the game show Jeopardy.

Having just gotten the news of his illness, Freeman spends the night writing a “bucket list,” things he wants to do before he “kicks the bucket.” Have you ever thought about what would be on your bucket list? Perhaps Freeman’s list could help you. He includes such things as:

Witness something truly majestic
Help a complete stranger for a common good
Laugh till I cry
Drive a Shelby Mustang
Get a tattoo
Visit Stonehenge
Go skydiving
See the pyramids

Not intended for anyone else’s eyes, Nicholson finds the list crumpled on the floor and reads it, then convinces Freeman to travel with him and do the very things on that list.

More than half-way through fulfilling the list, sitting on a mountain viewing the pyramids, Freeman tells Nicholson about a philosophy that says: When you get to heaven’s gates, there are two questions to be asked of you:

First, Have you found your joy?
And second, Has your life brought joy to someone else?

It was this scene and these two questions that led me toward our Advent theme this year of Re-Gifting God’s Gifts - receiving from God and sharing with others the gifts of hope, peace, joy, and love.

Today, the gift of joy.

As we look at our scripture lessons for this week we hear Paul’s call to “rejoice always.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve not mastered that one yet.

The psalmist sings a song celebrating the day when Israel returned from exile. Mindful of the great things God had done for them, their mouths were filled with laughter and shouts of joy were upon their tongues. And prayers that those who have sown tears will reap great joy.

The prophet Isaiah gave those returning from exile a reason for joy and a way to share joy. He was writing of God’s servant Israel. A few centuries later Jesus picked up Isaiah’s message for Israel as his own mission. Recorded in Luke’s Gospel is the moment where Jesus stands in the synagogue and reads the beginning words from Isaiah 61.

Isaiah describes a quality of life here and now on earth that reflects God’s desire for human community: good news, healing, freedom, release, justice, comfort, and joy. Jesus called it the kingdom of God.

And so the Christ of Bethlehem, full of the Spirit of God and inspired by Isaiah’s vision, comes with joy:

bringing good news to the oppressed - the rich and powerful oppressors of our world who make millions on the backs of poor laborers and Burmese military powers who drive people by force from their land will be brought to justice.

He comes binding up the brokenhearted (61:1) - your heart and mine broken by the world and by our own sin. Christ is coming to heal us.

He comes proclaiming freedom to captives and release to prisoners (61:1). Whether bound by the prison chains of our own making, or prisoners held in exile from their land, or imprisoned illegally by unjust governments, Christ is coming to bring freedom and release. Though faithful Christians have often found themselves behind bars for living their faith, there has always been a freedom even in prison that their captors could not take away. Christ is coming to free us from our prisons.

And he comes proclaiming the year of Jubilee (61:2). This was an event described in the book of Leviticus to occur every 50 years. A time when debts are wiped away, slaves are freed, fields are allowed to rest for a year, and land is returned to its original owners. This is so that property is not just owned by the few and so that the masses will not remain oppressed in debt and slavery. It is so that wealth is not passed along to those who do not work, and so that families do not remain in cycles of poverty. It is a call to social and economic justice, when the restoration of equality becomes the new order of the day. This is the world-changing word of justice Jesus comes preaching.

Jesus also comes to comfort those who mourn (61:2-3), replacing the ashes of our lives with garlands of beauty, bringing gladness where is sadness, strengthening the faint spirit, filling our mouth with praise. Yes, your tears of sorrow will turn one day return to songs of praise.

Jesus comes to repair ruined cities (61:4) - our own city where poverty and homelessness and hopelessness walk the streets, and war-torn cities across the world where joy has been crushed by the stench of death and destruction. Christ comes to heal ruined nations, ours and others, that have forgotten their way in the world.

But first we have to mourn. To know joy we first have to mourn the oppressive and violent condition of our hearts and lives, community and world. And welcome the Christ who is coming to restore and make new.

Isaiah says we receive joy by being clothed with the garment of salvation and covered in the robe of righteousness, receiving the bridegroom’s garland and the bride’s jewels (61:10). This is the joy of a wedding. When lives are brought together and the celebration of love is in the air. This is the joy Jesus comes to bring.

And as followers of Jesus, his mission becomes our own. It is a message and mission of joy that we are to receive and then share with the world as witnesses to the light of God’s love.

In Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians he writes, “Do not despise the words of the prophet.” These words of the prophets Isaiah and Jesus we must be careful not to despise or ignore.

This is the gospel of joy that we receive and then share. God’s work in our world is a partnership, a covenant between God and God’s people, where we continue the work of Christ in the world through the power of the Holy Spirit, realizing that God’s special concern is for the lowest and the weakest.

Joy does not come by insulating ourselves from the pain of the world. As a missional community, we turn our attention toward the oppressed, the brokenhearted, the captives, the prisoners, and the mournful. Joy comes by entering what Miguel Unamuno calls “the common weeping” of the world, and in the power of the Holy Spirit we continue the mission of Jesus:

working on behalf of the oppressed,
tending to the brokenhearted,

proclaiming release on behalf of those held captive unjustly in prisons around the world, and helping free those held captive in a prison of their own making,
comforting those who mourn: the grieving, the refugee, the lonely, the unemployed,
helping rebuild ruined cities and nations with the materials of hope and peace, joy and love, through the giving of ourselves and our resources.

There are so many people in our world oppressed, brokenhearted, captive, or imprisoned in some way, wondering when God’s transformation will come. Advent is a time of waiting and preparation for God to transform the world through Jesus Christ.

God sent Christ to light up our world with joy. And Christ sends us to share joy by bearing witness to the light of the world.

Where have you found joy? I had a moment of surprising joy during our first summer in Louisville when Louie and June Bailey took Cindy and me to the Smith-Berry Winery for a night of bluegrass music and good farm-fresh eating. If I had had a bucket list it would have been one item shorter after that night having met Wendell Berry who for 15 years has been one of my favorite writers. He is one of the wisest and most courageous voices in our world today, a prophet whose words we need not despise, and one whose beautiful fiction brings great delight.

That night I also met Wendell’s grand-daughter, Emily, who is a student here at the Highland Latin School. She was handing out tickets for door prizes. I asked her if she was going to make sure I won. Undeterred by my request, she boldly asked me what she would get in return. Nonchalantly I said, “$100.00.” And wouldn’t you know it - for the first time in my life I won a door prize - four very nice Smith-Berry wine glasses! Joy!

For the past three years I have seen Emily in the hallways numerous times. And each time she says with a great big smile, “You owe me $100.00.” And I say unconvincingly to her, “It’s coming.”

Well, having received a small gift of joy three years ago, I would like to announce that today I am re-gifting with this check of $100.00 to Emily’s favorite charity or cause in the hopes of bringing joy to her and to the people her charity might help.

What about you? Where have you found joy? and
How has your life brought joy to someone else?

Nobel Prize winner George Bernard Shaw wrote a poem entitled “True Joy of Life.”

This is the true joy of life.
The being used for a purpose
Recognized by yourself as a mighty one.
The being a force of nature
Instead of a feverish, selfish
Little clod of ailments and grievances

Complaining that the world will not
Devote itself to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my life
belongs to the whole community
And as long as I live,
It is my privilege to do for it
Whatever I can.
I want to be thoroughly
Used up when I die,
For the harder I work the more I live.
I rejoice in life for its own sake.
Life is no brief candle to me.
It is a sort of splendid torch
Which I’ve got hold of
For the moment
And I want to make it burn
As brightly as possible before
Handing it on to future generations.

If you are this day in search of joy, I invite you to join this Advent journey toward Bethlehem and experience the God who has come near to us in the Christ Child. People all around him are rejoicing. His mother Mary rejoices that she has found favor with God. Angels are sharing good news of great joy for all people, including you. And shepherds are glorifying and praising God for what they have seen and heard. Christmas joy can be yours.

If you have known God’s joy, consider for a moment: Who brought the news of joy to you? What have you seen and heard and experienced that brought joy to you that you can share with others?

True joy, everlasting joy, a joy much deeper than happiness, is found in a relationship with the God who gave us life and loved us so much he came to live among us in Jesus Christ, teaching us God’s way and God’s truth, whose words and deeds are full of life. And he calls us all to live in God’s grace and forgiveness, and to give ourselves for the sake of the world, to live a life burning as a “splendid torch” with God’s fire of justice and joy.

