Killing Pain
Children's sermon
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Preaching
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January 2, 2005
Second Sunday After Christmas, Cycle A
Day of Epiphany / Cycle A
Dear Fellow Preachers,
The almost unimaginable horrors of the tsunami that devastated large parts of south Asia remind us that this life truly can be a vale of tears, an abode of overwhelming suffering.
Although such news overshadows the pain that comes into our lives, there are many in our midst that must cope with chronic pain -- physical, spiritual, or emotional. Thousands are "bending low" from "life's crushing load," as the carol has it. Is there any balm in Gilead? In our lead article, team member George Murphy reflects on the hurt we experience and the way that God speaks to the source of our pain in some of the lectionary texts for this Sunday.
The first Sunday of 2005 is the Second Sunday after Christmas, for which the lectionary readings are: Jeremiah 31:7-14 or Sirach 24:1-12; Psalm 147:12-20 or Wisdom of Solomon 10:15-21; Ephesians 1:3-14; and John 1:(1-9) 10-18.
Many churches, however, will hear the lections for the Day of Epiphany: Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14; Ephesians 3:1-12; and Matthew 2:1-12.
Team members of The Immediate Word comment on both series of lections, and Chris Ewing offers a sermon on the texts for the Day of Epiphany. Included, as usual, are illustrations, worship resources (by George E. Reed), and a children's sermon.
Happy New Year to you and your ministry.
KILLING PAIN
(Lections for the Second Sunday after Christmas and the Day of Epiphany)
By George Murphy
The pain is killing us, so we have to kill the pain.
Vioxx, Celebrex, Aleve -- questions have arisen about the safety of these and other pills -- all of them painkillers -- in recent weeks. There have even been reminders that people should be careful about overuse of aspirin. There are legitimate uses for such medications and legitimate concerns about them, but the ongoing story of problems with painkillers calls our attention to the fact that many people in our culture feel that they have to get rid of pain. It makes us wonder how people could ever function back in biblical times when they didn't even have aspirin.
People then had to deal with physical pain. They didn't have the drugs and technologies we now have and probably didn't handle pain any better than people do today, though they may have gotten more accustomed to it. And like us, they had to face pains which are often more severe, those of loss, defeat, and guilt. When Jeremiah sees the disaster coming upon his people he cries (4:10), "My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain." And later he demands of God (15:18), "Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?" There are plenty of cries of pain in the Bible and demands that God do something about it.
On one level, pain and the ability to feel pain are important factors for survival in the physical world. Pain is, after all, a symptom of some illness or injury. The pain of burning tells a person to pull the hand away from the fire, and the pain of a broken arm or sprained ankle is a warning not to keep putting stress on the affected part. Some people have a rare condition in which they are unable to feel pain. This may sound wonderful, but such people often have short lives because they don't get appropriate warnings about dangers and injuries. (I got 384 Google hits on "inability to feel pain." You can check some of these out if you want more detail on this condition.)
So there's a sense in which we can say that pain is good. But pain and suffering also lead to severe problems with religious belief in the form of the theodicy question. How can a God who is all-loving and all-powerful allow suffering? C. S. Lewis titled his book on suffering simply The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1962). The argument of the previous paragraph doesn't get God entirely off the hook, for we can simply ask why a loving God would create a world in which pain is necessary. Perhaps a more serious objection is that the amount of physical, psychological, and emotional pain that people suffer in the world is far beyond what may be necessary to serve as warnings of danger. The pains caused by human sin can't be explained entirely by natural selection or any sort of physical necessity.
The great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, in which tens of thousands of people died, provoked a good deal of pondering of the theodicy problem in an intellectual climate in which traditional Christian claims had already been subjected to many challenges. (Discussion of contemporary religious reactions can be found at http://www.gospelcom.net/chi/DAILYF/2001/11/daily-11-01-2001.shtml.) There is a striking similarity between that catastrophe and the recent earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean, with a death toll now (28 December) reported at more than 40,000 and expected to rise. This raises the same questions about "natural evil" and the goodness of God but may not have as much of an impact on theology as the Lisbon earthquake had. If that's the case, it will probably be because we have already seen so many massive evils in recent decades that one more won't raise the level of theological questioning. But this new disaster, which has struck so many people, is nevertheless one more example of the pain that the world suffers.
I won't try to review the extensive discussions of theodicy here and would suggest that such discussion in a congregation might take place more profitably in a class or discussion session rather than a sermon. A great deal of discussion about theodicy assumes that God is immune from pain, and then has to deal with the question of how such a non-suffering God could be justified in allowing his creatures to suffer -- and even create a world in which they must suffer. The tremendous amount of suffering in the world in the twentieth century has forced the problem of suffering to the attention of the church. We shouldn't imagine, however, that people of antiquity were able to believe in a beneficent and almighty God only because they weren't really aware of the problem of pain. Near the beginning of the book that I mentioned, Lewis asks his readers to "lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practiced, in a world without chloroform" (p. 16).
Many traditional discussions of this problem have assumed that it is only creatures that feel pain, and that God is immune to it. A good deal of modern theology challenges the assumption of God's impassability, and therefore of the impossibility of divine pain. One of the influential books dealing with this question is the Japanese theologian Kazoh Kitamori's Theology of the Pain of God (Richmond: John Knox, 1965; a translation of the 5th Japanese edition). Referring especially to God's words in Jeremiah 31:20 ("therefore my bowels are troubled for him" [KJV]), Katamori argues that it is not only possible but necessary to speak of the pain of God. Aware that this challenges traditional concepts of the divine essence, he suggests that we speak of "pain as the essence of God" and says, "the cross is in no sense an external act of God, but an act within himself" (pp. 44-47).
There are biblical passages that speak about God being pained by the sins and sufferings of the world. (For example, what would be the point of being told in Ephesians 4:30 not to "grieve the Holy Spirit of God" if God could not in fact be grieved?) But the picture of God in heaven observing the world and being pained by what goes on there isn't entirely satisfactory. For God to say, "I feel your pain," like a politician talking to people who have lost their jobs, may not provide much comfort to people who are suffering.
The deepest answer to the problem of pain is in the Gospel for the Second Sunday after Christmas, John 1:1-18. In verse 14 we have words that are familiar but whose full depth often isn't plumbed: "And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory."
The evangelist doesn't use the type of abstract language we've become accustomed to and say "The Word became human" or, as in the Nicene Creed, "was made man." True as those are, they don't bring out the full sense of "flesh," which when used of humanity in scripture generally refers to our weakness in comparison with God, to our fragility and vulnerability. It is an unfortunate fantasy of some Christians that the infant Jesus never cried because he was pricked by the straw of the manger, because he had gas, or because he woke up and didn't immediately see Mary or Joseph. He was a real baby. The Word became flesh.
And the statement that "we have seen his glory" points toward the greater suffering of the cross. In the Fourth Gospel, that is the "hour" when Christ is glorified (cf. John 12:23). That is the hour in which Christ shares most fully in the pain of the world. And if we take Kitamori's arguments seriously, we won't try to limit the experience of this pain to Christ's human nature. Through the Incarnation God became a participant in creation's pains.
The Incarnation is not, however, just a way of God saying, "I feel your pain on a more intimate level." It is the means through which God heals the spiritual, mental, and physical ailments that cause the pain. And that healing takes place precisely through God's sharing in it. This is brought out very clearly in Matthew 8:17. In the first verses of that chapter the evangelist has gathered several stories of Jesus' healings of people from different ailments. The significance of these stories is then stated in the summary verse 17 by quoting the words of Isaiah 53:4, "He took our infirmities and bore our diseases."
Thus Jesus as "the great physician" shouldn't be pictured as an omnipotent medical professional that heals people without being affected by their illnesses. He is instead the one who cures by taking those illnesses upon himself.
Some churches have started to observe the Feast of the Epiphany on the Second Sunday after Christmas rather than on the traditional 6 January date, and they will use the lectionary texts for that festival on 2 January. There's some practical sense to that because, unfortunately, we're not going to be able to get many people to church in the middle of the week. (Of course there are some years in which there isn't a Second Sunday after Christmas but that's not a concern this time around.)
The "Word became flesh" theme isn't as explicit in the texts for the Epiphany as in the Johannine prologue. In the Epiphany Gospel, Matthew 2:1-12, the birth of Jesus in the first verse sets the stage for the coming of the magi. In the preceding verses in chapter 1 Matthew had emphasized the meaning of the name Jesus as "Yahweh is salvation" (or "the LORD saves") by saying, "he will save his people from their sins" (1:21). The verb sozo used here can mean "save" -- in the religious sense that we're accustomed to -- but also "cure" or "make well."
That's perhaps a tenuous connection with the theme of pain and healing. You could instead focus on verses 12-14 of the psalm for the Epiphany, 72, a prayer for the perfect king. (Isaac Watts' "Jesus shall reign where'er the sun" is a hymn version of this psalm.) While these verses don't speak explicitly of healing, the care that the king will show for "those who have no helper" and "the weak and the need" could certainly be connected with that theme. (Affordable health care is certainly a concern for many poor people in this country today.)
