Ecclesiastes 3.1–11 & Isaiah 60.1–6
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning, Plymouth Congregational UCC Fort Collins, Colorado I’m not usually one to make New Year’s resolutions, in part because I am no good at keeping them. But we find ourselves together as a church on this last day of 2017, and it seems important to reflect on the past year and also to look ahead. And today is also the seventh day of Christmas, and though you’ll have to go outside to see “seven swans a-swimming,” we in the church still get to ponder the meanings and the potentials of Christmas, even if the presents under the tree have all been opened. If there is -– as the writer of Ecclesiastes claims -– a time for all things, then what time is it now? For many of us it seems as if the bitterness of our political discourse over the last year has dominated our thinking and our action. It has imbued some of our daily lives with a sense of fear and anxiety. The threat of a nuclear war with North Korea, threats to deport Dreamers, creating physical or legal walls to keep immigrants out, American withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, the take-back of financial support for the United Nations, the roll-back of protected national monument lands in Utah, the revelation of sexual abuse and harassment by many women, the moral bankruptcy of the religious right, the new tax law that enshrines corporate tax cuts in the hopes that some of the wealth will trickle down, the emasculation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the diminution of the role of science in federal agencies, and the “seven dirty words” that employees of the Centers for Disease Control are forbidden to use in agency budget documents. I’m not forbidden to use them: “science-based,” “fetus,” “transgender,” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” and “evidence-based.” Feeling anxious yet? We’re actually seeing some of that anxiety here at Plymouth. I’m hearing it from some of you in conversation, and together we are experiencing it in the nervousness within our congregational family system…it is infecting our common life…how could it not? Many of us have never lived through a major war…some of you remember World War II and Korea and Vietnam, but for those of us who don’t remember those wars, Afghanistan and Iraq and the Gulf War seem very far away, perhaps because they were not fought by middle-class draftees. But in some ways, this time of national anxiety seems like a time of war…except that not all of us are on the same side. It seems like the fabric of our nation is fraying, and many of us have only lived through “a time to sew” and now we seem to be encountering “a time to tear” and to rend. Perhaps it feels like we are part of Isaiah’s prophecy: “Darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples.” It is a time like this that the world most needs people like you. It is a time to summon courage…the courage that you may not yet have had the opportunity to test. It is a time that the world most needs the ethical and moral witness of progressive Christianity. It is a time that the world most needs congregations like Plymouth that will stand up, using the life and teachings of Jesus to help steer our nation back toward compassion, justice, peace, freedom, integrity, honesty, selflessness, and generosity. What are the lessons we might derive during this time when the fabric frays? I think one of the lessons for middle-class folks is that it’s not all about us, that we have to become more active in community life and political life if we want to affect change. I think that for many of us, especially we who are comfortable, it will mean sacrifice for the common good. I think, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, that it’s time not to ask what Plymouth can do for you, but to ask what you can do for Plymouth… because Plymouth continues to be one of the most critical voices and forces for progressive Christianity and progressive community in the region. You have been entrusted with the light and love of Christ. I don’t care if you have three advanced degrees or if you never saw the inside of a college classroom, whether you have a three-figure income or whether you are barely making ends meet, whether you feel too old or too young to pitch in, whether your ancestors came from Germany or Georgia or Korea or Kansas. You have been entrusted with the love and light of Christ, not simply so that you can feel warm and comfortable, but so that you can share that love and light with others. It’s time for us to stop worrying about the beauty of our remodeled kitchens and second homes and the newest brewery and instead to start thinking more about the needs of others, the needs of our community, the needs of God’s world. None of us has the luxury just to bask in the glow of our own wellbeing…because that glow is actually not ours, it is God’s. And that glow isn’t just to help us feel warmth and light…it is to provide warmth and light for God’s world. You know on Christmas Eve, those of us in the chancel have the best seat in the house, because we get to experience the wave of candlelight that spreads up and down the pews to create a sea of light. One flame makes only small a difference in a dark sanctuary, but the warm glow of hundreds of candles illuminate it in an almost magical way. So it is with the light that each of us has been given to bear. To be sure, we can illumine a few shadowy places on our own, but together, we can become a beacon of hope. It is easy for us to give ourselves over to despair, fear, hopelessness, and anxiety. But that is not the path you are called to follow as a bearer of Christ’s light. So, let’s get courageous as we finish one year and begin a new one. Let’s not shrink back from the call of our God to make a difference in the world. Let’s not recede into fear, but rather let us empower one another with faith and with light. We can live our lives from a place of fear and scarcity or we can live our lives from a place of faith and abundance…we just can’t do both with the same time. I leave you today with the “Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem” by Maya Angelou (NY: Random House, 2005). Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses. Flood waters await us in our avenues. Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalanche Over unprotected villages. The sky slips low and grey and threatening. We question ourselves. What have we done to so affront nature? We worry, God. Are you there? Are you there really? Does the covenant you made with us still hold? Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters, Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air. The world is encouraged to come away from rancor, Come the way of friendship. It is the Glad Season. Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner. Flood waters recede into memory. Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us As we make our way to higher ground. Hope is born again in the faces of children It rides on the shoulders of our aged as they walk into their sunsets. Hope spreads around the earth. Brightening all things, Even hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors. In our joy, we think we hear a whisper. At first it is too soft. Then only half heard. We listen carefully as it gathers strength. We hear a sweetness. The word is Peace. It is loud now. It is louder. Louder than the explosion of bombs. We tremble at the sound. We are thrilled by its presence. It is what we have hungered for. Not just the absence of war. But, true Peace. A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies. Security for our beloveds and their beloveds. We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas. We beckon this good season to wait a while with us. We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come. Peace. Come and fill us and our world with your majesty. We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian, Implore you, to stay a while with us. So we may learn by your shimmering light How to look beyond complexion and see community. It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time. On this platform of peace, we can create a language To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other. At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ Into the great religions of the world. We jubilate the precious advent of trust. We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope. All the earth’s tribes loosen their voices To celebrate the promise of Peace. We, Angels and Mortals, Believers and Non-Believers, Look heavenward and speak the word aloud. Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud. Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation. Peace, My Brother. Peace, My Sister. Peace, My Soul. Amen. © 2017 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses. AuthorThe Rev. Hal Chorpenning has been Plymouth's senior minister since 2002. Before that, he was associate conference minister with the Connecticut Conference of the UCC. A grant from the Lilly Endowment enabled him to study Celtic Christianity in the UK and Ireland. Prior to ordained ministry, Hal had a business in corporate communications. Read more about Hal.
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Christmas Eve Meditation:
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning, Plymouth Congregational UCC Fort Collins, Colorado December 24, 2017 Why will 800 or 900 people struggle out through the cold on this night to come here to Plymouth? What is it that brings you here tonight? Is there something you expect to receive or to witness or to share in? What are you hoping for? Maybe you’ve come for the music. Personally, Christmas carols are among my favorite types of music we make here in the church. And on Christmas Eve we literally pull out all the stops, are led by a wonderful choir, and are lifted up by the chiming of bells and the sound of brass. Maybe you came because you feel as if coming to church on Christmas Eve is an obligation. You are home visiting your parents for Christmas, and you are here to be with them and you know they appreciate you being here. Perhaps the reason you came is that indescribable feeling of peace you experience, even for just a moment or two, when the lights are down and the candlelight spreads from person to person, and there is a sea of light in the darkness of a cold winter’s night. And this year especially, when there is so much anxiety in our national politics, we all need to find a quiet, peaceful center. There are multiple reasons for being here, and I would not presume to judge your motives for being here. I am just glad to see each of you here. Whatever your reason for being with us tonight, you are most welcome in this place. And whatever reason you are imagining right now for being here in this place…I am going to suppose that somewhere in your experience, there is a longing for an experience of the sacred, of the holy, of the divine within yourself and among those who are gathered. Perhaps, like