Love Has No To-Do List

 

December 24, 2023 – Christmas I

Isaiah 9:2-7; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-15-20

© 2023 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

Merry Christmas! You’re here. You made it. You can check getting to church off your list. Take a deep breath. Know that God is here and that, simply by showing up, you’ve already done everything you need to do in order for God to meet you in this place. I’m glad you’re here. And I believe that God is, too. I just wish the secret to navigating the rest of my holiday stress was as simple as showing up.

The holidays are hard, aren’t they? And that’s true even when Christmas Eve doesn’t fall on a Sunday. You’ve got to figure out what gifts to buy and where to find them. You’ve got to go to work parties and neighborhood parties and friend parties and family parties. There’s food to make for your own household and food to give away. Then there’s travelling—either loading up the car and setting out or welcoming your family in from out of town. Either way, it’s a hassle. And the whole time there’s the struggle of trying to keep the peace between people who seem to show up just looking for a fight.

All we really want is for the people we love to be happy, but making other people happy is a pretty stressful affair. Maybe if they just told us what they want—if they made a list of all the gifts and foods and conversation topics that would make them happy and gave it to us, then we would know exactly what to buy, what to cook, and what conversations to steer away from. If we could just add all of their preferences to our holiday to do list, then maybe everything would work out just right. But you know that isn’t how it works, don’t you?

When I was a little kid, I spent a week at my grandparents’ house every summer. It was a magical week of being the center of attention. Each day while I was there, my grandmother planned a different activity like going to the museum, playing miniature golf, or showing me off to some of her friends. One thing we never failed to do was go Christmas shopping. My grandmother would take me through the mall—from Toys-R-Us to Macy’s department store to Barnes and Noble—and let me pick out whatever I wanted to find under the tree five months later. At first, it was a fabulous arrangement. Who doesn’t want to pick out his own presents? There was no risk that an out-of-touch septuagenarian would choose the wrong thing. 

But, before long, the magic was lost. By the time I was eight, my memory was good enough that I could pick up every wrapped gift and know exactly what was inside before I tore off the paper. About that same time, I started to feel some pressure to pick out the “right” gift—the one that would make my grandmother happy. As we went shopping, I picked up on what I thought were subtle clues about what she thought her grandson should want, and I often ended up with a pile of books, CDs, and learning games that were better suited for a classroom than a playroom. She wanted to make me happy, and I wanted to make her happy, and, in the end, neither of us was.

Even perfectly made and perfectly executed plans fall short. We don’t want stuff under the tree. We want the stuff under the tree to be a sign that we are loved. And we want to be loved without having to tell someone what to get or what to cook or what to say in order to make us feel loved. We want to be loved by someone who loves us enough to know us and care about us and do all those things for us just because they love us. And we want to love them back in the same way. We want to love them in a way that shows them just how much we love them—more than they can possibly imagine. But loving someone like that isn’t easy. Even perfect plans fall short. And that’s why the holidays are so stressful. But it’s also why Christmas is so important.

On this holy night, we hear the angel say, “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” And, with those words, God let us know that it doesn’t matter whether our plans are perfect or whether they miss the mark completely. What matters is that God has already loved us and that God’s love has the power to make us perfect.

The birth of Jesus was not a plan set in motion but the fulfillment of God’s love for all time. The angel didn’t say that the child would one day grow up to be our savior. God did not tell the shepherds to come back in thirty years when the child was ready to take charge. God did not ask the world to stay tuned and wait for the day when Jesus would come and save them. The good news of Christmas is that our salvation comes to us as fully and completely as a newborn baby. Like any child who comes into our lives, God’s salvation isn’t something we need to learn how to take advantage of or figure out how to use. It’s not something we can mess up or get wrong. The gift itself is perfect because it is perfect love.

There in Bethlehem, all the love we would ever want to show or ever hope to receive is wrapped up in those bands of cloth and laid in that manger. That’s because, in the birth of Jesus, God has taken what is unavoidably imperfect within us and united it to God’s perfect self in order that all our brokenness might be made whole. And all we have to do is show up. There is no assembly required. There is no need to keep up with gift receipts. There is no chance that something will not fit. There is no worry that our plans will fall short. 

By coming to us as perfect love, God makes our love for each other perfect. God does not give us the Christ child to show us that we have the potential to become better—that, if we work at it hard enough, we might actually succeed in loving one another as fully as we hope. No, in the birth of our savior, God has already made our love perfect by loving us perfectly. 

We come this night to see again how much we are loved—enough that God would be born in us and for us. On this night, our souls are filled again to overflowing, not because they have been empty or lacking but because, at Christmas, we see again that they have always been full. It is nothing less than our own perfect love that we behold in the birth of Jesus our savior. 

“Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” Let us see in the Christ child how much we have been loved by God—loved even to perfection—and let us love one another with that perfect love which is God’s gift to us this night.

