In Search of the Christmas Spirit

Advent 3: The restoring face of God
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126:1-6

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Eleven days til Christmas.
As usual, about this time,
lots of talk about “the Christmas spirit.”
We’re all trying to “get into the spirit of Christmas.”
That means different things to different people, of course.
But generally, the “Christmas spirit” means
feelings of hope, peace, joy, optimism, generosity,
friendship, family, community.
Bottom line is, the Christmas spirit is joy. It’s happiness.
And it’s supposed to be contagious.

But this year, there’s a complicating factor in the Christmas spirit.
The economy.
Listen to these news headlines from the last couple weeks:
How to Renew Your Christmas Spirit with the Economy in the Dumps
Sour Economy and Layoffs Dampen Holiday Spirit
Layoffs Could Put a Crimp in the Christmas Spirit
Shortage of Money Endangers the Christmas Spirit
Can Retailers Get Consumers into the Christmas Spirit?

It’s clear that our culture makes a direct connection
between the Christmas spirit and money,
between happiness and our ability to buy, spend, and consume.

But that should come as no surprise.
All year round, every minute of every day,
we see evidence that our culture believes
happiness is something that can be bought.
And buy it we do.
People literally try to purchase happiness by the dose:
by the bottle, by the shot, by the joint, by the hook-up.

And don’t think this just applies to drugs and sex.
All of us, at some level, at one time or another,
try to purchase happiness.
Whether in rich food, stylish clothing, sporty cars,
exciting entertainment, or exotic travel.
Or simply buying new earrings, or a cool gadget,
or a Kline’s chocolate peanut-butter in a waffle cone . . .
We buy in the hope that it might pull us out of our doldrums.

Maybe it’s an effort to stave off sadness or maintain happiness.
Maybe we buy because we like the sense of euphoria it brings,
the momentary comfort, the feeling of pleasure . . .
even if the feeling is fleeting, which it always is.

Now I don’t think anyone here truly believes, deep down,
that money can buy lasting happiness.
And that’s certainly not our conscious motivation,
every time we go to the grocery, or department store,
or enjoy dinner and a movie.

But I do think we are all on a quest for joy,
for deep and lasting happiness.
And on that quest, we are likely to try many different paths.
And most of those paths don’t lead us very far.

It’s not that the quest is wrong.
Not at all.
On the contrary, it’s what God wants us to do.
To pursue joy. To seek the full and abundant life.
_____________________

Every year on the third Sunday of Advent, Joy Sunday,
the message of the scripture readings
is that there is a way provided that leads to joy.
There is a path, and God wants us to walk it.

There is a Christmas spirit worth pursuing.
But it has very little to do with sluggish retail sales,
or a falling Dow Jones,
or a diminishing 401K,
or rising unemployment.

We have a lot to learn about joy in our scriptures.
Let’s look first at the prophet and dreamer Isaiah.
The words of Isaiah 61, told by Tilli Yoder,
should surprise us, more than finding high Christmas spirit
in the middle of economic collapse.
Isaiah said to a lost people, in exile, abandoned and without hope,
“I’m here to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.
This is the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Right in the middle of the people of Israel’s deepest suffering,
when they stood ankle-deep in ashes,
the dreaming prophet said,
“I’m here to give you a garland instead of ashes,
to comfort all who mourn,
to anoint you with the oil of gladness,
to place on you the mantel of praise.”

Oh yeah? Where was Isaiah’s evidence?
On what grounds did the prophet have the nerve
to tell the people to cheer up, everything’s going to be fine?
When the soil was hard and dry and cracked,
how could Isaiah dare talk about green shoots springing up?

The joy Isaiah was dreaming about
was not joy based on happy circumstances.
It was joy based on a larger vision.
Isaiah was driven by a vision that came from God,
a vision of a peaceable kingdom
where God’s reign was unhindered,
where lion, wolf, lamb, and kid would live together in peace.
Isaiah’s dream was faithful dreaming,
not wishful thinking.

Wishful thinkers try to ignore present painful reality,
and imagine something new and beautiful into existence.
Faithful dreamers do not deny the darkness that is,
but they start with the light.
They begin with God and God’s purposes for creation,
which cannot and will not, in the end, be thwarted.

