Love, Love, Love

Last Friday, my parents came up to see Georgia and to hang out a little bit, and we went over to Tuckston United Methodist Church on the eastside of Athnes where my dad was a minister for 8 years, to go to their “Bethlehem marketplace.”

All the members of their church put on their bath robes, they dress up, and act like characters from Bethlehem as guests travel through, going to all the shops, and at each shop the people talk about how some “strange travelers” have come through recently. A young girl, riding a donkey, and a man who is engaged to her…which is quite a bit of a scandal.

Then, as you continue along your journey, you come to the inn. Where the innkeeper is talking about how there is no room, and that it broke his heart that he even had to turn away a young couple expecting a baby, and he wondered where they went. Then, his young daughter popped up, and exclaimed, “I know where they went!” And proceeds to show you the manger, where the baby is sleeping, and angels singing overhead.

It was a fun time to journey through Bethlehem. A lot of people broke character as we walked through to ask about how we were and what was going on. We swapped stories about how children and grandchildren were doing. And as we journeyed through, I thought about our own journey. I grew up in Athens, went to college, went to seminary, got married, had a child, moved here. A lot has happened in the short time we’ve been away from Athens, it has been quite a journey.

Hopefully, we have been journeying toward Bethlehem all of Advent. Shaking off the commercialism and busyness of the season to shed some light on what it means that Christ is coming among us. We light one more candle each week as we go throughout our journey, and many times it is good to look back at our journey to see where we have been, so that we can be better informed to know where we are going.

We started our journey talking about hope. Knowing that hope is something that undergirds our life, and that hope is what Christ brings into the world. I hope you all have shared your hopes with one another, and with your family. We all have hopes…but we learned that we also have Hope, with a capital H. Jesus Christ brings us hope. Hope for a future that is wonderful. And hope that this future is already breaking into our lives every day. Putting our Christmas Hope list together.
Then we talked about peace. Finding peace in the everyday, and becoming peace makers in our community, and the world. Trading in the pieces of ourselves for the peace of Christ.
Relinquishing our control of territory, and giving it over to God for the peace that God offers. That was the second leg of our journey.

Then, last week we talked about joy. How joy is different from happiness. And we have so many things to be joyful about. Mike and Teresa joined our church. This community rallied together to help some among us. The youth sacrificed Christmas gifts to buy a water buffalo for a developing country. We had laughter and music all afternoon at the parsonage, and we even had a joyful administrative council meeting, believe it or not, because there is so much to be joyful about. That was the third leg of our journey.

And now we are on the home stretch.

I ran cross country in high school. And whenever I would run a race, I would always try to pace myself. But then, when you get to that last stretch of the track, seeing the finish line in front of me, I found that I had an extra boost of energy. I run harder and faster that last leg, because you know that once you hit that line, you are done, and you can rest, and get replenished.
And so on this Sunday, we find ourselves on that last stretch of track in Advent. Some of us may want it just to be done. To go back to normalcy in our lives. Where we can take down the decorations, and rearrange our furniture back where it is supposed to be. We can get back into our routines without expectations of entertaining and shopping.

Well, I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news for those who want everything to go back to normal.

The good news is that Christ is coming. Christ is coming to be with us. Christ isn’t coming as a war hero who is going to take the world by force. Christ isn’t coming as a political figure who will unite everyone under the same banner. Christ isn’t even coming on a cloud or riding a horse or in an earthquake. Christ is coming…as a baby. The same way all of us came into the world. Christ is coming…as Jesus. As one who is born, grows up, and walks among us. Doing the one thing all the time that we all too often forget how to do…love.

That is today’s candle that we light in expectation of Christmas. Love. The one thing that holds it all together. The love of God is what gives us hope, it is what gives us peace, and it is what gives us joy.

Now for the bad news for everyone who just wants things to go back to the way they were.

It won’t.

Because when love enraptures your soul, things are never the same.

