{"id":290,"date":"2012-12-17T08:56:03","date_gmt":"2012-12-17T13:56:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newunionchristianchurch.org\/home\/?p=290"},"modified":"2017-10-26T22:20:32","modified_gmt":"2017-10-27T03:20:32","slug":"sermon-rejoice-hope-act-advent-3-c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.newunionchristianchurch.org\/home\/2012\/12\/17\/sermon-rejoice-hope-act-advent-3-c\/","title":{"rendered":"Sermon: Rejoice! Hope! Act! Advent 3-C"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well beloved, it\u2019s been a tough, tragic week of horrendous happenings.\u00a0 Like every other person in America, nay, across the world, with an ounce of human feeling for others in us, we have been shocked to the core, and our hearts are heavy with sorrow and grief.\u00a0\u00a0 Moreover, I suspect that many of us feel a great deal of anger that someone could take out his anger and rage on helpless, innocent 6 and 7 year olds, and their teachers who tried to protect them.\u00a0 It\u2019s not that we have made God in our own image, but that we are made in the image of God that makes me believe with all my heart, soul, strength, and mind, that God\u2019s heart was the first of all our hearts to break; that a cartoon of Santa Claus sitting in his sleigh with his hands covering his face, weeping, is an image that may correspond to a sobbing God, but not that God is Santa Clause fulfilling all our petty greedy wants.<\/p>\n

Mike Huckabee\u2019s self-righteous peroration that the events in Sandy Hook happened because God had been taken out of the schools (I presume he means because the children no longer say the Lord\u2019s Prayer) is as insane as the young man who perpetrated the killings.\u00a0 \u00a0God, in my mind, was in that school, and is still in that school, whether the state supported the daily offering of a Christian prayer or not.\u00a0 If you believe in the omni-presence of God throughout the whole created order, no law can take God out of anywhere.<\/p>\n

What Huckabee, I suppose, was really getting at is the moral decay of society.\u00a0 He and I would differ on the causes of that moral decay.\u00a0 He thinks it is because kids don\u2019t pray in school.\u00a0 Interestingly, the Supreme Court decision that removed public prayer from schools occurred in the same year that 98% of American households had at least 1 TV in their home.\u00a0 Now most houses have a TV in the majority of the rooms of the house.\u00a0 So I\u2019m inclined to think that the glorification of violence on TV, in the movies, and in video games\u2014and, on a theological front, the popular fundamentalist emphasis on the atonement and salvation through the blood of the cross, making that ancient violence redemptive\u2014has had more to do with the moral decay of our society than anything else. Somewhere along the line we Christians lost the beautiful concept of the incarnation that God became like us so that we could become more like God.\u00a0 We will never understand the rage that could drive someone to murder innocent children and their teachers.\u00a0 But that young man was going to show the world how angry he really was, so he took a weapon designed not for sport or target shooting, but for mass murder on the fields of battle, loaded with bullets designed to do maximum damage to living tissue, and slaughtered 12 little girls and 8 little boys, and 6 teachers, plus his mother and himself, but I sincerely doubt that his rage had anything to do with the absence, or presence, of prayer in his life.<\/p>\n

The question for us this morning, on this Gaudete Sunday when we are called to rejoice is this:\u00a0 How can we have joy when there is such pain in our country and the world in these days?\u00a0 I believe that we light the candles because of our faith. Christmas comes to declare that the Herods of this world who set\u00a0 the Rachels to weeping for her babies do not \u00a0and cannot have the ultimate power. We light candles to remind us of God\u2019s light that always shines in the darkness. Yes, we will light a candle of joy because even in the midst of tragedy, we have the joy of knowing we are not alone in this world. This is not the holly jolly cultural Christmas joy but the deep abiding joy of knowing that we are God’s beloved.\u00a0 We will sing our song of faith in the wilderness of our pain. We will light candles in defiance of darkness. We will hug and love our children and we will raise them up to believe the best in human beings and the best in themselves. We live as God\u2019s people of faith.<\/p>\n

Joy is the great theme and mood of Christmas, and underlies all the waiting and anticipation of Advent.\u00a0 On this Gaudete Sunday in Advent, Zephaniah tells the people of Israel to rejoice\u2014that despite all outward appearances\u2014God has not abandoned them.\u00a0 In fact, the prophet goes so far as to describe God as rejoicing and exulting over God\u2019s beloved people.\u00a0 Paul, from prison, writes to the Philippians to get their \u201cjoice\u201d together, and to rejoice always!<\/p>\n