Faithful dreamers see with the eyes of faith.
They don’t close their eyes to the facts.
If they are standing in the middle of a dry river-bed,
they admit that the soil is dry and hard and cracked.
But they refuse to let their lives be defined and ruled by that fact.
They allow themselves, by faith, to sink their toes in the mud
and watch the fish swim by.
They dream God’s dream.

We heard the same faithful dreaming this morning
in 1 Thessalonians, where Paul could tell persecuted Christians
to rejoice always, give thanks in all circumstances.
And in the Gospel of John,
where in the midst of crushing oppression from Rome,
one of the darker periods of Israel’s history,
John the Baptist could come and, as it says,
“testify to the light.”
_____________________

So maybe that’s the path to joy that all of us are looking for:
Learning how to dream God’s dream.
Maybe that’s the secret to living in a Christmas spirit year-round:
Seeing with the eyes of faith.

Well, yes it is, but something is missing.
Let’s get practical. Let’s get real.
If all we can say about living above the sorrows of life,
is “have more faith” . . .
If the only message of the church to a society gripped by fear,
is “dream God’s dream” . . .
then I’m afraid we’re going to lose some folks.

Because society has all kinds of practical solutions for our fears.
And they’re for sale.
What alternative do we have to offer?
Well, I happen to think the church has a better alternative.
And it’s both simple and practical.
And I guarantee it will work.
Three things we can do to stay on the path to joy:

Tell stories.
Stick together.
And love what God loves.

_____________________

Number 1, tell stories.
That’s what Psalm 126 was about,
which we read a few minutes ago.
The people were singing their story.

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.
Back then . . . our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy;
Back then it was said among the nations,
“The Lord has done great things for them.”
The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.

Past tense. This psalm is a look back . . . a history lesson in a song.
The psalmist says to the people, “Back in the day...
remember what God did,
and remember how we laughed?”
Finding the path of joy, requires looking back.
Joy is rooted and nourished
in the memory of God’s acts of mercy.

Recalling the works of God in the past,
is the way we get oriented on this path of joy.
We can’t find our way down a hard path,
without knowing from whence we came.
And to keep alive the memory of God’s mercy and goodness,
we have to be intentional, diligent.
We have to retell the stories. Over and over again.
Our culture is obsessed with anything and everything new.
That’s what drives the so-called “Christmas spirit”
in the retail sector.
The desire for something else new.
As a culture, we’re losing the skill of cultivating memory,
of valuing where we have been.

Joy is rooted in a deep familiarity with the God
who has been faithful to God’s people throughout history,
and is not going to abandon us now in the crisis of the day.
_____________________

The second practical activity on the path to joy,
is sticking together.
Maybe you didn’t know that Psalm 126
is part of a series of 15, from Psalm 120-134.
They’re called the psalms of ascent.
You’ll see that subtitle in your Bibles.
It is believed that the people sang these psalms
while they were on pilgrimage to the temple.
The temple was on top of a hill, Mt. Zion.
Thus, psalms of ascent.

Picture a huge crowd of pilgrims,
men and women and children.
Out in front are the musicians playing trumpet, lute, and drum.
All are singing this song together, in rhythm with their steps,
slowly and steadily making their way together
uphill toward the temple.
The key part of this picture, of course,
is that nobody is walking up that hill alone.

They’re each walking it themselves, but not alone.
They have other pilgrims nearby to lift their spirits
when they get weary,
to encourage them, to egg them on.
There are other pilgrims by their side,
to maintain joy on their behalf,
when they don’t have the personal capacity to sing.

Sometimes we need people to pray what we cannot pray,
to see what we cannot see.
Our pilgrimage is a pilgrimage of the people.
We walk together.
We encounter obstacles together.
We arrive together.
We meet God in worship together.
There is no lasting Christian joy
without being in community.
_____________________

The third thing the church can do in an anxious and fearful culture,
is to love what God loves.
Maybe the most important five words in Isaiah’s dream
were in verse 8: “I the Lord love justice.”