Every year at Christmas we see the transformation of homes, churches and places of business with bright lights and Christmas pageantry. But what other than hanging of the green and the singing of Christmas carols are we, God’s people, doing in the world to bring the good news of great joy of God’s transformation? What will we do this year to bring joy to someone perhaps we don’t even know: the oppressed, the brokenhearted, the imprisoned, those in mourning? Where will we bring joy to this frightened, anxious, violent city and nation of ours?

I invite you in the silence to sit on the mountain, as did Nicholson and Freeman, and ask yourself: Have you found your joy? And if so, offer a prayer of thanks. And then ask God how your life can bring joy to someone else. Perhaps we can “rejoice always” after all. If joy is not something we’re receiving at the moment, it can be something we are re-gifting. Let us prayerfully reflect in the silence.

December 7, 2008 - "Re-Gifting Peace"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
December 7, 2008
Advent II
Jason W. Crosby

Re-Gifting Peace

Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; II Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8

Just beneath the comfortable trappings of this season lurks a vexing problem. Distractions abound to keep us occupied these days. Lights which bring a sensation of warmth to cold dark nights. Trees with smells that quickly flood our minds with good memories of the past. Songs like Jingle Bells make us smile. Profound, poignant, inspiring worship services. Enough diversions exist to entrance us, so that we do not have to deal with our problem. For us to discuss peace and regifting peace, however, we must wrestle this conundrum.

Not that we don’t anticipate problems this time of year. The holidays put our lives and our relationships under a microscope. Inner tensions and familial rifts are magnified greatly at Christmas, so much so that many people find themselves depressed and families find themselves fighting with one another.

What followers of Christ may not expect this time of year is having to deal with a problem rooted in the birth of Christ. The apostle Paul wrote, “We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23). Christ’s death and resurrection presents those who are religious and those who are not with a whole slew of problematic questions. Why would a good God put Christ to death on a cross is one such question circulating at Easter. “He could as well have written,” according to Frederick Buechner, “We preach Christ born’ or ‘We preach Christmas,’ because the birth presents no fewer problems than the death does.” [1]

One problem, of many, that stems from Christmas is that now we live in an in-between time. God incarnate came, continues to dwell with us, but is not yet fully manifest. With the birth came a “foretaste of God’s glory divine” says Fanny J. Crosby in her hymn “Blessed Assurance.” Still, we only caught a glimpse of what we hope is to come. Christ’s birth put us on a bridge between two great chasms. Behind us, on one side sits the world as it was prior to the birth of Christ. Those touched by Christ’s love and grace cannot return to that place. We are different now. Yet, we can’t see what lies ahead. We hope we possess an idea as to what that promised land will be like. Our vision of that place, however, is murky at best. So, here we are, on a bridge, where we possess hearts of generosity and greediness, where we love one another and hate one another, care for one another and kill one another. The double lives we lead during this in-between time, lives both beautiful and repulsive, can lead us into frustration and uneasiness. Here is our Chistmas problem – When will we move beyond the foretaste of God’s glory given to us at Christ birth and be able to sit down for the full meal? How much longer will we have to live with the greed, hate, and killing around us?

The author of 2 Peter provides a response to these very questions. The community to whom this epistle was written lived a few generations after Christ. Some believed that the Savior who came, would have already returned by their time. As they contemplated their in-between existence, discontentment began to swell within them. When, they wondered, would the God who came once, come again?

I imagine the author’s answer was unsatisfactory to many then. It certainly is not likely to be kindly received these days. The writer tells those living on the bridge to wait.

Most people don’t like waiting. Especially these days, when we live in an immediate gratification world. The internet enables us to communicate with people on the other side of the globe instantaneously. All we have to do is turn on the television and the 24 hour a day, seven day a week, 365 day a year news channels tell us what happening in any place at that very moment. Consequently, many of us become agitated when we have to wait for an appointment, in traffic, or for our food to arrive at a restaurant. These are relatively petty issues compared to the serious injustices around us. The author’s plea to wait seems particularly unsettling and anachronistic when people live in a world where families find themselves on the streets because of others greed, where addiction suffocates hopes and dreams, where betrayal breaks the bonds of relationship, where the deaths of innocent children are explained away as collateral damage.