The Days Are Getting Longer

 

December 21, 2023 – St. Thomas (Blue Christmas)

Habakkuk 2:1-4; Hebrews 10:35-11:1; John 20:24-29

© 2023 Evan D. Garner

St. Thomas feels like an odd choice for a congregation that is looking for comfort and reassurance at Christmas time. This Blue Christmas service is for those who are hurting during the holidays—those for whom the bright lights of the season obscure the loss and grief we carry underneath the surface. We’re used to hearing this gospel passage about Doubting Thomas on the Second Sunday of Easter, when associate rectors are called upon to preach about the one who was not with the other disciples when Jesus came.

But we also hear from St. Thomas at funerals. When families meet to plan the funeral of their loved one, we offer them a list of gospel lessons to choose from, but, more often than not, families choose the reading from John 14. “Lord, we do not know where you are going,” Thomas said to Jesus. “How can we know the way?” This was Jesus’ last supper with his disciples. He had told his closest friends that he would be leaving them. And, although Jesus promised to come back and take them to himself, Thomas—of course, it was Thomas—put into words the confusion and doubt that others must have been feeling, too.

In a very real and practical way, St. Thomas’ association with our Blue Christmas service isn’t really a choice at all. We commemorate St. Thomas this night—the longest night of the year—because, back in the 9th century, when the calendar of saints’ days was being compiled, this was the day when legend held that Thomas had died. In the Christian tradition, we typically remember the saints of God on the anniversaries of their deaths. But not every denomination celebrates Thomas on December 21. Centuries after the calendar of saints was established, a competing tradition was found—a legend that suggested Thomas died on July 3. And some churches, in an attempt to make the days leading up to Christmas a little less busy, moved Thomas’ feast day to that summer date.

I don’t know when Thomas actually died. And I don’t think it matters whether we remember him in the depths of December or the brightness of July. But I don’t think it’s an accident that Thomas’ feast was originally set for the longest night of the year. I can think of no better saint to commemorate in our moment of deepest darkness because doubt is just another word for grief.

Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?

Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.

Those are not the words of a skeptic but the confessions of a man whose grief is insurmountable. Faced with the loss of Jesus, Thomas no longer knew how to make sense of the world, and his words reflect an inability to hang onto the tenets of the faith he had been taking for granted. How could someone so sure of who Jesus was and what he had promised—sure enough to give up his life in order to follow him—now be left with nothing but doubt? 

Grief robs us of what we need most in our moment of loss. When we experience a loss that touches our souls and wounds us that deeply, we, too, find ourselves confused, disoriented, unsure of things we had always known to be true. That is the moment when we need God’s help most of all, but that is also precisely the moment when God feels furthest away. Sometimes without even realizing it, our language of grief comes out as words of doubt.

I don’t know if I can keep going.

I don’t know what do to without him.

I don’t know how to pray anymore. I can’t find the words. I don’t know what to say. I don’t even know whom to pray to. 

I don’t know if I believe in God anymore. I’m not sure I want to believe.

Grief has the power to turn everything upside down. Like a child caught by surprise under a pounding wave, we swim back toward the surface only to come up with a handful of sand instead lungs full of air. We no longer know which way is up, what day it is, or who we are. We can’t figure out how to take a single step. We’re not sure of anything anymore.

We remember Thomas on the longest night of the year because tonight is the night when we need to remember that God’s response to our disorienting grief is always to come and find us. “A week later, Jesus’ disciples were again in the house, and [this time] Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’” Do not be overwhelmed by your grief. I am here. I am with you. Come and see.

When we have lost the will to believe, God comes and finds us. When we have forgotten what it means to have hope, God comes and find us. When we aren’t sure whether things could ever get better, God comes and finds us.

In the moments of our lives when that message is hardest to receive, God does not hide it away from us, testing to see if we have the strength to go and find it. Instead, God brings it to us by coming and accompanying us in our grief. God declares to the prophet, “Write the vision, and make it plain on tablets so that anyone can read it. Make it big enough that even someone running by could make it out.” God wants you to know that it doesn’t matter whether you are sure of anything because God’s love for you is sure. Your grief—your doubt—is not an obstacle to God’s love but the very channel through which that love comes and finds you. God asks nothing more of you than to sit in your grief until you recognize that God is there with you—until that is enough for you to see that the days are getting longer.

Who Needs Good News?

 

December 10, 2023 – The 2nd Sunday of Advent, Year B

Isaiah 40:1-11; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8

© 2023 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

In 1864, the Radical Democracy Party nominated John C. Frémont as their candidate for the highest office in the land. Frustrated by Abraham Lincoln’s promise to reconcile with the southern states once the Civil War was over, the hardline abolitionists’ choice of Frémont was as incendiary as it was strategic. Frémont had previously been appointed by Lincoln as commander of the Department of the West—a prestigious military post, which Frémont then squandered by overplaying his anti-slavery tactics. After declaring martial law in all of Missouri, promising to arrest and execute any civilian found to have secessionist sympathies, and declaring the emancipation of all enslaved persons within the state two years before Lincoln himself issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Frémont was relieved of his command. 