The letter Paul is writing to the Romans is a letter he is writing to people he has never met. He plans to go to the Romans, to preach there, and to take up a collection for a mission trip he has planned for Spain. And his letter to the Romans starts off in a different way than any of the other letters he writes.

Basically, it says: I’m Paul, and here is what I’m all about. I’m all about Christ and who he calls me to be.

If you were to write a letter like that, what is it you would say?
Hello, I’m (Blank), and here is what I’m all about.

Are you all about family? Or all about Children? Are you all about your work? Are you all about retirement? Are you all about hunting? Are you all about sports? Think about that for a second. What are you all about? Where do you invest your time, money, and energy, because where you invest those three things says a lot about who you are. If you are all about your family, then everything you do springs from that well. That is where you derive your source and your strength.

Or if we wrote that letter, together, as a community, what would it say we were all about. If we wrote a letter that was to be distributed to everyone in Franklin County, we would say, “Hello, we are Bold Spring United Methodist Church, and this is what we are all about.”

Might I suggest love? It is the foundation upon which we stand…that God is love.

Might I suggest love, because as the Beatles say, love is all you need.

But I’m not talking about a feeling, and I’m not saying that you can survive on love. We all know that there are other things people need. Shelter, food, clothing; sure, but also vocation, purpose, hope, peace, and joy. But when we are all about love of God and love of neighbor, we want those things for everybody, not just for ourselves.

When we are all about love…everything will change. Love will become the source of who we are, it will become the motivation of our actions, it will be the reason we get out of bed in the morning, and it will be the reason that when we lie down, our minds are churning of what we can do to share love with others.

Because the other thing the Beatles say about love is that in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.

So we must share it.

One of the more interesting phenomena that we are experiencing right now is that there is a third kind of company that is emerging in the marketplace. There used to be two, simple, neat categories of “For profit,” which is a publicly traded company, and “Not-for-profit.” That is not the case anymore as a third category has emerged called “For Benefit.” These companies make as part of their mission to benefit society. The old model used to be that you made as much money as you possibly could, by whatever means you could, so that you reached a point that you were taken care of and you gave the rest philanthropically. The “For Benefit” companies are taking a different approach. They are publicly traded, but want to make their societal impact now. And so they make money, but they make money for the purpose of making a positive impact on the world.

Tom’s shoes is an example. Which is a company based out of California that makes and sells pretty trendy shoes. I heard an interview with the creator and CEO, Blake Mycoskie, on NPR. For every pair of shoes that is purchased, Tom’s shoes donates a pair of shoes to a village in the developing world. That’s it. And they have already given away millions of shoes to children mainly to prevent cuts, scrapes, it helps them receive an education, and stay healthy. For Benefit.

I am intrigued by this model.

Mainly because I think it does what the church should do. Make an impact. Not just exist solely for its members, though there is benefit in being a member here, but also be for benefit of the community in which it exists. Offering the love of Christ. As much love as is created here, as much love is given away. And so on and so on.

Christ is coming among us. So while we are on the homestretch of this Christmas season, we may ramp up our energy to push through the finish line…but I believe that we are pushing through to the starting line. The point at which we begin, which is Jesus Christ coming into our lives.

Then, everything changes. But most importantly, what we are all about. Love of God, and love of neighbor.

The root of our life. And a life-giving presence. I believe we are beginning to see what love can do. And we are beginning to understand that this entire Advent season, as we have been preparing and waiting with anticipation Christ coming to be among us; that when he comes, our lives will change. And we will see what love can do at this church and in this community.
Let’s see what love can do.

Love can break down barriers. Barriers that are hindering all of us. Barriers of guilt, barriers of doubt, and barriers of fear. Whether they are racial barriers, economic barriers, class barriers, or political barriers…we all have things that are preventing us from being in community with one another. Love can break down those barriers.

Love can inspire mission. Can inspire us to give of ourselves. And the youth are leading us in this. The youth go on a mission trip every summer. The youth have been raising money for a water buffalo through Heifer international, and the youth have been volunteering their time at Cornerstone ministries to pack bags of food for those in our community. Love can do that.

