The title of this blog, "Abounding in Love, Abiding in Grace" is a phrase from a song titled "Benediction Song" written by Professor of Bible and Religion and family friend, Patricia Shelly. The words are:
The Lord lift you up, the Lord take your hand,
the Lord lead you forth and cause you to stand,
secure in God's word, seeking God's face,
abounding in love, abiding in grace.
The song is special to me for a few reasons. I remember singing it as a kid in church and feeling pretty special that I knew the writer. :) It has become a tie to my Mennonite heritage for me, and served as such in my ordination service. Maybe most importantly it sings of the kind of life in God I strive for. I believe that before I do anything, before any of us does anything, God lifts us and leads us and causes us to abound in love and abide in grace. Our lives are blessed to be lived secure in God's love and grace, seeking to see God's face in the faces of others and to be God's face - and hands and feet - in the world.
Another reason I chose to begin blogging now is, I think, something to do with the new church year and the urgency of Advent this year. I find myself, as many of us do, begging for the presence of Christ in the world with more insistence, more desperation. As many of my colleagues did, I preached about the massacre in Newtown, CT this last Sunday through the lenses of Zephaniah, Philippians and Luke's portrayal of John the Baptist. I relied heavily on the faithful witness of other bloggers and facebook friends to find my way to the gospel. Below is the manuscript of that sermon. I fancy myself a better speaker than writer, but I hope it comes across. And if it helps you see a bit of the light of the Christ Child this day, God bless you for that.
Peace to you.
Rev. Sarah
Friesen-Carper
December 16,
2012, Peace Lutheran Church
Advent
3: Zephaniah 3:14-20; Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:1-18
The words of the prophet Zephaniah and the apostle Paul this
morning are hard for me to hear. I want to plug my ears in defiance or just
throw them out altogether. Though I usually love these words from Zephaniah, “Sing, Daughter Zion; shout aloud, Israel!
Be glad and rejoice with all your heart!” or from Philippians,
“Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!” – today they almost
feel hollow to me, shallow, almost trite.
After the shooting on Friday and the
senseless deaths of 20 innocents, I’d prefer the words from Jeremiah chapter 31
and Matthew chapter 2, “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because
they are no more.” Or better yet, I’d like to yell and scream with John the
Baptist, “You brood of vipers!” I’m so angry with lawmakers who sit on their
hands when it comes to gun control. I’m angry with stigmas about mental illness
and the poor health care coverage for those who suffer. I’m angry with the
media for making the shooter famous and for cinematizing the raw emotions of
the grieving. I’m angry with people who say that because God isn’t invited into
our schools, God stood by and let this happen. Broods of vipers! All of them!
But really all that yelling and all my anger is just a mask
for my deep, deep fear and deep, deep grief. Grief for the loss of life and the
loss of innocence. Grief for the families and the community in Newtown. Grief
for that poor boy and all who suffer mental illness. Fear for my child and all
our children. Fear for my mother, the principle of an elementary school. Fear
that things will never, ever get better.
In John the Baptist’s day, the days of Tiberius Caesar and
Pontius Pilate and Herod and so on John was not the only one offering baptisms
in the region of Judea. There were many religious zealots living somewhat
roughly, preaching wildly and attracting a following. Most of them offered
baptism as a sign of cleansing and dedication or re-dedication to something.
People from all over Jerusalem and all over Judea would head out into the
wilderness to find these religious enthusiasts and learn from them the ways of
spiritual enlightenment. To them, John was not necessarily different from any
of these others. He was likely not the only one people thought was maybe the
Messiah. Everyone was looking for something.
Something new maybe or something true. Something to reassure them that God had
not abandoned them. Something that offered hope in a hopeless world.
You see, they lived in a world of wars and sickness and pain
and poverty like never before seen. Roman law allowed very little freedom. They
still remembered the massacre in Galilee a few years back when a group of
villagers tried to overthrow the Roman authority. The whole village was wiped
out – men and women and children. Even the houses and stores and barns and
animals were burned. And the religious authority was not better. In their world
illness of any and every kind was assumed to be a result of sin and therefore
deserved. Some people were worthy of God’s attention and some were not. People
thought to be sinful or unclean were turned away from synagogues and the Temple
and excluded from religious rites.
It really wasn’t all that different than things are today.
And just like today, people were turning wherever they could to ask the big
life questions. Where is God? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does
suffering exist in the world? If God really loves us, how can he let this stuff
happen? Does God really even exist?
These are the same questions that the people asked the
prophet Zephaniah. He was a prophet in Babylon. The people had been taken from
their homes in Jerusalem. Their temple - the visible sign of God’s presence and
love for them - was destroyed in their presence. Their homes and fields and
shops and barns were reduced to ashes. Their families were brutally attacked
and many innocent children and adults were killed. The rest were hauled off to
do slave labor in Babylon, treated like animals and living in abject poverty.
Psalm 137 which begins, “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and
wept when we remembered Zion.” In their
grief and shame, they asked Zephaniah, where is our God now? Where is the one
who promised steadfast love and faithfulness?
The Apostle Paul also did not write from his lake house in
Greece. He wrote this letter to the Philippians from his jail cell in Rome
where he grew ever weaker and where he was convinced he would die.
Very often we want to focus on the nice side, the good side
the warm and cuddly side of Scripture and certainly of our lives. Phrases like
“Rejoice! Again I say rejoice!” are reduced to happiness when everyone in the
family gets along and is gathered around the Christmas tree drinking eggnog and
singing Deck the Halls. But this Advent we cannot blithely ignore the reality
of pain in the world and in our lives. And these readings are not meant to
accompany Hallmark movies where the good guys win and the bad guys lose.
Paul’s command to “rejoice!”, Zephaniah’s demand that we
sing and shout, even John’s words with their challenge to repent – these are
all radical claims on hope. As one of my colleagues wrote, “they have the
audacity to speak not only of rejoicing, but of living in any circumstance with confident
hope in a loving and gracious God
who is still present even in the
midst of the pain, suffering, and tragedy that is part of human community.”[i]
And that is the true meaning of Christmas and our Advent preparation. These
readings promise the coming of One who in the words of
Zephaniah “is with you, saves you, takes great delight
in you; in his
love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.” And in the words of Paul,
will give us the peace which surpasses all understanding. And even in the words
of John the Baptist will burn away all the evil, pain, grief and despair – the
chaff of our lives – and bring us to himself.
We are people of a God who comes to us in the flesh. One who takes on all the sinful, broken, grief
stricken parts of the world. One who sits with us in the midst of our grief and
pain. He is not a distant, disapproving Father waiting for an invitation to
dinner. God is always and ever present, especially
in the deepest darkness of our lives.
We are people who, because of the grace of God, without
sugarcoating death or glossing over sorrow, can fully and painfully enter the
grief of this world, and can stand and even with tears in our eyes, “have the
audacity to proclaim joy in the midst of sorrow and life in the midst of
death.”
We are people who know that “God’s love is not negated or
overshadowed by tragedy, senseless violence, or the inexplicable horror that
one human being might inflict on another. At the center of our faith is the
truth that God is especially in these times and these places.”
This is the God in whom our faith is grounded. The one who
is with us in our suffering and perfectly loves us even in our imperfection.
And so with boldness and perhaps some tears we are going to
sing Joy to the World. We sing it as a lament that the fullness of God’s joy is
not yet here. We sing it as a prayer that God’s joy come to us again. And we
sing it with hope and expectation as we look for that time when God’s joy does
fill the earth. Amen.