During advent, however, we wait. Consciously waiting is what sets advent apart from others times of the year. Like a lot of children, Christmas morning was my promised land. I wanted it to arrive as soon as possible. No matter how much I wished December 25th would come more quickly, I lacked the ability to alter the flow of time. Instead of wallowing in my frustration, each advent season I would make a chain of loops of red and green construction paper. Each day, as Christmas drew closer, I would remove a loop from the chain, and wait. I wasn’t just sitting around my room with my chain made of construction paper waiting, however. In retrospect, I realize that in waiting something happened to me. Rather that existing in a state of high anxiety, my advent chain gave me a greater sense of contentment. I say a greater sense of contentment because I’m sure that my mother, who is here today, will readily attest to the fact that I was still very anxious in the days leading up to Christmas. But, waiting with that chain settled me, at least somewhat.

Each year, when we wait during advent, we wait in the expectation that something more will happen. As we wait to mark the birthday of Jesus, don’t we do so expecting that we will reencounter the gifts given to us when God became incarnate? Advent waiting is good practice for us, since 52 weeks of the year we are waiting on that bridge in-between what was and what will be. Just as when we consciously wait during advent we expect something more to happen, perhaps we should expect something more to happen when consciously waiting the remaining days of the year.

What is that something more that might happen to us if we engage in conscious waiting year round? For one, a commitment to waiting will breed greater attentiveness. Waiting for the new heaven and the new earth is not like waiting for a casserole to bake. Waiting for a casserole demands passive waiting. Once the dish is in the oven, there is not much more a person can do to change that composition of that casserole. You can clean up the kitchen or work on another dish, but as for the casserole, all you can do is wait. Waiting while we journey to the other side of the great divide is a very different act. We’re not sure what the outcome will be. We’re not sure how we will get there. We don’t have a recipe to follow. So, we must listen very carefully while waiting. We must be very attune to the present moment in which we find ourselves. Henri Nouwen wrote, “Waiting, then, is not passive. It involves nurturing the moment, as a mother nurtures the child that is growing in her. Zechariah, Elizabeth, and Mary were very present to the moment. That is why they could hear the angel. They were alert, attentive to the voice that spoke to them and said, ‘Don’t be afraid. Something is happening to you. Pay attention.” [2] If we are attentive, we may sense that God is doing something to us while we wait. We may also become more adventurous. Active, attentive waiting leads us to places we never imagined we go. The Magi practiced active, attentive waiting and they ended up at the manager. This congregation has practiced active, attentive waiting that has repeatedly set it on a course impossible to predict.

Actively waiting for God, which enables us to better hear God when God speaks, and better move when God says go, might just be the best path to peace available for us amid the duality of these in between times. Waiting in this fashion brings us closer to God’s peace. The community to whom Isaiah 40 addressed found themselves waiting in exile in Babylon. Waiting in oppression to return home. Yet, in waiting God’s comfort and God’s peace was revealed. It’s waiting, actively and attentively, for God’s peace that may very well be our only hope of survival in this time. Without it, our greed may overcome our generosity, our hate may overtake our love.

This idea that the path to peace follows the way of waiting may sound absurd to some. The final poem written by Dietrich Bonheoffer suggests that at least for him, this notion that waiting for God might bring about peace has traction. Bonheoffer, the German Christian minister who plotted to bring down Hitler’s Nazi regime, was put in prison in November of 1943. 1944 proved to be his last Christmas. In the cellar of a Nazi prison on December 19, 1944 with death creeping near, he wrote a letter to his fiancé. He closed that letter with his final poem, which in part, reads:

By kindly powers surrounded, peaceful and true,
Wonderfully protected with consolation dear,
Safely, I dwell with you this whole day through
And surely into another year.

Though from the old our hearts are still in pain,
While evil days oppress with burdens still,
Lord, give to our frightened souls again,
Salvation, and thy promises fulfill.

And should thou offer us the bitter cup, resembling
Sorrow, filled to the brim and overflowing,
We will receive it thankfully, without trembling,
From thy hand so good and ever-loving.

But, if it be thy will again to give
Joy of this world and bright sunshine,
Then in our minds we will past times relive
And all our days be wholly thine.

When we are wrapped in silence most profound,
May we hear that song most fully raised
From all the unseen world that lies around
And thou art by all thy children praised.