On the other hand, if you're going to exercise some freedom with the church calendar and the lectionary, you could use Luke 2:21 as a text. This is part of the Gospel for the Feast of the Name of Jesus on 1 January, the eighth day on which a Jewish baby would have been circumcised and given his name. This would make it possible to concentrate on the connection of the name of Jesus with salvation in the full biblical sense of the word sozo. Besides, starting the year in the name of Jesus isn't a bad idea!
What concerns do people have about pain -- in its broad sense -- that we have to address? On one hand, pain is a symptom. Sometimes it's enough to deal with aches and pains with medication, but in other cases there may be a serious underlying problem that will be ignored if we just get rid of the symptom. Painkillers will not cure cancer. A person who is in pain and wants to be healed has to be willing to recognize that there is a deeper problem than just the physical hurting.
And that's true for other pain as well. The pains of guilt can be covered up temporarily with alcohol or other drugs, or on a more "exalted" level by some spiritual anesthesia that enables the person to believe that there's really nothing wrong. A real cure requires recognition that there is a sickness -- which is the function of the law -- and that the healing of God's forgiveness can take place because our infirmities and diseases are borne by Christ.
On the other hand, some people refuse to make use of painkillers because they think that that would show that they're weak. They're tough and can defeat pain without any help! It's not too much of a stretch to connect that attitude with the belief that we have to save ourselves and can't trust in Christ alone for salvation. Justification isn't a matter of spiritual toughness but of spiritual realism.
The message that the Word of God, who is God, became flesh and took on our manifold illnesses and pains also gives us some guidance about how we as members of the Christian community are to help one another with the problem of pain. We are, Saint Paul says, to "bear one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2). We can be present and open to those who are in pain and keep them in prayer. While we can't fully take away the pain of those who suffer, worries and fears can be lessened if the sufferer knows that someone else is willing to share them. (Charles Williams' novel Descent into Hell [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1965] makes use of this idea in an imaginative way.)
The Bible doesn't offer us a magic pill that will deaden all the pains of the world.
(The word anodyne may be useful here.) It does proclaim the one who heals the underlying wounds and sickness of creation by becoming a participant in the world's history and the pains that go with that.
Team Comments
Carlos Wilton responds: George, these are points well taken. Pain is indeed a universal human problem, both a blessing and a curse -- a blessing in that it is the body's distant early warning system against even more severe illness or injury, and a curse in that it is a highly unpleasant experience (to say the least). Pain relief is a timely topic, and not only because of recent, well-publicized recalls of popular pain medications.
"Chronic pain" is a relatively new addition to the medical vocabulary (and still controversial, as researchers struggle to determine whether it is an ailment in its own right, or merely a symptom). "Pain Centers" have sprung up in various places: doctors hang out a shingle (or, more commonly, erect a large, illuminated sign on a well-traveled road), indicating that this is where patients can go to obtain pain relief. Some of these physicians have been accused of being too liberal with writing prescriptions, particularly for easily abused narcotics like oxycontin.
My wife is a chaplain with a home-based hospice program, and she frequently has cause to remind patients and family members of a central feature of the hospice philosophy: that there is no reason why any terminally ill patient should be overcome with pain. Appropriate pharmaceutical technology exists to control just about any kind of pain, as long as side effects or addictions are not an issue (as they generally are not in hospice care). Keeping the patient comfortable is the priority, and that goal is usually attainable. When it's not, it's generally because the patient, for whatever reason, has declined to take the prescribed medication.
I appreciate the quotation from C. S. Lewis, about earlier generations not having had access to chloroform. We easily forget that fact. On Civil War battlefields and on Navy sailing ships, gruesome operations were performed without any anesthetic other than a swig of "medicinal" spirits. On the home front, dental care was relatively unknown, so many people in their middle years and older walked around in constant pain from decaying teeth. Orthopedic care was primitive, and in remote areas was completely unavailable; broken bones were often set poorly, leading to lifelong, painful disabilities. Television commercials today proclaim how terrible it is to have a headache, and rush to the rescue with the latest pills. A couple hundred years ago, headaches were the least of human problems.
Now is the time for year-end reviews in the media, and one of the entertainment milestones most often mentioned as 2004 draws to a close is the phenomenal success of Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ. Among the most controversial aspects of this film is its violence, and in particular actor James Caviezel's agonizingly graphic portrayal of Jesus' physical pain under torture. It is hard to think of a more graphic depiction of John 1:14: "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."
The year 2004 also brought shocking revelations of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib facility in Iraq and similar allegations concerning the top-secret holding facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Pain is at the heart of that story as well. The debate largely centers around which prisoner-interrogation techniques cross the line between discomfort and pain, both physical and psychological. The fact that our Lord was himself a victim of torture may give us pause to consider to what extent the deliberate infliction of pain may be appropriate (if, indeed, it is ever appropriate) in serving the cause of justice. In any event, pain is often a part of human life, and the hard fact is that sometimes there is no relief to be found, not even under the childproof cap of a prescription bottle. To undertake a long-term journey with pain, emotional or physical, is one of the terrible trials of mortal existence. It is some real comfort to know that, in Christ, God knew severe pain, and also that, as Jeremiah promises the long-suffering children of Israel, one day "their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again" (31:12b).
Chris Ewing responds: For those using the Epiphany lections this week, there are several possible avenues into an exploration of our struggles with pain. Both Isaiah 60 and Psalm 72 show decisive action, on the part of God or of God's anointed, to bring an end to pain: in Isaiah the pain of exile, in the psalm the pain of injustice. In a religious culture shadowed by the suspicion that pain is like broccoli, disagreeable but good for you, I think it is important to hear the strong witness of both these passages (and many like them!) that God takes no pleasure in human suffering, and is not indifferent to our plight. One must of course be judicious in preaching this, since the Chronicler and the prophets (including an earlier Isaiah) do not hesitate to ascribe the painful exile to God's corrective action against a wayward people. But if the scriptures are less squeamish than many of their latter-day interpreters about envisioning a God willing to inflict pain, they are also unanimous that this is neither God's desire nor God's last word. Redemption is always where the story tends.
The New Testament lections for Epiphany focus more on the universality of God's redeeming intent than on any exploration of what it is we are redeemed from. Nonetheless, there are some openings for approaching the subject of suffering. In Matthew we see Herod suffering fear: at the news of a possible rival, "he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him." We are not conditioned to have much empathy for Herod, nor for others whose pain issues in non-redemptive responses, but there might be room for some reflection on the universality of distress; or this might serve as a starting point for cataloguing some of the kinds of suffering we experience, and to which Christ responds.
Perhaps the most powerful link to the theme is found in Ephesians 3, if we extend the reading by one verse to include verse 13. (This in fact more properly represents Paul's thought, bookending the passage that began with an allusion to his imprisonment in verse 1). Having ardently expounded on God's universal salvific intent in sending Christ, and Paul's own mandate to spread that gospel to the Gentile world, he concludes with a prayer that his hearers "may not lose heart over my sufferings for you; they are your glory."
This creates an opportunity to explore a whole other side of the issue of suffering, and that is its relationship to purpose. Usually we are willing to tolerate a considerable amount of discomfort if we can see the necessity and the point of it. The point at which pain becomes suffering is typically the point where it loses it's meaning: when we suffer, not for something but from something. Paul (or someone writing in his name) contends that the trials he is undergoing are suffused with glory, because they are part of the unveiling of God's plan of redemption in a resistant world. (Along the same line, we may recall that Jesus, as he neared his own moment of "glorification," mused aloud that "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" [John 12:24].) The whole passage is rich in material for reflection on pain and purpose. Because Paul's pain resulted from and was held within a high purpose, it was not a matter for discouragement, even if the pain was prolonged. Rather, it was a sign that something important was happening.
No matter how we approach the problem of pain in our preaching, we will want to be very alert to the pain in our pews. Particularly among seniors, who are likely to form the greater part of an early-January congregation, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pain are endemic. As pastors we will want to think about how our words will be heard out of the middle of the situations our people are living.
Related Illustrations
From Carlos Wilton:
From a Leadership Online interview with preacher John Ortberg:
We did a survey when I was at Willow Creek and asked thousands of people, "Think about an era in your life when you felt like you were growing the most spiritually. What contributed to that?" The number one answer: Pain ... Because pain is such a vivid, intense, and unpleasant experience, it creates motivation to seek outside help in a way that hardly anything else does. Pain has a way of opening somebody up to say, "The way that I have been doing life is not working." It creates openness that often is not there in the routine of day to day. So as pastor, I continually ask, "Where are folks in pain? How can I be with them? And how might God be at work in their lives?" ...
Pain doesn't necessarily bring about spiritual transformation. Pain in the default mode will produce anger, resentment, despair, and enormous problems in human life. Hence the need for the pastoral moment, for wise spiritual guidance. Pain will lead to Christian spiritual transformation only if it is handled well and wisely, if it causes the person to open up to God.
-- "Holy Tension: Creating and Seizing Opportunities for Spiritual Transformation," The Leadership Interview with John Ortberg, Leadership Journal (Winter 2004). Full article online at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2004/001/1.22.html
***
A story is told of Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. One day the evangelist was standing waist-deep in a river, baptizing new converts to the faith. Patrick was holding his crozier (his bishop's staff), as the line of new converts made their way into the water. One who came up to him was a clan chieftain, a fierce warrior. Unfortunately, as Patrick was lowering this man under the water, he inadvertently pressed the tip of his staff into the chieftain's foot. The man said nothing, but as he climbed onto the riverbank, everyone could see that he was limping. Someone explained to Patrick what happened, and he immediately went to the chief and asked, "Why did you not cry out when I struck your foot?" The chief answered, "I remember you telling us about the nails in the cross, and I thought pain was part of my baptism."