Love can make us one with Christ. One with each other. And one in ministry to all the world, the promises that we make week after week. Love is what makes it possible.

Hello, we are Bold Spring United Methodist Church. We are all about love of God, and love of neighbor. We like to see what love can do in our world. And we do it, because of Christ being in our life, and offering us life. Christ saves us, and inspires us. Won’t you join us?

I'm talkin' 'bout joy

I first want to make a correction. With my sketchy memory, I gave you some wrong information on Byron Herbert Reece last week, the poet who wrote the poem I read to you about John the Baptizer. He went to and taught at Young Harris, not at Reindhardt. And, Chowy-Stowy is near Blairsville, not Canton. I’m sorry for the confusion.

But that aside, I think we all learned how peace is coming, and we should follow our cue from John on how to prepare the way for it.

So far, we have talked about Hope and Peace. How they are coming to us in this Christmas season. We do not need to lose sight of that. Despite things ramping up with the holidays approaching, exams coming, Travel plans to arrange, decorating to be done, shopping to think about…all of these things take a back seat to hope, peace, and today’s candle…joy.

Church gurus around the world decided that this candle should not be purple like the rest, but should be pink. They felt that purple was too much of a downer, so they went with a brighter color.

Now too many of us in this Christmas season, and in our country confuse joy with happiness. I think it might have something to do with a whole generation being raised on the Partridge Family where the opening theme song was, C’mon get happy!

Like if you aren’t happy, then there is something wrong with you.

But I think that if we are honest with ourselves, its impossible to be happy all of the time. There are tough days. And Christmas time is no exception.

Some of us have lost people who were very special to us recently. Some of us are worried about closing out the year. Many of us have experienced loss in one way or another, as a lot can happen in our lives. Sometimes it is expected, but many times it is not. If we are honest, as we should be this time of year, we don’t feel very happy.

Yet we feel this pressure all around us to be happy. That as long as we can grip something with our mind vice we can force ourselves to look on the bright side, and forget about the rest.

So on the day when we light the candle for joy…we wonder if it is even possible, because we confuse happiness with joy. Because happiness is a feeling. And feelings come and go. But our joy isn’t based on a feeling. It is based on a relationship. A relationship that will always be there. A relationship that we explore anew at this time every year, but one in which we should explore every day. A relationship on one we call both savior, and friend. Who we call a King, yet is coming among us as a baby.

The people to whom Isaiah was talking felt that too. They were under threats from all sides. Assyrians, Babylonians, Egypt…different kings with different agendas that wanted their land for different purposes. Some practical, some political, but the single truth remained that the land promised to them, and given to them by God, was being taken away from them by forces beyond their control.

We can’t control our lives. We think we can. We operate under the allusion of control with insurance policies and security systems, but we can’t control everything.

Just as we can’t save ourselves. Only God can. We can’t heal ourselves, only God can. You see we feel the same things that the displaced Israelites felt. That we are tired at the end of the day from all of our activities, trying to be good people and doing good, and we wonder if we made any difference. We feel that some things in life just aren’t fair. Why some people are “normal” and many of us are not. Why some have all the luck, and some do not. Like the song by Mary Chapin Carpenter. Sometimes you are windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.

How can we be honest and light a candle for joy in the face of that?

We can light the candle, because Joy is different from happiness.

One of my family’s holiday traditions is that after the late Christmas eve service, we would watch a Claymation Christmas. It was this special that ran on TV one time, and my parents happened to tape it. It was made by Will Vinton, who is a claymation artist. Claymation was stop motion animation where Clay figures were made, and you would move them one motion, take a picture. Move them a little bit more, take a picture, and so on and so on. So when we ran through the pictures quickly, it looked like they were moving. It was a tedious process, but I always really liked it.