the magi – foreigners who set out across the desert, following a star – you aren’t entirely sure what you will find at the end of your trek tonight. Maybe you will sense a presence within yourself that wasn’t quite detectable before…maybe when you receive the elements of communion or when you boldly sing “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” or when you lower your unlit candle over the flame held by the person next to you, or when you hear familiar Bible stories, or when you see the cast of characters in the nativity scene…maybe you will sense the presence of God in your midst. This year, I had a wonderful sabbatical and was able to travel in Italy. And in the Roman Catholic churches where I visited or worshiped, the prevailing symbol of the faith is the crucifix: Jesus nailed to the cross. Symbols are important, because they are like road signs that point beyond themselves toward a larger reality that has not yet come fully into view. And if your dominant symbol is the crucifix, it speaks clearly of the death of Jesus and its importance in your faith. And a key interpretation –- one that I don’t share –- is that Jesus had to die to pay for your sins. In many Protestant churches, you will see a cross without the body as the dominant symbol of our faith. It is the cross of the resurrection, so it conveys the idea that what is really important in your faith isn’t just that Jesus died, but rather that he is risen. So, it’s a symbol of hope. The dominant symbols of two branches of the Christian household are symbols of death and resurrection…they are symbols from the last week of Jesus’ life. I’ve been wondering, though, if we need a new symbol for our faith. One that gets at the marvel…the miracle…of Jesus’ life rather than his death. And I wonder, too, what is stirring within each of you right now…what brought your through our doors tonight. Is it that Jesus died or is it that he was born? Over the millennia, the church has spent a tremendous amount of energy creating dogma and creeds so that the faith would “get it right,” as if “having the right answers” is what our faith is all about and that the church could do that for you. My guess is that your faith doesn’t center around the argument that Jesus is of one substance with the creator or that his mom was a virgin or that we saved by faith alone. In the lived reality of our faith, that’s sweating the small stuff! And when they were hammering out the Nicene Creed, they somehow skipped all but a few days of Jesus’ life. 1,700 years ago, the bishops at Nicaea jumped from “born of the Virgin Mary” to “suffered under Pontius Pilate” and they missed all of the good bits that happened in between! They missed Jesus’ 40-day vision quest in the wilderness, the beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord’s Prayer, the Parables of the Mustard Seed and the Good Samaritan, the healing of the blind man, and hundreds of pieces of subversive wisdom that Jesus shared with his followers. Jesus’ life is filled with provocative, even dangerous stuff! No wonder the church has tried to avoid it! But in avoiding it, we have lost the treasure of our faith: knowing what it would be like if God took on human form; knowing what a human life utterly conformed to the will of God would be like. What would it be like for any of us – for you! – to be filled with the spirit of God? When you think about it, this nativity scene boasts an unlikely cast of characters. God could have sent the angels to tell influential politicians of Jesus’ birth, but instead the angels told the shepherds, who were the off-kilter, antisocial people who lived with the smelly sheep up in the hills. God could have chosen a princess to bear Jesus, but instead chose an unwed teenage peasant mom betrothed to a guy who was good with his hands, but didn’t talk much. (He doesn’t get even a single line in the Bible.) God could have chosen to find them a nice birthing suite at a hospital in Bethlehem, but instead provides an innkeeper with a sense of compassion, who shows the very pregnant Mary out to a stable. What in God’s name was God thinking? I don’t think it was unintentional. A king not born into political power and affluence, but on the ground with the lowest of the low, in a backwater village on the edges of the Roman Empire. What a life that baby was about to have…what a life. So, maybe that’s why you and I are here tonight, to try and catch a glimpse of that child who was born for us and for all people. At the end of the day, Christian faith is not about doctrine or dogma or tradition or theology…it’s about a life…his life and your life. Symbols are important because they point to a larger reality beyond themselves. So maybe the symbol of our faith doesn’t need to reflect death. Perhaps it needs to reflect life. How different would our faith be if we were to use the manger, the trough filled with hay to feed the animals, as the symbol of our faith. Maybe what each of us is hoping for tonight is that we will catch a glimpse of that life here in the manger, and here within each of us. Let every heart prepare him room! Amen. © 2017 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses. AuthorThe Rev. Hal Chorpenning has been Plymouth's senior minister since 2002. Before that, he was associate conference minister with the Connecticut Conference of the UCC. A grant from the Lilly Endowment enabled him to study Celtic Christianity in the UK and Ireland. Prior to ordained ministry, Hal had a business in corporate communications. Read more about Hal.
