This past Wednesday a small group of us met for prayer as we often do on Wednesdays at 11:30. You can join us by zoom if you would like. We often have a few that join that way. You can call the church and we’ll send you the link if you don’t have it already.
Anyway, last week Susan Cormier, who is a church member and also our Administrative Assistant, realized that lately, we have not been starting off our prayer meetings by sharing our joys! Shame on us. Joy and thanksgiving should be the root of prayer! When we begin anything with joy and gratitude, then everything becomes a response to God’s grace, whether we know it or not, and even if we reject or deny it. That’s why – in the words of my old theology professor from seminary, Doug Ottati – we begin worship with confession of sin and the proclamation of salvation, or rather, as he said in class one day, “The good news of salvation is baked into our liturgy.”
Sometimes we need a reminder that salvation is not just a word we use in church, and redemption is not just something that athletes and cake bakers create for themselves on TV, and transformation is not just something that happens to caterpillars and butterflies. That’s why, on the third Sunday of Advent, we light a pink candle.
There’s more to the pink candle than that, historically speaking, and you can look it up online if you want. What matters to us, as followers of Jesus in the Reformed tradition, is that this candle represents joy-filled expectation! This is the closest we dour Presbyterians get to the theological equivalent of a squeal of joy. It’s a full-on theological “Squeeee” for Jesus. Alternatively, it’s the look of hope, peace, and joy that we feel when we see a young woman struggling in her final days of pregnancy and trying to be kind to others while we just look at her all doe-eyed and clueless.
That hapless joy is the joy we have when we truly understand what salvation, redemption, and transformation are all about. These words – salvation, redemption, and transformation – describe what is only possible through God’s love and by God’s choice. The Good news is that God looks at us, every time, and says, “Yes, I do choose.”
That does not mean that we can take God’s choice for granted and do as we please. It means that every choice we make, consciously or unconsciously, is made in response to the one choice that God made through Jesus. Our reading today reminds us that God’s choice has always been to love us, from the beginning. When I say the beginning, I really mean the beginning – before creation itself.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at different gospel accounts of the “beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ” and how it connects to the Advent or coming, of Christ. In Mark’s Gospel, we saw that the call to repentance and salvation offered through the empty cross is the source of our hope. In Matthew’s Gospel, we saw how the good news began with the example of righteousness – or at least doing the right thing – in order to lay a foundation for peace.
This week, we are lifted into the light of God’s love and find our source of joy in the realization that Jesus was as active in creating the order of all things as he is in restoring the order of all things! No, that does not mean that Jesus was the first time traveler, and it doesn’t mean that he, as a man, had personal control over the cosmos like some great and powerful genie in a bottle (supreme cosmic power, itty bitty living space).
What it means is that the author of John’s Gospel, which might have been him or somebody recording things for him, wants us to know that Jesus the Son and God the Father are not just partners and co-conspirators. They are one and the same. I know that is very confusing to say that the Father and the Son are the same, but the point that John makes is that the reality of God is beyond our understanding. While God understands that, God has always intended for us to know God and to enjoy it!
John knows this, too, so he starts out in the same way as Genesis, “In the beginning…” The first thing that God does, in the beginning, is to speak things into existence, “Let there be light.” John wants us to know that the word of God has the same weight and impact and presence as the reality of God. That’s why he says that Jesus is the word of God – the divine logos – that was present in the beginning and active in creation.
Just creating things and letting them go was not enough for God, though. The only problem was that, unlike us, God does have supreme cosmic power and can’t be contained or defined by something that doesn’t have that same kind of power. Whew. This is starting to sound like that riddle, “Can God make something that is too heavy for God to move?”
Well, I’m not so sure about that. What I do know is that our scriptures affirm that God chose to limit God’s self and become truly human. Since we knew God as the progenitor, the Creator of all that is, we needed to know God through Jesus in another way. We also needed to know Jesus as a man in order to know that what God did through him was for us. We needed to know that he wasn’t just some “expression of God’s divinity” but that he could also be an “expression of our humanity” before God.
In the words of Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, “God became like us in order to make us like God.” It would be great if that’s all there was to it, but unfortunately, we know that there is more to the story. Jesus came to his own people and they rejected him.
Let’s stop right there and remember how much hatred has been created by holding those words too loosely. “His own people” were, of course, the Jews. Many have used this one verse to justify terrible things, and we have to call that out because it still goes on. We have to call that out, just like we have to call out all racism and xenophobia and all the ways that we reject each other because the reality that this verse points to is something far greater than his rejection by the jews. It points to God’s rejection by humanity.
More than that, the reality that it points to is that God – source and sovereign of all creation – chose to become flesh and live among us (literally the word means to tabernacle – to live in something temporary and movable), and God still chooses to do it, even now.
Do we get that? Do we realize in our times of suffering that God is experiencing the same suffering with us? Do we realize that when we experience rejection that God has been rejected with us? Do we realize that when we discount and reject others that we are discounting and rejecting God? Do we realize that letting go of the need to reject others and instead of rejecting that part of ourselves that wants to pretend like we have all the power in the universe is what we are invited to do when we light one pink candle for joy in the presence of the Lord?
One of the great stories we lift up every year about the joy that comes from rejecting the part of yourself that rejects others is A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. It’s a story that has been retold so many times that it’s become as ubiquitous as trees and ornaments and lights, which is what Dickens hoped for and why he named it “A Christmas Carol” when it wasn’t written with any musical score in mind.
Of course, this story is often retold as a musical, and one of the great moments is always the part where he wakes up as a changed man on Christmas day! Before that, though, he is confronted by past losses, present suffering, and the threat of destruction if he doesn’t change his ways. Probably my favorite musical number in the whole show, at least in the one released in 1970, is Thank You Very Much – the one where they dance and sing and give thanks and praise for his death and the canceling of their debts while Scrooge dances along obliviously.
I love it because it shows how oblivious I can be to those that I impact negatively. It shows how, when I am praised I tend to set myself up as the center of praise. It reminds me how much we all forget our indebtedness to God for the love and grace and mercy that we have received, and it reminds me of the transformation that is possible when God’s love re-orients our hearts toward gratitude, compassion, and generosity as the source of true joy.
That kind of transformation starts with God’s love. It starts with the hope of salvation. It grows in “right” relationships that demonstrate redemption and proclaim peace, and it gets expressed in pink candles, giddy smiles, and in the hearts of those who know what it’s like to be rejected and to still choose to accept others.
The beautiful thing is this: while we may light a candle for joy today, the experience of joy-filled living can be yours every day – even if you aren’t “feeling” joyful. Joy is still found in the expectation of what is to come, and today we are reminded that Christ has come, and is coming, to make all things new. Thanks be to God for that.
Alleluia! Amen!
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