Don’t Quench the Spirit

December 11, 2011
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28.
We cozied up one evening last week and watched A Charlie Brown Christmas. It first aired when I was six – prime childhood Christmas-loving age to be sure, and, since Baby Boomers have seen it more than once it’s a tradition. It’s been part of 46 seasons for me, and remains my favorite of all the pop-culture homages to Christmas. Maybe it’s the amazing Vince Guaraldi score. Maybe it’s Linus asking for “lights, please” and giving the definitive reading of Luke’s Christmas story. But I think it’s more likely poor old Charlie Brown asking plaintively, “Isn’t there anybody who can tell me what Christmas is all about?”
Actually, it’s not that question that gets me so much as the very first thing Charlie Brown says: “I think there must be something wrong with me Linus. Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy. I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel. I just don’t understand Christmas I guess. I like getting presents, and sending Christmas cards, and decorating trees and all that, but I’m still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed.”
Charlie Brown is not the only one who feels that way. In fact, I’d guess that most grownups share that feeling some times.
There are reasons that sometimes we feel like Charlie Brown around holidays. The culture, especially the mass consumer culture in America around Christmas, screams at us in every imaginable way that this is “the most wonderful time of the year,” and that we can find joy around every Christmas tree.
Against those claims, however, we confront often harsh reality. Whether it’s deep social problems, injustices, violence and war, or more deeply personal concerns, there is a disjunction for us whose depth equals the depth of our concerns.
For those who have lost loved ones, the holidays can be particularly difficult, especially if the loss happened during the holidays even years ago. The emptiness feels all the more acute when all around you people seem so filled with the so-called “Christmas spirit.” Their joy seems to mock your pain.
Like all who grieve, you want to scream to the world that keeps on spinning, “Stop! Can’t you see the pain I’m in!”
Against the backdrop of mass consumer culture’s warped version of Christmas, that cry of human suffering may just be the most authentic carol of the season. Indeed, the suffering cry draws closer to the spirit of Christmas than anything you’ll find in the stores or on line or wrapped beneath your Christmas tree, for the baby in the manger was God’s most gracious response to human suffering, to human bondage, to human brokenness and injustice.
The prophet Isaiah’s words give meaning to the nativity scene: the spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives.
That’s what Christmas means: the spirit of God is turned loose on earth! This is not just any birth; the hopes and fears of all the years are to be met when the spirit of God is loosed in human history.
As Charlie Brown understood, there’s nothing at all wrong with giving gifts, sending cards, decorating trees and generally making merry as we Northern Hemisphere Christians try to light up the darkest days of the year.
But there’s also nothing wrong with feeling depressed sometimes, with feeling sadness at new or not so new grief and loss, feeling disconnect when you’re far from family and homeplaces, feeling a bit left out when your mood doesn’t quite match up with the mood that Madison Avenue tells you to feel.
That’s just it: God doesn’t tell you to feel happy. Jesus was not anointed to make you feel good, but rather to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, and proclaim liberty to the captives. And, Jesus chose to live out that anointing, that calling, in a community with disciples called to participate in that hope-filled but always difficult and sometime incredibly sad work.
Those disciples? That’s us. You and me. Not called to “be happy,” but called to bring good news!
The heart and soul of the good news is quite simple, maybe even as simple as Linus’ response to Charlie Brown’s ultimate cry for the meaning of Christmas: “there were in the same country shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night … fear not for behold I bring you tidings of great joy for unto you is born this day a savior which is Christ the Lord … glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, goodwill toward all.”
Unto you is born a savior. That is to say, one who will bring you salvation, healing, wholeness, communion with one another and with God. That is to say, shalom – peace, and good will to all.
That news is no guarantee that you’ll experience December as “the most wonderful time of the year.”
It is, however, an invitation to open your heart to something deeper, that your cries of sorrow may be met by the Spirit that calls you into the more profound hallelujah that we sing together as we stumble along the way of Jesus in the world.
