“How Does A Weary World Rejoice? We Acknowledge Our Weariness” a sermon on Luke 1:1-23, Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19

Luke 1:1-23
Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19
“How Does A Weary World Rejoice? We Acknowledge Our Weariness”
Preached Sunday, November 26, 2023

Today we are starting a new worship & sermon series called “How does a weary world rejoice?” It's based on a line from the first verse of the Christmas carol, “O Holy Night.” The first verse goes (And I’ll say it, won’t sing it):

“O holy night, the stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of the dear Saviour’s birth;
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
'Till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn;”

A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices.

How does a weary world rejoice?

There are very few people that I have talked to who don’t acknowledge that we live in a weary world: personal loss, short days and dark nights, war and rumors of war, gun violence, strained and broken relationships, poverty, hate crimes…and so much that wears us down, that weighs heavy on our hearts.

So how does a weary world rejoice?

It may seem almost antithetical to rejoice in the midst of our weariness and grief. Whenever I preach at funerals, I like to start my sermon by acknowledging the range of emotions those gathered may be feeling that day. I often say something generally like this:

“I think it is important to take a moment and address and validate the range of emotions you may feel today. Today you will hopefully laugh as you remember the good and funny memories. And those are good to share and to laugh over. Those same memories may make you cry. You may experience bursts of anger or frustration, grief, anxiety...Whatever today brings, know that it is okay to feel what you feel and that you are surrounded today by love - you are not alone.”

Normally when I mention memories that may make people laugh - several do, a light chuckle in the midst of their weariness and grief. They are remembering something that makes them laugh, they are thinking of a memory of joy. Laughing and crying and laughing again…and maybe crying again. The joy and the grief intermingle almost naturally.

Joy is more than happiness or elation - it goes deeper. I won’t go too deeply into my definition of joy this morning but I prefer to think of joy as a sense of a deep trust in God. A sense of hope. Joy is “that thrill of hope” that the hymnist writes about. Trusting that the God that was born into this world in the form of Jesus will come against to save and redeem us. And when we trust in this hope, we have joy - and that can present itself as the ability to laugh, even in grief.

This is what we focus on in the season of Advent, these four weeks of preparation before Christmas. We are remembering the birth of Christ, yes, and we are looking towards Christ’s second coming when the work he began will be completed - and that is the source of our joy, the source of our rejoicing.

That brings us to our theme for this week, our first answer to “How does a weary world rejoice?” We acknowledge our weariness.

I already said that I don’t think any of us would be in denial that our world is weary…for all those reasons previously listed, all that happens in our world that breaks our hearts and the heart of God. So let us look at our Scriptures this morning and how we see reflected in them weariness, hope, and rejoicing.

Zechariah is weary from years of wanting a child and not having one. Weary from the long journey of infertility. Month after month, year after year, not having your hopes fulfilled. Those who have walked this path know how particularly painful and hard it can be. And I want to recognize how the Scripture narratives surrounding Advent and Christmas, of Elizabeth and John, of Mary and Jesus, of miraculous pregnancies and births - how these Scriptures can be particularly triggering and painful for those who have experienced infertility. If this is you, please know that God meets you in your weariness. And, in discussing these narratives in church throughout this season, if you need to excuse yourself to use the restroom, to tune me out, it’s okay. Take care of yourself and your heart.

And so, one day Zechariah is in the temple, fulfilling his priestly duties, and an angel appears before him and tells him, “Your prayer has been heard.”

His prayer for a child. How many years has he been praying that prayer and feeling like it wasn’t being heard? He was in the temple praying when the angel appeared for him - was he praying for a child at the moment? Taking the opportunity while he was in the holy of the holies to lift up his personal petition? Had this prayer worked his way into his litany of prayers that he always offered up? Was he praying with any hope that his prayer would be answered? Or at this point was he just going through the motions - a prayer he had said many times but not a prayer that he felt he had any hope of being answered, praying without hope.

Because his response to hearing his prayer has been heard and is being answered, is not one of rejoicing or gratitude - it is disbelief. And for that, the angel makes him mute until the birth of his son.

How often does the world’s weariness, our weariness, keep us from hoping, from believing that our prayers could be answered? Our prayers for love, for peace, for restoration, for a better world.

How often does the world’s weariness, our weariness, keep us from seeing all the ways our prayers have already been answered? All the love we already have. All the ways in which seeds of peace are being sown. All the ways in which, day by day, small act by small act, our world is being restored, being made better.

How often does the world’s weariness, our weariness, keep us from being our own answer to prayers, being the agents of love, peace and restoration for a better world. Acting even as we pray.