Luke 1.46b–55
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning, Plymouth Congregational UCC, Fort Collins, Colorado 17 December 2017 Those of us who come from an Episcopal background know this text well by its Latin name, the Magnificat, because it is part of the service of Evening Prayer every week, and the sung Evensong has some incredibly beautiful choral settings of this text. Magnificat simply means “magnifies,” and it refers to Mary’s declaration that her soul magnifies the Lord. Think about that image for a moment: a magnifying glass that makes God even larger in our field of vision. Mary’s soul makes God come into clearer view for us. [Pull out magnifying glass] Sometimes with a magnifying glass you need to pull it closer or draw it farther away for the object to come into focus. And not all of us have the same visual acuity…some people see really well up close, and people my age tend to want to extend their arms so things are clearer. And some of us have different magnifying glasses that enable us to pull God into view. For some of us, the lens is nature, and for others it is working for justice and peace, and for yet other people it is contemplation and prayer, and for still others the optics of fellowship and hospitality provide the best view of God. What is it that magnifies God for you? How do you catch a glimpse of the sacred? Sometimes we have trouble bringing the Holy into focus. Our nation is in a time of deep anxiety, and it is more important than ever to keep the sacred in view. In a time when we’re not able to get away to the mountains, if that is our magnifying glass, it can be soul-killing. Or if we have an illness that prevents us from social contact, if that is our lens, it can make contact with God elusive. And at those times, we need to adjust the focus or even try switching to a new lens for awhile. For me, the ocean is one of the places in nature where it is easiest to sense the presence of the Holy…and beachfront access is somewhat limited in Colorado. And so, I changed my lens a few years back and started fly-fishing so that I could be out on the water. It isn’t the same as sea kayaking, which I dearly love, but it works. And sometimes God is just plain hard to see, no matter how hard we seem to try. That’s when faith (our relationship with God) and perseverance come into play. [Bring out binoculars] Not everybody sees the Holy through the same lens, but all of us have access to multiple lenses. Perhaps even trying out a different way to see God would be a useful exercise. So, if you find God only in solitary moments, perhaps singing together in church or engaging someone at coffee hour or teaching Sunday school would open a new vista.
Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps someone sees God through you and your life? I’m not saying that any one of us is a carbon copy of God, but rather that there is a spark of the divine mixed in with all our human foibles and shortcomings that might just awaken the Spirit within another person. You might act as a lens through which someone can catch a glimpse of God!
Sometimes, at this time of the year when the nights are longest and the daylight is brief, we most need to find the bright spark of the holy. And then we need to find tinder and blow on the spark so that it illumines and shines all around. By our standards, Mary was a “nobody.” She was a Judean peasant woman in backwater of the Roman Empire. She herself says that God “looks with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” So, how might God be looking at us this morning? How might God be looking at you? If God could favor Mary with being the bearer of Christ, why couldn’t God regard us similarly? Meister Eckhart, the great14th century mystic, wrote, ”We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of God is begotten in us.” So, what can we do to be the bearers of Christ? What can we do to carry Christ within us and help him to be reborn not just 2,000 years ago in a faraway land, but here, now, again and again? We don’t know very much about Mary, neither from the gospel record, nor from first-hand historical accounts. But one of the things we must certainly realize about this woman from the child she bore and raised is that she must have been extraordinary. If Jesus reflected something of Mary, it may have been her faith and compassion. Whether you take the birth narratives literally or figuratively, Jesus definitely had some of Mary’s DNA and she had the opportunity to nurture and shape the boy who would become the messiah. In other words, her soul magnified God. So, I was thinking about this: what is it that my soul magnifies? What is it that the core of my being as well as my daily activities amplifies and projects? Does my soul magnify God, or does it magnify my own needs and wants? Can someone ever see a reflection of the divine through something I do, or is it all so much “other stuff” that the Christ-light is obscured? What does your soul magnify in the ways you spend your time, and exert your power and influence? What does your soul magnify in your interactions with others? What does your soul magnify in what you pray about or for? I imagine that when clients for the Homelessness Prevention Initiative come through Plymouth’s doors each Friday or when guests of Faith Family Hospitality Network enter our church tonight, they sometimes get to glimpse the sacred in the faces of the volunteers who are here to greet them and connect them with assistance. And when an ill or homebound parishioner receives a visit from Jake or Jane Anne or me or receives a meal from another member, I imagine that is a lens through which they experience God’s love is in a very human form. We all have that capacity. As I was driving on College Avenue awhile back, a woman with a broad smile offered to let me go ahead of her when I was turning onto Drake Road. It was a simple act of kindness, but I read into it a sense of Christmas grace: a moment of unearned kindness given to me by someone I don’t know and may never see again. And I thought to myself, what would the world be like if all of us allowed our lives to magnify the Lord – in greater or lesser ways, in simple acts or in mighty ones? What if we all acted from grace and faithfulness and compassion? Maybe we’d have fewer political tweets and a Congress to does something that isn’t in the interest of the wealthiest among us, but of people like Mary and Jesus. We may not read about it on Facebook or see it in the headlines (especially those from Washington), but the world is populated by a portion of people who intentionally bring God into clearer view through prayer, action, compassion, investment, service, and helping others to find access to the sacred. It is almost as if there is seldom-visible queue of people who line up to help others see the divine more sharply. When was the last time you encountered someone who offered you a moment of grace or insight or inspiration? And did you take advantage of the opportunity to thank them or maybe even follow their example? I have seen angels right here at Plymouth…and none of them has wings. Amen. © 2017 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved AuthorThe Rev. Hal Chorpenning has been Plymouth's senior minister since 2002. Before that, he was associate conference minister with the Connecticut Conference of the UCC. A grant from the Lilly Endowment enabled him to study Celtic Christianity in the UK and Ireland. Prior to ordained ministry, Hal had a business in corporate communications. Read more about Hal.