The ways of Christ are never simple. I was reminded of that again last week in corresponding with my friend Rick Ufford-Chase, who is on his way home today from Bethlehem where he represented the Presbyterian Church at the Kairos Palestine gathering. He sent me a note Thursday saying, “I was in Manger Square in front of the Church of the Nativity this morning at 6:30 when they rang the bells. The security wall is a 20 foot high concrete barrier visible from my hotel - and from almost everywhere in Bethlehem. How's that for the juxtaposition between hope and despair?”
The day before I’d sent him an Advent reflection from David Hanson, a Georgia writer, who noted in his thoughts on this third Sunday of Advent, which traditionally focuses on hope:
“Ultimately, if we aim to continue in the ways of Christ, we must develop the discipline of hope. But hope is a volatile business and a difficult practice in our world. When we resist hope, we resist the second comings of Christ, the returns of God, toward which Advent calls us. But that is not all. When we resist hope, we also resist being disappointed with God. And we will be disappointed, make no mistake. Our hope in God, if not God, will fail. To truly develop the practice of hope, we must confront and embrace this disillusionment with God, the failures of God, the long delay of God, the absence of God. Unless we do, we are condemning ourselves to delusional saccharine spirituality, a false hope that will wither in times of anguish, turmoil, and loss. But a hope that also can mourn the loss of hope is a beginning of a deeply centered Christian practice. And if we can manage to endure and mourn the loss of hope in God and in ourselves, perhaps then we can begin the process, like Abraham and Sarah, of hoping against all hope.”
I think hope is a gift of the Spirit, and, further, that sometimes hope is how we experience the spirit of God. The spirit simply feels like hope. It does not necessarily feel like happiness, for it may well be hope that comes watered by a river of tears.
Advent will not always feel like joy, but our sorrows cannot ultimately quench the spirit of the Lord that is upon us calling us to share what is, after all, good news.
For you Christ has come, and for you, surely, Christ is coming again.
Open your heart to this good news, and may the spirit of God be poured out upon you in abundance these days.
Last night Rick sent me another note. This one included a quote from the Rev. Mitri Raheb, a Palestinian Christian who lives in Bethlehem. He told the Kairos gathering last week:
“In the Kairos document, the most powerful section is the section on Hope. There is a big difference between optimism and hope. None of us will leave this meeting with optimism. ….”
Calling on the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Mitri continued “even if we know there is no way we can be successful, still, we have only one option: to go out today into the garden and plant olive trees. We do the work. This is what Kairos is about - planting an Olive Tree when the world will come to an end tomorrow. This is crazy - but the world needs our kind of crazy. Otherwise, there will be no shade in which our children can play. There will be oil to light our lamps. There will be no branches to wave when peace finally comes. Our hope creates a culture of life. Optimism is what we see. Hope is what we do.”
Advent hope is like that; it does not require mere happiness, or even really any happiness from us. Rather, it understands that often the way through our own despair is by way of the suffering of others as we do the faithful work of hope, the faithful work of planting seeds that we already know we may never see grow, but that are planted so the future might be otherwise.
As the prophet Isaiah put it,
“For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.”
The spirit of God was loosed on the world through the life of a baby born in a stable in the tiny little town of Bethlehem. That spirit continues in all times and places, through you and me and so many others, to do the work of Advent hope.
May that spirit continue to pour forth in you and through you even now. For that, Charlie Brown, is what Christmas is all about. Amen.

Glad Tidings

Isaiah 40:1-9; Mark 1:1-8
The gospel of Mark begins like this: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Matthew’s “gospel” begins with, “An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah ….” Luke’s “gospel” opens with an author’s note to Theophilus. John starts his “gospel,” famously, “In the beginning was the word.”
We call each of these writings “gospel,” and refer to them collectively as “the gospels.” But what is this “gospel”?
Turn on your google machine and you’d think, for starters, that “gospel” is music, which, of course, it is. But it was something else first. A second glance at the same google machine confirms what you’d expect: gospel is religious.
