Sermonstudio

COMMENTARY ON THE LESSONS

Lesson 1: Jeremiah 31:7-14 (C, E)
Jeremiah has been called "the father of true prayer." In general, he emphasized the distinction between inner goodness and mere outward conformity to law. In this passage, Jeremiah may be addressing himself to the Gentiles, or at least is aware of their attention, as he celebrates the festival. After reiterating the prophetic expectation of God's final faithfulness in bringing His people back from their wanderings, he strikes the note of every troubled people's yearning: "I will turn their mourning into joy." This early 600 B.C. celebratory pronouncement was probably compiled by Baruch, but expresses Jeremiah's own anticipation of God's kindness and welcoming of his people back into community with the promise of goodness with which "my people shall be satisfied."

It's sad, in a way, to read of the joyous promises made by the prophets, then to see the tragic fate of much of the Jewish life. I recently watched a segment about World War II on The History Channel, and the show included rarely seen amateur movie film from Dachau, Germany. I sometimes think we all should be required to see these films periodically to be reminded of the inhumanity of which we are so capable.

Lest we blame this all on the Germans, take note that recently it was announced that former army helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson is being awarded the Soldier's Medal, the U. S. Army's highest non-combat award for bravery. Do you recall why? After American troops had massacred some 500 old men, women, and children at My Lai, Thompson saw what was happening. He called for help for a young girl who lay injured. A G.I. walked over and shot her. Thompson then set his copter down between the few remaining civilians and advancing G.I.s and ordered his gunner to fire on his own men if they tried to kill any more. He thereby saved many innocent lives, but at risk of his own life and also his career.

Footnote: he believes the government held up the award for thirty years, rather than publicly admit that something terrible had been done by American troops. I report this not to condemn, but to remind us that we are all sinners, capable of inhumanity which might surprise us.

As for a sermon, I would use the passage 13b, "I will turn their mourning into joy."

Lesson 1: Sirach 24:1-2, 8-12 (RC)

Lesson 2: Ephesians 1:3-14 (C); Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a (RC, E)
What matters to us here is that the author believed that God is slowly drawing all people into one Grand Community through Jesus Christ. Here we find a strong implication of predestination, as each of us has been called and destined to be united in Christ by the power of the Spirit in the fullness of time. Ultimately, this is God's intention. As inheritors of this marvelous future, we are to celebrate the fact that we are included. We are to be recipients of "every spiritual gift," and we are to "praise God for (this) glorious grace, for the free gift He gave us in His dear Son."

I suppose this is another of those major passages which offers many sermonic possibilities. Of course the culmination of this divinely orchestrated process is eternally beyond any conception possible to our little minds. One biblical scholar spoke of standing along the edge of the Grand Canyon, looking down on the colossal scene of the Colorado River, and rocks which have been estimated to be a billion and a half years old. My mind can't get around that thought. What I can grasp is the kindness of God who, in the context of that mighty, unimaginable reach of time, and in space which is said to be expanding in all directions at speeds beyond my experience, should decide that Carver McGriff is worth including in all of this, and is to be given -- undeservedly -- "every spiritual gift."

Like a baby receiving milk from a devoted mother we can receive and be nourished by that which is totally beyond our understanding. We can only stand in awe at the implications of this passage and gratefully give thanks that for whatever reasons, we are to be part of all of this now, and are promised a place in what lies ahead. To make all of this possible God has given you and me and the people we address the Holy Spirit. Praise the Lord. Now, for next Sunday?

Gospel: John:(1-9) 10-18 (C); John 1:1-18 (RC)
We recall some important differences between the writer of John's Gospel and the writers of the synoptics. Many years had passed. A new century was dawning, and much had changed. Whereas the earlier Gospels were written primarily for Jewish Christians, John was writing at a time when the Gentile world had begun to embrace the faith. Greeks could not be expected to understand the begats, for example. Who cares that Jesus descended from King David, an unknown? John must change not reality, but the thought forms in which it was presented.