***
Let me share with you the pit, the bedrock of my faith on these matters, about where God is. This is how I see it. Long ago, when the best and brightest of all the ages was at the end of His rope and it felt as if God had abandoned Him, He asked the same question David asked in his time of trouble: Why? Why? And He got no answer, not in words. Heaven was silent again. No answer. Dead silence. He died without an answer from God.
But then, just three days later, before the fingers of the light had filtered through the mist of the morning, before the citizens of the city had finished their second snooze, the Almighty got into the grave where Jesus' body lay. And the power of His creative spirit began to move inside that dead corpse. Life began to pulsate again through its dead nerves and flow like energy through its arteries like a rush of warm power. And Jesus came alive. Jesus asked the most painful question anybody can ever ask of God, and the answer came, not with words, but with an action; not in theory, but in life. In resurrection.
So this is what I want to say to you. If you feel God has gone away on vacation and left you on your own, go straight to Him. Ask a question. Raise a protest. Ask him why He is letting you down. And then you'll have to do the hardest thing of all. Wait. Wait for Him to come back the way Jesus did. Wait for Him to come back and give you your own resurrection.
I know that waiting is the hardest job in the world. It is ten thousand times harder to wait than it is to rush into action. But when it feels as if God's gone, gone on leave of absence, and you ask Him why, you may have to wait for Him to come back. I want to tell you that the secret of waiting is hope. Wait with hope. Wait with hope! For He will come back. He will come back! Keep on waiting. Keep on hoping. He'll come back. He always has. And He will come back to you.
-- Lewis Smedes, Shame and Grace: Healing the Shame We Don't Deserve
***
Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers.
-- Thomas Merton
***
A cup is a container for holding something. Whatever it holds has to eventually be emptied out so that something more can be put into it. I have learned that I cannot always expect my life to be full. There has to be some emptying, some pouring out, if I am to make room for the new. The spiritual journey is like that -- a constant process of emptying and filling, of giving and receiving, of accepting and letting go.
-- Joyce Rupp, "The Cup of Our Life"
From Chris Ewing:
Walt Wangerin's famous story, "Ragman" (found in Ragman and Other Cries of Faith) depicts Jesus as a ragman walking the streets of the city, collecting the rags people have used to staunch tears and blood or to wrap up in when drunk and sick, giving them new, clean rags for their old ones. When the exchange is made, the people are healed of their grief, wound, illness or age, while the ragman takes on their infirmity along with the rag. The story culminates with a powerful evocation of Good Friday and Easter, and concludes with the risen Christ responding to the storyteller's plea, "Dress me."
***
Saying that Jesus is Lord means that there is no situation in which he is irrelevant or impotent.
-- Rowan Williams
***
Joy is not the absence of suffering, but the presence of God.
-- Source unknown
***
Neurosis is the avoidance of legitimate pain.
-- Source unknown
***
Courage is a fragile vessel lightly floating upon an abyss of fear and uncertainty. Thus every effort is made to sustain courage.
-- John H. Hayes, Preaching through the Christian Year (A), p. 91
***
Pain is inevitable, but misery is optional.
-- Source unknown
***
Someone once said to a gallant soul who was undergoing a great sorrow, "Sorrow fairly colours life, doesn't it?" Back came the reply: "Yes! And I propose to choose the colour!"
-- William Barclay, commentary on Romans (5:3-4)
***
Creator God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference -- living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardship as the pathway to peace; taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that you will make all things right, if I surrender to your divine will; that I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with you forever in the next. Amen.
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
***
Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will every really be yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
-- C. S. Lewis, closing words of Mere Christianity
***
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket -- safe, dark, motionless, airless -- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell.
-- C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
***
The very thing we don't want to talk about is the very thing we must talk about.
-- Greg Mcdonell
***
I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright.
I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more.
I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive.
I wish you enough pain so that the smallest joys in life appear much bigger.
I wish you enough gain to satisfy your wanting.
I wish you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess.
I wish you enough hellos to get you through the final good-bye.
-- Source unknown
***
Dance like no one is watching. Love as if it's never going to hurt.
-- Source unknown
***
All that man vainly desires here below is perfectly realized in God. We have all those impossible desires within us as a mark of our destination, and they are good for us provided we no longer hope to fulfill them.
-- Simone Weil
***
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything:
That's how the light gets in.
-- Leonard Cohen, Anthem
***
I took a friend of mine who is visually impaired to church with me last Sunday. Several of the children in the congregation were fascinated with her Braille Bible. One of the adults came over to see what the kids were so excited about, and Ellen told the woman, "Oh, well, I was telling them how bumpy the road to salvation is."
-- Ray Kerley, Baptist pastor, May 2000
***
People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light within.
-- Elizabeth Kübler-Ross
***
When you have a flat tire by the side of the road, it's important to have the right kind of prayer. Jesus won't miraculously come down and fix the tire. But he'll have a marvelous conversation with you while you await the tow truck.
-- Rev. Jim White, Anglican priest, quoting his father
***
Faith is not something one has, or can lose. Faith is something you DO, because your life depends on it.
-- Dawna Markova, No Enemies Within
***
To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives -- the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections -- that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank-you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for. Let us not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God.
-- Henri Nouwen
***
He who has a "why" to live can cope with almost any "how."
-- Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
A Sermon for Epiphany
IN HUMAN STORY
Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12
By Chris Ewing
I suppose long trips have been undertaken for stranger reasons. Perhaps you have embarked on such a journey -- a quest, a fool's errand even, only you didn't realize until later that you had set out, leaving everything behind. If you had known, chances are you would not have dared to go.
You know the kind of journey I mean -- the one that begins with an inner restlessness, a restlessness that may not even make it to conscious attention very often; only it prods at the edges of your thoughts, it sours the taste of today, it reminds you, whether you're listening or not, that this wasn't all you'd hoped for....
I remember the day I began the journey of singleness, though I didn't know it at the time. I certainly didn't intend to become single again. I most certainly didn't want to. I hoped and prayed that I was beginning the journey of restoring health, to myself and to my family. As I wrote in my journal, "The waves I am setting up could scuttle this marriage. I don't want to scuttle this marriage; I want to heal it. ... I want this marriage; I want an intact family. But now at last I see that I do not want it in any shape, at any [price.]"1
If on that August day in 1993 I could have known where that determination would land us little more than a year later; if I'd had any idea what the years to follow would be like, I wonder if I would have had the courage to reach for health. Yet, to stay where I was, to leave us all where we were, would have been death -- spiritually, psychologically, in all the ways that matter -- for all of us. By the grace of God we have been finding our way to health ... but if we'd had any idea what the journey would be like, we might never have set out.
That's the kind of journey I'm talking about. The kind where you would turn your camel around and go back if you could, only you have no maps and the star is still going west.
It's the kind of journey our world is hesitantly embarking on in the wake of September 11. We know the way things have been doesn't work; we've been struggling for most of the last century, in fact, with how to make the world livable for all of us -- politically, economically, environmentally, religiously -- how to build a world we can all inhabit together, and on what terms. September 11 reminded us we aren't there yet; reminded us how urgent the task is and how high the stakes are. It goaded us upon our journey -- even as it threatened to deflect us altogether into retaliation and xenophobia. We're a long way from any place that feels like home now, with grave doubts about the probability or even the possibility of completing our quest. Do we turn around and gallop back to the kind of nationalism that precipitated two world wars? Or do we tighten the saddles, squint harder against the blowing grit, and venture yet farther from the last oasis towards the star that we glimpse dimly and intermittently through the swirling sandstorm, the glimmering hope of a world working together in peace?
Paul maintains, in the passage from Ephesians, that God is at work in human history, gradually unfolding the divine plan for bringing all of humanity together through the work of Christ. "In past times, [humankind] was not told this secret," Paul wrote; "but God has revealed it now" -- and continues to unfold it through the life and work of Paul and of all of us. It is "through the church," he says, that "the wisdom of God in its rich variety" is to be made known2 -- a quest, a fool's errand even, on God's part! -- a journey as risky and uncertain as my quest to heal my marriage. For the healing of humanity requires that humanity cooperate to some degree. And we all know the human story well enough to know that that doesn't always happen.
The scary part about our Christian faith is that God takes the human story seriously. Everything stands or falls on it: on our individual human stories, and on the shared human story of our church, our nation, our whole global village. God works with us through history, by history, not apart from it. Our lives and our choices are God's material -- the journey as we actually make it, filled with roadblocks, backtracks, and deception as it is. This is the means by which God chooses to be revealed to the world, and to accomplish God's purposes. In human story is how God chooses to be known.
As I look back on my own personal story, I tremble as I see how God has breathed through it. I cringe in shame over some parts; I marvel at others. And with each passing year I am more deeply impressed with both the fragility and the power of God's presence in human story.