I’m not saying that we can’t or shouldn’t be weary - it’s the reality of our world. If we weren’t experiencing the weariness of the world at all, I’d be worried we’ve closed our hearts off to the pain and suffering in this world. This weary world should break our hearts - break them open, where there can be an outpouring of love and care. Break our hearts open rather than hardening our hearts to the pain - but also to the hope that our prayers could be answered - as could have been the case with Zechariah.

In our other Scripture reading this morning, the psalmist prays over and over: “Restore us, O Lord God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.”

There are people in the world today praying this prayer. In Israel-Palestine, in Ukraine, in the Mahoning Valley, in our congregation. In the midst of a weary world praying to God for help, for restoration.

Let us not lose hope that these prayers will be answered.

In the midst of a weary world,
God is still acting;
God is still listening;

God will still hold true to God’s promises to come again, and restore us all.

And so, in the midst of a weary world,
We can acknowledge our weariness,
While still praying, still hoping, still rejoicing.
May it be so. Amen.

"Kept Awake By Hope" a sermon on Matthew 25:1-13 & 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

Matthew 25:1-13
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
“Kept Awake By Hope”
Preached Sunday, November 12, 2023

Lately there has been a lot of talk about The End. Capital T, Capital E. And recent events are troubling - we should be troubled in the face of violence and war in all areas of our world. We should be troubled for those who face a mini-apocalypse every day. Every day, someone’s world ends. Through death or through the world as they knew it ending. Apocalypses happen, on scales large and small, every day in our world. And throughout all of time, as long as there have been times, people who are facing mini-Apocalypses have interpreted their end as The End, their times as The End Times.

And with pastoral compassion today I want to say to you: What if we stopped trying to layer the Book of Revelation (and other Apocalyptic and Prophetic literature in the Bible) on top of our world like it was some sort of road map of what is happening right now. What if we saw it not just as a book of prophecy - which might unfold in the way we expect it to - or not! - Remember how often we talk about prophecies in Isaiah and how Jesus fulfilled them in a way the people were not expecting - ways that were more peaceable, inclusive, and all-encompassing… And so, to view Revelation and other Apocalyptic and prophetic literature in the Bible as not something that needs to be played out in our times or in the future - and it still may be that - but view them also as writings that depict a mini-apocalypse that already happened for a group of people living under an oppressive rule, where they were being martyred, persecuted, and their world was ending.

Or take today’s text from 1 Thessalonians which people have taken to be a basis for the rapture. The rapture was an idea that was invented in the nineteenth-century - recently, and is not part of our United Methodist doctrine. What if instead of reading the end times into it, what if we focused instead on the hope of this passage? What if we stopped looking at these texts as a scare-tactic for conversion and instead started asking: where is the hope?

Popular Christianity has spent too much time focusing on the apocalypse - upon an end without hope - upon God’s judgment and wrath, upon rewards in Heaven or eternal punishment in Hell. And this is often at the neglect of the needs of the least of these, the outcasts and marginalized, those whose worlds are ending in the here and now. And for many Christians who take seriously God’s commands to love our neighbor as ourselves and who are honestly offended at the hateful rhetoric and fear of death and judgment that often accompanies so-called Christian teachings, well, some have chosen to abandon beliefs about the afterlife and about the end all together - saying, “you know - it’s nice if there’s a heaven and all that. But that’s not why I do what I do. It’s not why I love God or love my neighbors. So they put those beliefs about the end to the side -- and get on fine for a bit. I was once at a point where I myself put these beliefs to the side, decided whatever the afterlife or the end held, it didn’t matter - I did this for a couple of years. The problem is, what happens when we don’t believe anything about the end is that we begin to lose hope. We can begin to believe that there is nothing worth continuing for. We can begin to believe that there is no point to any of this and that the world, each other, humanity, all our brokenness - is beyond redemption. We begin to mourn, as Paul says, like those without hope.

Now, something you may not know about me, I am a big fan of superhero movies and especially Marvel movies. So has anyone here seen Endgame? It was the big finale to a phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe - it came out in 2019. …

At the end of Infinity War, the movie before Endgame, Thanos (That’s the Big Bad Guy) snapped his fingers and erased half of humanity -- and not just humans on earth, but half of creation throughout the universe. An apocalypse, world ending. 23 days after Thanos snaps his fingers, the Avengers (that’s the team of superheroes) finds Thanos and realizes they can’t undo what he’s done. They can’t just fix it. The world as they knew has ended - they can’t save it.

The movie then skips forward 5 years. 5 years of loss. 5 years of pain and grief. 5 years of helplessness and having no hope of those lost ever being restored. The world that Endgame takes place in is a world that is broken. In a world that is overwhelmed with grief and pain. In a world that the Avengers and all humanity have accepted that they just can’t fix - the problems are bigger than them and there’s not much they can do. And they begin living without hope. They let themselves go, isolate themselves, become depressed, go down dark paths, become people they don’t want to be - all because they are living without hope.