Claymation Christmas is the clay figures singing various Christmas carols hosted by a clay tyrannosaurus rex and a triceratops. I just realized how ridiculous that sounds, and I don’t think I could make that up if I tried.

But one of my favorite carols from that show is their rendition of Joy to the world. It is a gospel version, and during it a stained glass window in the church comes alive. And at one point, the bass line of the song is, “I’m talking ‘bout joy.” Repeated over and over and over.

I’m talking ‘bout joy.

I’m talking about praising and worshipping God to the ends of the earth. I’m talking about families loving, forgiving, and eating with one another. I’m talking about the true gift of the season, Jesus Christ coming into our lives. I’m talking ‘bout joy.

I’m talking about living your true calling and true vocation. I’m talking about seeing your kids grow up, and asking the tough questions, and doing wonderful things in their lives and in their communities. I’m talking about giving becoming far greater a priority in our lives than receiving. I’m talking ‘bout joy.

And I’m talking about joy, in spite of our unhappiness, that God is in control of this world, and God is in control of our lives.


One of the more interesting things to me about this passage from Isaiah is that the mute will sing songs, and the lame will leap like deer. Not only are these people given abilities that they did not have before, but they use them to their utmost.

Because when you walk on that Holy Road, we are expected to use whatever gifts God has given us to the utmost. I’m talking ‘bout joy.

Strengthen those drooping hands, and weak knees. When the toughness of the world is crashing down on you. God is coming.

The kids sang last week, and they did a phenomenal job when they interpreted what Mary, the young girl that found out from an angel that she was going to have a child says to God…The answer is yes.

God is breaking through into our lives…say yes, because we are being invited on a wonderful adventure with wonderful opportunity. The iconic character from JRR Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, never would have gone on an adventure, or played in part in the righting of their world had he not done one thing…leave the shire. Leave his comfort when he was invited.

God is inviting all of us this Christmas season. God is inviting us to share the love and joy of Christ that we have. God is inviting us to be a part of something truly special when we say we will become a part of this church. God may be inviting you to work with the children. God may be inviting you to sing in the choir. God may be inviting you to help with the youth. God may be inviting you to a mission trip. God may be inviting you to give a tithe, 10% of your income, which is a scary thing, because you have never done any of these things before and you don’t know if you are talented enough, and you aren’t sure if you will make it. …say yes.

I’m talking ‘bout joy.

Times are tough, and sometimes we are not happy, but I’m talking ‘bout joy. That hope that Jesus is coming and breaking into the dark places in life to shine his light. The peace that will be brought in the world and in our innermost selves.

I see joy in your faces, and I see it in this church. As we are getting closer and closer to Christmas, we honor those and those things we have lost, but joy is coming…and joy is here.

Don’t lose it.

My dad, has always compared me to Tigger, from the Winnie the Pooh books. He says that I have a “bounce” to me. He says he knows that things are tough when I lose my bounce, and sometimes I need to get my bounce back.

I will be honest with you this morning, I was losing my bounce there for a while. I was struggling in my ministry, and was struggling in my calling to even continue to be a minister. I researched teaching and a host of other things that I could do. But being here at Bold Spring. In this community, in this church, with all of you and the great things that we have done and all of the energy and great things that God is asking us to do…I have my bounce back.

What gives you bounce? What gives you joy? Is it seeing new faces among the familiar ones here at our church? Is it great music? Is it the faces of the children?

If you have lost your bounce this year, I hope you are able to get it back, because God is giving it back to us. To restore our relationship with him…he is sending his son.
I’m talking ‘bout joy.

Peace

Last week, we heard from Paul about the hope we have in our lives. About how Christ’s breaking into the world is a reality into which we must live our lives now. I hope you, as I have been, keeping your “Christmas list.” If you weren’t able to be here last week, I would love to talk to you about how to make your own Christmas list, or you can find someone who was here last week who would love to share it with you.
Our hopes are rooted in the hope that Christ brings…so what do you hope for this Christmas?