By kindly powers protected wonderfully,
Confident, we wait for come what may,
Night and morning, God is by us, faithfully
And surely at each new born day. [3]

He was killed April 9, 1945. Bonhoeffer lived in the worst conditions this in-between time has arguably ever seen. Yet, in his waiting, he had little else to do in his Nazi prison cell; he found a gift, of peace, that only God can offer.

Those who know peace, naturally will re-gift it. Peace is not something that belongs to us that we own or possess. Peace is not something we can manufacture for ourselves. It is not a tool, a building, or even a career. It is a gift that we can prepare ourselves to receive or reject. Really, it is impossible to hoard peace. If we keep peace to ourselves like wealth, we will lose it. That is because there is a communal element to knowing inner-peace while waiting in these in-between times. Isaiah and the epistle were written to communities. Living in community and loving others while attentively waiting is another ingredient necessary for us to know peace. Those we know peace, naturally, will regift it as a way of demonstrating love to others with whom we wait.

“Indian giver” is considered to be a pejorative term. It shouldn’t be. It is customary in Native American cultures that whenever a gift is given to someone, that gift is shared with the entire community. Peace knowers will be Indian givers.

We may regift peace by heeding Isaiah’s words, “preparing the way, by making straight a highway in the desert for our Lord.” In others words, by using our voices to stand non-violently in opposition to violence, or by using our feet to march in protest to injustice in any form, we regift peace. Today let us also remember, those who know peace, may give it away, by being instruments of peace, who make sweet, warm melodies - melodies that call others to wait with them, in between what was and what, by God’s grace, will be.

___________________________________________
1. Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, HarperCollins, 90.
2. Henri Nouwen, Watch for the Light: Reading for Advent and Christmas, Plough, 2001, 32.
3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, edited and translated by Edwin Robertson, Zondervan, 2005, 180-181.

Nov 30, 2008 - "Re-Gifting Hope"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
The First Sunday of Advent
November 30, 2008
W. Gregory Pope

Series: Re-Gifting God’s Gifts

RE-GIFTING HOPE

Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19;
1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37

Our theme for Advent this year is Re-gifting God’s Gifts - the gifts of hope, peace, joy, love, and the gift of God’s self.

We will be asking ourselves two questions:

1. Where do you find hope, peace, joy, love?

and

2. How do you share God’s hope, peace, joy, and love with others?

We will ponder receiving God’s gifts and then re-gifting them, sharing them with the world.

When we think of re-gifting we usually think of giving away those gifts we were given that we either did not care for or have more of than we need.

God’s gifts of hope, peace, joy, and love can never be too plentiful and are gifts we care for deeply. And the wonderful thing about re-gifting God’s gifts is that you can share them and keep them for yourself at the same time.

At the Advent wreath you are going to hear stories of how people have received and given the gifts of hope, peace, joy and love.

So I invite you to open your hearts this Advent season to the great gifts of God.

And then to open your hands to share those gifts with the world.

The Cry for Hope

It has been said that human beings can live without anything except hope. When hope dies, we die. We can live for brief periods of time without love, but we cannot live without the hope of love soon coming our way. We can live in desperate times if have the hope of a better tomorrow.

In her novel Breathing Lessons, Anne Tyler describes a middle-aged character named Maggie as one who “viewed her life as circular; it forever repeated itself and was entirely lacking in hope.” [1]

Some people view their lives and history itself as a treadmill that goes round and round in monotonous cycles, no hope of anything new. To feel as if we are without hope is to live at the bottom of the bottom.

How do we get so low?

The prophet Isaiah points to our sin as one cause of such hopelessness, choices we have made that harm ourselves and others and have a way of hiding God’s face from us. To be hidden from God’s face, blocked from the light of God’s love, to feel out of the reach of God’s gracious hand, is to indeed feel hopeless.

Are there ways of living your life that keep God’s face hidden from you? Are there choices you are making that are turning your life away from God?

The hiddenness of God is a mystery. It’s hard to know if God does indeed turn away from us for a season or if it is only perception. Reality or perception, if we do not feel God’s presence, or believe God is present, our lives can become blinded to hope.