Justice, or righteousness—same Hebrew word—
is what God is all about.
It defines the mission of God.
God’s love and longing is to restore justice in all creation.
God is the One who created all things right and just
to begin with.
And after creation, God said, “This is very good.”
By those words, God declares what God loves.
God loves creation that is in harmony and peace,
each creature fulfilling its God-ordained part.
All in right relationship.
All reflecting God’s justice.

So it stands to reason,
that if we want to walk the path of joy,
we must orient our lives around what God loves.
We will value what God values.
We will live in the righteousness and justice of God.

You know, if we were created in the image of God,
doesn’t it make sense that we will be most alive,
and most fully human,
and most joy-full,
when our passions line up with God’s passions,
when our loves match God’s loves,
when our values reflect God’s values.
If we were created in God’s image,
we will be at our best
when our lives accurately reflect that image.
When we love what God loves.

So the more familiar we are with what moves God,
with where God’s heart is,
and the more we pursue that,
the more joy we will know in life.

God’s heart is reconciling all people and creation to himself.
God is moved to deep compassion for the poor and the suffering,
God has a longing to restore those who are lost and wandering.
Our path to joy
is a path oriented around those longings and loves of God.

In no way is this a denial of the sadness and tragedy and struggle
present in our lives in this world.
In no way is this a suggestion that we should not
weep and grieve and lament and protest the darkness around us.
The brokenness of the world is a reality.
But it is not our starting point.
We were created by God and for God.
We were created in love and for love.
We were created with joy and for joy.

Even while we weep and mourn the sorrows of life,
there is a deeper current, an underground river so to speak,
that is a river of joy . . .
if we have aligned our loves with God’s loves,
our purposes with God’s purposes.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a culture oriented
around self-fulfillment,
around satisfying individual drives and desires,
around the accumulation of material wealth and power,
is a culture that, when times are hard,
get paralyzed by fear, anxiety, and self-doubt.

We as a church have an alternative to offer the world,
if we make it our practice—
our continual practice, and our sacred practice—

to tell stories
to stick together
to love what God loves.

We will be a people of joy
when we live as a community of memory
that commits itself together
to orient itself around God’s mission and passion.
We will be a people,
who even in the midst of the most dire circumstances,
can say with full confidence,

Faithful and true is the word of our God.
All of God’s works are so worthy of trust.
God’s mercy falls on the just and the right;
Full of God’s love is the earth.

We who revere and find hope in our God
Live in the kindness and joy of God’s wing.
God will protect us from darkness and death;
God will not leave us to starve.

God of creation, we long for your truth;
You are the water of life that we thirst.
Grant that your love and your peace touch our hearts,
All of our hope lies in you.*

God of life,
rain down your love and your joy on your people.

—Philip L. Kniss, December 14, 2008

*from the song, "Rain Down," by Jaime Cortez, based on Psalm 33



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Found by God at Peace

Advent 2: The comforting face of God
Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8

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This is Advent. The word means coming.
God has come.
God is come.
God will come.
Those are the great truths of the Christian faith.
And in Advent, we celebrate them.
God come. To be with us in Jesus Christ. Emmanuel.

But simply to declare those truths begs some questions.
This season of celebration is also known as
a season of spiritual searching.
When God comes to us, what does God find?
In what state does God find us?

In the scriptures on the second Sunday of Advent,
we always meet John the Baptist.
We heard the story told by Tara this morning.

The question of what God will find when he comes,
is exactly the question John was dealing with.
John was preparing the way for Jesus to come.
Jesus the anointed one, the Messiah, was about to be revealed.
John was getting the people ready.

Which was no small task.
Let’s recall what John and his Jewish people
were dealing with in the Middle East 2000 years ago.
His Hebrew community of faith, the children of Abraham,
were losing sight of their peoplehood,
they were getting farther and farther from the covenant.
Which was quite understandable.
They were under extreme pressure.
The Empire of Rome was slowly and surely crushing their identity.
They were becoming more and more like the Romans and Greeks,
and most of the Hebrew people didn’t notice, and didn’t care.
There were some sub-groups that were strong, almost separatist.
Pharisees, Sadducees, Nazarites, Zealots.
They tried their best to strengthen and renew the Jewish identity.
To help the people remember who they were.
These groups used vastly different methods—
ritual purity, fasting, denial, violent rebellion.
They operated out of different convictions,
different assumptions about what God wanted for the Jews.
So there was a lot of conflict between them.
Meanwhile,
God’s people were losing their communal moral grounding.