This week, we hear from John the Baptist. I’ll be honest with you, the worst sermon I ever preached was on John the Baptist. Hopefully, that history won’t repeat itself this morning. But I think one of the reasons that sermon was so bad was because I don’t feel like I’ve ever quite understood John or his role in all of this. He is a prophet, in the same manner as Elijah, quoting Isaiah, and preparing us for Christ. Yet he is a prophet on the outside who shouts things at the religious and political establishment that would never be said in polite company. He is extremely important, but dresses as someone extremely poor, and lives on whatever the land gives to him.

I don’t really know anybody like that. With the courage to stand up against the powers of this world…but also with authority given to him that people listen. I would compare him to a “street preacher,” but his words are not ignored by those passing by. And yet, he also steps aside when people begin to give him more authority than his purpose, showing a tremendous amount of humility.

So this week, while I was working on this sermon I became engaged in a conversation with a good friend of mine who is a brilliant religious skeptic. He is in a master’s program for creative writing and is getting some essays published soon in a journal and was asking for some help forming some sentences and syntax. While I had him on the phone and sharing google documents, I decided to jump on the opportunity to ask him about John, to which he replied to me with a poem by Byron Herbert Reece.

I really enjoy poetry. There is something that a poem can say that just cannot be said in other ways, and I particularly enjoyed this one.

Byron Herbert Reece is a fascinating person in his own right. A son of farmers in the Choestoe community near Blairsville, Georgia. He went to Young Harris, but never graduated because he began getting published. He constantly fluxed between unsuccessfully managing his family’s farm, and successfully teaching and writing at UGA, Young Harris, and Emory. His books and poems had widespread fame, but he had just as equally widespread trouble managing his money, and died in obscurity. He wrote a poem about John that my friend shared with me, and I want to share with you because it tells the whole story of John. The poem is a little lengthy, but I wanted to share just the first and sixth stanza with you as it talks about our text this morning. Its titled: John: A New Testament Ballad.

O, who is that with raven tress
And fire-face, crying in the wilderness?

It’s John

Who is it shouts so loud and rude,
Who speaks so sharp to the multitude?

It’s John

His words seem dark to mate his hair,
The way of Christ the Lord prepare,
Does John

What else are those that come advised?

Repent, repent and be baptized,
Says John.

Though water has no power to save,
And I baptize in Jordan’s wave,

Another cometh after me,
With heaven’s fire baptizes He!
Says John, John, John.


VI
Well, Herod long at rest has been,
Lying the grave’s stark width within.

The good thing out of Nazareth
Has rendered up His mortal breath,

And John the Baptist looked of late
With dead eye from Salome’s plate;

All in time are drowned and dim-
Have we not heard the last of them?

Not so, for Herod lives again
The million lives of sinful men,

And Christ the Lord on Easter morn
Held death’s dominion up to scorn;

And though betimes his rest is deep
John may not always silence keep.

He quiet lies and does not cry
As long as men put evil by,

Keeps silence will men bow to sin
And then we wakes and cries again,
Does John, John, John!


John has a role…one that we should try so hard to emulate, and that role is to prepare the world for Jesus. But before we can prepare the world, we have to make sure we are prepared for Jesus. That is why we come to church, we come to Sunday school, and why we are gathering at the table this morning…to prepare for Jesus.

And in preparation, we need to talk about peace. That is the candle we lit this morning on the advent wreath in our anticipation of Christmas. Peace.

So many times, we confuse the spellings of the word peace. We replace the “A” in the world with an “I”. so in trying to establish P-E-A-C-E, we push each other aside to grab our P-I-E-C-E.

Since we began to establish our own territory, people have fought. Look back to the Garden of Eden. Everything was at peace, until Adam and Eve wanted a piece of what God said was His.

Think back to your history classes, what was the reason a majority of wars are fought? Territory. Someone wanting to add to his or her piece, by taking it from someone else. That’s one of the main problems in every conflict right now in the world…people taking pieces from one another. And by taking each others pieces, we take each other’s peace.