Greek thought was also strongly influenced by the writing of the philosophers, especially Plato, who taught that there are two worlds. One was the material world of physical reality. The other was the real world, a perfect world beyond the vision of mortal man. The Greeks believed in God as the creator of that perfect world. Deity must be associated with the higher, other world.

Another factor was the widely held idea that Jesus wasn't really human. Rather, he was a divine creature wearing the appearance of humanity. As such, Jesus never really bled when cut, or grew tired, or became hungry. And Jesus could never share the experience of suffering humanity. This was called Docetism and was angrily repudiated by John and the Christian community which knew Jesus as at once divine, yet also human.

So John presented Jesus as pre-existing, a part of that other, perfect world. And Jesus became a human being in the physical sense of that human existence. The idea of "the word" was familiar to the Greeks. It was the Logos, the embodiment of divinity and of reason. How much more convincing the Jesus story was as John presented it, than the Messianic idea which was foreign to the Greeks. But the Christ of John, recast in differing idea and thought forms, is still the Jesus as Messiah.

I can't find any information on whether John knew the story of the virgin birth. Surely he did. Whether that idea had been repudiated by developing theology, or had come to seem unimportant, or perhaps would have had no meaning to a Gentile world who thought that sort of thing happened all the time, is not terribly worrisome now. What we do know is that in this lengthy passage we have an emphasis on the divinity of Jesus as the means by which the purposes of God are being fulfilled through a Spirit which was given through Christ.

So, with a few verbal strokes, John has summarized the Christian story so well-known to the Jews, and has rephrased its promises and its expectations in a way the Gentile world could understand. Even today, many -- perhaps most -- Christians declare John to be their favorite Gospel. As we think, now, about struggling with such immensities in eighteen or twenty minutes, it may be wise to lay hold of a central thought for purposes of preaching.

Gospel: Luke 2:41-52 (E)
(See First Sunday After Christmas.)

SERMON SUGGESTIONS

Title: "Darkness, Then The Dawn"
Text: Jeremiah 31:13b
Theme: If I may just start this on a personal note, I have terribly vivid memories of my beloved first wife's tragic death in a car accident. While she was still barely alive, I rode with her to the hospital in an ambulance. Only after an anxiety- stricken wait, was I informed that she had died. My devastation may be familiar to some who have also suffered such a loss. But I was to learn more in the next several months than I had learned in all of my previous years about the working of mourning and of God's gift of joy.

Here's what I learned. First, we must endure. I doubt that anyone can hope to live a full life without sooner or later experiencing tragedy of one sort or another. The only possible escape is an insensitive spirit. There was an old Simon and Garfunkel song with lyrics like this: "I am a rock ... no one touches me." But if we care, if we love, we will be hurt. And since all must experience loss and failure and rejection and disappointment, all of us must mourn.

I learned that if we endure, if we are willing to pay our installment on the price of love and life, we grow. We learn patience, and we learn sympathy for others. Our pain always rewards us if we allow that. It's like rubbing a knife against a stone. Done one way it can dull the blade. Done another, it can sharpen and hone the blade. So with pain. It can make us bitter. But it can also make us strong and sensitive.

Finally, I learned that through prayer, God will, after we have learned, and after we have grown, give a priceless gift: joy. Then we can sing with our hearts as well as with our voices:

O joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee.
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

Title: "It Will All Make Sense"
Text: Ephesians 1:3-14
Theme: This passage presumes several things: that God has a definite plan "from the very beginning," that God "has chosen us to be his through union with Christ," and "this plan which God will complete when the time is right" will make sense, and each of us who is willing, will be part of the fulfillment of that plan.

