Your Light<title> <link rel="STYLESHEET" type="text/css" href="../../sermon.css"> <style fprolloverstyle>A:hover {color: #FF0000} </style> <style type="text/css"> p { font-family: sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify; } cite { font-variant: small-caps; font-size: smaller; } </style> <link rel="STYLESHEET" type="text/css" href="../2002/sermon.css"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" vlink="#0000FF"> <table BORDER=0 CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=4 > <tr VALIGN=BASELINE BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"> <td COLSPAN="2" BGCOLOR="#000080"> <b> <font color="#FFFFFF"> <span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">  Your Light </span> </font> </b> <font color="#FFFFFF"><br>A Sermon based on </font> <a target="_blank" href="http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language=english&version=NIV&passage=Luke+1:39-55"><font color="#FFFFFF"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">Luke 1:39-55</span></font></a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td COLSPAN="2" width="640">  <p>It wasn't just that Mary was excited to be expecting, perhaps like any expectant mother. It was that she could not conceive of what had been conceived in her. When it finally dawned on her what was about to dawn into humanity through her, she broke out in song. <strong>"My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. For he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant." "He has looked with favor,"</strong> she said, on <strong>"lowliness."</strong></p> <p>Most of us spend all of our lives running from our humanity. When we discover that God in Christ has actually taken a step toward what we've been running from, then sometimes we break out in song, too. "Amazing grace! How sweet the sound. . . . I once was lost but now am found." Have you been found? Have you been found out, perhaps? Mary had been found, and it caused her to sing. We'll get back to that in just a moment.</p> <p>First, we should stop and take note of the fact that, once we are found, or found out, breaking out in song is not necessarily our instinctive reaction. I've heard three stories just this week, perhaps you have as well, of ministers whose pasts have come back to haunt them. Some of them from as far as twenty-five years ago, when they were responsible for some form of sexual abuse. I've wondered for those people who have been spending all these years running from their past, how much of their life energy has been consumed, trying to keep a secret they hoped no one would ever find out. How about you? Is there any shameful thing in your past today that you've been hoping no one would find out for five or ten or fifteen or twenty or thirty years, or longer?</p> <p>One of the most meaningful experiences I had this past year was attending the funeral of Phil Strickland. Phil was the director of the Christian Life Commission of the Baptist General Convention of Texas for years. By those who knew him well, he is remembered mostly because he called all of us to live out the call of Christ in the everyday ethics of life. He was a true master of the application of the Gospel to real life. It was almost like he had this internal spiritual GPS. He seemed to always have a clearer understanding than most of us of how to follow the call of Christ to build the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.</p> <p>You tend to put people like that up on a pedestal. Phil was always on some kind of a pedestal when I thought of him and saw him and spoke to him. I always felt humbled in his presence, a little intimidated. Maybe that's why, at his funeral in February of this past year, these words that were spoken of him hooked me, and I've thought about them virtually every single day since. It was said of Phil that one of his favorite sayings was that the more human we are, the more like God we are becoming.</p> <p>Maybe I resonated with those words because, being a minister, I'm always expected to fill a role. To live out for others, oftentimes by proxy, their fantasies of what human holiness looks like. Most preachers under that pressure just give up, adopt special vocabularies, and learn to say words like, "Jeeesus," with a special intonation of voice so that people will know they're holy. I always wondered why those pressures de-energized me while at the same time it energized me to be around people who expected me, like Phil Strickland, to live out the call of Christ, not by denying my humanity through some false spirituality and not even just by accommodating my humanity, but by actually walking toward it and trying to discover why in the world God would have created me as God did.</p> <p>That's what so amazed Mary and amazes me, that when God went to redeem the world, he did so by taking a step toward our humanity, not away from it. We are created human, in the image of God. Or, to put it another way, when God went to create us in his image, <em>this</em> is what happened <cite>(gesturing toward the congregation)</cite>. Can you believe that? Every single one of us is the unique expression of God in human form.</p> <p>I hate to go to the mall. I particularly hate going to the mall most on the weekend before Christmas. But, last Friday night, at six o'clock, like fools, we pulled into the parking lot at NorthPark Mall, like every other fool in North Dallas. To my utter surprise, we found a parking spot three slots from the door. I love to go to the mall for only one reason, and that is to watch all the different forms of humanity walking around. No two noses, no two earlobes, no two heads, no two bellies alike. And every single one of them, just like you, the unique expression of the image of God in human form. <em>You</em> are the expression of God in this world and in eternity.</p> <p>So, it is true that the more human we become, the more we become like God. Those who try to be spiritual in a way that denies their humanity run counter to the creative intention of God. We were created in God's image. That is why, when God went to redeem the world, God conceived a baby in a human mother's womb. Go figure.</p> <p>The message of Christmas is that God walked into our humanity. If that is true, then, if we are to discover God in our lives, then we, too, must walk toward our humanity and embrace it as Mary did in her song: </strong>"He has looked on my lowliness with favor."