Sound familiar? Our world is kind of like this. We have disease and pain. Climate change and tyranny. Hate and violence. War in Gaza, in Ukraine, all over the world. We have violence in our own streets. And the problems are just...so big. And often, it feels like there’s not much we can do to change it or to fix anything.

We can begin living like we have no hope.

And when we live without hope, we too can become people we don’t want to be: people who have lessened themselves as anything besides the beloved children of God we are called to be. And yet - It’s hard to have hope in our world - it is. I’ve heard and even preached many things about the cynicalness or pragmatic-ness of Gen Z and Millennials. We know the earth is dying. We know our job prospects are somewhere between bad and worse. We’re worried about World War 3 and ever having a mortgage is almost laughable. Mini-apocalypses are faced every day. But what does this do to us? What does this do to our souls, our relationships, our outlook and actions? We need hope.

Hope changes everything.

So let’s talk a minute about hope.

Our hope comes from Christ and from the promise of the resurrection and the restoration of all creation. We do not mourn and we do not live as those without hope when we hold fast to a sound eschatology, to a vision of the end that includes the creation of a New Heaven and a New Earth. When we talk about Armageddon and the Apocalypse - these tend to be visions or ideas of The End without hope. With fire, brimstone, judgment, pain. When I talk about The End in terms of Christian belief, I prefer to use the term Eschatology because it has way less baggage from Hollywood and literal interpretations of the Book of Revelation. Eschatology does literally mean our theology about the last things, the end times, but I found a really good and solid eschatology doesn’t focus as much on The End but on the New Beginning.

That is: when Christ comes again in final victory. Christ will do for all of creation what he did as a first fruit when he was resurrected from the dead. He will defeat all death. All powers of evil. All forces of violence. He will also restore all that God has created. From the planet, to the birds of the air and the animals of the ground, all humanity, the heavens -- all will be redeemed, recreated: restored to that before sin and evil entered this world. Including relationships that have been broken by misunderstanding, by pain, by violence, by death - ALL will be restored.

Sometimes I wonder what our world would look like if Christians talked a lot more about this rather than the violence of apocalypses. If we focused on the Hope, on the New Beginning, the New Creation,

We hear about the New Creation many times in Scripture. One of the most famous passages comes from the 21st Chapter of Revelation, offered as a hope to those that John wrote to who were facing their own apocalypse:

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’

And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’ Then he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.’”

We also hear of the new creation in the Book of Isaiah, a vision of the wolf and the lamb feeding together, the lion eating straw, swords being beaten into plowshares, all nations being gathered together on one mountain, and there being no violence or destruction.

Our hope is found in the promise of the End, the promise of resurrection, and the promise of a New Creation.

This hope is how we stay awake. We have focused on Paul’s encouragement to us to not live as those who mourn without hope. I’d now like to turn our attention to the parable of the bridegrooms and especially on Jesus’s explanation of the parable and his admonition at the end to “keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

We do not know the day or hour our world will end. It could be the Big End. Nuclear War, the sun going out, a meteor - or any of our worlds could end at any time - a loved one dying, a diagnosis, a car crash - there are apocalypses, big and small, that happen every day. Every day someone’s world ends - either through death or the world as they knew it ending. And we are not called to try and figure out the day or hour, we are not called to interpret prophetic Scriptures like a road map. We ARE called to care for the last, the lost, and the least - to be there when worlds end, offering the survivors hope, showing them love. We are called to keep awake! To be ready for The End, big or small, and we keep awake by having hope that even at The End, Christ has a New Beginning for us.

Living with hope is a million times better than the alternative. Living with hope for the future gives us strength and courage now.
Living with hope now is like having enough oil in our lamps to carry us through this life and these days where people are so desperate for hope.
Living with hope is that we are prepared to move through our days with hope and anticipation for the eventual New Beginning.
Hope helps us carry on.
Hope helps us to live into the vision of the future - of restored creation. Restored relationships. Wholeness. Hope helps us to live into this vision in the here and now.

In the wise words of Tony Stark, Iron Man:
"Part of the journey is the end...everything's going to work out exactly the way it's supposed to."

Or, more conventionally for Christian circles, in the words of Julian of Norwich, when we believe in The New Creation, when we hold on to hope for the redemption of all things, when that hope keeps us awake and that hope helps us live in the here and now…She says,

“All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Have hope.

Amen.

"Beloved Children" an All Saints sermon on 1 John 3:1-3

1 John 3:1-3
“Beloved Children”
Preached Sunday, November 5, 2023 (All Saints)

Today is All Saints Sunday. A day in the Christian year where we recognize, remember, give thanks to God for those faithful persons who have died and gone on to be with God. We read the names, call to mind, honor those who are no longer with us, who, in their lives, showed us what it means to follow God, to know God, to love God.

