Combat Fatigue And Christmas
Sermon
Shining Through The Darkness
Sermons For The Winter Season
Object:
Be patient, my brothers, until the Lord comes. The farmer looking for the precious crop his land may yield can only wait in patience, until the winter and spring rains have fallen. You too must be patient and stout-hearted, for the coming of the Lord is near.
-- James 5:7-9 cf
Three verses from James 5, from today's second lesson. Waiting, in patience, has always had a theological significance even though, I am sure at first thought, waiting means people queuing up at a cash register in a supermarket or Christmas-decorated department store, or waiting for a sermon to be over. But waiting is far more significant. It is a part of being human; waiting is at the heart of religion and meaning. Let me give some quick examples from history.
A representative example of "waiting" at the dawn of civilization would be in the annual spring festival held in ancient Egypt as early as 3000 BC.
In the vast majority of early civilizations, it was agriculture that gave life, and the gods were of rain and sun and soil. A person's religion consisted of year after year waiting patiently and hopefully for the gods to bless them with rain and satisfactory growing weather or curse them with drought or storm.
The Egyptian spring festival celebrated the death and resurrection of the god Osiris. A model of the dead god was cast in a gold mold in the form of a hollow mummy and then filled with a mixture of barley and sand; it was wrapped in rushes and laid in a shallow container. For nine days the people watered this idol and waited. On the tenth day it was exposed to the sun. And the people waited.
On the fourteenth day this gold mummy god was placed in a coffin and buried in a grave. On the nineteenth and the last day of the festival, the god Osiris was pulled out of the grave -- out of the ground. It was for them an annual resurrection of the god; it was like wheat growing from the soil.
The festival was timed to correspond with the Nile River returning to its banks after its annual flooding, after bringing new moist soil; and on the last day of the festival, as Osiris is pulled from the earth, the people go to their fields to see what they were waiting for -- their newly sown grain sprouting from the moist soil. It was a waiting for life.
A carving in an ancient Egyptian temple shows stalks of wheat growing from the mummy of the dead god watered by a priest from a pitcher. By the mummy is an inscription that reads, "This is the form of him who may not be named, Osiris of the mysteries who springs from the returning waters."
The people's long winter wait is fulfilled but not totally, because there will be another year and they will wait and worry again if the god will rise and if the grain will grow.
This mentality is typical of early civilization and religions. Usually the waiting was even more critical because most rains and rivers were not as dependable as the Nile. But in each situation, waiting was necessary for life.
Let me use another typical example from history, this time about 3,000 years later, and look at gnosticism in the ancient Near East and Roman world.
Gnosticism had many different forms, but its primary concern was one of waiting -- a waiting for the spirit of god to come and reveal "truth," to reveal ultimate "knowledge" or "gnosis" to an individual.
Gnostics believed god was good, was truth, and was light and that the world was bad, was false, and was darkness. The world was like a vast prison whose innermost dungeon was the earth. In the cosmos that separates god from earth there were believed to be lesser demon gods who ruled the world and stopped any interaction between god and earth.
Humans were a part of the evil world but encased in each person was a spirit, a pneuma, which was a portion of the divine substance -- a piece of goodness that had fallen into the world.
This spirit of god immersed in flesh, was stupefied, asleep, or intoxicated by the poison of the world; it was ignored and could only be awakened and liberated by the coming of "knowledge" or "truth." So the gnostic waited.
The gnostic waited for a messenger from the world of light to penetrate the barrier of the spheres and earth, and outwit the guardian, evil gods, and awaken the inner spirit of a person from its earthly slumber and give it saving knowledge.
Gnostics waited for a messenger, a messenger to give them the key to life. They waited and waited.
In all cases, humanity senses that it requires waiting for total life. But whether you are waiting for the right thing or not is another question.
It is no different today, no matter what level you wait.
I read in a magazine that every once in a while the local people on one island of the New Hebrides in the South Pacific paint their bodies with red paint to spell out the letters USA and, equipped with bamboo poles to symbolize rifles, they march down to the shores of the Pacific to await the arrival of John Frum.