"What is emerging from the rubble of the twentieth century?" asks American Presbyterian pastor Jim Breed, in a 1998 reflection. "Cynics will conclude that the current 'peace' is only an interlude between the old savagery of the twentieth century and some new savagery yet to be devised [like September 11!]. Sometimes after a long day, and a long week, in the wee hours of the morning, after thinking of friends of mine who died in Vietnam, or relatives who died in earlier wars, or who are dying now on city streets, I get cynical. Sometimes after long work with low pay, and seeing little to show for it, I get cynical.
"But the Gospel is not cynical. It is realistic, but not cynical.
"A new world is waiting to be born....
"Often it doesn't seem as though that is the case. But the Gospel is emphatic on that subject. We have no choice but to keep the faith, and pursue the vision of the Gospel."3
Because, in spite of all appearances, God is at work in our human story. It can be hard to see the star from the middle of the sandstorm; and our tracks may meander all over the desert in the course of getting there; yet we affirm -- and at times we can clearly see -- that God is indeed with us in this, leading us places we otherwise never would have gone, accomplishing things it assuredly would not have been in our minds or in our strength to do, and through us changing the shape of the future.
We are the gathered loaf now, which Christ takes in his hands, blesses, and breaks, handing us out to a world hungry for the presence of God. "This is my body," he says; "take and eat."
And when the night has devoured us to the last crumb, Jesus takes the wine of our tears and our laughter, thanks God for it, and passes it round to a thirsting world, saying, "This is what it is to be truly human. This is the seal of my presence in history, redeeming your story. Drink it, all of you."4
Thanks be to God.
Notes
1. Personal journal, August 12, 1993
2. Ephesians 3:5, 8-10; TEV and NRSV
3. James Lincoln Breed, note #5250 to SERMONSHOP DISCUSSION, November 6, 1998
4. Adapted from my communion liturgy for the Sailing on the Wind event at PCTC, July 1995
Worship Resources
For The Second Sunday after Christmas Day or Epiphany Sunday
By George E. Reed
OPENING
(N.b.: All copyright information is given from the first cited place where found. Some copyright information may differ in other sources due to adaptations, etc.)
Music
Hymns
"We Three Kings." WORDS: John H. Hopkins, Jr., 1857; MUSIC: John H. Hopkins, Jr., 1857. Public domain. As found in UMH 254; Hymnal '82: 128; TPH 66; AAHH 218; TNNBH 97; TNCH; CH 172.
"Rise, Shine, You People." WORDS: Ronald A. Klug, 1973; MUSIC: Dale Wood, 1973. (c) 1974 Augsburg Publishing House. As found in UMH 187; Hymnal '82; LBOW 393.
"Word Of God, Come Down On Earth." WORDS: James Quinn, 1969; MUSIC: Johann R. Ahle, 1664. Words (c) 1969 James Quinn. As found in UMH 375; Hymnal '82: 633.
"There Is A Balm In Gilead." WORDS: Afro-American spiritual; MUSIC: Afro-American spiritual; adapt. and arr. William Farley Smith, 1986. Adapt. and arr. (c) 1989 The United Methodist publishing House. As found in UMH 375; Hymnal '82: 676; TPH 394; AAHH 524; TNNBH 489; TNCH 553; CH 501.
"It Is Well With My Soul." WORDS: Horatio G. Spafford, 1873; MUSIC: Philip P. Bliss, 1976. Public domain. As found in UMH 377; AAHH 377; TNNBH 255; TNCH 438; CH 561.
"Silence, Frenzied, Unclean Spirit." WORDS: Thomas H. Troeger, 1984; MUSIC: Carol Doran, 1984. (c) 1984 Oxford University Press. As found in UMH 264; TNCH 176; CH 186.
Songs
"Be Not Afraid." WORDS and MUSIC: Robert J. Dufford. (c) 1975, 1978 Robert J. Dufford, S.J., and New Dawn Music. As found in Renew 243.
"Something Beautiful." WORDS: Gloria Gaither; MUSIC: William J. Gaither. (c) 1971 William J. Gaither. As found in CCB 84.
"All I Need Is You." WORDS and MUSIC: Dan Adler; arr. Nylea L. Butler-Moore. (c) 1989 Out of the Door Music. As found in CCB 100.
CALL TO WORSHIP
Leader: Come, let us worship our God.
People: We honor and adore the One who created us.
Leader: Let us open our lives to the One who is always with us.
People: We worship the One who presence is eternal.
Leader: Let us offer to God all of our lives.
People: To you, O God, we offer all our joys and sorrows.
COLLECT / OPENING PRAYER
O God, who is closer to us than our own breath: Grant us the wisdom to know you are always with us and to discover your caring presence in all the changes of life; through Jesus Christ our elder brother. Amen.
or
We come to worship you who is and was and always shall be. You are the constant in our lives whether we are in joy or in sorrow. Be with us in this time together that we may praise you and learn once again to recognize your presence among us. Amen.
PRAYER OF CONFESSION / PARDON
Leader: Let us confess to God and before one another the state of our lives.
People: We come in truthfulness to confess that we are people who have forgotten the lessons of the past. Time and again we have been taught that you, O God, are the One who will never leave us nor forsake us yet we live our lives wondering where you are. In the joys and pleasures of life we forget that you have created us to receive such gifts and in the hard places of life we forget that you are with us and within us, experiencing our pain with us. Heal our memories and teach us once again that you love us and care for us and will never leave us desolate. So fill us with your Spirit that we are always aware of your caring presence in our lives. Amen.
Leader: The God of Abraham, Sarah, Moses, and Miriam; the God of Mary and Joseph is with us to declare that we are loved and cared for and always forgiven. Amen.
GENERAL PRAYERS, LITANIES, ETC.
We adore you, O God, for your wonderful greatness that comes to us not only in our joy but in our pain. You have walked with us throughout our existence and you have walked as one of us. You know the pleasures earth offers and its sorrows and travail.
(The following paragraph is most suitable if a prayer of confession will not be used elsewhere.)
We confess that often we fail to remember that you know our troubles and care for us as your own dear children. We look at the grief and sorrow around us and in our own lives and we ask where you are when you are standing with us all the time. We complain about your absence when, if fact, it is only our failure to recognize your presence. Open our eyes to you saving, redeeming presence. Touch our hearts so that we might recognize you as you travel life with us. Grant us to be so filled with your Spirit that we enter into all of life with the assurance that in you we are safe.
We give you thanks for all the ways in which you have shared yourself with us. We thank you for your faithfulness as you care for us in our joys and in our sorrows. You have blessed us with so many joys and pleasures with the gift of this earth. There is beauty all around us in nature and in the creations of our sisters and brothers. Most of all we are blessed with your presence in all of our lives.
(Other specific thanksgiving may be offered.)
We offer to your gracious care those who are on our hearts. We know that you love them and are with them in their distress. We ask that our love and our spirits may join with yours in touching their lives in their troubles.
(Other petitions may be offered.)
All these things we ask in the Name of Jesus who taught us to pray saying, "Our Father ...."
Hymnal & Songbook Abbreviations
UMH: United Methodist Hymnal
Hymnal '82: The Hymnal 1982, The Episcopal Church
LBOW: Lutheran Book of Worship
TPH: The Presbyterian Hymnal
AAHH: African American Heritage Hymnal
TNNBH: The New National Baptist Hymnal
TNCH: The New Century Hymnal
CH: Chalice Hymnal
CCB: Cokesbury Chorus Book
PMMCH3: Praise. Maranatha! Music Chorus Book, Expanded 3rd Edition
Renew: Renew! Songs and Hymns for Blended Worship
A Children's Sermon
Kneeling down in prayer
Object: the knees of the children
Based on Matthew 2:1-12
Good morning, boys and girls. Isn't it neat that God made you in a certain way? (let them answer) All of our body parts have a certain job to do and each one is very important. Let's take a look at our hands and think about what they can do. They can open doors, throw a ball, pick up food, and carry a glass of water. What do ears do? (let them answer) Very good, they let us hear but they also hold up our glasses and let us wear earrings. Feet are for walking, running, and wearing shiny shoes.
What do you think knees are for? (let them answer) They bend and help us walk better. I like what the wise men did with their knees. Do you know what the wise men did on their knees? (let them answer) They worshiped the baby Jesus. The Bible tells us that when they entered the house where Mary was, they knelt down and worshiped the baby Jesus.
How many of you kneel when you pray? Before we go to sleep, many of us kneel and thank Jesus for such a wonderful day. We also pray for others like our mothers, fathers, relatives, and friends. If we have something very special to ask God we use that time while we are on our knees to ask him to consider it. The other night when I prayed I asked God if he would consider helping me with a problem. I explained the problem to him and prayed that he would have an answer for me. I haven't heard yet what God's answer will be but I know I will find out.
The wise men came a long way to worship Jesus. They followed a star for many days until it led them to where the baby Jesus was beginning his life with us. They knew that God sent signs and the star, called the star of Bethlehem to lead them right to his bed. Mary was surprised to see such grand visitors but it was another sign to her that the baby Jesus was something special. She also knew how special he was when they got down on their knees and worshiped Jesus.
Let's all take a moment to kneel down and worship Jesus. We can pray to God and thank him for sending us the love in such a wonderful Savior.
The next time you look at your knees remember what the wise men did when they came to the house where Jesus lived as a baby. They knelt down on the ground and thanked God for sending the Lord Jesus.