Mark 1: 1-8
Second Sunday in Advent 12/10/17 The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph Plymouth Congregational UCC, Fort Collins, Colorado Will you pray with me? May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be good and pleasing to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. Merry Christmas, Plymouth... at least according to the Gospel of Mark! In today’s Scripture passage, we find the opening remarks of the Gospel According to Mark foretelling the birth of Jesus through the mixing of the story of John the Baptist and verses cited from Isaiah. This lectionary reading brings us Mark’s Christmas even though we are in Advent. What is particularly interesting is that, while it doesn’t sound like it on first reading, Mark 1: 1-8 is in fact this Gospel’s entire Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany Story combined in shorthand. Some like to simply ignore this Gospel by saying, “Oh Mark doesn’t have a Christmas story,” but that is simply because we don’t like what we find. Yes, I know that sounds impossible, but it is true: Merry Christmas, and I bet many of you haven’t even finished your Christmas shopping. From this point where our reading left off in this Gospel, we jump right into the baptism of Jesus and the start of his ministry! Mark does Christmas a little differently: no angels, no manger, no magi, no star, no Mary, no Joseph, no shepherds, no Santa Claus, no presents, no cookies, no tinsel, no mother-in-laws visiting, no nothing! Nada! Right about now, my guess is that might sound good to many of you. This season is stressful and lonely for many. Mark is sort of the Grinch of the Gospel writers. Merry Christmas (early) today from the Gospel of Mark! Sort of feels like we all just got coal in our Christmas stockings, right? Where did the glamor go? Mark is the oldest of the Canonical (or narrative) Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Matthew and Luke were written later and were based, in part, on the outline and organization of Mark. This is uniformly accepted in Biblical Studies academic circles. Studying these distinctions is an entire field of Biblical study called “Gospel Parallels.” This is the study of the slight and significant differences between the four Gospels and the three canonical ones in particular! It is also the best topic to bring-up if you want to be the most awkward person at a cocktail party! The Gospel of Mark allows us the opportunity to rethink Christmas because Mark offers us a stripped down version—A back to basics lesson. There are several important things that, if we take Mark seriously, we learn about the Christmas Season that we might forget once we read Matthew and Luke’s elaborate versions of the start of Jesus’ life. Mark grounds the entire story of Jesus in Prophesy of Isaiah. Unlike Matthew and Luke, Mark’s entire Jesus narrative remains rooted squarely with the ancients as an outgrowth of older tradition. Verse 2: “As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of the one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight.’” Then in verses 4-8, Mark elaborates and says that John the Baptist was the one whose job, whose sacred mission it was to create a world that is ready for Jesus Christ—the Prince of Peace—to enter. “John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness [wham, voila, poof], proclaiming [screaming, yelling, preaching, extolling] a baptism of repentance and a forgiveness of sins [renewal, peace, restart, hope… hope]… He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming* [hey y’all… even as awesome as I am … just wait]; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals [which by the way is the most lowly, dirty, and stinky thing you could do for someone in the ancient world]. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” *This is interesting because why would God need any help from people, from humans, especially this mountain-man John who would fit in better with us rock climbers and backpackers of Colorado than the city dwellers of New York or Jerusalem? Why would God need to wait for the world to be ready for Jesus, and then why would God want someone who is verily an outcast from the places of power and culture to do it? This raises the question: Who are we in this story? I think we are John the Baptist crying out in the wilderness—for crying out loud in a world that can’t seem to get it! Crying out loud—doesn’t that seem to be most of our work as Christians these days? We are John the Baptist in this Christmas Story as we enter Advent in 2017. Plymouth, are you ready to get real with me? Let’s talk about our “crying out loud.” Because Mark’s Gospel offers us one heck of a Christmas Story in only a couple of verses that calls us to the mat—us powerful, comfortable, mainline old school Christians. Church, Christianity, congregation is all about journeying through Scripture, tradition, and faith exploration together. Every single year in our liturgical context, we take a slow tour through the Bible, and that tour always begins with this weird thing called Advent. Advent is the first stop on a tour of wonders. Have you ever been on a tour of the Avery House here in Fort Collins? It is a really cool place for weddings and part of the Poudre Landmarks Foundation. Where is the first place you go? You start in the lobby of the house, and what is the first thing they tell you in