1. The universe is a wonderful mystery. I stood with friends on a beach on the south coast of Jamaica recently, looking at the stars. There were no nearby lights. The atmosphere was clear of all the contaminants which cloud our vision in the cities. We could see how astronomers can tell us that there are billions of stars. The sky was radiant with the glittering starlight. My mind can hardly grasp the thought that the light from those stars which struck my eyes as I stood there was emitted by those celestial bodies before my birth, and the light currently emitted by those stars would not reach this earth until after my death. I stood dumbfounded as, for the first time since my childhood, I took the time quietly to watch the silent skies, to feel the mystery of time and space as it surrounded me. Albert Einstein once wrote: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious, the sense of wonder in the presence of something partly known and partly hidden. The man to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer stand wrapped in awe and wonder, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle."

2. All of this is part of a grand plan. How do we know this? The Bible tells us so. But your own good sense confirms this. To look at your own newborn babe, to see your own likeness there, is to see revelation. To glance at the person you love, to feel those strong ties, that confirmation of your willingness to give everything you have for his or her welfare, does that not confirm that the universe makes sense? To sit with friends amid laughter and the warmth of knowing yourself accepted despite your many faults, to walk in sunlight and feel the flowing energy in your body, to know that you are doing something with your life which, however much reward it may bring in earthly terms, is richly rewarded in the knowledge of its own value to others, do not these experiences confirm meaning and purpose? To look back down memory lane, to remember those who gave you love, who made your own life possible, who never judged but only loved, can they really be gone? Of course not. Mystery? Of course, yet James Russell Lowell said it well: "Behind the dim unknown, standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own."

3. You and I are essential to the fulfillment of God's plan. Those of us with children certainly understand this. How could I envision a completed world without my own dear child as part of that world? Two young women stood alongside White River, talking about this and that. Their two little boys were playing along the river bank, when suddenly, one of the boys screamed. The other boy had fallen into the river and was caught in the current, fast from recent rains. The little fellow couldn't swim. Frantically, his mother ran to the river bank, then seeing that her son was being swept down river, she jumped in and quickly disappeared from sight. You see, that mother couldn't swim either. Both mother and son drowned. But that mother could not, apparently, imagine a world without her beloved child, so she joined her fate to his. Is that any less true of God?

4. Mysterious though it be, God has included us in that great Plan. He secures us to his purpose through Jesus Christ who came for us. Have any of you read some of the writings of Karl Barth? When I was in seminary, we all were supposed to read Barth, but I usually had trouble understanding some of his theology. Too many big words and all. He wrote many books. One day he was interviewed and was asked if there was any way he could summarize the content of those impressive tomes. He smiled and replied that, yes, he could. He could summarize them all this way: "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so." That may be all the assurance you and I can hope for, but if there's anything to Blessed Assurance, that inner knowing which transcends proof, we need nothing more to be able to give our lives on this premise: God has a plan, it is "secret" for the present, but you and I are essential to that plan, and through Jesus Christ, we are included in its fulfillment, now, and at the end.

Title: "A Faith To Proclaim"
Text: John 1:14
Theme: We might echo the words of one of Scotland's great preachers, James Stewart. He wrote this: "The fact remains that the greatest drag on Christianity today, the most serious menace to the Church's mission, is not the secularism without, it is the reduced Christianity within: the religious generalities and innocuous platitudes of a pallid anemic Christianity which is simply ... the 'highest common factor' of half a dozen different religions. This is what Kierkegaard called 'vaporized Christianity....' "

This passage, and the context from which it comes, is the distilled message of the Bible. It needs to be heard again and again by today's congregations: Jesus, the historical man, was in fact the embodiment of God's nature. He was, and is, the focal point of all of life's meaning. To refuse him admittance into one's life is to consign oneself to meaninglessness, to the lostness of the human soul. This does not mean that God rejects those who worship in other religions so long as they have never been confronted by the person of Christ, but it is to say that once we know him, we can never thereafter safely turn from him as the salvation of our eternal souls. He is the revealer of grace, and of truth. By grace we mean the undeserved gift of love and all which that implies, and truth means the opening of our blind eyes to the meaning of our own existence.

1. God alone can make us happy. C. S. Lewis said it well: "... it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself because it is not there. There is no such thing."

