Isaiah 2:1-5
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44
As we begin the Advent journey, Pastor Johnson breathed life into The Word and its message for us today – that we live our lives, day to day, hoping for something to change ourselves. The change that Advent calls for is to see the world with new eyes, through glasses that appreciate each day as a pure and total gift, a blessing from God.
The challenge: Tomorrow, at the start of our day, we should seek to ask ourselves this question:
“Is this the day I’m going to do something different? Is this the day I’m going to accept Jesus as my role model for being an agent of change? Is this the day I will have a bold enough vision, a big enough dream to be a person of the light in a world of chatter, busyness, distractions and noise? Can I find a kind way to rattle someone’s cage of complacency or entitlement … and say how wonderful life is?”
Or will I buy into the news media’s constant barrage of concentrating on the things that divide us all, on confrontation, turmoil, strife, war, and a culture that tends to view modern life through lenses of individual accomplishments, the zero-sum game, and the rat race that the world can become … if we CHOOSE to view it that way.
From a sermon of the same name, Barack Obama once heard preached, he recalls in his book, The Audacity of Hope:
“Our culture fixates on where our values clash. Spend time actually talking to (people) and you discover (we are more alike than different). We are at an empathy deficit. Empathy calls us to take task. No one is exempt from the call to find common ground. Talk is cheap. Empathy must be acted upon. If we aren’t willing to pay a price for our common values, if we aren’t willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should (collectively) ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all. (Our values) demand deeds and not just words. (In so doing), we are all shaken out of our complacency. We are forced beyond our limited vision.”
I have a quote framed in my office that I find myself looking at more and more, the older I get, not so much because it’s becoming any more the truth, and only because I am only now becoming more aware of that truth:
”The voyage of discovery requires not seeking new landscapes, but rather having new eyes.”
Professor Keating, the unconventional and counter-cultural professor who introduces his poetry students to the defunct Dead Poets’ Society has them stand on his desk to ‘view the room’. In so doing, he reminds them:
“Just when you think you understand something, you must view it from a different perspective.”
In Washington, DC, the police gathered handguns confiscated in the nation’s homicide capital. The artist Esther Augsburger welded the handguns together to re-create the image of a large plow blade, reminiscent of the scriptural text from Isaiah:
“…and they shall beat their swords into plowshares”
That image also brought back to mind my days in graduate school when I asked why the rather long, and complex computer programs we were to learn and run were called, respectively, Hickory and Isaiah. The first, Hickory, was used to study the behavior of wood germane to the Colorado region where the code was written. The latter was named by a fellow student, Tim Dewhurst, who wrote the code that simulated metal forming processes. My friend is today a professor at Cedarville University where he spends equal time enriching Christian lives as performing 3-dimensional analyses of complex metal forming operations.
Rather than slabs of metals in a processing plant, Tim saw a language that helped put in some technical perspective how to alter the view of one form to another. Like Esther, he saw the world with ‘new eyes’. Esther did not see guns, but a welded monument of hope.
Do we wear those kinds of glasses? Do we have that kind of hope … that seeing things differently will allow us to, through God’s grace, change the way others view the world?
If we do, Jesus and Pastor Johnson reminded us, the world will likely, on more than an occasion, see us as fools. Pastor Johnson posed an Advent question for us to consider:
“Are we courageous enough to be called a fool for the cause?”
We are promised that, if we do, Jesus will walk that road with us every step of the way, but we are asked to start today! Today, we are tasked to offer a word of kindness, of peace, a word of hopefulness where one is usually not found.
We are to see beginnings where others see only ends. We have to discover the Word by wearing new glasses, by adopting new eyes. The landscape’s what it’s been. We are tasked to view it from a different perspective.
But, first, to do that will require that we see today as a gift and ask:
“With whom will I share that gift? To whom will I give that gift back?”
There’s an old adage that goes
“The love in your heart wasn’t put there to stay. Love isn’t love … ‘til you give it away.”
Our gift of today is very much the same.
In Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, Emily is allowed to return from the dead to experience, again, one day of her life. Mrs. Gibbs is somewhat insistent in declaring to Emily “Choose and unimportant day. Choose the least important day of your life. It will be important enough.”