the Advent of your old house tour? First they will ask you nicely to please not touch anything… please do not break the Avery House collection and keep your kids close as you do the walk. “Fort Collins has Franklin Avery to thank for the wide streets in Fort Collins; he took advantage of the open spaces when he surveyed the town in 1873. Avery later founded First National Bank and was instrumental in developing water projects that enabled agriculture to flourish in northern Colorado. In 1879, he and his wife Sara built a family home on the corner of Mountain Avenue and Meldrum Street and raised their children, Edgar, Ethel, and Louise, there. The original two-story home consisted of two rooms on the first floor, now the entry area and dining room; three bedrooms upstairs; and a basement. Constructed of sandstone from local quarries, the house cost $3,000 when it was built. During the ensuing years, the Averys added to the house several times; the final addition included the distinctive Queen Anne tower…” [PLF website] That is all well and good and exactly what a tour of an old house should be, but is this also how we experience our annual church tour through Scripture? “Hi I’m Jake and I will be your tour guide this year through Scripture. First Jesus was born in a manger to really cool young parents Mary and Joseph (you would have liked them), then he did a lot of miracles, made friends, told great stories, and had a tough death because of some political misunderstandings…but its all good, you see, cause there is Easter, resurrection, and ascension and potlucks… and endowments now in his honor.” Is this also how we read the Bible…as a casual walk about tour through quaint old facts and anecdotes of ancient times: Queen Anne towers and dust collectors? If the lectionary cycle lulls us into an old house walking tour where we are scared to break things, something is wrong. I love the Avery House, but I think we mistake our annual tour through the Bible for an antique house tour. It is time to shake the dust off. Since Advent is like our lobby talk where we set our values for the coming year Bible tour, lay-out the rules, it is my job as your tour guide to inform you that this year… please PLEASE break some sh… stuff this year! For crying out loud! Adventing is weird and highly dangerous walking tour of history where we are called to be the John the Baptists crying out in the wilderness for a new time declaring: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love to a world that doesn’t remember how to do these things and frankly is threatened by them for good reason! Being John the Baptists in Advent is more about being like Indiana Jones in a dangerous adventure of caves and mystery than being Hyacinth Bucket (Bouquet) keeping up appearances in an old British Castle. If you got that second reference, then there is a prize waiting for you in the gift shop. Think about it—how dangerous are the Gospel truths of Advent: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love! Love would mean giving-up hatred that maintains political order. Hate and fear is how the world works politically speaking. Do we really want love? Wouldn’t it be anarchy? Peace would mean that weapons manufactures would lose countless sums of money and contracts and people might even lose their jobs. What about security firms and lawyers? Violence is how our economy works. Do we really want peace? Wouldn’t it be bad for the economy? Joy would mean that the pharmaceutical companies would need to rethink their business models and the all the people who spend their days (some of you my friends) writing to the comments section in the Coloradoan about how mad they are at CSU would have to find something more productive to do with their time. A lack of joy and perspective on the miracle of life is how we know how to use our time. Do we really want joy? Wouldn’t we be bored? Oh, and hope would mean that we might support affordable education or real healthcare, housing, and food for our world! Do we really want hope? Wouldn’t that be unfair for the nations and individuals who inherited so much blessing from a benevolent prosperity God? Wouldn’t the world be unjust or ungovernable with too much hope? See how truly dangerous Advent is for the status quo! But then we say… again… with confidence and true belief—“World, hey you, you haven’t seen NOTHING yet! Just you wait until the love and the peace and joy and hope of God gets ahold of you through the Christ Child. Just you wait!” How hard is that for us to do? Maybe the reason it hasn’t happened yet, is we (Christians) don’t really believe it anymore ourselves… it is just something we repeat because we were brought-up to come here on Sundays and pay ministers salaries. Do we believe what we proclaim in Advent on this Gospel of Mark Christmas? Maybe that is the only way to start inviting God back to this planet—if the Christians themselves learn to believe in these again: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. If we are honest with ourselves, can we overcome our despair and liberal pessimism long enough to even believe these things are possible for a split second? It is only by believing that they were possible that voting rights came for all, slavery was abolished, that apartheid was no more. If you don’t really believe we can do it together, humanity, then don’t take the Gospel in vain for crying out loud. Adventing