For All People

Luke 2:1-20

Try to imagine that you’ve never heard this story.

I know that many of us have been told – and have told – this story over and over, in word and song and image, until it’s a part of your permanent record. But I’m asking you to step away, just for a moment, from the candle glow and the rich tapestry of tradition and story and song, and imagine that you’ve never heard of babies in mangers.

That you’re going about your daily life, maybe at work, and an angel of the Lord is standing in front of you.

Just…there. Probably without a tinsel halo, but unmistakably an angel.

And you are frankly and unexpectedly terrified. Because the raw power of the presence of God drops the floor out from under you a lot faster and harder than those spinny rides at Six Flags.

Do not be afraid, says this creature of awe.

Look, I’ve brought you news of great joy for all people. 

I brought you the one thing that is really, really for everybody:

For awful people and fabulous people. Nerdy people and sporty people and mean and nice. Enemies and friends. Important, notable people and invisible, uncounted people. Faithful people and uncertain people and oppositional people. Strangers.

Seven billion human beings on the planet.

I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that many an “all”.

But here is this messenger of God, standing in front of you, saying “I brought you this news. God picked you, particularly you, to know this one thing which is joy for that unimaginably many all people.

There’s proof, the angel says. Proof you get to see. Right down the hill in Bethlehem. Check it out.

Obviously, you go and see. “No” isn’t really an option when the power and presence of God is that focused on you.

But how do you think of yourself now? How do you respond?

How do you live with, live into, the experience of God putting the great joy of EVERYONE in your particular hands and heart, eyes and ears, in a world that doesn’t ever seem to have enough joy to go around?

That’s what happens to the shepherds, on an otherwise perfectly ordinary night in the hills around Bethlehem.
Suddenly they are the few people in the world gifted – or burdened – with the one thing that is great joy for all people. Holding in their ears and eyes and hearts the news so big that it belongs to all the world.

Why would God pick you or me, or one particular group of shepherds, when God could most certainly tell everyone on earth at once? How on earth am I, are you, are we, going to share this with all people? Most of us aren’t even on local TV.

I fear that I might be paralyzed by that knowledge; by the responsibility of being entrusted with the gift of God’s joy that belongs to everyone else as much as to me.

Luckily for us and for the Christmas story, the shepherds aren’t paralyzed. They go and see just what the angel promised: Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger.

Then they tell their story: their story about hearing this news directly from God, about being given the great joy that is for all.

And then they go back to their ordinary work, “glorifying and praising God” for seeing the great joy of all the earth, just as they were told. They live out their joy while they go on with their lives. They aren’t shy about it; they just do what comes naturally.

Because they know – they know now, from their own experience – that God’s got this.

God tells whoever God wants, because God has the great joy of all people – friends, enemies; politicians and migrants and bus drivers and executives and internet trolls and people on the other side of the earth and the people I can’t imagine right now – God has the great joy of all people covered; completed.

God has come right to them – personally, particularly to these shepherds to tell them that they – ordinary, unimportant they – know what God has done for every single person on this earth. For the earth itself.

That great truth is a great responsibility, yes. But in hearing and seeing and telling, they discover that it is God’s responsibility that they have been invited to rejoice in and share.

That’s what happens to us tonight too: to you and to me every single time this story is told to us.

We hear the angel bring us the news of universal joy. We encounter the child in the manger. We share with the shepherds this one particular experience that is great joy for all people. And we know what God has done for every single person on earth. For the earth itself.

The power and presence of God may come over you and me more gently than the shepherds: in the candleglow and the music and the wonder and love of the familiar story, without the heart-stopping angel.

And in the midst of that, God still says to you - to you, particularly, and to me - behold, I bring you good news of great joy for all the people. You will see it, you will know it, in the child in a manger.

Let yourself feel it, right now: all the joy and peace and glory you came here tonight to feel. All the joy and peace and glory you long for; wait for; everything you love about finding the child in the manger. Feel the great joy and peace and glory of God, joy for all people. And know that God has put it in your hands, yours to hold and respond.

Now what do you do?