I’ve been in a fight one time in my life. I don’t know why it happened. It was in the fifth grade. A guy named Bryce punched me at soccer practice, and I punched him back. I think it was over a girl. We both cried, which didn’t impress the girl. Then, in talking to the coach, he asked us, “did that make you feel better?” No, we sobbed. And I didn’t. I didn’t have peace. Because as Ghandi said, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

And it was the same problem that John was facing. All the religious and political establishments of the time were trying to assert their authority so that their piece of the pie would remain intact. It says both Sadducees and Pharisees were there at the time John was preaching. Those two groups are NEVER together because they are at odds religiously. They believe different things, yet they both come to hear John because what he has to say applies to all of us. The political establishment feared John, because the pieces they had worked so hard to get suddenly would become obsolete if what John was saying were true. Get ready, because Christ is coming. And all of our little pieces that we have carved out for ourselves, will be consumed into the P-E-A-C-E of Christ.

And so he says “repent, repent and be baptized.” In another way of saying it, give your piece back to God, and God will establish peace in your life. Trade your pieces, for peace.

We have all of these ideas of ownership and territory, especially at Christmas. I don’t know about your family, but ours runs into it. We each have our own things that we bring to the table, and we each have our own priorities, and it is when we bump into each other, that we have conflict.

Meredith and I love the show “Parenthood.” It is a wonderful show, and we both love watching it because we both come from big families with all kinds of family dynamics and subtleties and we are all trying to figure it out together. And two weeks ago, they had a thanksgiving episode. One of the major points of conflict in their thanksgiving dinner was that a guest of the family brought pie. It was the guest’s family tradition. And one of the sisters in the family is the one who made the pie. They infringed on each others territory, so there was conflict.

The same thing happens at Christmas. There is competition in who gets what gifts for who, and how much time is spent with family, and to make sure it is equal and fair. That is one of the hardest adjustments people have to make when they get married. Becoming absorbed in each others traditions. Because there will be conflict. Like does spending two days with one family during the month of December equal spending Christmas Eve with the other? These are the kinds of bartering conversations that happen around the holidays.

And John is telling us this morning…all of those things are human constructs and restrictions you have put on yourselves. Trade those broken pieces of yourself in. Repent, repent and be baptized. Trade those pieces, for peace.

Peace is what we need to offer the world through this church. Where we share what we have because it’s not our piece anyway, it’s God’s. Where in committee meetings and program areas we don’t fight with one another because someone is infringing on our territory, but that we trust one another and work with one another. Our committee meetings should be something that people are excited to be a part of because they are being given an opportunity to serve…not something that is dreaded because people feel ownership over things.

We don’t own this church. God does. We don’t own this world. God does. And God can offer peace when we just turn in the broken pieces of ourselves.

Where do you find your peace? Is it in your family? Is it in reading? Is it in athletics? Is it in the quiet, or is it in the cacophony of noise? Where do you find peace?

Because peace is what is coming. John tells us so. John is like the stagehand who builds the set for the play. He doesn’t get a lot of recognition for the magic of the play, the main character does. But without the set…where is the main character going to stand?

The main character in our lives is Jesus. And Jesus is bringing peace. John tells us how to prepare the place for Jesus to stand.

Personally, I find a tremendous amount of peace in the sacrament of holy communion. Where we gather together, all as one family, none more important than another. Whether you have been here for 30 years or thirty minutes you are welcome at this table. You get the same bread and the same grape juice that everyone else gets. And we are all offered the same nourishment of God’s tremendous grace. There are no restrictions on it. It doesn’t matter what you have done in your life that makes you feel unworthy. It doesn’t matter if you are scared of what people might think of you. We all share it together.

Let this Christmas season be a time of peace for you. Prepare for it. Prepare for Jesus coming into your life. Let go of all those tiny pieces you hold most dear, and give them to God in exchange for peace.