Second Sunday after Christmas
The true light
Object: a flashlight and a Bible in a box with small holes
Based on John 1:(1-9) 10-18
Good morning! The Bible tells us that Jesus is the true light, a light that enlightens everyone. Why do you think Jesus is called a light, a true light? (let them answer) Jesus came into the world to show us the truth about God and God's plan for our salvation. Showing people the truth is what it means when it says that the light enlightens everyone.
Let's see if we can illustrate this for you. I have here a box, and there is something important in it. Look through these holes and see if you can tell me what's in the box. (let them try to see through the holes. Check it out beforehand to be sure they can't see what is in there) It's too dark to see, isn't it? Let's see if I can help. I will shine this flashlight through some of the holes and then let's see if you can tell me what's in there. (shine the light as they peer into the box)
So now we can see that there's a Bible in there. Well, just as you could see the Bible when I shone the light, Jesus is the light that makes it possible for us to see what's in the Bible. Because of him, we can understand what God is telling us in the Bible. He is the light that enlightens everyone. Without him and what he has done for us, nothing in the Bible would make any sense. Let's thank him for that.
Dear Jesus: Thank you so much for coming into the world as a light that enlightens all of us. Because of you, we can all understand what God is telling us in the Bible. Amen.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Immediate Word, January 2, 2005, issue.
Copyright 2004 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., P.O. Box 4503, Lima, Ohio 45802-4503.
1 21
Second Sunday After Christmas, Cycle A
Day of Epiphany / Cycle A
Dear Fellow Preachers,
The almost unimaginable horrors of the tsunami that devastated large parts of south Asia remind us that this life truly can be a vale of tears, an abode of overwhelming suffering.
Although such news overshadows the pain that comes into our lives, there are many in our midst that must cope with chronic pain -- physical, spiritual, or emotional. Thousands are "bending low" from "life's crushing load," as the carol has it. Is there any balm in Gilead? In our lead article, team member George Murphy reflects on the hurt we experience and the way that God speaks to the source of our pain in some of the lectionary texts for this Sunday.
The first Sunday of 2005 is the Second Sunday after Christmas, for which the lectionary readings are: Jeremiah 31:7-14 or Sirach 24:1-12; Psalm 147:12-20 or Wisdom of Solomon 10:15-21; Ephesians 1:3-14; and John 1:(1-9) 10-18.
Many churches, however, will hear the lections for the Day of Epiphany: Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14; Ephesians 3:1-12; and Matthew 2:1-12.
Team members of The Immediate Word comment on both series of lections, and Chris Ewing offers a sermon on the texts for the Day of Epiphany. Included, as usual, are illustrations, worship resources (by George E. Reed), and a children's sermon.
Happy New Year to you and your ministry.
KILLING PAIN
(Lections for the Second Sunday after Christmas and the Day of Epiphany)
By George Murphy
The pain is killing us, so we have to kill the pain.
Vioxx, Celebrex, Aleve -- questions have arisen about the safety of these and other pills -- all of them painkillers -- in recent weeks. There have even been reminders that people should be careful about overuse of aspirin. There are legitimate uses for such medications and legitimate concerns about them, but the ongoing story of problems with painkillers calls our attention to the fact that many people in our culture feel that they have to get rid of pain. It makes us wonder how people could ever function back in biblical times when they didn't even have aspirin.
People then had to deal with physical pain. They didn't have the drugs and technologies we now have and probably didn't handle pain any better than people do today, though they may have gotten more accustomed to it. And like us, they had to face pains which are often more severe, those of loss, defeat, and guilt. When Jeremiah sees the disaster coming upon his people he cries (4:10), "My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain." And later he demands of God (15:18), "Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?" There are plenty of cries of pain in the Bible and demands that God do something about it.
On one level, pain and the ability to feel pain are important factors for survival in the physical world. Pain is, after all, a symptom of some illness or injury. The pain of burning tells a person to pull the hand away from the fire, and the pain of a broken arm or sprained ankle is a warning not to keep putting stress on the affected part. Some people have a rare condition in which they are unable to feel pain. This may sound wonderful, but such people often have short lives because they don't get appropriate warnings about dangers and injuries. (I got 384 Google hits on "inability to feel pain." You can check some of these out if you want more detail on this condition.)
So there's a sense in which we can say that pain is good. But pain and suffering also lead to severe problems with religious belief in the form of the theodicy question. How can a God who is all-loving and all-powerful allow suffering? C. S. Lewis titled his book on suffering simply The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1962). The argument of the previous paragraph doesn't get God entirely off the hook, for we can simply ask why a loving God would create a world in which pain is necessary. Perhaps a more serious objection is that the amount of physical, psychological, and emotional pain that people suffer in the world is far beyond what may be necessary to serve as warnings of danger. The pains caused by human sin can't be explained entirely by natural selection or any sort of physical necessity.
The great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, in which tens of thousands of people died, provoked a good deal of pondering of the theodicy problem in an intellectual climate in which traditional Christian claims had already been subjected to many challenges. (Discussion of contemporary religious reactions can be found at http://www.gospelcom.net/chi/DAILYF/2001/11/daily-11-01-2001.shtml.) There is a striking similarity between that catastrophe and the recent earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean, with a death toll now (28 December) reported at more than 40,000 and expected to rise. This raises the same questions about "natural evil" and the goodness of God but may not have as much of an impact on theology as the Lisbon earthquake had. If that's the case, it will probably be because we have already seen so many massive evils in recent decades that one more won't raise the level of theological questioning. But this new disaster, which has struck so many people, is nevertheless one more example of the pain that the world suffers.
I won't try to review the extensive discussions of theodicy here and would suggest that such discussion in a congregation might take place more profitably in a class or discussion session rather than a sermon. A great deal of discussion about theodicy assumes that God is immune from pain, and then has to deal with the question of how such a non-suffering God could be justified in allowing his creatures to suffer -- and even create a world in which they must suffer. The tremendous amount of suffering in the world in the twentieth century has forced the problem of suffering to the attention of the church. We shouldn't imagine, however, that people of antiquity were able to believe in a beneficent and almighty God only because they weren't really aware of the problem of pain. Near the beginning of the book that I mentioned, Lewis asks his readers to "lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practiced, in a world without chloroform" (p. 16).
Many traditional discussions of this problem have assumed that it is only creatures that feel pain, and that God is immune to it. A good deal of modern theology challenges the assumption of God's impassability, and therefore of the impossibility of divine pain. One of the influential books dealing with this question is the Japanese theologian Kazoh Kitamori's Theology of the Pain of God (Richmond: John Knox, 1965; a translation of the 5th Japanese edition). Referring especially to God's words in Jeremiah 31:20 ("therefore my bowels are troubled for him" [KJV]), Katamori argues that it is not only possible but necessary to speak of the pain of God. Aware that this challenges traditional concepts of the divine essence, he suggests that we speak of "pain as the essence of God" and says, "the cross is in no sense an external act of God, but an act within himself" (pp. 44-47).
There are biblical passages that speak about God being pained by the sins and sufferings of the world. (For example, what would be the point of being told in Ephesians 4:30 not to "grieve the Holy Spirit of God" if God could not in fact be grieved?) But the picture of God in heaven observing the world and being pained by what goes on there isn't entirely satisfactory. For God to say, "I feel your pain," like a politician talking to people who have lost their jobs, may not provide much comfort to people who are suffering.
The deepest answer to the problem of pain is in the Gospel for the Second Sunday after Christmas, John 1:1-18. In verse 14 we have words that are familiar but whose full depth often isn't plumbed: "And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory."
The evangelist doesn't use the type of abstract language we've become accustomed to and say "The Word became human" or, as in the Nicene Creed, "was made man." True as those are, they don't bring out the full sense of "flesh," which when used of humanity in scripture generally refers to our weakness in comparison with God, to our fragility and vulnerability. It is an unfortunate fantasy of some Christians that the infant Jesus never cried because he was pricked by the straw of the manger, because he had gas, or because he woke up and didn't immediately see Mary or Joseph. He was a real baby. The Word became flesh.
And the statement that "we have seen his glory" points toward the greater suffering of the cross. In the Fourth Gospel, that is the "hour" when Christ is glorified (cf. John 12:23). That is the hour in which Christ shares most fully in the pain of the world. And if we take Kitamori's arguments seriously, we won't try to limit the experience of this pain to Christ's human nature. Through the Incarnation God became a participant in creation's pains.
The Incarnation is not, however, just a way of God saying, "I feel your pain on a more intimate level." It is the means through which God heals the spiritual, mental, and physical ailments that cause the pain. And that healing takes place precisely through God's sharing in it. This is brought out very clearly in Matthew 8:17. In the first verses of that chapter the evangelist has gathered several stories of Jesus' healings of people from different ailments. The significance of these stories is then stated in the summary verse 17 by quoting the words of Isaiah 53:4, "He took our infirmities and bore our diseases."
Thus Jesus as "the great physician" shouldn't be pictured as an omnipotent medical professional that heals people without being affected by their illnesses. He is instead the one who cures by taking those illnesses upon himself.
Some churches have started to observe the Feast of the Epiphany on the Second Sunday after Christmas rather than on the traditional 6 January date, and they will use the lectionary texts for that festival on 2 January. There's some practical sense to that because, unfortunately, we're not going to be able to get many people to church in the middle of the week. (Of course there are some years in which there isn't a Second Sunday after Christmas but that's not a concern this time around.)
