Blessing and Joy

Luke 1:39-56

Many years ago I had a conversation with a good friend and she coined a phrase I had never heard before and it sounded strange to me.  She said, “I’ve lost my joy.”  She was a Christian of a more charismatic variety than me.  She had been taught that joy is one of the fruits of the spirit that Christians receive through the workings of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22,23).  These spiritual fruits like fruit on a tree develop and ripen over time in followers of Jesus as a result of a deepening devotional life. 

Being raised your typical Presbyterian I had hardly heard of the Holy Spirit let alone that the Spirit works in us and brings forth these fruits.  I thought being a Christian simply meant being good and sticking to God’s rules all on your own efforts because that’s the deal if you want God on your side. 

My friend was the most committed and devout Christian I knew at the time and always seemed so joyful.  She was the first person I met who went to church and actually worshipped.  She said she lost her joy, that at the end of the day she wasn’t feeling joy anymore, but rather profound disappointment.  People she loved had let her down and hurt her.  These people wouldn’t give her the space to sort things out.  On top of all that she didn’t feel close to God anymore.  She lost her joy.  It even came to the point that this worship-filled person pulled away from church.  For a couple of years, she couldn’t worship.  She lost her joy.

Thankfully, her story is not tragic.  In time her joy returned.  God brought her life together in the way she felt he promised he would.  She married, became an elementary teacher, and had children.  She had hit a period where she just needed to walk alone, a period of time for God to heal some deeper hurts in her than just her present ones.

This friend is one of those people I think of when I hear Mary’s Song.  Let me give a rather expanded translation.  “My soul, the entirety of my being, worships the Lord and my spirit, that within me that makes me feel alive, rejoices greatly in the God of my salvation.  For, He has looked with favour on his overwhelmed servant.  From now on people will call me blessed!  God has done great things for me that only God can do.  His mercy is for all those who trust their whole lives to him.”  Mary sang that song the moment she realized that God truly did have his hand in her troubling circumstances.  The angel had told her that her elderly relative Elizabeth was pregnant and so she was.

There is great joy in Mary’s Song, in Mary, but it leaves me with a few questions.  I don’t think that what she means by joy and by being blessed is what we think they mean.  Let me start with what it is to be blessed.

These are holiday times and most of us gather together with our families and have a big meal.  Usually someone will say grace and then begin to count the many blessings the family enjoys.  Everybody is reasonably healthy.  Everybody enjoys a comfortable life.  The family has a good name.  We give thanks that God has blessed us in so many ways.  Gratitude is a good thing to feel towards God, but I don’t think this sort of “count your many blessings” is what Mary meant when she said people would call her blessed.

For Mary, being blessed meant God had included her in his mission to bring salvation to the world.  This blessing came by means of an unexpected pregnancy that would have blemished the family name.  Not to mention the health risks to her for she was somewhere between 13-15 years old.  Nobody but Elizabeth and Joseph believed her that the child in her was the Son of God conceived by the Holy Spirit.  Then, when Jesus was born Joseph and Mary had to become refugees in Egypt because jealous King Herod wanted to kill the baby.  That meant Joseph had to leave his job as a respected carpenter.  Then, as Jesus progressed through childhood, he apparently wasn’t your "normal" child and people knew it.  So, Mary had to bear the stigma of having a child who appeared mentally unstable.  Then, Jesus started his “Kingdom of God” ministry on the coattails of crazy cousin John - John the Baptizer...locusts, honey, camel hair.  Then, Jesus was arrested and tried for treason.  Then, she had to watch her son die a public execution by crucifixion and as she stood there utterly heartbroken people certainly would have mocked her for being the mother of this humiliated false Messiah.  Whatever she felt when she encountered Jesus raised from the dead would have certainly been tempered with what we know today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Mary is called blessed not because she was a good, hardworking person and so God rewarded her with health, wealth, and a respected family name.  Mary is called blessed because God was working through her and she remained faithful through all that she suffered for being the mother of Jesus. 

Blessedness always comes in the face of suffering.  In this fallen world full of evil, God’s workings, his mission to save and heal it will always meet with adversity.  Yet, the blessing one receives for being a disciple of Jesus and living according to him who is the light of the world is, well, him; the assurance of his presence personally with us and God’s favour, his faithfulness to us.  Health, wealth, and a good name are quite often distractions that keep us from being faithful and enjoying the fullness of life that Jesus has for us.  