John Frum is a legendary soldier who they expect to reappear from the surf in landing crafts filled with the Jeeps and chewing gum and the other marvels of industrialized society that the GIs brought to the New Hebrides during World War II. They wait patiently for this, for what they consider an advanced form of life, but John Frum never comes.
Also in New Guinea, I believe, backwoods tribes now and then carve airplane runways out of the jungle and sit and wait for the giant WWII cargo planes to return. They call them "giant bird gods from the sky." They wait but nothing happens.
Waiting is a part of being human. We all wait for life, for meaning, and for what we see as ultimately important. All people wait, but what they're waiting for is often quite different.
Communists classically wait and work for the final synthesis when conflict will end in equality. Buddhists classically wait with life and fulfillment, then they wait for that big winning lottery ticket or that long shot horse to win big, or to guess the bottom of the stock market.
It's waiting -- but waiting for what? And if what you are waiting for comes, will it fulfill?
Waiting means not having and having at the same time. The condition of man's relation to God is first of all one of not having, not seeing, not knowing, and not grasping. Religion in which this is forgotten replaces God by its own creation. Some people don't wait for God because they say they possess him totally in a book -- the Bible -- or in an institution -- a church or temple. They possess him in their own experience.
You cannot possess God if he is the true power of life. It's hard to proclaim God to children or pagans or skeptics or secularists and at the same time make clear to them that we don't possess God, that we, too, wait for him.
The theologian, Paul Tillich, once wrote that much of the rebellion against Christianity was due to Christian's covert or veiled claim to possess God already and therefore have no need to wait.
Is God a thing that can be grasped and known among other things? Is God less than a human person? We always have to wait for a human being. Even in the most intimate communion among human beings, there is an element of not having and not knowing, and of waiting.
Although waiting is not having, it is also in a sense having. The fact that we wait for something shows that in some way we are already grasped by it. If we wait in hope and patience, the power of that for which we wait is already effective within us.
One who waits in an ultimate sense is not far from that for which he waits. One who waits in absolute seriousness is already grasped by that for which he waits.
One who waits in patience has already received the power of that for which he waits. One who waits passionately is already an active power himself.
The key, though, is what are you waiting for -- for rain, for an idol of gold, money, or power. Christianity describes our existence in relation to God as one of waiting also, but waiting for one who directs in love and whom we, as Christians, say fulfills all life. Our waiting is not one of despair or emptiness.
All time runs forward. All time, both in history and in personal life, is expectation. Time itself is waiting, not for another time, but for that which is eternal.
It is December 15. We are in the process of waiting for Christmas. After almost two months of an unremitting heavy-artillery promotional barrage in advertising in stores and the media, we are in a state of combat fatigue, if not bankruptcy, by December 25.
We are almost tired of waiting, but waiting for Christmas is essential. It permits us, compels us, to take seriously the reality of our present situation. We don't live in a world of perpetual Christmas mornings. We live in a Maundy Thursday to Good Friday world. We are waiting in a world where some people don't trust each other or love each other much, where peace on earth and goodwill to people are at times hard to find.
After almost 2,000 Christmas mornings, Christians still find it hard to be fully human and honest, free and responsive, even within the close circles of our own families or church friends, let alone the wider circle of humanity.
But in this waiting for the coming, in this wait for the Advent, we can also participate in the Christ we hope for. Christmas is not to be a winter-wonderland orgy of escapism, but it is a festival of light in darkness.
In waiting, we can recognize the darkness -- our darkness -- and also see the coming of light in God's love through Christ.
Having to wait is not a curse but a gift of time to discover meaning: time to write a loving card to a friend, time to read, to pray, to find someone whose Christmas would be lost without you, time to care, time to prepare for the coming of the Lord, time to sense that God knows when and where he will be born into our lives.
This is the eternal message of Advent, of waiting for Christmas: time to watch and pray. Advent is time to be ready and open to perceive that our Lord is being born in our midst in all the situations of life that demand our love, our acceptance, and our giving of ourselves; it's our Christmas present here and now.