The "Word became flesh" theme isn't as explicit in the texts for the Epiphany as in the Johannine prologue. In the Epiphany Gospel, Matthew 2:1-12, the birth of Jesus in the first verse sets the stage for the coming of the magi. In the preceding verses in chapter 1 Matthew had emphasized the meaning of the name Jesus as "Yahweh is salvation" (or "the LORD saves") by saying, "he will save his people from their sins" (1:21). The verb sozo used here can mean "save" -- in the religious sense that we're accustomed to -- but also "cure" or "make well."
That's perhaps a tenuous connection with the theme of pain and healing. You could instead focus on verses 12-14 of the psalm for the Epiphany, 72, a prayer for the perfect king. (Isaac Watts' "Jesus shall reign where'er the sun" is a hymn version of this psalm.) While these verses don't speak explicitly of healing, the care that the king will show for "those who have no helper" and "the weak and the need" could certainly be connected with that theme. (Affordable health care is certainly a concern for many poor people in this country today.)
On the other hand, if you're going to exercise some freedom with the church calendar and the lectionary, you could use Luke 2:21 as a text. This is part of the Gospel for the Feast of the Name of Jesus on 1 January, the eighth day on which a Jewish baby would have been circumcised and given his name. This would make it possible to concentrate on the connection of the name of Jesus with salvation in the full biblical sense of the word sozo. Besides, starting the year in the name of Jesus isn't a bad idea!
What concerns do people have about pain -- in its broad sense -- that we have to address? On one hand, pain is a symptom. Sometimes it's enough to deal with aches and pains with medication, but in other cases there may be a serious underlying problem that will be ignored if we just get rid of the symptom. Painkillers will not cure cancer. A person who is in pain and wants to be healed has to be willing to recognize that there is a deeper problem than just the physical hurting.
And that's true for other pain as well. The pains of guilt can be covered up temporarily with alcohol or other drugs, or on a more "exalted" level by some spiritual anesthesia that enables the person to believe that there's really nothing wrong. A real cure requires recognition that there is a sickness -- which is the function of the law -- and that the healing of God's forgiveness can take place because our infirmities and diseases are borne by Christ.
On the other hand, some people refuse to make use of painkillers because they think that that would show that they're weak. They're tough and can defeat pain without any help! It's not too much of a stretch to connect that attitude with the belief that we have to save ourselves and can't trust in Christ alone for salvation. Justification isn't a matter of spiritual toughness but of spiritual realism.
The message that the Word of God, who is God, became flesh and took on our manifold illnesses and pains also gives us some guidance about how we as members of the Christian community are to help one another with the problem of pain. We are, Saint Paul says, to "bear one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2). We can be present and open to those who are in pain and keep them in prayer. While we can't fully take away the pain of those who suffer, worries and fears can be lessened if the sufferer knows that someone else is willing to share them. (Charles Williams' novel Descent into Hell [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1965] makes use of this idea in an imaginative way.)
The Bible doesn't offer us a magic pill that will deaden all the pains of the world.
(The word anodyne may be useful here.) It does proclaim the one who heals the underlying wounds and sickness of creation by becoming a participant in the world's history and the pains that go with that.
Team Comments
Carlos Wilton responds: George, these are points well taken. Pain is indeed a universal human problem, both a blessing and a curse -- a blessing in that it is the body's distant early warning system against even more severe illness or injury, and a curse in that it is a highly unpleasant experience (to say the least). Pain relief is a timely topic, and not only because of recent, well-publicized recalls of popular pain medications.
"Chronic pain" is a relatively new addition to the medical vocabulary (and still controversial, as researchers struggle to determine whether it is an ailment in its own right, or merely a symptom). "Pain Centers" have sprung up in various places: doctors hang out a shingle (or, more commonly, erect a large, illuminated sign on a well-traveled road), indicating that this is where patients can go to obtain pain relief. Some of these physicians have been accused of being too liberal with writing prescriptions, particularly for easily abused narcotics like oxycontin.
My wife is a chaplain with a home-based hospice program, and she frequently has cause to remind patients and family members of a central feature of the hospice philosophy: that there is no reason why any terminally ill patient should be overcome with pain. Appropriate pharmaceutical technology exists to control just about any kind of pain, as long as side effects or addictions are not an issue (as they generally are not in hospice care). Keeping the patient comfortable is the priority, and that goal is usually attainable. When it's not, it's generally because the patient, for whatever reason, has declined to take the prescribed medication.
I appreciate the quotation from C. S. Lewis, about earlier generations not having had access to chloroform. We easily forget that fact. On Civil War battlefields and on Navy sailing ships, gruesome operations were performed without any anesthetic other than a swig of "medicinal" spirits. On the home front, dental care was relatively unknown, so many people in their middle years and older walked around in constant pain from decaying teeth. Orthopedic care was primitive, and in remote areas was completely unavailable; broken bones were often set poorly, leading to lifelong, painful disabilities. Television commercials today proclaim how terrible it is to have a headache, and rush to the rescue with the latest pills. A couple hundred years ago, headaches were the least of human problems.
Now is the time for year-end reviews in the media, and one of the entertainment milestones most often mentioned as 2004 draws to a close is the phenomenal success of Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ. Among the most controversial aspects of this film is its violence, and in particular actor James Caviezel's agonizingly graphic portrayal of Jesus' physical pain under torture. It is hard to think of a more graphic depiction of John 1:14: "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."
The year 2004 also brought shocking revelations of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib facility in Iraq and similar allegations concerning the top-secret holding facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Pain is at the heart of that story as well. The debate largely centers around which prisoner-interrogation techniques cross the line between discomfort and pain, both physical and psychological. The fact that our Lord was himself a victim of torture may give us pause to consider to what extent the deliberate infliction of pain may be appropriate (if, indeed, it is ever appropriate) in serving the cause of justice. In any event, pain is often a part of human life, and the hard fact is that sometimes there is no relief to be found, not even under the childproof cap of a prescription bottle. To undertake a long-term journey with pain, emotional or physical, is one of the terrible trials of mortal existence. It is some real comfort to know that, in Christ, God knew severe pain, and also that, as Jeremiah promises the long-suffering children of Israel, one day "their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again" (31:12b).
Chris Ewing responds: For those using the Epiphany lections this week, there are several possible avenues into an exploration of our struggles with pain. Both Isaiah 60 and Psalm 72 show decisive action, on the part of God or of God's anointed, to bring an end to pain: in Isaiah the pain of exile, in the psalm the pain of injustice. In a religious culture shadowed by the suspicion that pain is like broccoli, disagreeable but good for you, I think it is important to hear the strong witness of both these passages (and many like them!) that God takes no pleasure in human suffering, and is not indifferent to our plight. One must of course be judicious in preaching this, since the Chronicler and the prophets (including an earlier Isaiah) do not hesitate to ascribe the painful exile to God's corrective action against a wayward people. But if the scriptures are less squeamish than many of their latter-day interpreters about envisioning a God willing to inflict pain, they are also unanimous that this is neither God's desire nor God's last word. Redemption is always where the story tends.
The New Testament lections for Epiphany focus more on the universality of God's redeeming intent than on any exploration of what it is we are redeemed from. Nonetheless, there are some openings for approaching the subject of suffering. In Matthew we see Herod suffering fear: at the news of a possible rival, "he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him." We are not conditioned to have much empathy for Herod, nor for others whose pain issues in non-redemptive responses, but there might be room for some reflection on the universality of distress; or this might serve as a starting point for cataloguing some of the kinds of suffering we experience, and to which Christ responds.
Perhaps the most powerful link to the theme is found in Ephesians 3, if we extend the reading by one verse to include verse 13. (This in fact more properly represents Paul's thought, bookending the passage that began with an allusion to his imprisonment in verse 1). Having ardently expounded on God's universal salvific intent in sending Christ, and Paul's own mandate to spread that gospel to the Gentile world, he concludes with a prayer that his hearers "may not lose heart over my sufferings for you; they are your glory."
This creates an opportunity to explore a whole other side of the issue of suffering, and that is its relationship to purpose. Usually we are willing to tolerate a considerable amount of discomfort if we can see the necessity and the point of it. The point at which pain becomes suffering is typically the point where it loses it's meaning: when we suffer, not for something but from something. Paul (or someone writing in his name) contends that the trials he is undergoing are suffused with glory, because they are part of the unveiling of God's plan of redemption in a resistant world. (Along the same line, we may recall that Jesus, as he neared his own moment of "glorification," mused aloud that "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" [John 12:24].) The whole passage is rich in material for reflection on pain and purpose. Because Paul's pain resulted from and was held within a high purpose, it was not a matter for discouragement, even if the pain was prolonged. Rather, it was a sign that something important was happening.
No matter how we approach the problem of pain in our preaching, we will want to be very alert to the pain in our pews. Particularly among seniors, who are likely to form the greater part of an early-January congregation, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pain are endemic. As pastors we will want to think about how our words will be heard out of the middle of the situations our people are living.