If blessedness comes in the face of suffering, what does this say about joy?  We live in a culture that sees the pursuit of happiness as a basic human right.  But, we also live in a culture in which corporate advertisers tell us we can’t be happy unless we have this or have that and there’s never enough.  True happiness in this broken world is not found in wealth and security.  It’s when your whole being rejoices from saying “I know my Jesus is with me and that he is working through me and that my dis-ease at not having the “good life” that so many around me enjoy is not in vain.  Yes, God is working through me.  I am blessed!”

At the end of the day when we are alone with ourselves, what do we come back to?  Is it joy?  Do we lift our hearts in the wonder that we belong to Jesus, that he is with us and we are a part of his reign in this hurting world?  At the end of the day what do we come back to?  Is it joy?  Amen.

When Jesus Comes

Isaiah 40:1-11

This passage from Isaiah portrays the very powerful moment of God declaring he would restore his people living in exile in Babylon.  God had decided that they had suffered enough for the real life consequences of their not acting like the people of their steadfastly loving and ever-faithful God.  It was now time for God himsefl to come and shepherd his people and nothing was going tp stop God from doing it.  So, God tells Isaiah to cry out with words of comfort and to beckon all of creation to prepare the way for this small remnant who had not made Babylon their home and whose hearts rather longed for their own homeland in Palestine.

God told Isaiah to cry out and speak tenderly to the heart of God’s people with a message of good news, but it seems Isaiah was a bit reluctant.  To paraphrase Isaiah’s answer, it would sound more like, “God, what could I possibly say to this people that would comfort them?  You have leveled them to the extent that they more readily believe that bad things come from you than good.  They are grass and you have withered them with the scorching heat of your judgment.” 

And to paraphrase God’s response, “Just as sure as my Word was to destroy them so now is my Word that I am coming to them tenderly to gather them up and to be their shepherd.  The whole world will see it and know that I am God.  I am coming to them and there is nothing they can do but watch in awe.”  That’s a very powerful image there, God’s just going to do it.

Well, this passage is special to me because I saw something very much like it happen.  It was during my last two years of seminary.  I was serving as the volunteer chaplain at the Masonic Home of Virginia, which is a retirement community.  About all I did there was conduct worship at their Sunday evening chapel service and occasionally visit.  So, what happened there wasn’t my doings.  It was God.  He took a chapel of very elderly exiles and turned it into a vibrant church.

When I first started, the chapel service, and I hate to say it, was a depressing sight.  There were about 35 mostly drowsy people because of the heat in there and a very screechy choir of 5 or 6 fronted by Mr. Helsabeck who was stone deaf, loud, and monotone.  More somberly, and I say this with great respect, they were exiles of life much like the Jews in Babylon.  Old age had taken from them their independence, their homes, their ability to care for themselves, their life-long friends, and their spouses.   Many had even outlived their children.  Mostly, they were there to be in a safe place while waiting their turn to die.  Death was all they had to look forward to.  There wasn’t much hope there.

For me this was my first real regular preaching work.  I was inexperienced and at a loss as to what I could possibly preach that would be of any kind of comfort to them at all.  Well, I prayed on the matter and fortunately the first Sunday I preached there was Easter Sunday and that was my answer.  Preach on the hope of our faith.  For the two years I was there it seemed that nearly every time I sat down to write the sermon what came out was in someway about hope and continuing to live as those who have hope in the face of death. 

You’d think they would have grown tired of hearing that same central message week after week, but hope was what they needed, Christian hope.  Our hope is founded on Christ’s living presence with and in us through the Holy Spirit.  We have the friendship and companionship of the Holy Spirit who renews and reinvigorates our lives daily and even moment-to-moment.  He’s a constant companion and it is his renewing presence that will flow forth through us making us to be harbingers of hope.

Those beloved children of God took the message seriously. I actually got many of my sermons from just watching how they lived and commending them for it.  From what I saw of their life together in that very close-knit community they definitively lived as those who had hope.  They visited each other in illness and supported each other when yet more bad news came.  They helped one another in small daily tasks like meals.  They prayed for each other.  Played games together.  They had a way of understanding when so and so was a little grouchy today.  These exiles knew how to live in a community-centered way that cried out, “We have hope.  We are still alive.”  Christ’s life was living in them and they were living according to it. 