is not just the lobby (opening intro) for an old house museum tour stroll through the Bible anymore. Advent isn’t the lobby introduction to your grandmother’s old house museum tour. We are called to be the John the Baptists proclaiming that something new is coming—something bigger than ourselves or our imaginations. We are, as Mark implies in his Christmas story, called to be prophets. Now, while I am your tour guide, I am not your John the Baptist. I don’t even own a Subaru. You are John the Baptist in this Advent time of preparation. There is this myth, and I see it play out with the prayer tree that because you have paid professional clergy, we are the ones called to proclaim and you are the ones to follow. Plymouth, however, is a Calvinist-rooted Congregational Church, so you don’t get off that easy. :) Today, Mark drops a lump of coal in our Christmas plans. He is the Grinch to Luke and Matthew’s idealist Santa Claus. Mark calls all us to the mat to advent with him. Advent in Mark consists solely of us crying out loud…wailing in the desert. In Mark our role is to reveal God’s reign, for maybe… I propose, the reason these things are not realized or realizable, the reason the world doesn’t change, the reason Jesus has yet to repeat radical transformation and return in our midst is because we think we are on an old house tour of the Bible (admiring knick knacks covered in dust) rather than a religion (that word has power) of belief and action! This year, for the sake of peace, it is time for us to break some stuff… and believe something again. This year, we need to be religious, and believe something ancient, brooding, and dangerous for a change. No more safe Christianity for 2018. We tried that already in 2017, and how did that work out for us? Merry Christmas, for crying out loud, from the Gospel According to Mark! AuthorThe Rev. Jake Miles Joseph ("just Jake"), Associate Minister, came to Plymouth in 2014 having served in the national setting of the UCC on the board of Justice & Witness Ministries, the Coalition for LGBT Concerns, and the Chairperson of the Council for Youth and Young Adult Ministries (CYYAM). Jake has a passion for ecumenical work and has worked in a wide variety of churches and traditions. Read more about him on our staff page.
Isaiah 40.1–11
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning, Plymouth Congregational UCC Fort Collins, Colorado December 3, 2017 I’d like to start with a question: What is the primary medium through which you get the news? Perhaps if I asked this question even five years ago, I would get a different answer. How many of you read a newspaper either in paper form or online? How many of you consider a news magazine like Time or The Week as the primary way you get the news? How many of you listen to radio as your primary news source? How about television news? How about from on online-only source like Buzzfeed or a news aggregator like Flipboard? How many of you rely on social media like Facebook for your news? I’d like to ask another question: How many of you find the news more upsetting, disquieting, overwhelming, anxiety-inducing, and downright scary than you did, say, two years ago? One of the things I notice in myself as I have shifted from sitting down at breakfast with the morning paper…a physical paper…and reading it online is the pace and flow of my consumption of the news. When you read a newspaper or a news magazine you are entirely in control of the pace of your reading. If you start to feel overwhelmed by the grief or anger of yet another woman who has been subjected to sexual harassment, you can pause, ponder, think about its context, and come back to the story. But if you are getting your news online and have sat down at the computer to read a story in the New York Times, you are less likely to take a pause to think, to consider, and to finish your cup of coffee. Electronic media -– even good journalism, which seems to be in decline -– stream at you and demand your attention in the way that paper sources do not. And that likely results in a sense of being overwhelmed by sensationalism, by inflammatory tweets, and by “entertainment” news that doesn’t really matter. And no matter how we get the news, the content itself seems more daunting every day. In her address accepting a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Award, author Annie Proulx last month offered a stinging and truthful summation of what we together confront: “We don’t live in the best of all possible worlds. This is a Kafkaesque time. The television sparkles with images of despicable political louts and sexual harassment reports. We cannot look away from the pictures of furious elements, hurricanes and fires, from the repetitive crowd murders by gunmen burning with rage. We are made more anxious by flickering threats of nuclear war. We observe social media’s manipulation of a credulous population, a population dividing into bitter tribal cultures. We are living through a massive shift from representative democracy to something called viral direct democracy, now cascading over us in a garbage-laden tsunami of raw data. Everything is situational, seesawing between gut-response ‘likes’ or vicious confrontations. For some this is a heady time of brilliant technological innovation that is bringing us into an exciting new world. For others it is the opening of a savagely difficult book without a