Related Illustrations
From Carlos Wilton:
From a Leadership Online interview with preacher John Ortberg:
We did a survey when I was at Willow Creek and asked thousands of people, "Think about an era in your life when you felt like you were growing the most spiritually. What contributed to that?" The number one answer: Pain ... Because pain is such a vivid, intense, and unpleasant experience, it creates motivation to seek outside help in a way that hardly anything else does. Pain has a way of opening somebody up to say, "The way that I have been doing life is not working." It creates openness that often is not there in the routine of day to day. So as pastor, I continually ask, "Where are folks in pain? How can I be with them? And how might God be at work in their lives?" ...
Pain doesn't necessarily bring about spiritual transformation. Pain in the default mode will produce anger, resentment, despair, and enormous problems in human life. Hence the need for the pastoral moment, for wise spiritual guidance. Pain will lead to Christian spiritual transformation only if it is handled well and wisely, if it causes the person to open up to God.
-- "Holy Tension: Creating and Seizing Opportunities for Spiritual Transformation," The Leadership Interview with John Ortberg, Leadership Journal (Winter 2004). Full article online at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2004/001/1.22.html
***
A story is told of Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. One day the evangelist was standing waist-deep in a river, baptizing new converts to the faith. Patrick was holding his crozier (his bishop's staff), as the line of new converts made their way into the water. One who came up to him was a clan chieftain, a fierce warrior. Unfortunately, as Patrick was lowering this man under the water, he inadvertently pressed the tip of his staff into the chieftain's foot. The man said nothing, but as he climbed onto the riverbank, everyone could see that he was limping. Someone explained to Patrick what happened, and he immediately went to the chief and asked, "Why did you not cry out when I struck your foot?" The chief answered, "I remember you telling us about the nails in the cross, and I thought pain was part of my baptism."
***
Let me share with you the pit, the bedrock of my faith on these matters, about where God is. This is how I see it. Long ago, when the best and brightest of all the ages was at the end of His rope and it felt as if God had abandoned Him, He asked the same question David asked in his time of trouble: Why? Why? And He got no answer, not in words. Heaven was silent again. No answer. Dead silence. He died without an answer from God.
But then, just three days later, before the fingers of the light had filtered through the mist of the morning, before the citizens of the city had finished their second snooze, the Almighty got into the grave where Jesus' body lay. And the power of His creative spirit began to move inside that dead corpse. Life began to pulsate again through its dead nerves and flow like energy through its arteries like a rush of warm power. And Jesus came alive. Jesus asked the most painful question anybody can ever ask of God, and the answer came, not with words, but with an action; not in theory, but in life. In resurrection.
So this is what I want to say to you. If you feel God has gone away on vacation and left you on your own, go straight to Him. Ask a question. Raise a protest. Ask him why He is letting you down. And then you'll have to do the hardest thing of all. Wait. Wait for Him to come back the way Jesus did. Wait for Him to come back and give you your own resurrection.
I know that waiting is the hardest job in the world. It is ten thousand times harder to wait than it is to rush into action. But when it feels as if God's gone, gone on leave of absence, and you ask Him why, you may have to wait for Him to come back. I want to tell you that the secret of waiting is hope. Wait with hope. Wait with hope! For He will come back. He will come back! Keep on waiting. Keep on hoping. He'll come back. He always has. And He will come back to you.
-- Lewis Smedes, Shame and Grace: Healing the Shame We Don't Deserve
***
Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers.
-- Thomas Merton
***
A cup is a container for holding something. Whatever it holds has to eventually be emptied out so that something more can be put into it. I have learned that I cannot always expect my life to be full. There has to be some emptying, some pouring out, if I am to make room for the new. The spiritual journey is like that -- a constant process of emptying and filling, of giving and receiving, of accepting and letting go.
-- Joyce Rupp, "The Cup of Our Life"
From Chris Ewing:
Walt Wangerin's famous story, "Ragman" (found in Ragman and Other Cries of Faith) depicts Jesus as a ragman walking the streets of the city, collecting the rags people have used to staunch tears and blood or to wrap up in when drunk and sick, giving them new, clean rags for their old ones. When the exchange is made, the people are healed of their grief, wound, illness or age, while the ragman takes on their infirmity along with the rag. The story culminates with a powerful evocation of Good Friday and Easter, and concludes with the risen Christ responding to the storyteller's plea, "Dress me."
***
Saying that Jesus is Lord means that there is no situation in which he is irrelevant or impotent.
-- Rowan Williams
***
Joy is not the absence of suffering, but the presence of God.
-- Source unknown
***
Neurosis is the avoidance of legitimate pain.
-- Source unknown
***
Courage is a fragile vessel lightly floating upon an abyss of fear and uncertainty. Thus every effort is made to sustain courage.
-- John H. Hayes, Preaching through the Christian Year (A), p. 91
***
Pain is inevitable, but misery is optional.
-- Source unknown
***
Someone once said to a gallant soul who was undergoing a great sorrow, "Sorrow fairly colours life, doesn't it?" Back came the reply: "Yes! And I propose to choose the colour!"
-- William Barclay, commentary on Romans (5:3-4)
***
Creator God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference -- living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardship as the pathway to peace; taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that you will make all things right, if I surrender to your divine will; that I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with you forever in the next. Amen.
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
***
Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will every really be yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
-- C. S. Lewis, closing words of Mere Christianity
***
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket -- safe, dark, motionless, airless -- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell.
-- C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
***
The very thing we don't want to talk about is the very thing we must talk about.
-- Greg Mcdonell
***
I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright.
I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more.
I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive.
I wish you enough pain so that the smallest joys in life appear much bigger.
I wish you enough gain to satisfy your wanting.
I wish you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess.
I wish you enough hellos to get you through the final good-bye.
-- Source unknown
***
Dance like no one is watching. Love as if it's never going to hurt.
-- Source unknown
***
All that man vainly desires here below is perfectly realized in God. We have all those impossible desires within us as a mark of our destination, and they are good for us provided we no longer hope to fulfill them.
-- Simone Weil
***
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything:
That's how the light gets in.
-- Leonard Cohen, Anthem
***
I took a friend of mine who is visually impaired to church with me last Sunday. Several of the children in the congregation were fascinated with her Braille Bible. One of the adults came over to see what the kids were so excited about, and Ellen told the woman, "Oh, well, I was telling them how bumpy the road to salvation is."
-- Ray Kerley, Baptist pastor, May 2000
***
People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light within.
-- Elizabeth Kübler-Ross
***
When you have a flat tire by the side of the road, it's important to have the right kind of prayer. Jesus won't miraculously come down and fix the tire. But he'll have a marvelous conversation with you while you await the tow truck.
-- Rev. Jim White, Anglican priest, quoting his father
***
Faith is not something one has, or can lose. Faith is something you DO, because your life depends on it.
-- Dawna Markova, No Enemies Within
***
To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives -- the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections -- that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank-you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for. Let us not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God.
-- Henri Nouwen
***
He who has a "why" to live can cope with almost any "how."
-- Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
A Sermon for Epiphany
IN HUMAN STORY
Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12
By Chris Ewing
I suppose long trips have been undertaken for stranger reasons. Perhaps you have embarked on such a journey -- a quest, a fool's errand even, only you didn't realize until later that you had set out, leaving everything behind. If you had known, chances are you would not have dared to go.
You know the kind of journey I mean -- the one that begins with an inner restlessness, a restlessness that may not even make it to conscious attention very often; only it prods at the edges of your thoughts, it sours the taste of today, it reminds you, whether you're listening or not, that this wasn't all you'd hoped for....
I remember the day I began the journey of singleness, though I didn't know it at the time. I certainly didn't intend to become single again. I most certainly didn't want to. I hoped and prayed that I was beginning the journey of restoring health, to myself and to my family. As I wrote in my journal, "The waves I am setting up could scuttle this marriage. I don't want to scuttle this marriage; I want to heal it. ... I want this marriage; I want an intact family. But now at last I see that I do not want it in any shape, at any [price.]"1
If on that August day in 1993 I could have known where that determination would land us little more than a year later; if I'd had any idea what the years to follow would be like, I wonder if I would have had the courage to reach for health. Yet, to stay where I was, to leave us all where we were, would have been death -- spiritually, psychologically, in all the ways that matter -- for all of us. By the grace of God we have been finding our way to health ... but if we'd had any idea what the journey would be like, we might never have set out.
That's the kind of journey I'm talking about. The kind where you would turn your camel around and go back if you could, only you have no maps and the star is still going west.
It's the kind of journey our world is hesitantly embarking on in the wake of September 11. We know the way things have been doesn't work; we've been struggling for most of the last century, in fact, with how to make the world livable for all of us -- politically, economically, environmentally, religiously -- how to build a world we can all inhabit together, and on what terms. September 11 reminded us we aren't there yet; reminded us how urgent the task is and how high the stakes are. It goaded us upon our journey -- even as it threatened to deflect us altogether into retaliation and xenophobia. We're a long way from any place that feels like home now, with grave doubts about the probability or even the possibility of completing our quest. Do we turn around and gallop back to the kind of nationalism that precipitated two world wars? Or do we tighten the saddles, squint harder against the blowing grit, and venture yet farther from the last oasis towards the star that we glimpse dimly and intermittently through the swirling sandstorm, the glimmering hope of a world working together in peace?