Indeed, it is all but impossible for us to hear the word “gospel” as anything other than religious, but, fascinatingly enough, the first readers of Mark’s “gospel” – the oldest of the gospels – would not have heard his opening sentence as religious at all.
“The beginning of the gospel, the good news, the glad tidings of Jesus Christ” would have struck the ears of first century Palestinian hearers of these tidings as a tweak in the face of Rome. “Gospel,” as a literary genre, consisted at that point almost entirely of propaganda from the empire.
It is as if you turned on the television to watch the State of the Union address and found a story about salvation instead. And, if you bothered to listen to the whole message, you would hear that this healing and wholeness for your life and your society were not coming through the work of a president or a congress or the powerful or the wealthy or the “job creators,” but, instead, through the lives of the poor, the sick, the outcast and the occupied. The convention is turned on its head, and the reason for doing so would quickly become clear.
Mark is up to something. His second sentence gives another big clue as he quotes Isaiah, "See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'"
The gospel, the glad tidings, the good news about Jesus is, before it is anything else, a message of hope to an occupied people. Before it is anything else – before it is “religious,” before it is about “eternal life,” way before it is about something called “church,” – the good news of the gospel comes as a response to the cry of those people asking – as oppressed people have always asked – is this the way it’s supposed to be?
Is this the way it’s supposed to be?
Your own answer to that question is an excellent way to gauge your own response to the gospel. If everything is just fine the way it is then you have no need of tidings – glad or otherwise – that begin with the declaration, “Turn everything around, for the kingdom of God is at hand!”
That’s as good a translation as you’ll get of Jesus’ earliest teaching. Metanoia – the Greek in the gospels – means to turn from the path one is on. The essence of Jesus’ message? Everything must change!
Is this the way it’s supposed to be?
If you’re fine with the way things are then Jesus really has very little to say to you – except, perhaps, for that basic Advent imperative: wake up!
Wake up! Wake up and look around you. Everything is not fine, and this is not the way it’s supposed to be.
Have you seen the 60 Minutes clip that is making the Facebook rounds lately? The one that focuses on homeless families in central Florida? The one that mentions a county there that has 1,100 homeless children in its school system? The one the features a 15-year-old girl and her younger brother who live in a van with their carpenter father because, well, because there is no room for them in the inn?
Is this the way it’s supposed to be?
Wake up! Wake up and look around you. Everything is not fine, and this is not the way it’s supposed to be.
Have you noticed that our U.S. tax dollars – yours and mine our friends’ and loved ones’ – pay for almost half of the entire world’s total spending on war and the preparation for war? And have you noticed that nobody even talks about that anymore? Swords, plowshares, prince of peace?
Is this the way it’s supposed to be?
Wake up! Wake up and look around you. Everything is not fine, and this is not the way it’s supposed to be.
Have you felt the broken places in your own life lately? Have you wondered why some simple things are so often just so damned difficult? Have you felt hope slip away like water down a drain pipe and wondered when justice might flow like a might water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream?
Everything is not the way it’s supposed to be. Repent. Turn around on the path you’re on and look toward a new horizon. There, like a bright morning star, stands the one whose glad tidings are for you: the good news of Jesus the Christ.
On this good news everything depends. On this good news begins the great turning of the world. On this good news rest the hopes and fears of all the years.
So, recalling that, in those days, a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered, and that the glad tidings of Jesus the Christ register first and foremost God’s discontent with the way things are, and also God’s invitation to register our own hopes for the way things could yet be, pause for a moment to consider your own “hopes and fears” this Advent season.
We all come from some place, and we meet here for a little while along the way. We bring to this place our brokenness, that we might experience something of God’s healing grace. We bring to this place our deepest longings, that we might find here bread for our journeys into hope.
We come to this place to register, then, our hopes and fears, and to join our voices in the glad tidings that say, “no, this is not the way things are supposed to be,” and thus to join our voices with the ancient prophets to declare good news:
"In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.” Let it be so, and may I participate in the transformation. That is to say, amen.