Joy, unselfish joy, was what the crowds saw in John the Baptizer.\u00a0 The cynics, the narrow-minded, the arrogant who thought that they alone constituted God\u2019s chosen because they had Abraham as their father, were not able to see it in the Baptizer, especially when he called them a brood of vipers. \u00a0I would suggest to you that John would be calling many, if not most varieties Christians today a brood of vipers for their claims that only right belief and absolute certitude about who is saved and isn\u2019t saved gives them their security.\u00a0 John says to them, as he said to those long ago, God will still raise up faithful people even when your ideas have been destroyed by the ax of history or modernity.\u00a0 The issue for John is not orthodox heritage, but that unselfish joy which delights in the gladness of others.\u00a0 Joy, it would seem, starts chain reactions of magnanimity, generosity of heart and purse, open friendliness, compassion\u2026not fear so huge that one must carry a concealed deadly weapon.\u00a0 Joy is infectious.<\/p>\n

Joy is a much neglected virtue.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t mean simpering sentimental sappiness, but it is a core attitude toward life, albeit tempered by realism but not driven to pessimism, because joy springs from hope, from a conviction that things do not have to be as they are.\u00a0 Hope, Augustine taught us, has two lovely daughters:\u00a0 Anger at the way things are; and Courage to see that things do not remain as they are.\u00a0 Only the truly joyful understand how hope insists that we take a dim view of the present only because we hold a bright view of the future, not a predictable future, to be sure, but a preferred<\/span><\/em> future for which we can work and pray and suffer because hope arouses, as nothing else can, as my friend Bill Coffin always said,\u00a0 \u201ca passion for the possible.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cJust as all the water in the sea cannot sink a boat unless it gets inside;\u00a0 so all the despair in the world cannot bring you under unless it seeps into your soul.\u201d \u00a0[Bill Coffin, in an Advent Sermon in 1984]<\/p>\n

Joy and hope, with anger and courage become a powerful spiritual catalyst providing energy for action.\u00a0 Some have said that \u201cnow is not the time to discuss how we need to change\u201d; now is the time for grief. \u00a0\u00a0My friends, I am sick and tired of grieving over the death of innocents.\u00a0 It is past time we did something about the idolatry of guns in our country.\u00a0 As someone else said this past weekend, if our bridges were collapsing, killing 28 people, we would do something about it.\u00a0 Just because we can\u2019t stop every act of wanton violence doesn\u2019t mean that we can\u2019t reduce the numbers of victims of gun violence. \u00a0I don\u2019t want to weep for any more children.\u00a0 My grief erupts in anger that is based on hope and motivates me to action.\u00a0 When the Brady campaign tells us that there have been 94,000 people shot with a firearm in the past year, we no longer have a problem, we have an epidemic.\u00a0\u00a0 As a beginning, there are three things need to be done, immediately, while this horrific event is still fresh, and so that those precious Sandy Hook kindergarten children have not died in vain:\u00a0 1)\u00a0 the loopholes that allow 40% of the guns sold in America without a background check must be closed;\u00a0 2)\u00a0 we need adequate federal funding to computerize the records in every state of persons who have been adjudicated as unfit to purchase or own a firearm; and 3) we need to restore the ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004, and also ban the sale of multi-bullet ammunition clips.\u00a0 \u00a0There is much more that needs to be done, but these three matters could at least reduce the numbers of deadly incidents such as we have witnessed this past year from Aurora, Colorado, to the Sikh Temple in Michigan, to the merciless slaughter of children and teens in Chicago, to this most recent nightmare.<\/p>\n

We light candles in Advent to put up light in the darkness, because we believe that we personally and the world can be different, that it can be better, more beautiful, more just, more peaceful. \u00a0\u00a0As Disciples of Christ, we believe that Jesus came not to die for our sins, but to show us how to live with hope and joy.\u00a0\u00a0 God became Emmanuel \u201cGod with us\u201d, so that we could become more like God.\u00a0 Rejoice! Hope!\u00a0 Act!\u00a0\u00a0 Amen.<\/p>\n

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Well beloved, it\u2019s been a tough, tragic week of horrendous happenings.\u00a0 Like every other person in America, nay, across the world, with an ounce of human feeling for others in us, we have been shocked to the core, and our<\/p>\n

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