Isaiah puts some of the blame on God for not being more visibly and powerfully present to Israel in their return from exile. Isaiah cries out to God, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” - do what you did in the past, bring fire and earthquake, make our enemies tremble. Three times he asks for God’s presence, but it seems to Isaiah that God has hidden God’s self from the people.

Scott Bader-Saye believes this divine inaction tells us something about the way God has chosen to relate to the world. The hidden God of Isaiah 64 is the God who refuses to act powerfully and dramatically to rescue.

And in many ways this understanding makes more sense to us. The frustration Isaiah feels is the frustration we often feel. It is the struggle to reconcile the ancient stories of God’s powerful presence with our present experience where God doesn’t seem to act so powerfully. We have these biblical stories of God’s grand intervention and wonder why God doesn’t do the same today. Why would God deliver Israel from Egypt but not deliver six million Jews from Hitler’s death camps? [2]

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a German concentration camp in 1944, offered this perspective. He said “God lets himself be pushed out of the world and on to the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which God is with us and helps us.” [3]

For Bonhoeffer this realization was not a denial of faith but a retrieval of faith in the God of the cross, whose power is suffering, whose omnipotence is vulnerability, who relates to the world through the vulnerable path of non-coercive love and suffering service rather than through domination and force.

God’s refusal to replicate a Red Sea-type deliverance does not mean that God has abandoned God’s people. Our hope does not rely on God’s acting today in the same ways God acted in the ancient stories, but it does rely on God’s being the same God yesterday, today, and tomorrow - a God who hears our cries, a God who does not abandon us, a God that will finally redeem all that is lost in a new heaven and a new earth (Isa 65:17). [4]

What has been the testimony of scripture and saints down through the centuries is that the absence of God is a very real experience, but that God’s absence is never permanent. Hope is never completely lost.

While Isaiah says God has hidden God’s self from us, the psalmist cries for God to shine God’s face upon us that we may be saved.

We are like the people of Israel - waiting, wanting, expecting to see the face of God.

Even though the people of God had sinned and felt God had hidden God’s face from them, they still trusted God in their spiritual exile.

Our hope is in God’s restoration: Restore us, O God, the psalmist prays.

Where God’s Hope is Found

How does restoration come? Where can we see God’s face shine upon us? Where do we find God’s hope in the world?

Isaiah points us to the past. God did awesome deeds we did not expect. God may not have given us a Red Sea deliverance, but God did carry us through some stormy waters: the death of someone we did not think we could live without, the time our family fell apart, or when the dream of a career came crashing down around us, or when we made the decision to leave home and move to the other side of the world in the hope of a better life. And we were given a new home and a new family. We were held by a strength beyond our own. God has done things we did not expect.

There is no God like our God, Isaiah says. With our God there is always hope. God is our Father, and we are God’s children. God is the potter, and we are the clay, the work of God’s hands. And God is not finished with us yet. God is always making of us a new creation.

We are not defined by our past. God does not remember our iniquity forever.

Isaiah and the psalmist call for God to bring hope and salvation into a troubled present: to give ear, to shine forth, to stir up might, and save. They point us toward a future when God did “give ear” to our cry Indeed, the Shepherd of Israel gave much more. God gave God’s whole self. The Lord God of hosts left the throne of the cherubim and in Christ joined the rest of us who knows what it is like to feel that God has forsaken you. God answered the demand, “Let your face shine upon us that we may be saved,” though not as anyone expected: it was in the light of a Child born in Bethlehem, the light the darkness has never overcome.

God did not end political and military oppression. God’s might was expressed in the vulnerability of a baby who grew up to die at the hands of oppressors. And that first advent we relive each year sustains us until that second advent that we anticipate each year when God will act fully and completely for our salvation.

History does not go round and round in monotonous cycles. History has a goal. And that goal is the kingdom of God where the world will be redeemed and re-created by God. The Christian story is a salvation story.

Yes, we live in a world full of wars and rumors of wars, corruption, greed, and injustice. But’s that’s only one side of it.

The Christian story reveals another side where, in the words of Eugene Peterson, “with every sunrise, grace spills across the horizon in acts of healing and words of truth. . . . Jesus opens our eyes to the world of grace and commands us to pay attention. That means we don’t go into the world each day desperately trying to hold on to things or people, panicked at everything that might weaken our grasp on those things or those people.” [5]

Rather, we open our lives in hope to the Christ who is with us, keeping awake, waiting expectantly for those times and places, great and small, where Christ breaks into our lives and our world.