Despite that advice, Emily returns on her 12th birthday to find her mother obsessing over seemingly insignificant details in the kitchen and her father otherwise overly preoccupied. She quickly realizes that humans are preoccupied with their petty occupations and small thoughts, and know little of true joy and happiness. Stimson reminds her afterward:
“Now you know what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion or another. Ignorance … and blindness!”
We don’t have time to even look at one another. We’re too busy getting from one place to the next to see what’s in between, to just enjoy or realize or BE in the moment. We’re too busy making Christmas plans to appreciate that there even IS a Christmas and come to peace with what a gift it really is.
But … WHEN we do it, when we slow down enough to get a glimpse of it – BOY, is life ever good.
Pastor Johnson and Barack Obama are reminding us and tasking us, as Jesus did, to take action today. For we do not know the day or the hour. And that day will most assuredly come, perhaps when we least expect it.
In the meantime, there are blessings to have, people to love, empathy to be acted upon, moments to be grateful for and appreciative of. We’re not talking about Christmas gifts or business meetings, or those things that seemingly can’t be placed in perspective enough for us to enjoy our daughter Emily’s 12th birthday.
We’re talking about our very souls.
So Pastor Johnson asks us to consider Jesus’ call:
“Is this the day I’m going to do something different? Is this the day I am going to have a vision, a dream big enough? Is this the day I will be a person of the light, forced beyond my limited vision?”
As Barack Obama ends his discourse on taking action:
“To do otherwise would be to relinquish our best selves.”
Rather than slabs of metals in a processing plant, Tim saw a language that helped put in some technical perspective how to alter the view of one form to another. Like Esther, he saw the world with ‘new eyes’. Esther did not see guns, but a welded monument of hope.
Do we wear those kinds of glasses? Do we have that kind of hope … that seeing things differently will allow us to, through God’s grace, change the way others view the world?
If we do, Jesus and Pastor Johnson reminded us, the world will likely, on more than an occasion, see us as fools. Pastor Johnson posed an Advent question for us to consider:
“Are we courageous enough to be called a fool for the cause?”
We are promised that, if we do, Jesus will walk that road with us every step of the way, but we are asked to start today! Today, we are tasked to offer a word of kindness, of peace, a word of hopefulness where one is usually not found.
We are to see beginnings where others see only ends. We have to discover the Word by wearing new glasses, by adopting new eyes. The landscape’s what it’s been. We are tasked to view it from a different perspective.
But, first, to do that will require that we see today as a gift and ask:
“With whom will I share that gift? To whom will I give that gift back?”
There’s an old adage that goes
“The love in your heart wasn’t put there to stay. Love isn’t love … ‘til you give it away.”
Our gift of today is very much the same.
In Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, Emily is allowed to return from the dead to experience, again, one day of her life. Mrs. Gibbs is somewhat insistent in declaring to Emily “Choose and unimportant day. Choose the least important day of your life. It will be important enough.”
Despite that advice, Emily returns on her 12th birthday to find her mother obsessing over seemingly insignificant details in the kitchen and her father otherwise overly preoccupied. She quickly realizes that humans are preoccupied with their petty occupations and small thoughts, and know little of true joy and happiness. Stimson reminds her afterward:
“Now you know what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion or another. Ignorance … and blindness!”
We don’t have time to even look at one another. We’re too busy getting from one place to the next to see what’s in between, to just enjoy or realize or BE in the moment. We’re too busy making Christmas plans to appreciate that there even IS a Christmas and come to peace with what a gift it really is.
But … WHEN we do it, when we slow down enough to get a glimpse of it – BOY, is life ever good.
Pastor Johnson and Barack Obama are reminding us and tasking us, as Jesus did, to take action today. For we do not know the day or the hour. And that day will most assuredly come, perhaps when we least expect it.
In the meantime, there are blessings to have, people to love, empathy to be acted upon, moments to be grateful for and appreciative of. We’re not talking about Christmas gifts or business meetings, or those things that seemingly can’t be placed in perspective enough for us to enjoy our daughter Emily’s 12th birthday.
We’re talking about our very souls.
So Pastor Johnson asks us to consider Jesus’ call:
“Is this the day I’m going to do something different? Is this the day I am going to have a vision, a dream big enough? Is this the day I will be a person of the light, forced beyond my limited vision?”
As Barack Obama ends his discourse on taking action:
“To do otherwise would be to relinquish our best selves.”
No comments:
Post a Comment