Well, like the shepherds long ago, it’s not our job to save the world.

It is our job, when God puts the whole world’s joy into our hands, to embrace it. To go and see. Not wait for the right time to check it out, but to go now and see what God is doing in the world, as soon as God has told us.

It is our job – it should be our joy – to see, and to tell. To tell the crazy, amazing story of how God picked particular shepherds long ago, particular you and me here and now, to be washed over with the glory of God, filled up with good news, and meet the child in the manger.

It is our job to celebrate our way back to and through our daily lives. Glorifying and praising God without embarrassment, absolutely naturally – because that is natural when you’re full of God’s own great joy.

Because you and I, like the shepherds long ago, now know from our own experience, from what God chooses us to hear, that God has the whole earth’s joy handled, completed, for always and ever.

Here in the candleglow; in the tradition and the peace and the music, it’s our gift to embrace the joy that God pours out for all the world; the world beyond our imagining. To let that joy move us and lift us and change us, not just tonight, but as we make our way back to daily life, glorifying and praising God for all that we have heard and seen, as it has been told to us.

Rejoice

Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-18

Are you rejoicing right now? Rejoicing always?

If not, why not?

You heard Paul: “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say, Rejoice!” Let your gentleness be known, don’t be anxious: Rejoice!

It’s a great idea, isn’t it? Who doesn’t want to be joyful?

Except, well, there’s a lot of pressure on our emotions right now, most of us. Pressure to make happiness, to give happiness, to be happy. The TV commercials and the internet and the proliferation of Santas all noisily, constantly, insist that the only appropriate way to feel this month is happy, with a spoonful or two of both generosity and greed. 

For many of us, this is fun and friendly, a delightful time of year.

But for many of us it’s exhausting or anxiety-provoking.  

Sometimes right at the same time that it’s fun.

For some of us, maybe many of us, that constant expectation of happiness beats against our grief. Old, deep sorrows, or new fresh wounds. Grief not only for loved ones we miss, but for opportunities lost; love unfulfilled, or change we didn’t choose. Or it presses on our fears, for ourselves and our world. Or our worries.

It’s hard – maybe impossible – to be happy when you are sad. Or afraid. Or anxious and exhausted. 

But you can be joyful.

Paul knows that. He’s writing from prison when he instructs, commands, his friends in Philippi to rejoice. And he knows that they’re under stress too: pressure to change their faith from outside the community, and leadership struggles within. Rejoice always, he says, right in the midst of that.

A few years ago, the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop Emeritus of Southern Africa, Desmond Tutu, met in the mountains of India for a week of conversations about joy. Specifically about how to be joyful in the midst of adversity.

Like Paul, both these men know something about the obstacles to joy: they have personally experienced exile and war, oppression and revolt. And they share with you and me the stress and anxiety of snarled traffic and canceled planes, the physical pain of illness, the grief and pain of loss.

And still these are two deeply joyful men.

Writer Douglas Abrams, preparing to turn their conversation into The Book of Joy, asked them how we find joy, maintain joy – how we rejoice – in the face of bitter adversity or troubles we can’t solve.

The answers they gave kept returning to themes of compassion and connection; the truth the Dalai Lama repeated that “I am one of seven billion; a human being among human beings.”
It is essential, they agreed, to care about the humanity of those around us; to see and connect with both the pain and the happiness of others in order to be joyful oneself. To be able to love the other as yourself, the two spiritual leaders agreed, is one of the key ingredients of joy.

They also agreed that the experience of adversity – of grief and loss, frustration, stress, and pain – is essential to our capacity for joy, the two leaders insisted, because it brings us together. Adversity develops generosity of spirit like a muscle, Bishop Tutu says, (154) and reflects that illness, grief, pain force us to depend upon and connect with others, unable to isolate ourselves.

The Dalai Lama spoke of Tibetans imprisoned for decades in Chinese forced labor camps, who survived not by strength or force of will, but by “warmheartedness” – the ability to extend compassion, their sense of shared humanity, to their guards and torturers as well as fellow prisoners. (147; 155-6)

That same sense of compassion and connection – with the guy who cuts you off in traffic in his expensive luxury car; the doctor muttering frightening possibilities while she pokes and prods you painfully – is what shields you and me in our own daily lives from envy, anger, loneliness and despair, and increases our capacity for joy.

