sermon Notes 12/11 Is. 61, Ps. 126

The alarm goes off. You murmur to yourself, but I was having such a good dream. (I won’t dream of going into any detail about the content of an especially good dream for some of us) Ps. 126 imagines what it would be if life could look like a Christmas dream. We try to decorate or lives now with so much tinsel, to act as a cover for troubles. Sometimes I think we want a white Christmas to cover over our sins and disappointments with a holiday that cannot bear the weight we place on it. This is a dream not only of the future but one that would make up for a missed past, for the hurts, wrongs, pain of the past. It imagines a great reversal where tears are replaced by laughter. Instead of being paralyzed by fear, they act to do one of the great acts of confidence in a future go out and sow seed.It imagines the answered prayer, almost as if calling God on it. I served in a rural area and was always astonished how farmers could go out spending a fortune on weed killer and pesticide and fertilizer before they could even sow a single seed, not knowing what sort of return they could expect on the crop, barring of course any natural disaster of drought or flood or hail. I learned to see it as a prayer in action.

Is. 61 is the mission statement of Jesus in the gospel of Luke, the gospel from which we will read of the Annunciation and the Magnificat of Mary there and there alone. I do notice that this doesn’t say much about marketing the church. In our time, it does not say Christmas is for children; Christmas is for those in trouble. It speaks of helping people in need. It is not a listing of the economically needy alone. It mention those who are hurting in their hearts, mourners and bind up the brokenhearted. We leave the latter to alcohol with friends and the words and music of songwriters. We react to mourners by hoping that they well get back to work as soon as possible and not burden us with a repetition of some facet of their loss. That’s especially true this time of year, so we warn folks not to ruin Christmas. Of course we are called to do charitable things at this time of year, and an astounding generosity pours out of people, hard economic times or flush ones.
I am drawn today to the emotional side of the passage, of binding up different sorts of wounds, maybe even seemingly incurable ones of abuse such as the innocents taken at Penn State. What sort of oil of gladness could heal their mourning? Maybe in our time it would be going out somewhere we we splash on good cologne, (or in my case the only bottle of cologne I own, but it is good, after all I got it at Macy’s.) What difference would it make to us to wear a mantle of praise instead of the finest cloak of a faint spirit? When we are in grief, we wonder if we will ever laugh again. If we do, then we feel guilty about it, as if it were improper, inappropriate to use the baby Boomer words for forbidden).

We had a wedding here yesterday, and the passage concludes with the decorated life of a wedding, of bride and groom at their best. It uses what is on the outside to be a sign of the inside, of being placed on good terms with God, each other, and maybe hardest of all, ourselves. It imagines an Advent garden, where what we call the Christmas spirit springs up and is evergreen,just like a Christmas tree.