2. God can and will help us in times of trouble. This doesn't necessarily mean God will do as we wish, since God knows what is in our best interests whereas we often do not. But those who receive Christ as savior, and who are confronted by overwhelming problems, discover that 100 percent of the time, if we trust him, and do as he asks us to do, we are able to defeat our enemies and overcome our problems, sometimes by eliminating them, sometimes by transcending them.

3. God understands why we are as we are and forgives us for our mistakes. The only qualification to that is that He requires of us that we recognize and understand our mistakes, and that we try to make amends as much as possible. The very heart of grace is the renewed chances it affords us.

4. This is ours through Christ. Again to quote Lewis: "If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire, if you want to get wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into the thing that has them. They are not prizes which God could, if he chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality ... Once a (person) is united to God, how could he not live forever?" And surely we can define eternal life as, not only life after death, but joyous existence here and now.

ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS

I said, "Let me walk in the field";
God said, "Nay, walk in the town."
I said, "There are no flowers there."
He said: "No flowers, but a crown."

I said: "But the sky is black.
There is nothing but noise and din":
But he wept as he sent me back,
"There is more," he said, "there is sin."

I said: "But the air is thick,
And fogs are veiling the sun,"
He answered, "Yet souls are sick,
And souls in the dark undone."

I said: "I shall miss the light,
And friends will miss me they say."
He answered me, "Choose tonight,
If I am to miss you or they."

I pleaded for time to be given,
He said: "Is it hard to decide?
It will not seem hard in Heaven
To have followed the steps of your guide."

I cast one look at the fields,
Then set my face to the town;
He said: "My child, do you yield?
Will you leave the flowers for the crown?"

Then into His hand went mine,
And into my heart came He;
And I walk in a light divine,
The path I had feared to see.
-- George MacDonald

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Two Cripples
Two cripples entered a church one day;
Crippled -- but each in a different way:
One had a body strong and whole,
But it sheltered a warped and twisted soul.
The other walked with a halting gait,
But his soul was "tall and fair and straight."
They shared a pew, they shared a book,
But on each face was a different look:
One was alight with hope and joy
And faith that nothing could destroy.
The other joined not in prayer or hymn,
No smile relaxed his features grim.
His neighbor had wronged him; his heart was sore;
He thought of himself and nothing more.
The words that were read from the Holy Book
Struck deafened ears and a forlorn look.
To one came comfort -- his soul was fed;
The other gained nothing from what was said.
Two cripples left the church that day;
Crippled -- but each in a different way.
A twisted foot did one body mar,
But the twisted soul was sadder by far.

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Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a piece called "Conversation at Midnight" to speculate what it would be like for us were God to decide to withdraw from the world. "Ricardo said, 'Man has never been the same since God died. He has taken it very hard. Why, you'd think it was only yesterday, the way he takes it. Not that he says much, but he laughs much louder than he used to, and he can't bear to be left alone even for a minute, and he can't sit still ...

"He gets along pretty well as long as it's daylight, and he works very hard, and he amuses himself very hard with the many cunning amusements this clever age affords. But it's no use; the moment it begins to get dark, as soon as it's night, he goes out and howls over the grave of God.' "

____________

Ann Landers once reported the story of a young man who immigrated here from Italy, worked incredible hours, saved every dime he could earn and finally, he was able to send passage home for his dear wife. Excited, the young man went, accompanied by the people for whom he had worked, to meet his wife whom he had not seen for some years. But when she stepped off the train from New York, it was obvious that she was pregnant. Her infidelity was obvious to all. For a moment, the young husband was paralyzed by shock. But only for a moment. He quickly threw his arms around his wife and spoke his love. Then, referring to his children, including the soon to be born baby, he said "I love them." The writer of the letter who reported this story said the Italian family lived many happy years, raised several more fine children, and loved the illegitimate child as much as any of them.

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Psalm Of The Day
Psalm 147:12-20 -- "Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem!"

Prayer Of The Day
Thou hast taught us how to pray. If we do so every day, we will always find our way, in this lifetime, come what may. Amen.