When President Lincoln got word that his irascible former general had been nominated by a convention attended by only four hundred delegates, Lincoln responded by appealing to the Good Book. Quoting a passage about David running from King Saul in 1 Samuel 22, the President said, “And everyone that was in distress, and everyone that was in debt, and everyone that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them; and there were with him about four hundred men.”  It was a clever way to disparage not only Frémont but also the ragtag group of disaffected Republicans that supported him, but one wonders whether likening Frémont to David, who later defeated Saul and became Israel’s greatest king, was a wise choice for a biblical allusion.

At the very beginning of Mark’s gospel account, the gospel writer quotes Isaiah 40: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” In fact, all four gospel accounts—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—use these words from the prophet Isaiah to define the theological content of John the Baptist’s prophecy. He was, in their understanding, the one who prepared the way of the Lord and made his paths straight. But I wonder, two thousand years later, whether we rightly remember what those words meant to Jesus and his contemporaries. To really understand the original biblical allusion, we have to go back even further, about five hundred forty years before Jesus’ birth, and not to Israel but to Babylon, where God’s people lived in exile.

At that time, God’s people were desperate for some good news. For sixty years, they had suffered under the tyranny of the Babylonian king. Jerusalem had been ransacked by invaders. The holy temple had been destroyed. The people had been carted off in captivity. Their leaders had been executed. The calamity that befell them was not only political and economic but also theological. How could they continue to believe in the God of their ancestors if that God had failed them so completely? Who could make sense of what had happened without abandoning the faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—of Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel?

Into that theological void, the prophets had spoken. Prophets like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah, Amos, Hosea, and Obadiah, had helped God’s people recognize that it was not God who had abandoned them but their leaders who had given up on God and God’s ways generations earlier. The only language the prophets could find to explain how their God had allowed such a disaster to occur was language of judgment and condemnation. God’s people had gone astray, so God punished them severely. But, after sixty years of total humiliation, God’s people had heard enough of that. They were tired of the children’s teeth being set on edge because their parents had eaten sour grapes. Something had to change. A new theology was needed.

Like a gentle breeze blowing across their face after a summer storm had passed, the prophet Isaiah brought words of consolation to God’s people: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” At last, God’s word to God’s people was, “Comfort.” The debt of their sins had been paid, including the interest that was due. God was prepared to do a new thing, and that meant salvation for God’s people.

Now the time had come for God’s people to make a highway through the wilderness—a wide and impressive boulevard like those they had seen in Babylon, but this highway would stretch through the desert places so that it might reach God’s people in their distress. For decades, they had seen their captors parade their gods up and down the city’s streets in festal processions designed to celebrate the enthronement of their deities, but now the God of their ancestors would come and reveal God’s glory—God’s magnificence and might—so that all people would see it together—so that no one would mistake which God was really in charge.

A voice said to the prophet, “Cry out!” And the prophet said, “What shall I cry? What words could I possibly say to help my people believe again—to help them have hope again?” And the voice replied, “Say that all people are grass. Remind them that, though the grass withers and the flower fades, the word of our God will stand forever. Help them see that the empire which surrounds them is here today but gone tomorrow. Tell them that their God is coming to save them and that God will lead them like a shepherd, feeding his flock with justice and gathering the lambs in his bosom and leading them so gently that even a nursing ewe can keep up.” 

A half of a millennium later—after about as much time as has passed since European settlers came to this continent—God’s people were again surrounded by imperial oppressors, and the good news of Jesus Christ began to unfold with the proclamation of John the Baptist. This was God’s consolation for God’s people. Again, they were desperate for some good news, and this time it sounded like this: “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” 

John went out into the wilderness, clothed in the prophet’s garments of camel skins and a leather belt, eating the uncivilized food of locusts and wild honey, in order to prepare a highway on which God’s people would encounter their savior. John knew that it was in the desert places, apart from the structures and institutions of the empire, out where the wounded and brokenhearted people had gathered, where God would again come to God’s people. That’s because, whenever God saves us, it is always an act of disruption—an unsettling of the status quo that has imprisoned us. And that means that the highway we must travel in order to find our savior is always the road of repentance. 

Two thousand years later, we must be sure that we are hearing the biblical allusion in the right way. We must hear the invitation to repent with the same spirit of comfort and hopefulness that John the Baptist invoked two thousand years ago. It is no accident that all four gospel accounts link Isaiah’s message of comfort with John’s baptism of repentance. Repentance doesn’t mean enduring the harsh words of judgment and condemnation. It means turning away from them because they no longer have any authority in our lives. 

Repentance is that great and hopeful disruption of our lives which our souls crave. Repentance is the food of the anxious spirit, the balm of the grieving countenance, the light of the wayward conscience. Repentance is daring to believe that God can and will come to save us even though the world wants us to think that God’s salvation has passed us by. Repentance means turning aside to find the one who comes to rescue us. It means believing that God’s words of comfort and reassurance are meant for each one of us. Surely that is good news that we, too, are desperate to hear.