Paul discovered that in Christ God is doing what Isaiah and the psalmist asked God to do, breaking into our world through the gathered community of faith, strengthened by our fellowship with Jesus, not lacking in any spiritual gift, full of hope rooted in the faithfulness of God who will see us through to the very end.

Hope is what is left when your worst fears have been realized and the future looks like a never-ending bleak mid-winter. In Advent, God’s people summon the courage and the spiritual strength to remember that the holy breaks into the daily. And that in small ways we can open our broken hearts to the healing grace of God with a willingness to be mended.

We do not lose heart; rather, we live with our hearts broken open so that compassion, caring, and reckless love of God can find a way into our hearts and the heart of the world.

Sharing Hope

This first Sunday in Advent corresponds as it often does with the celebration of Thanksgiving. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians he invites us to offer thanks to God, not for material gifts, but for spiritual gifts found in the church. A reminder that we are the gathered body of Christ “intended to be a feast of abundance laid out for the sake of the world.” [6]

We have gifts to share - God’s gifts of hope and peace, joy and love. We enter the darkness of our world with whatever hope we have, sometimes hoping against hope that we can shed the light of hope.

The Cellist of Sarajevo

It was 4:00 pm on May 27th, 1992, during the siege of Sarajevo, that several mortar shells struck a group of a hundred starving people waiting in a long line in front of the only bakery in town that still had enough flour to make bread. Twenty-two people were killed and at least seventy were wounded.

The next day hungry people lined up again to beg for bread - certain they would die if they didn’t come to the bakery and convinced they could die if they did. Vedran Smailovic, a renowned local cellist, had been standing at his window the day before and saw the whole thing happen. That next day, as the people lined up again, he dressed in the black suit and white tie in which he had played every night until the opera theater was destroyed. He walked into the street carrying his cello and a chair.

Smailovic sat down in the square and, surrounded by debris and the remainders of death and the despair of the living, he began to play the mournful Albinoni’s Adagio (which you will hear in just a moment), the one music manuscript that had been found whole in the city after the carpet bombing of Dresden.

For the next 21 days (one day for each of his friends and neighbors that had died), shelling or no shelling, he came back to the square to play the Adagio in honor of the dead.

His actions inspired the novel by Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo. [7]

Galloway says he played until he felt his hope return. And most days, by the time the last few notes had faded, he was able to feel the music somehow restore his hope.

Today, where he sat, there is a monument of a man in a chair playing a cello. A monument to his refusal to surrender the hope that beauty could be reborn in the midst of a living hell.

What the cellist wanted, says Galloway, was to stop things from getting worse. And perhaps the only thing that will stop things from getting worse is people doing the things they know how to do.

What is it you know how to do that can stop things from getting worse and shed a little light of hope?

Play music.
Sit with a child.
Visit someone who is lonely.
Teach someone English or math or science.
Install clean water in a village without clean water.
Pray with someone.
Work for justice.
Be a peacemaker.

Christ: The Cellist of the World

Galloway says of one of his characters who serves as a resident of the city that he would often sit “inhaling more pain than he knew the world could hold.”

In the midst of our cities filled with violence and loneliness and fear, the Christ of Bethlehem comes as the cellist of Sarajevo and Iraq and Mumbai and Louisville. His arms are spread on a piece of carved wood, inhaling all the pain the world can hold, and he plays the music of the world’s salvation, singing hope through his tears, refusing to despair that God is shaping a new creation.

Christ, the cellist of the whole world, brings hope where there is no hope. Can you hear his music?

(Cellist plays Albinoni’s Adagio)
________________


1. Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons, Knoff, 1988, 315
2. Scott Bader-Saye, in David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, editors, Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, Vol.1, Westminster John Knox Press, 2008, 4
3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison, Macmillan, 1971, 360
4. Bader-Saye, 6
5. Eugene H. Peterson, Conversations: The Message Bible with its Translator, NavPress, 2007, p.1568
6. Martin B. Copenhaver, in Bartlett and Taylor, Feasting on the Word, 18
7. Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo, Riverhead, 2008