“SHARE THE VISION”
Luke 1:39-45 Isaiah 12:2-6
A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart
Epworth United Methodist Church
Berkeley, California
December 17, 2006
Luke 1:39-45 Isaiah 12:2-6
A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart
Epworth United Methodist Church
Berkeley, California
December 17, 2006
Friends,
Once again, the text and what was preached are not one in the same.
Grace and peace.
This is a different day than any of us envisioned. Whether you are here for the first time and never knew young Aidan whom we mourn, or whether you are counted among those devastated by the incomprehensible loss of that bright wondrous 14 month old child ... you are here ... we are here ... in an unexpectedly Advent Sunday.
Prepared themes and prior weeks’ preparations have been wildly disrupted by hearts breaking and grace awakening. Everything is changed ... and nothing has changed. Life continues to emerge and blossom ... in shared tears, in shared anger, in shared memory, in shared joys and burdens, in shared vision. One person asked me yesterday, “How can we go on with Christmas as usual?” We can’t... praise God. For we have become unexpectedly Advent people expecting, longing, aching for good news of God With Us.
A more demanding question probably is how can we not go on to Christmas? How can we not go on to vision? Not just because our faith proclaims that life and love do not end in death. But even more because our shared faith ... and commitment ... and love ... won’t let us alone, and won’t let us go, and won’t let us ignore the claim that God-With-Us still places upon us. As we “share one another’s joys” and “bear one another’s burdens,” how can we not go on to live lives, to build a community worthy of the eager joy, love and promise that shone so brightly, briefly and yet so memorably in Aidan, in that precious child of God? and in Jimmy, whose baptism we will celebrate today, that precious child of God? ... in every precious child of God?
I was shaken as well as moved when I looked again at the Gospel reading for this Sunday and began to read its familiar words ... “When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.’” I realized this story is not just about the babies ... John and Jesus ... it is about the women who bore and loved and lost them.
We know about people walking in darkness and trusting God.
Mary and Elizabeth ... kinswomen ... cousins ... widely separated by age and situation were drawn together ... and drew strength from each other.
Elizabeth was menopausal ... she had prayed for children all of her life ... I know that prayer...she had never been able to have a child...I know that grief....and now,... she found herself pregnant . She was an “old” woman for her day, and she was six months along when she heard that her unmarried teenage cousin Mary was pregnant too.
When Mary learned that she was pregnant ...poor... too young ... not married ... potentially shamed and shunned ... what did she do first? She journeyed “with haste” to the rural village of her cousin, Elizabeth.
When Mary knew she would give birth to Jesus she sought company ... community. In the face of this disruptive vocation, she did not want ... to be alone.
Mary, who wondered at the news that she would bear the Savior, also carried the burden of unexpected blessing.
Elizabeth, who rejoiced at the news that she would bear a child, also carried the burden of overdue blessing, of an aging body, of an unknown future.
Let’s guess ... 15 and 50 ... wildly different circumstances ... what did they offer each other? Potential ...and experience. Vulnerability ...and physical strength. Endurance and surprise. Age, youth, questions, hopes, expectation, confusion ... and, most fundamentally ... companionship.
Next Sunday we will celebrate the birth of the song and the son of Mary.
The theme for this Sunday is “share the vision.” We’re not in this alone.
Earlier this year I preached on an affirmation that we are “Easter people in a Good Friday world.”
Well, today we truly are Unexpected Advent people in a Christmas world of low ... to no ... expectation. Each year we enter the season of Advent ... the four Sundays before Christmas. We remember the stories about expectation. We tell the stories about a people yearning and longing ..for a saviour ... who can turn night into day ... despair into hope... grief into joy. We remember.. at a sentimental distance, because we already know the rest of the story. We hear about waiting while what we say we’re waiting for already is all around us. I remember last year, one of our wise children asked, “But wasn’t Jesus born last year?!”
We speak of Advent ... we light candles... but we’re really already “Christmas as usual” people.
But suffering, or even the everyday questions of children (for those who have ears to hear)force us to look deep ... shake us back to real longing, and yearning, to wonder and to waiting desperately for Good News of God-With-Us.
The Gospel of John begins with familiar words, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”
The story of Mary and Elizabeth is not just about disruptive new life for two women. It is about disruptive vocation and vision for the salvation of all people.
Mary ... blessed and now sanctified ... could have been too scared to reach out ... but she ran to Elizabeth ... and they held each other up. They perceived God and praised God for bringing new life through them to the world. They recognized the blessedness of the other, and the relationship between the new life within them.
On the cover of your worship guide you see a copy of Epworth’s new logo introduced this Advent....(T-Shirts are available from our youth group....)
Our advent theme, “Do You See What I See?” also expressed an invitation to describe what people saw in this simple, evocative symbol as a means of naming God’s yearning for new life through this body of faith ... “a dove, a baby, a snail, a seashell, a Madonna, a seal, a mother and child, a rose, an otter, a swan, a home, a shofar, trumpet, peace, an ear, a vessel, a womb, an angel, a germinating seed.
Each vision has both a nurturing, sheltering dimension as well as an opening and emerging spirit.
Now, I invite you to share your vision. Shared vision is not one thing alone ... sharing vision is seeing God in the world, in one another, in ourselves and honoring what others see as resolutely as we put forth what we see. Let us perceive and praise God every week, every day, and discern our future led by unexpected and long overdue blessings.
For the past three Sundays as different people have lit Advent Candles, they’ve offered statements of vision, I’ve sensed a movement beyond logos to Logos ... beyond symbol to Word made flesh.
Last Sunday a first conversation was held to share dreams for children’s ministries...and possible staffing for such ministries.
Let us speak the truth given us, let us listen deeply to God and to one another, let us make plain the vision.
Barbara Brown Taylor, in a published sermon titled “Mothers of God” describes the ways in which even people of faith can and do say “no” to the claims and visions of God’s work and purposes. We can say “no” by refusing to look. We can say “no” by becoming angry, or bitter. And then, Brown Taylor writes, “Or you can decide to say yes. You can decide to be a daredevil, a test pilot, a gambler. You can set your book down and listen to a strange creature’s strange idea. You can decide to take part in a plan you did not choose, doing things you do not know how to do for reasons you do not entirely understand. You can take part in a thrilling and dangerous scheme with no script and no guarantees. You can agree to smuggle God into the world inside your own body. Deciding to say yes does not mean that you are not afraid, by the way. It just means that you are not willing to let your fear stop you.”
I believe that the emerging vision of Epworth has a great deal to do with the well-being of children, with a just ordering of our society and our world on behalf of those who labor to keep the basic work of living going on. It has to do with probing the depths of our souls rather than slipping along in the shallows, even progressive shallows. It has to do with songs of the spirit and everything to do with radically inclusive life-changing faith in Christ. This shared vision understands that as people move together, God’s light dispels the darkness of even the deepest night. Amen. | posted by Unknown @ 12/18/2006 01:08:00 PM