Well, something began to happen there at the Masonic Home and the only way I can explain it is that Christ Jesus showed up in a powerfully obvious way.  It seemed every month attendance grew at the chapel service.  In the two years that I was there it went from 35 to nearly 90.  The choir blossomed to over 20 members.

If you will allow me to coin the terminology of the study of how churches grow, Christ gifted and equipped this little fellowship for his ministry.  There were folks there who were just natural pastors who did a lot of visiting and seeing that needs were being met throughout the community.  They had evangelists and teachers.  New residents and old did not go without an invitation to come to the chapel service and the Wednesday night Bible study, which they taught themselves and the people were excited to participate in it and learn.  They had justice advocates who requested the administration to provide extra staff on Sunday nights to help wheel the wheelchair bound folks to chapel and they did.  In fact, the administration was so impressed with how important the chapel had become in the community that they remodeled the chapel, put in a new sound system, and made space for wheelchairs.  The chapel folk even had a vision.  They didn’t go through months of congregational studies to find it.  It was more like, “Oh my God we’ve got a church here.”  And they got excited and just did what they knew they were supposed to do.  They loved to do it because ministry had become their purpose to live.  They found and lived hope.

This transformation just happened.  I couldn’t believe it.  They couldn’t believe it.  It was wonderful to see.  Here was a growing and vibrant church in a retirement home where the average age was 83.  No longer was it just some religious adjunct to the programming.  The only way we could explain it was with this image that Isaiah portrays here.  God just decided it was time to come and shepherd his people and he did it in such a way that the residents, staff, administration, and family members could only say, “Here is God.” 

Well, I’ve abstained from giving examples from the personal lives of my friends there at the Masonic Home and how they knew Christ was there personally comforting them through their hardest days.  I will just say that God who was there in a big way building up the chapel was also there in even greater proportion for these people whom he loved.  Christ was with his people giving them hope that he would continue to increase in their lives and what happened with the chapel was visible proof of it.

Well, it’s Advent and as the preacher here today I guess it’s my responsibility to proclaim that God is coming into our lives in a very wonderful way and there’s nothing we can do about it except prepare for it.  And how do we prepare for it?  How do we latch on to hope and then begin to live as those who have hope especially in a world were people are prone either to hope in the wrong things and even worse have no hope at all?  Well, the secret I believe lies in just letting God be God, letting God prove himself to the world through what he does in us.  Well, it begins with tending to God’s presence with us now in worship, prayer, studying the Scriptures, and just being still inside to feel God’s presence, letting go of this life to find his.   Sitting at Christ's feet is where we find hope.   As we do this I can say with certainty because I’ve seen it happen that God will give us a clear sense of what he put us here to do and through each of us individually and this congregation God will prove himself.

Keeping Awake

Isaiah 64:1-9

I grew up Presbyterian, but I didn’t discover until I was 19 that God was communicative and could be really felt and experienced and that Church was more than something people did who were inclined to be “good”.  At that time I took an excursion among Christians of the Nazarene persuasion.   It was a fellowship of about 30 people who met in an elementary school cafeteria on Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night.  They loved the Lord and wanted to serve him.  They felt in their hearts the worship they raised.  There was a sweet, sweet Spirit in that place.

That congregation started as a small handful of people a good 15 years before I ever went there.  I was with them roughly three years and in that time they tripled in number.  They raised enough money among themselves to buy a piece of property and build a church building with a paved parking lot debt free.  It seemed so easy, effortless.  The Lord was present with them.  That was the ‘80’s, Bible-belt, USA.

I went from that church back to my Presbyterian roots and became active in a small town Presbyterian church that had a very active family and youth ministry.  We had about 125 on a Sunday.  That church overflowed in hospitality, maturity, friendship, and support.  We grew and had to do some building modification for the afterschool ministry we had.  We did it debt free.  It was so easy.  That was the early ‘90’s.