Now . . . think about that description of a people.
A faith community once close, cohesive, in covenant,
now fragmented, polarized,
under cultural and political pressure.
A faith community losing their peoplehood in a hostile culture.
A faith community losing touch with the core
of who God called them to be in this world,
because they have assimilated into it,
rather than engage it with their faith.

I could be describing 1st-century Palestinian Judaism.
Or I could be describing 21st-century American Christianity.

Seems like the social and spiritual state of affairs
in these two faith communities—
are more similar, than they are different.
So maybe John the Baptist’s message is relevant to us, too.

Actually, John’s message wasn’t even original to him.
He was comparing their state of affairs,
with that of his people hundreds of years earlier.
John borrowed the text of his sermon directly from Isaiah,
the great prophet of Israel in the olden days.
When the Hebrew people were floundering in exile,
Isaiah was calling them back into covenant.

So here we have three vastly different cultures,
in vastly different eras,
over a period of 2,500 years,
to which the same sermon applies.
And it’s fresh every time.

It goes like this,
“People of God, remember who you are.
Repent. Return to your God, to your covenant.
Return to your mission and identity as a people of God.
God is full of mercy. God will abundantly pardon.
God wants to move among you,
to form you as a people,
to partner with you, as a people,
to establish God’s reign in the world,
to bring about what is right and just,
to restore what has been broken.
So repent, my people. Prepare the way for the Lord.”

That is Isaiah’s message and John the Baptist’s message—
a message to the lost people of God.
Repent, people. Repent.
But this is not the kind of repentance you might be thinking of.

This is not exactly the same as the repentance called for
by a revival preacher inviting us to walk the sawdust trail.
This is not you and me individually, feeling sorry,
being emotionally convicted of my personal sin.
That might happen in the process.
I very well might feel sorrow and regret
for particular ways I’ve been disobedient to the covenant.

But repentance is not the same as sorrow.
Repentance is not remorse.
Repentance is a change in our way of thinking.
The Greek word for repentance, metanoia,
literally means, to “think again,”
to “change one’s mind.”

Thinking rightly, is the first step toward living rightly.
It doesn’t guarantee a change in behavior.
But faithful thought,
points us toward faithful living.
I’m not saying right thinking saves us.
No, right thinking prepares us for God’s coming.
It prepares us for the Advent God wants to usher in.
It makes us ready for God’s saving work.

That’s why John the Baptist was very modest in his claims.
He preached repentance, and he baptized.
But he didn’t tell the people coming out of the water,
“Okay, now you’re saved.”
He said, “Okay, now you’re ready for God to come to save you.”
He said, “I’m just the messenger.
One is about to come who will do the saving,
the Messiah.
Don’t look to me. Look to him.
I’m not even worthy to stoop down and untie his shoes.”

Furthermore, this call to repentance
was a call to the whole community.
People were individually being invited to respond, yes,
but the question they responded to was,
Do you want to identify yourself
with this new thing God wants to do with his people?
Are you ready to join this repenting community
who are going think differently about who they are,
and about what God is up to in this world?

Communal repentance was the essential step of preparation.
A change in thinking was exactly what the people needed
to get them ready.
_____________________

So if John the Baptist’s message applies to
the lost people of God today,
what would it look like for the church of Jesus Christ, in this place,
to have communal repentance,
a collective change in our thinking?
It’s a big question. But it’s worth wrestling with.
And we don’t wrestle with it often enough as a church.
Critical thinking takes a lot of work, and time, and energy.

Much easier to go with the flow, with what seems to work.
If what we’re doing here in church
looks good, feels good, sounds good,
it must be good.