These can be saints in the canonical sense as certain Christian sects are used to thinking of them. St. Peter, St. John, St. Augustine, St. Julian, St. Teresa, and so on and so forth. Honoring and remembering these saints as examples of what it looks like to whole- and full-heartedly love and follow God can be a worthwhile and beneficial part of our faith.

And, especially today, we are focusing more on the everyday people, those our paths have crossed with, those who were in our lives who shaped us, who loved God, loved us, and shared that love of God with us. I think of my grandmother and great-grandmother. Those who sat me on their knees and first shared the faith with me. Who sang hymns next to me in church. Who showed me what it looks like to love all your neighbors. I think of church members who showed me what it looked like to be faithful until the end, of having a faith big and brave enough to face hardship with hope, of having a faith generous and inclusive enough that all were welcomed in.

All of you have people, who through the way they lived, through the way they loved you, shared with you the love of God. Today, these are who we are referring to as the saints.

Through honoring and remembering these saints, we recognize that God’s love for these saints, and for us, extends beyond this life, beyond the grave. God’s love extends to these saints, and to us, to a place where there is no hunger, no thirst, no hardship, no tears, and no more death. A place where those saints are gathered now, in the presence of God, and someday, we too will be gathered there. We recognize that the saints, and us, in this life, and the life beyond, we are all beloved children of God.

Today we also did a baptism of a beloved child of God.

In certain Christian traditions, there are certain days that are set aside as preferred days for baptisms. These days are Easter, Pentecost, Baptism of the Lord, and…All Saints Day. Perhaps the first three days are obvious to us why they would be preferred days for baptisms. The Feast of Christ’s resurrection that we share in our baptism, the birth of the church which we are joining when baptized, the remembrance of Christ’s baptism as we too are baptized - these make obvious sense…but for many of us, All Saints Day may, at first, seem like an odd choice.

We are used to thinking about baptisms, and especially infant baptisms which we commonly do in The United Methodist Church, we are used to thinking of them as joyous and life-filled celebrations - which they are. And then we are used to thinking about All Saints as this somber, kind of morose day. They don’t mesh. And while there is a certain sadness to All Saints, there is also an immense sense of comfort, of hope, of assurance of love beyond the grave. As well as thanksgiving for all who have gone before. And in baptism, we claim the title of child of God. And in claiming that title, in claiming the identity of children of God, through baptism, we then die to all other identities - identities of sin, or evil, or any identity that would lessen as, that would attempt to claim us as anything less than the beloved children of God we are.

One of the ways I like to talk to parents about baptism is like signing the adoption papers. We know that all children are inherently, beloved children of God. In the sacrament of baptism we formalize that with a ritual, with the signing of the adoption papers. The person baptized or their parents sign the papers - that they will do their best to live as a child of God, that they would do their best to raise their child as a child of God, to teach them about God’s love that they would one day fully accept that identity for themselves. God signs the papers. And there is no trying with God - God always fully keeps God’s promises that this child is a beloved child of God. And then, the congregation signs the papers. That is, we make promises to surround the baptized with love, to share God’s love with them, to show them what it means and what it looks like to follow and love God. And when a specific congregation makes those promises, it’s specific for that child and that congregation but it’s also universal. We who are present for the baptism, sign those papers, make those promises, on behalf of Christians everywhere. That no matter where that child ends up, and no matter what children (young or old) come and go from our community, we - and all Christians everywhere - would share God’s love with all of them and be constant examples for them of love of God and love of neighbor.

We make those promises on behalf of all Christians. We welcome the baptized into the community of faith - not just Boardman UMC community of faith but the universal body of Christ - AND, that universal body of Christ doesn’t just include those who are living. It includes that great cloud of witnesses, the saints. The baptized is welcomed into Christian community - the community of the children of God, of the living saints *and* those who have died - who have passed on - saints in the presence of God, yes, *and* still children of God in God’s everlasting care. We, together, living and dead, are all children of God, all part of the same community to which the newly baptized is welcomed in.

And for those of us who are alive, we are called to be living saints - to claim the identity of children of God and the identity of saints together for ourselves...and then help others claim those identities. We are called to live life in such a way that, like those who we remember today who have gone before us, we will then show others the way to God with our lives. That we would be saints to the child we baptized today, all the children we have and ever will baptize, and really, to all people. That we would be saints. That we are the ones who - show, tell, share - that they, that all people, are also beloved children of God, loved so deeply by God that that holy, eternal love even extends beyond the grave.

Today, as we remember the saints, may their memories spur us on to live as living saints, to fulfill our baptismal promises, to fully live into our identities as beloved children of God, and through our lives, share that eternal, everlasting love, with every child of God.

May it be so. Amen.