Luke 2: 41-52
Luke 3: 1-6
New Thing!
Rev.
Elizabeth Macaulay
December
31, 2006
This is a New Year’s sermon.
We begin with
the message of the Baptizer, John. His
call was to make the way ready for the message of Jesus.
So as we
make our way ready for the living of the message of Jesus - I pray that is one
of our intentions for the New Year - it makes good sense to see how it is God
used John to help us to be open to Jesus.
What John
preached was repentance. Why? In order
that our sins be forgiven and in order that we are able to stand openly before
God.
As a good Jew, John would know that to repent means to turn
toward God.
And he
would also know that repentance means three things:
Experiencing genuine regret for past misdeeds.
Sorrow and remorse for the injury that has been caused.
And, a deeply felt desire to avoid repeating the offense.
In order
for forgiveness to happen, it takes a willingness to repent, according to John,
and according to his cousin Jesus, whose first words, attributed to him in Mark
are these: “The
As we take
the time to look over the year we just lived.
The days we have been given only this one time, is there a one of us who
is not in need of repentance?
Is there a
one of us who does not:
Experience regret for some misdeed undertaken in the past
year or fifty?
Is there a
one of us who does not know that we have caused injury? Is there a one of us who cannot feel sorrow
for that?
And, is
there a one of us who does not beg God for the power and desire to stop stop
stop whatever it is we are doing that is causing pain?
We are,
each one of us, in need of repentance.
We are in need of repentance because there is not a one of us who can go
through life without hurting people. It’s
part of the cost of being human.
So John is speaking to us through the ages. And Jesus is joining his voice to the
invitation.
Repent. Allow
yourself the good gift of honesty with your God.
And allow forgiveness to happen.
Allow
yourself to forgive others, knowing that God is in the healing, and maybe most
difficult of all tasks: allow yourself
to accept forgiveness: from others and
from your God
Because
wallowing in your own remorse and wretchedness is not going to bring in the
This
business of forgiveness is some of the hardest soul and relational work we
do. And we feel so alone in it because
we don’t’ want to share the places where we feel shame and grief. We judge ourselves so viciously that we are
sure the rest of the world joins in the mud hurling we do so well in our own
direction.
John the baptizer would have us to know another way. The way of healing.
Dr, Carolyn
Myss is a spiritual healer who is full of deep knowledge. She maintains that there are three energies,
energies that she calls angels, who are available to us every moment of our
lives.
The first
is the angel of necessity. Necessity
teaches that what happens in our life serves the whole of our lives and
spirits. To welcome and make peace with
necessity means that you suspend judgment of the experience and choose to live
it fully. We make use of the Wesleyan
questions while making decisions:
scripture, tradition, experience, and reason, and having done our best
discerning, we live without that voice in our heart and head shrieking at us
that we are doing it all wrong. When we
honor necessity, we spend our energies living our lives instead of judging
them.
The second
angel is that of choice. Choice means
that you do your best to negotiate along the way of live. You make the best choices you can in the
moment. You seek answers and you make
decisions grounded in the best you can discern at the time.
The third
angel is the one we need to invite into the living room of our hearts. It is the angel of compassion. Compassion is
the gift that gives us the grace to recognize that the choices we make, the
company we are in, the challenges we are facing, are there by divine design,
and we will always be provided with the way to negotiate the fruits of our
choice. The issue is not about shredding
ourselves and walling ourselves away from God due to a choice we may regret and
repent of.
Treasure is
instead found in turning to God with our humanity, knowing that God’s welcome
is grounded in compassion.
And who knows, we even may find compassion within ourselves
for ourselves.
So my
friends, what sorts of things do you need to give over to our compassionate
God?
Let us name
them in our hearts during this time of prayerful silence.
So we ground ourselves in the blessed gift of repentance and
forgiveness.
And,
knowing that forgiveness is the best soul gift we can embrace, we turn to the
first scripture lesson read this morning for a suggestion about how it is we
can live fully into the new year.
Can’t you just imagine the scene?
Jesus, all
of twelve, old enough to go with his parents to observe the Passover. And what does he do?
He finds
himself so enthralled with the shimmer of wisdom and sacredness in the temple
that he forgets about his parents and the journey home that awaits him.
He cannot
seem to tear himself away from the place he knows to be home, even though he
has never been there before.
And his parents go nuts looking for him.
And when they find him, he says to them “did you not know I
need to be in my Father’s house?”
What kind of response is that to give an overwrought with
worry mother and father?
It’s an
honest one. It speaks to the sense that
Jesus had that he had found the right thing, the right fit, the right place for
him to be fully and wholly alive.
It is that
that drew him to the temple and kept him there.
As a mother I’m not too keen on the worry he caused, but can’t you just
feel the way he must have felt sitting in the midst of the temple that had been
waiting for him for so long?
Jesus, as
Joseph Campbell would say, found his bliss.
He found the thing in life that resonated with God’s call to him and his
eager response.
For three
days between Christmas and New Year’s, I followed my bliss. I was at our cabin, surrounded by books and
in front of a fire and happy to go from one delectable morsel of writing to
another.
One of the
books I brought with me is one written my the Trappist monk Thomas Merton,
called Seeds of Contemplation.
Merton
talks early in the book of how it is we go through lives wearing many sorts of
masks, and that one of our God given tasks is to find and embrace the truth of
who we are. And one of the ways we live
that truth is through our vocation.
Our
vocation, Merton says, is not simply to be, but to work together with God in
the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny.
Our
vocation, as Quaker theologian Parker Palmer puts it, is the place where our
own passions and the needs of the world intersect.
So my good
friends, Jesus, at age 12, discovered that he had a passion for opening himself
to the teachings of the sacred. That
passion was so strong that he lost himself in it.
What is your passion?
That’s the new year’s question of this portion of the sermon.
What is it
God has planted in you that is sacred and unique? Is it gardening or teaching or parenting or
nursing or laughing or learning or praying or singing? What passion is it, what is it that is your
bliss?
And how and when are you going to give yourself permission
to follow it as sacred?
How are you
going to discern your passion and honor your passion as gift and live it as the
bliss God intended it to be?
So we will have time to pray about that, you and I. What is
your bliss?
And how
will you name it and practice it as sacred?