That was all nearly thirty years ago and I humbly admit that how we did church back then is my default.  Today, I look back on those times and like Isaiah I say “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence—as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!  When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, You came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.”  That, of course, was Isaiah remembering God giving the Law to the Israelites at Mt. Sinai.

Isaiah was voicing the lament of a faithful remnant whom God had brought home to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon.  They came home only to find the good ole days were not a possibility anymore.  Those living on the Land didn’t want them back and were hostile about it.  The glory-filled life they had hoped for would prove too difficult for them to build.  It’s like Canadian Geese returning after their southern migration only to find that the site of their idyllic northern home has become an adult lifestyle gated community of condos and the residents don’t won’t their teeny yards covered in geese poo like Centre Island, Toronto.  What are the poor geese to do?

This remnant of the faithful felt God had abandoned them, that God had hidden his presence from them.  It seemed God had acted from a distance to get them home but God just wasn’t with them because their hopes, their expectations of the way things could be were not being realized.  They struggled sometimes violently to reclaim their ancestral lands.  The Temple, the place where God would live, lay in ruins for generations.  The former glory of Solomon’s Temple wouldn’t be realized for over 400 years when Herod the Great “restored” it in the years immediately preceding Jesus’ ministry.  Yet, historical accounts tell us that the institution of religion surrounding Herod's temple was so corrupt that most Israelites did not believe the presence of God ever graced the place.

But what about Isaiah’s prayer that God would tear open the heavens and come and be present with great acts among his people?  Did it go unanswered?  No.  Mark recounts in his Gospel account of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordon by John the Baptist that just as Jesus was coming up out of the water John saw the heavens torn open and the Spirit of God came down upon Jesus and a voice came from heaven saying “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.”  The heavens did get torn open and the Presence of God did return to be with his people to live in the new living Temple of Jesus the Christ.  Then, following Jesus resurrection and ascension, God poured the Spirit upon Jesus’ followers (another faithful remnant) in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost, the national feast at which the Jews celebrated the giving of the Law at Sinai.

Well, here we sit like a faithful remnant, waiting for, longing for a new revival, waiting for God to show up and be present and make things like they were thirty years ago when we knew how to do church.   What do we do?  

Well, Jesus promised he would return and he told his disciples to “Keep awake”.  It’s been 2,000 years now.  In that span of time the church has had periods of sleeping and awakening.  Today, we are the by-product of a church, a faithful remnant, that woke up 500 years ago when Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation in conjunction with the invention of the printing press. 

As a faithful remnant of the Protestant awakening we live in the day when the printed page has been superseded by the webpage.  Information is disseminated and processed radically differently now than it was just 30 years ago.  Church isn’t where people come to find religious information.  They get it off the Internet and talk about it in coffee shops among small groups of friends.  This is a huge factor as to why when our snowbirds return in the spring they find their home churches growing smaller.  We need to adapt but simply learning how to use social media, though helpful and necessary, won’t bring people back to church.  You can build a coffee shop and people will come; but build a church…meh.

Just days before his saving death Jesus told his disciples to keep awake while they wait, so also we who live in the days of the death of the institutional church need to keep awake while we wait for God to tear open the heavens and come be present with us today.  Awake doesn’t mean be gimmicky like a multi-national fast food chain that’s the same wherever you go.  We need to be a local, slow food, home-grown feast devoted to Jesus and committed to being his disciples.  Facebook and blogging on the Internet isn’t the highway home for the church.  The road home is the long, slow road of discipleship – the living embodiment of the Jesus who gave his life for this world to feast.  Jesus’ life symbolized, signified and tasted in the meal of Holy Communion abides in the feast of the Holy Spirit-filled fellowship enjoyed by Jesus’ disciples gathered around him.

We and the Holy Spirit-filled fellowship we share rather than the Internet must be the living source of the Jesus whom people should be talking about in small groups in coffee shops.  It would be great if we as a church took the task to hand of taking a year to equip ourselves for taking our Jesus-embodied fellowship to where people meet today.  I’m talking a congregation-wide discipleship course.  This will require more from us than Sunday attendance, but will transform us.  Here’s the program – Greg Ogden’s Discipleship Essentials.  This is not fast food.  It is a sit-down meal.  But, it’s the kind of focusing on Jesus that will wake us up and keep us awake.  Amen.