happy ending. “To me the most distressing circumstance of the new order is the accelerating destruction of the natural world and the dreadful belief that only the human species has the inalienable right to life and God-given permission to take anything it wants from nature, whether mountaintops, wetlands or oil.”1 You may be wondering what this has to do with Advent. Listen to how one Old Testament scholar describes the setting for today’s scripture: “Events moved at a dizzying speed for the Jewish people between 550 and 515 BCE, the period of thirty-five years that produced” this section of the book of Isaiah. You will remember that this is the period when a significant number of the best and brightest of the Jewish people were taken into captivity and exile in Babylon. “The crises of those years would have tested even the most robust and secure of communities. But the Jewish community of”2 that time was neither robust nor secure. Even though they may have had been economically prosperous during that portion of the exile, their spiritual alienation was profound. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel!” It doesn’t sound so very far off from where you and I find ourselves as we begin this trek through Advent this year. Some of us are enjoying a record-setting stock market; some of us will benefit from the tax plan the Senate passed yesterday, whether or not we oppose or support it; Colorado has a historically low 2.7% unemployment rate. But we all understand in our gut that something is not right. We are a people in exile. “O come, O come, Emmanuel!” Many in our nation may be enjoying material prosperity, but it comes as we face an environmental crisis of unparalleled proportions and it comes on the backs of those laboring in sweatshops in China and the developing world and in fields from California to Florida. We have a profound spiritual problem in this nation if we think the situation is acceptable. So, where do we turn? Where do we find comfort and joy in the face of a tsunami of bad news and injustice? Listen to the prophet: “The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever. Get you up to a high mountain… lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, ‘Here is your God!’ “See, the Lord GOD comes with might…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.” I was struck by what I heard in two separate conversations last week with members of our congregation. One woman, who is quite politically active, told me that Plymouth is the one place in her life that is a source of strength right now. One man who is experiencing a rough time with his family said that he comes to worship because it is the one hour a week when he can calm himself and just be at peace. “O Come, O come, Emmanuel!” And when I see our teens sleeping out on Plymouth’s front lawn for the 13th consecutive year to raise funds and awareness, I am warmed and given hope. Their efforts have an immediate impact, and the sleep-out also helps to inform who these young people are becoming and where their priorities lie. Whether they know it or not, our teens are bringing us and others comfort and joy! When we are planning worship at Plymouth, we don’t use a whole lot of electronic media, especially in the morning, in part because we want it to be a time when spiritual renewal can take place. So welcome to live, handcrafted, artisanal, free-range, no hormones added worship! I hope that it brings you joy! I know that part of the DNA of our congregation is doing and acting for justice, and I also hope that each of us can take comfort and deep joy from our faith and from the presence of God within and among us. “O Come, O come, Emmanuel!” In their dialogic Book of Joy, the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu conclude that our pursuit for outward happiness based on things and accomplishments ultimately results in dissatisfaction and suffering. And that joy is something far more profound than happiness. The archbishop compares joy to a mother coming through the pain of childbirth and how that pain is transformed into the joy of bringing new life into the world. It is a metaphor with deep resonances in this Advent season as we prepare for the arrival of Christ once more. May you find a few deep breaths of peace even if you are overly busy. May you find comfort and joy in your faith, even if you are overwhelmed by the news. May you find a refuge and a sanctuary here at Plymouth to shelter you, to inspire you, and give you hope. O Come, O come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel, who mourns in lonely exile here; until the son of God appear. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel! Amen. 1 reprinted at http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/annie-proulx-national-book-award- speech.html 2 Paul D. Hanson, Interpretation: Isaiah 40–66.(Phila.: WJK Press, 1995), p. 1 © 2017 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will happily be granted for non-profit uses. AuthorThe Rev. Hal Chorpenning has been Plymouth's senior minister since 2002. Before that, he was associate conference minister with the Connecticut Conference of the UCC. A grant from the Lilly Endowment enabled him to study Celtic Christianity in the UK and Ireland. Prior to ordained ministry, Hal had a business in corporate communications. Read more about Hal. |
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