The trouble with that line of thinking is,
our thoughts and values are so deeply formed
by the culture around us,
that what looks good to our culture looks good to us.
And we end up with a bunch of “successful churches”
that are mirror images of the culture around them . . .
where big is better than small,
where popular is better than unpopular,
where now is better than later,
where security is better than risk,
where individual happiness and personal fulfillment
is the ultimate goal.
Trouble with that line of thinking is,
we end up with a kind of church and a kind of Christianity
that is just one more product to market, to advertize,
and to sell to individual consumers.
God and religion are just one more path
to a better life, a happier and more secure life.
So the “good life” is our end, and God is our means.

Brothers and sisters,
whenever anyone makes the God of all creation
into the means for achieving something they want,
they have just committed the sin of idolatry.
Idolatry is something we religious people are very good at.

That’s what was getting John the Baptist all riled up.
His people had lost themselves.
They had become good citizens of the Roman Empire,
but they had stopped depending on the God who walked with them
out of physical and social and spiritual slavery.
They were opting for the safe path.
They chose not to risk the wrath of the Emperor,
by openly declaring their undivided loyalty to Yahweh,
the God of Abraham.
John was inviting them to repent,
to think differently about themselves,
to think differently about their God.

That’s the only thing that would prepare them adequately,
for what God was about to do among them,
in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
_____________________

We really are in the same boat today. Most of us.
We play it safe.
We put our security where our culture puts its security.
In the strength of the dollar.
In the rise of the stock market.
In the ability to buy all the stuff we want,
and protect ourselves from those who would take it from us.

But a collective, communal repentance of God’s people today
would completely reorient us as a church.
We would stop thinking of church as
just another group to belong to,
or activity to attend,
or charitable cause to support,
or spiritual product to consume.
Being an active part of the people of God
participating in the mission of God in the world
would be the—I said THE—orienting reality of life.
It would form our values and shape our thinking.

So when we face threatening circumstances
such as the world faces today—
economically, socially, militarily, environmentally,
our instinctive response would not be to hunker down in fear,
or to slip into our protective shell,
and hold on to what we have for dear life.
No, reoriented people of God ask people-of-God type questions.
They look for signs of God’s reign
even in the midst of a desolate wilderness.
And they live in genuine hope.
And deep trust.
And peace.
And comfort.
They live in a spirit of readiness for God’s salvation.

Our hope and comfort and peace come
from the voices we choose to listen to.
A repentant, reoriented people of God
will hear the voice of God in the desert,
saying, “the valleys will be lifted up,
the rough places made level,
and the glory of the Lord will be revealed.”

They don’t consider it folly,
when in the middle of a long exile,
they hear a welcome word, like Isaiah’s
“Here is your God!
He will feed his flock like a shepherd;
he will gather the lambs in his arms,
and carry them in his bosom,
and gently lead the mother sheep.”

They don’t read Psalm 85 as wishful thinking . . .
“For God the Lord will speak peace to his people . . .
Surely his salvation is at hand . . .
Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.”

They take it as genuine encouragement,
not religious mumbo-jumbo,
when they read the apostle’s words in 2 Peter,
“The Lord is not slow about his promise . . .
Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things,
strive to be found by God at peace.”
God is coming.
Strive to be found by God at peace.

When God’s people repent together,
when they turn in their thinking and their living,
and reorient themselves around the hopeful truth
that God has come, God is come, and God will come in Jesus Christ,
it changes everything.
It brings deep hope and trust.
It brings a centeredness to life.
It brings peace.

It makes them ready for the present and future Advent of God in Christ.
I think this is at the heart of what we at Park View Mennonite
are trying to do,
as we begin a process of re-examining our vision,
and our priorities as a congregation.
It will be an opportunity for communal repentance,
for a collective change in our thinking about ourselves,
and about what God is up to in the world.
It will put us in a position for God’s Advent among us.
It will make us ready for God’s saving work.
It won’t save us, anymore than good works saves anyone.
God saves. And repentance gets us ready.

So whenever and however God comes,
we will be found at peace.
We will, like the hymn writer put it,
have our hope built on nothing less than Jesus.
“When Christ shall come with trumpet sound,
oh, may we then in him be found,
dressed in his righteousness alone,
faultless to stand before the throne.”

—Philip L. Kniss, December 7, 2008


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