We have waiting time to sense that God is alive and at hand, that the power of life is beginning to act now in our lives and in the lives of all his people to bring light in our darkness.
Sermon delivered December 21, 1997
First Lutheran Church
Duluth, Minnesota
-- James 5:7-9 cf
Three verses from James 5, from today's second lesson. Waiting, in patience, has always had a theological significance even though, I am sure at first thought, waiting means people queuing up at a cash register in a supermarket or Christmas-decorated department store, or waiting for a sermon to be over. But waiting is far more significant. It is a part of being human; waiting is at the heart of religion and meaning. Let me give some quick examples from history.
A representative example of "waiting" at the dawn of civilization would be in the annual spring festival held in ancient Egypt as early as 3000 BC.
In the vast majority of early civilizations, it was agriculture that gave life, and the gods were of rain and sun and soil. A person's religion consisted of year after year waiting patiently and hopefully for the gods to bless them with rain and satisfactory growing weather or curse them with drought or storm.
The Egyptian spring festival celebrated the death and resurrection of the god Osiris. A model of the dead god was cast in a gold mold in the form of a hollow mummy and then filled with a mixture of barley and sand; it was wrapped in rushes and laid in a shallow container. For nine days the people watered this idol and waited. On the tenth day it was exposed to the sun. And the people waited.
On the fourteenth day this gold mummy god was placed in a coffin and buried in a grave. On the nineteenth and the last day of the festival, the god Osiris was pulled out of the grave -- out of the ground. It was for them an annual resurrection of the god; it was like wheat growing from the soil.
The festival was timed to correspond with the Nile River returning to its banks after its annual flooding, after bringing new moist soil; and on the last day of the festival, as Osiris is pulled from the earth, the people go to their fields to see what they were waiting for -- their newly sown grain sprouting from the moist soil. It was a waiting for life.
A carving in an ancient Egyptian temple shows stalks of wheat growing from the mummy of the dead god watered by a priest from a pitcher. By the mummy is an inscription that reads, "This is the form of him who may not be named, Osiris of the mysteries who springs from the returning waters."
The people's long winter wait is fulfilled but not totally, because there will be another year and they will wait and worry again if the god will rise and if the grain will grow.
This mentality is typical of early civilization and religions. Usually the waiting was even more critical because most rains and rivers were not as dependable as the Nile. But in each situation, waiting was necessary for life.
Let me use another typical example from history, this time about 3,000 years later, and look at gnosticism in the ancient Near East and Roman world.
Gnosticism had many different forms, but its primary concern was one of waiting -- a waiting for the spirit of god to come and reveal "truth," to reveal ultimate "knowledge" or "gnosis" to an individual.
Gnostics believed god was good, was truth, and was light and that the world was bad, was false, and was darkness. The world was like a vast prison whose innermost dungeon was the earth. In the cosmos that separates god from earth there were believed to be lesser demon gods who ruled the world and stopped any interaction between god and earth.
Humans were a part of the evil world but encased in each person was a spirit, a pneuma, which was a portion of the divine substance -- a piece of goodness that had fallen into the world.
This spirit of god immersed in flesh, was stupefied, asleep, or intoxicated by the poison of the world; it was ignored and could only be awakened and liberated by the coming of "knowledge" or "truth." So the gnostic waited.
The gnostic waited for a messenger from the world of light to penetrate the barrier of the spheres and earth, and outwit the guardian, evil gods, and awaken the inner spirit of a person from its earthly slumber and give it saving knowledge.
Gnostics waited for a messenger, a messenger to give them the key to life. They waited and waited.
In all cases, humanity senses that it requires waiting for total life. But whether you are waiting for the right thing or not is another question.
It is no different today, no matter what level you wait.
I read in a magazine that every once in a while the local people on one island of the New Hebrides in the South Pacific paint their bodies with red paint to spell out the letters USA and, equipped with bamboo poles to symbolize rifles, they march down to the shores of the Pacific to await the arrival of John Frum.
John Frum is a legendary soldier who they expect to reappear from the surf in landing crafts filled with the Jeeps and chewing gum and the other marvels of industrialized society that the GIs brought to the New Hebrides during World War II. They wait patiently for this, for what they consider an advanced form of life, but John Frum never comes.