John the Baptist prescribes practices of connection and compassion to those who come to him in fear and uncertainty, anticipating God’s judgement. Share your coats and your food – whatever you have – with those who have none. Resist the isolation and hard-heartedness of everyday graft and greed so common it’s not noticed in many professions; refuse to use your power over others to enrich yourself at someone else’s expense.

And Paul tells his beloved friends in their beleaguered community in Philippi to let their gentleness be known to all. A gentleness that can also be understood as “consideration for others” or “forbearance,” a compassionate patience. And he reminds them to practice gratitude, giving up worry and anxiety; turning everything to God in thankful prayer.

That last is good, familiar advice. And I know it’s harder to do – to make stick – than it sounds. Paul knew it. The Philippians knew it. John the Baptist probably did, and Archbishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama certainly do – telling stories of how they failed at forbearance and have to keep turning to gratitude and prayer.

Two men who exude the peace of God – a joyful calm, a healing vibrancy – know all about the challenges and obstacles, and demonstrate in their very being the power of compassion and connection to create and sustain a deep, rich, resilient joy. A joy entirely different from the pressure to be and appear happy that peaks in December but stresses our culture all year round.

That’s why we need the invitation to joy; need Paul’s imperative command to “Rejoice!” in the midst of our “happy” seasons and in the painful, angry, or tearful times. And in the days and months when the work of being happy is too hard to maintain. Because deep joy – radiant, resilient joy, the incomprehensible peace of God that Paul invokes – is rooted in our honest acknowledgement of grief and pain, stress and failure, and how we are connected to one another by our shared weakness and need as well as our strengths. This joy we are called to is the opposite of – and the only true antidote for – the anxiety and stress of a world that demands happiness.

And that joy is also rooted in the truth that the Lord is near; the truth we celebrate in this Advent season: that the presence of God is close among us now, and the judgement to come is meant to restore us in joy.
Our connection and compassion with God is as true and as essential as our connection and compassion with other human beings in filling our hearts with that peace that passes understanding. That peace which is also the deep and radiant joy Paul commands and invites from his prison cell, the joy shared by two wise and holy survivors of oppression and exile.

And living in the peace of God – in the midst of anticipation and exile, trouble or loss or excess – is both how we prepare for the coming of God, and how we know that the Lord is near.

So as you feel the pressures of the season of happy, or as you live with grief and pain, listen to Paul, and the Archbishop, and the Dalai Lama:

Rejoice in the Lord always.

Again, I will say, Rejoice.

The Highway

Luke 3:1-6

In the second year of the presidency of Donald Trump, when Xi Jinping held power in China and Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Angel Merkel and Theresa May wrestled Brexit in Europe; when The Border Wall was a federal budget issue and gun regulation and marijuana decriminalization were the hot issues in the states and climate change the fearsome topic of world politics;

the Word of God came to the people of Trinity in Moorestown, and they went forth into the wildernesses of the Pine Barrens and of the Cherry Hill Mall crying out with the words of the prophets, “Prepare the Way of the Lord!”

Okay, the last part’s a bit of a stretch, I know.

But before I got to the part where I set you up as a public evangelist, were you wondering where we were going with all those political figures and issues?

Or did you notice right away that this is exactly what you heard Luke doing just a minute or two ago, locating the story and the preaching of John the Baptist right in the middle of a complex political and social environment?

Luke gives us a long list of rulers and governors (that very few of us in this room want the responsibility of pronouncing out loud), to pin down the preaching of John the Baptist to a very specific time and place. And to the very specific political and social reality of the restlessness and partisan messiness of Roman rule in Israel.

It’s important to Luke that John and Jesus come into a world made ripe for some kind of faithful change and ready for political upheaval. It’s important, too, that the coming of God happens at a real, historical, specific moment – a place and time we can recognize.