</strong> Not away from it. Especially toward those parts of us, frankly, that cause us the most shame.</p> <p>We've heard all these old Baptist jokes. Like the one that says if you want to go fishing, and you're going to take a Baptist, you'd better take two Baptists with you. If you only take one, he'll drink all your beer! You've heard that. See, one Baptist will drink all your beer but you'll be safe if you take two Baptists because Baptists don't drink in front of each other. Now, the reason those jokes are funny is because all humor has some base in a context of reality. The beer joke is funny because the truthful context of that humor is that we've been found out. We're not as good at playing the crowd we're with as we'd like to think. We've been seen for what we are, human beings. Only to the extent that we embrace that and integrate that into all of our being, even in our search for God, will we experience true integrity by <em>integrating</em> into oneness our whole being.</p> <p>Reading the first chapter of the book of Isaiah, we discover that the prophet expresses the abject weariness of God with pretentious holiness. God is not interested in people who live double lives coming to church as though they are not. He says of these acts of worship that they are actually false expressions of spirituality that deny our real humanity. In the first chapter of Isaiah, he says, <strong>"They have become a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them"</strong> <cite>(Isaiah 1:14, NIV)</cite>.</p> <p>All the sins that Isaiah mentions as wearying God have to do with acts of social injustice, particularly those times when people who feign spirituality then leave the church and go out and abuse people with their power. All of his instructions about repentance in the first chapter of Isaiah have to do with remedying social injustice. <strong>"Learn to do right. Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the cause of the widow"</strong> <cite>(Isaiah 1:17, NIV)</cite>. Immediately after that, God pleads with us through the prophet, <strong>"'Come now, let us reason together,'" says the Lord. 'Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool'"</strong> <cite>(Isaiah 1:18)</cite>. God is saying to us, "Why don't we just have an honest conversation about the most shameful parts of yourself, and then you'll discover true healing."</p> <p>Have you ever had an honest conversation with anyone about the most shameful part of yourself? Have you also discovered that families usually aren't whole, or fully healed, until the children become adults and are able to have adult-to-adult conversations with their parents? Sometimes what I miss most about my mother, who has been gone now for twenty years, is not the sentimental past but the honest conversations we never got to have as adults.</p> <p>I heard this story once. It's a true story. I have forgotten whose family was involved. It's been years ago. It was about a family that was raised in the country. And, after some years, when the children had grown up and gone away, the father went to tear down the old outhouse, because now they had indoor plumbing and didn't need it anymore. When he pushed over the old outhouse he found buried underneath it some old wrappings for cigarettes. It brought a tear to his eye, because he realized that, when those children were growing up, that's where they would go and hide and smoke so their daddy wouldn't find them out. In the days of their childhood, that would have been a very punishable offense. As an old man, tearing town the outhouse, it brought tears to his eyes as he thought about the life his children lived apart from him and never had learned to share with him.</p> <p>Families don't become whole until both children and parents can talk about those things that once caused them to hide in shame. You will never be whole with God until you're able to have an honest conversation with him about the things you're most afraid he'll find out but already knows. Some families never do become whole. One of my favorite authors is Mary Karr. She was raised in a home where the father was an alcoholic and the mother suffered from severe clinical depression. As she reflected on her childhood in her older years, she wrote these words. "Children in distressed families are great repositories of silence and carry in their bodies whole arctic wastelands of words not to be uttered, stories not be told, or to be told in the sketchiest form, merely brushed by. It's an irony that airing these secret dramas is often a family's chief taboo" <cite>(Mary Karr, The Liar's Club)</cite>.</p> <p>It is sad that the greatest inheritance some parents will leave their children are whole arctic wastelands of silent shame they never talk about. And yet, when we discover that, of all of our cousins and uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters who have come to the Christmas table to celebrate this meal with us today, God in Christ is part of our family, too. He has come not just to hear our stories of shame, but on the cross, to actually bear our shame with us.</p> <p>So it is that we discover the meaning of Christmas not just in celebrating the fact that God in Christ has taken a step toward us but has actually embraced our humanity to share our shame with us. Paul, as he nears the end of his own life in the book of Romans, is haunted by his own humanity. <strong>"Who will deliver me from this body of death?"</strong> <cite>(Romans 7:24, NIV)</cite>. Answering his own question by faith he celebrates, <strong>"Thanks be to God. There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ"</strong> <cite>(Romans 7:25a, 8:1)</cite>.</p> <p>Who will deliver us? The God who came and not just forgave our shame, but shared our shame with us. Who walked toward those things, into those dark, shadowy corners of our lives where we are most afraid to be found out.</p> <p>I got a lot of Christmas cards, and I'm sure you did this week. I got one that was very disappointing. I figured you have the right to hear it. After eighteen months of playing all the games and abiding by all the rules, I received a letter dated December 21 from Dr. Elba Garcia, our City Councilwoman for this district, who says, regarding our community center and our request for permission to build it: "I am sorry that I cannot accommodate your request at this time."