Also in New Guinea, I believe, backwoods tribes now and then carve airplane runways out of the jungle and sit and wait for the giant WWII cargo planes to return. They call them "giant bird gods from the sky." They wait but nothing happens.
Waiting is a part of being human. We all wait for life, for meaning, and for what we see as ultimately important. All people wait, but what they're waiting for is often quite different.
Communists classically wait and work for the final synthesis when conflict will end in equality. Buddhists classically wait with life and fulfillment, then they wait for that big winning lottery ticket or that long shot horse to win big, or to guess the bottom of the stock market.
It's waiting -- but waiting for what? And if what you are waiting for comes, will it fulfill?
Waiting means not having and having at the same time. The condition of man's relation to God is first of all one of not having, not seeing, not knowing, and not grasping. Religion in which this is forgotten replaces God by its own creation. Some people don't wait for God because they say they possess him totally in a book -- the Bible -- or in an institution -- a church or temple. They possess him in their own experience.
You cannot possess God if he is the true power of life. It's hard to proclaim God to children or pagans or skeptics or secularists and at the same time make clear to them that we don't possess God, that we, too, wait for him.
The theologian, Paul Tillich, once wrote that much of the rebellion against Christianity was due to Christian's covert or veiled claim to possess God already and therefore have no need to wait.
Is God a thing that can be grasped and known among other things? Is God less than a human person? We always have to wait for a human being. Even in the most intimate communion among human beings, there is an element of not having and not knowing, and of waiting.
Although waiting is not having, it is also in a sense having. The fact that we wait for something shows that in some way we are already grasped by it. If we wait in hope and patience, the power of that for which we wait is already effective within us.
One who waits in an ultimate sense is not far from that for which he waits. One who waits in absolute seriousness is already grasped by that for which he waits.
One who waits in patience has already received the power of that for which he waits. One who waits passionately is already an active power himself.
The key, though, is what are you waiting for -- for rain, for an idol of gold, money, or power. Christianity describes our existence in relation to God as one of waiting also, but waiting for one who directs in love and whom we, as Christians, say fulfills all life. Our waiting is not one of despair or emptiness.
All time runs forward. All time, both in history and in personal life, is expectation. Time itself is waiting, not for another time, but for that which is eternal.
It is December 15. We are in the process of waiting for Christmas. After almost two months of an unremitting heavy-artillery promotional barrage in advertising in stores and the media, we are in a state of combat fatigue, if not bankruptcy, by December 25.
We are almost tired of waiting, but waiting for Christmas is essential. It permits us, compels us, to take seriously the reality of our present situation. We don't live in a world of perpetual Christmas mornings. We live in a Maundy Thursday to Good Friday world. We are waiting in a world where some people don't trust each other or love each other much, where peace on earth and goodwill to people are at times hard to find.
After almost 2,000 Christmas mornings, Christians still find it hard to be fully human and honest, free and responsive, even within the close circles of our own families or church friends, let alone the wider circle of humanity.
But in this waiting for the coming, in this wait for the Advent, we can also participate in the Christ we hope for. Christmas is not to be a winter-wonderland orgy of escapism, but it is a festival of light in darkness.
In waiting, we can recognize the darkness -- our darkness -- and also see the coming of light in God's love through Christ.
Having to wait is not a curse but a gift of time to discover meaning: time to write a loving card to a friend, time to read, to pray, to find someone whose Christmas would be lost without you, time to care, time to prepare for the coming of the Lord, time to sense that God knows when and where he will be born into our lives.
This is the eternal message of Advent, of waiting for Christmas: time to watch and pray. Advent is time to be ready and open to perceive that our Lord is being born in our midst in all the situations of life that demand our love, our acceptance, and our giving of ourselves; it's our Christmas present here and now.
We have waiting time to sense that God is alive and at hand, that the power of life is beginning to act now in our lives and in the lives of all his people to bring light in our darkness.
Sermon delivered December 21, 1997
First Lutheran Church
Duluth, Minnesota