Luke very much wants us to understand the Good News that God brings salvation right into the historical, political, physical reality we live in. It’s good news – the Word of God for Trinity in Moorestown – that God can and will come in the very ordinary, specific physical and political time and place that we live, just as God comes into the ordinary, specific, physical and political reality of first century Palestine.

Now, it may not feel like good news to some of us to associate the presence of the Messiah or the kingdom of God with our current political and physical moment. Many of us are much more comfortable keeping faith separate from politics, since politics seems so very messy and unholy. Since the bitterly partisan nature of US politics right now is a dangerous and unnecessary force of division among us, and we know God doesn’t really want us divided and full of fear.

We might prefer – as many of Jesus’ followers and Luke’s readers probably preferred – that God would just end all that messiness, or at least make it easy for us to ignore it and separate from it.

But Luke insists it is good news that the kingdom of God comes among us right in the middle of all that. The kingdom of God isn’t separate from the messiness of secular rulers and compromise and division. God comes to us right in and through that.

And God’s kingdom comes with the voice of one crying out from the margins, or maybe from the wilderness of the center of politics: “Prepare the way of the Lord. Make a straight and level highway for our God; the valleys raised and mountains flattened, level and smooth, and all shall see God’s salvation and glory.”

Prophets have been saying that for thousands of years. John appears to be quoting Isaiah – who, like Baruch whose words we also heard this morning – proclaims this “way of the Lord” as the way that Israel’s exiles will return home; the way that all the barriers that separate God’s people from God’s home and heart will be swept away, and we will be redeemed and led back to God.

In the voice of Luke and John, announcing the coming of Jesus, the “way of the Lord” becomes the straight and level highway with which God comes at last into our midst, sweeping through mountains and across chasms, into our place and time and national reality and daily lives, yours and mine.

It turns out that the “way of the Lord”, the highway of our God, goes both ways. It’s the way the full presence and power of God comes into the ordinary here and now, along this way where all obstacles are removed. And the way we return to God, from the exile of today’s partisanship and secularism. Or we return from the exile of our own sins – our stupid, embarrassing, or malicious choices and actions, small and great – along the same way.

As he repeats the powerful poetry of the prophets, John wants his hearers – God wants us, now – to prepare the way of the Lord by looking at our real, physical, historical context – our place and time; our hearts and lives; the news and the traffic and all the real barriers and mountains and chasms, walls and potholes – and see the highway of our God.

When we can see that the road from God to us, and from us to God, runs right through those barriers, leveling them and bridging the gaps, then we’ll find ourselves able to help build that highway for others. We’ll find ourselves removing the barriers we can remove, with actions of forgiveness and repentance. We’ll find ourselves taking the small actions and making the large commitments that dismantle the systems and structures that prop up mountains of racism and sexism and classism and nationalism and partisanism, raising valleys as we invest in renewal and generosity and grace, knowing that God removes the barriers we can’t remove.

So look around you. Look at this second year of the presidency of Donald Trump, the first year of the governorship of Phil Murphy, this time of walls and guns and weed and climate change. Look at the mountains too high and steep for you to climb and the canyons too deep and wide for us to navigate; look at the rough roads and broken pathways, and see the highway of God.

See a world where politics and policy and our own wrongs are not obstacles that separate us from God, or God from us, but the way through which God’s highway runs.

What does that look like, when the way from God to you runs through our current politics, without the politics being an obstacle? When the way from God to you runs through a broken relationship with family or friends without stumbling?

What new landscape do you see when the way from us in our exile to return to the heart of God runs through guns and climate change and border security and how we treat people in the Shop Rite parking lot – and not one of those things is an obstacle, but rather a way that God’s salvation is revealed?

What you see, then, is what John sees. What Isaiah and Baruch and Jesus of Nazareth saw, and what God sees: a highway of salvation and glory here and now in the midst of everything that denies it or tries to block it. A highway where forgiveness and repentance, hope and trust move mountains, and nothing can separate us from the glory of God.

Step on to that highway you see, and run toward God, as God runs toward you, toward us.