</p> <p>Now, she could have. She chose not to. I've been angry about that all week long. I knew the letter was coming. It's just politics. I found myself asking in this situation, as I was preparing this message this morning, what would my friend Phil Strickland do? Then, I thought that a better question would be, what would Jesus do in response to this Christmas card? Then, I thought maybe a better question is, what is Jesus doing? This is what I decided about this letter. Dr. Garcia's denial of our dream, for her own reasons, does not carry with it the power to deny our higher calling in Christ to remedy social injustice and serve humanity in the name of Christ in this community. Her one vote on the City Council cannot and will not trump the call and the blessing of God for Cliff Temple Baptist Church! But, if we are not careful, out of fear that her one vote can, then what we will end up doing is responding in shameful ways, or in ways that try to shame Dr. Garcia into behaving more like we wish she would, and in fact become the very church most people hate: the one that always creates shame.</p> <p>Or, we can take this Christmas card, because it's a letter to all of us, not just to me. And we can take a step toward it, this very human response to this very good thing, and keep walking toward it until we discover what Holy God is doing in it. Because long before Dr. Garcia said, "No," Jesus jumped way out ahead of her and got to where that "No" would land. And he'll be waiting for us when we get there.</p> <p>Some of you are going to have to hold my feet to the fire in the coming days on what I just said. Just remember, when you hold my feet to the fire, they are very human feet. But I honestly believe, folks, that if God can put himself in the package of a baby and be born a human being, there's nothing a City Councilperson can do that will stand in the way of his redemption plan in this place. And when it's all done, we too will break out in song, marveling at what God has done. Will you believe that with me?</p> <p>On my honeymoon, I got hooked on <em>Law & Order</em>, the television series. It was because we were in a place in Grand Cayman where the only television station we got had <em>Law & Order</em> on it, and when there was nothing else to do, I'd watch <em>Law & Order</em>. Each episode always begins with something like this disclaimer: 'These are not true stories, but they're sometimes based on kind of true stories.'</p> <p>Well, I was watching a <em>Law & Order</em> episode recently in which a woman had committed a crime a quarter of a century before, in her teenage years. After committing the crime she became a fugitive. She took on a false identity and even got married and had a child with her husband who didn't know her previous identity. After a quarter of a century she was finally found out. When she was sitting in the interrogation room she refused legal counsel. She was tired of it. She was ready to give up. She said to the police that every single day, for twenty-three years, <em>every day</em>, she had thought about giving up. Can you imagine living a life where you're trying to carry on one life while at the same time employing enormous amounts of energy keeping a secret you hope no one else finds out.</p> <p>Is there some shameful part of yourself you have been running from that today Christmas life and Christmas light could transform? What if you opened the door to that event, to invite God in, only to find that on the other side of that door you had locked for so long, Jesus is sitting there in a rocking chair, saying, "Where have you been for so long? I've been wanting to have this conversation all of your life."</p> <p>One of my other favorite writers is Anne Lamott. She lost most of her youth to alcohol and drugs, resisting the whole notion of the church, of God, by her own confession sleeping with more men than she could remember. She got pregnant in one of those encounters, had an abortion, was living with the shame of all of that. She writes that she went to bed one night, feeling terribly alone. I close this morning with her confession. May I read it to you?</p> <p>"After a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner. And I just assumed it was my father, whose presence I had felt over the years when I was frightened and alone. The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on a light for a moment, to make sure no one was there, and, of course, there wasn't. But, after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus. I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby, and I was appalled. I thought about my life, and I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen.</p> <p>"I turned to the wall and said out loud, 'I would rather be dead.' And I felt Jesus sitting there on his haunches in the corner of my sleeping loft, watching me with patience and love, and I squinched my eyes shut, but that didn't help, because that's not what I was seeing him with. Finally, I fell asleep. And in the morning, he was gone.</p> <p>"This experience shook me badly, but I thought it was just an apparition born of fear and self-loathing and booze, but even then, everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up. Wanting me to open the door and let it in.</p> <p>"But I knew that would not happen. You let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever. So, I tried to keep one step ahead of it, slamming my door when I entered or left.</p> <p>"Shortly after this experience, one Sunday, I went to church. And absolutely hated the experience. I left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels as I walked under a sky as blue as one of God's own dreams. And I opened the door to my house, and I stood there a minute. And then I hung my head and said, 'I quit.' I took a long deep breath and said out loud to Jesus, 'All right. You can come in'" <cite>(Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies, Pantheon, 1999)</cite>.</p> <p>Anne Lamott is one of the finest Christian writers I've ever read, all because one day, she opened the door and let Jesus into her shame. She walked toward her humanity, not away from it.</p> <p>Your light, your Jesus, Christmas light, is waiting on the other side of that very same door.</p> <hr width="100%" /> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> Glen Schmucker, Pastor </td> <td> <div align=right>  December 24, 2006 </div> </td> </tr> <tr> <td COLSPAN=2> Copyright © 2006, Glen Schmucker </td> </tr> </table> </body> </html>