Paul maintains, in the passage from Ephesians, that God is at work in human history, gradually unfolding the divine plan for bringing all of humanity together through the work of Christ. "In past times, [humankind] was not told this secret," Paul wrote; "but God has revealed it now" -- and continues to unfold it through the life and work of Paul and of all of us. It is "through the church," he says, that "the wisdom of God in its rich variety" is to be made known2 -- a quest, a fool's errand even, on God's part! -- a journey as risky and uncertain as my quest to heal my marriage. For the healing of humanity requires that humanity cooperate to some degree. And we all know the human story well enough to know that that doesn't always happen.
The scary part about our Christian faith is that God takes the human story seriously. Everything stands or falls on it: on our individual human stories, and on the shared human story of our church, our nation, our whole global village. God works with us through history, by history, not apart from it. Our lives and our choices are God's material -- the journey as we actually make it, filled with roadblocks, backtracks, and deception as it is. This is the means by which God chooses to be revealed to the world, and to accomplish God's purposes. In human story is how God chooses to be known.
As I look back on my own personal story, I tremble as I see how God has breathed through it. I cringe in shame over some parts; I marvel at others. And with each passing year I am more deeply impressed with both the fragility and the power of God's presence in human story.
"What is emerging from the rubble of the twentieth century?" asks American Presbyterian pastor Jim Breed, in a 1998 reflection. "Cynics will conclude that the current 'peace' is only an interlude between the old savagery of the twentieth century and some new savagery yet to be devised [like September 11!]. Sometimes after a long day, and a long week, in the wee hours of the morning, after thinking of friends of mine who died in Vietnam, or relatives who died in earlier wars, or who are dying now on city streets, I get cynical. Sometimes after long work with low pay, and seeing little to show for it, I get cynical.
"But the Gospel is not cynical. It is realistic, but not cynical.
"A new world is waiting to be born....
"Often it doesn't seem as though that is the case. But the Gospel is emphatic on that subject. We have no choice but to keep the faith, and pursue the vision of the Gospel."3
Because, in spite of all appearances, God is at work in our human story. It can be hard to see the star from the middle of the sandstorm; and our tracks may meander all over the desert in the course of getting there; yet we affirm -- and at times we can clearly see -- that God is indeed with us in this, leading us places we otherwise never would have gone, accomplishing things it assuredly would not have been in our minds or in our strength to do, and through us changing the shape of the future.
We are the gathered loaf now, which Christ takes in his hands, blesses, and breaks, handing us out to a world hungry for the presence of God. "This is my body," he says; "take and eat."
And when the night has devoured us to the last crumb, Jesus takes the wine of our tears and our laughter, thanks God for it, and passes it round to a thirsting world, saying, "This is what it is to be truly human. This is the seal of my presence in history, redeeming your story. Drink it, all of you."4
Thanks be to God.
Notes
1. Personal journal, August 12, 1993
2. Ephesians 3:5, 8-10; TEV and NRSV
3. James Lincoln Breed, note #5250 to SERMONSHOP DISCUSSION, November 6, 1998
4. Adapted from my communion liturgy for the Sailing on the Wind event at PCTC, July 1995
Worship Resources
For The Second Sunday after Christmas Day or Epiphany Sunday
By George E. Reed
OPENING
(N.b.: All copyright information is given from the first cited place where found. Some copyright information may differ in other sources due to adaptations, etc.)
Music
Hymns
"We Three Kings." WORDS: John H. Hopkins, Jr., 1857; MUSIC: John H. Hopkins, Jr., 1857. Public domain. As found in UMH 254; Hymnal '82: 128; TPH 66; AAHH 218; TNNBH 97; TNCH; CH 172.
"Rise, Shine, You People." WORDS: Ronald A. Klug, 1973; MUSIC: Dale Wood, 1973. (c) 1974 Augsburg Publishing House. As found in UMH 187; Hymnal '82; LBOW 393.
"Word Of God, Come Down On Earth." WORDS: James Quinn, 1969; MUSIC: Johann R. Ahle, 1664. Words (c) 1969 James Quinn. As found in UMH 375; Hymnal '82: 633.
"There Is A Balm In Gilead." WORDS: Afro-American spiritual; MUSIC: Afro-American spiritual; adapt. and arr. William Farley Smith, 1986. Adapt. and arr. (c) 1989 The United Methodist publishing House. As found in UMH 375; Hymnal '82: 676; TPH 394; AAHH 524; TNNBH 489; TNCH 553; CH 501.
"It Is Well With My Soul." WORDS: Horatio G. Spafford, 1873; MUSIC: Philip P. Bliss, 1976. Public domain. As found in UMH 377; AAHH 377; TNNBH 255; TNCH 438; CH 561.
"Silence, Frenzied, Unclean Spirit." WORDS: Thomas H. Troeger, 1984; MUSIC: Carol Doran, 1984. (c) 1984 Oxford University Press. As found in UMH 264; TNCH 176; CH 186.
Songs
"Be Not Afraid." WORDS and MUSIC: Robert J. Dufford. (c) 1975, 1978 Robert J. Dufford, S.J., and New Dawn Music. As found in Renew 243.
"Something Beautiful." WORDS: Gloria Gaither; MUSIC: William J. Gaither. (c) 1971 William J. Gaither. As found in CCB 84.
"All I Need Is You." WORDS and MUSIC: Dan Adler; arr. Nylea L. Butler-Moore. (c) 1989 Out of the Door Music. As found in CCB 100.
CALL TO WORSHIP
Leader: Come, let us worship our God.
People: We honor and adore the One who created us.
Leader: Let us open our lives to the One who is always with us.
People: We worship the One who presence is eternal.
Leader: Let us offer to God all of our lives.
People: To you, O God, we offer all our joys and sorrows.
COLLECT / OPENING PRAYER
O God, who is closer to us than our own breath: Grant us the wisdom to know you are always with us and to discover your caring presence in all the changes of life; through Jesus Christ our elder brother. Amen.
or
We come to worship you who is and was and always shall be. You are the constant in our lives whether we are in joy or in sorrow. Be with us in this time together that we may praise you and learn once again to recognize your presence among us. Amen.
PRAYER OF CONFESSION / PARDON
Leader: Let us confess to God and before one another the state of our lives.
People: We come in truthfulness to confess that we are people who have forgotten the lessons of the past. Time and again we have been taught that you, O God, are the One who will never leave us nor forsake us yet we live our lives wondering where you are. In the joys and pleasures of life we forget that you have created us to receive such gifts and in the hard places of life we forget that you are with us and within us, experiencing our pain with us. Heal our memories and teach us once again that you love us and care for us and will never leave us desolate. So fill us with your Spirit that we are always aware of your caring presence in our lives. Amen.
Leader: The God of Abraham, Sarah, Moses, and Miriam; the God of Mary and Joseph is with us to declare that we are loved and cared for and always forgiven. Amen.
GENERAL PRAYERS, LITANIES, ETC.
We adore you, O God, for your wonderful greatness that comes to us not only in our joy but in our pain. You have walked with us throughout our existence and you have walked as one of us. You know the pleasures earth offers and its sorrows and travail.
(The following paragraph is most suitable if a prayer of confession will not be used elsewhere.)
We confess that often we fail to remember that you know our troubles and care for us as your own dear children. We look at the grief and sorrow around us and in our own lives and we ask where you are when you are standing with us all the time. We complain about your absence when, if fact, it is only our failure to recognize your presence. Open our eyes to you saving, redeeming presence. Touch our hearts so that we might recognize you as you travel life with us. Grant us to be so filled with your Spirit that we enter into all of life with the assurance that in you we are safe.
We give you thanks for all the ways in which you have shared yourself with us. We thank you for your faithfulness as you care for us in our joys and in our sorrows. You have blessed us with so many joys and pleasures with the gift of this earth. There is beauty all around us in nature and in the creations of our sisters and brothers. Most of all we are blessed with your presence in all of our lives.
(Other specific thanksgiving may be offered.)
We offer to your gracious care those who are on our hearts. We know that you love them and are with them in their distress. We ask that our love and our spirits may join with yours in touching their lives in their troubles.
(Other petitions may be offered.)
All these things we ask in the Name of Jesus who taught us to pray saying, "Our Father ...."
Hymnal & Songbook Abbreviations
UMH: United Methodist Hymnal
Hymnal '82: The Hymnal 1982, The Episcopal Church
LBOW: Lutheran Book of Worship
TPH: The Presbyterian Hymnal
AAHH: African American Heritage Hymnal
TNNBH: The New National Baptist Hymnal
TNCH: The New Century Hymnal
CH: Chalice Hymnal
CCB: Cokesbury Chorus Book
PMMCH3: Praise. Maranatha! Music Chorus Book, Expanded 3rd Edition
Renew: Renew! Songs and Hymns for Blended Worship
A Children's Sermon
Kneeling down in prayer
Object: the knees of the children
Based on Matthew 2:1-12
Good morning, boys and girls. Isn't it neat that God made you in a certain way? (let them answer) All of our body parts have a certain job to do and each one is very important. Let's take a look at our hands and think about what they can do. They can open doors, throw a ball, pick up food, and carry a glass of water. What do ears do? (let them answer) Very good, they let us hear but they also hold up our glasses and let us wear earrings. Feet are for walking, running, and wearing shiny shoes.
What do you think knees are for? (let them answer) They bend and help us walk better. I like what the wise men did with their knees. Do you know what the wise men did on their knees? (let them answer) They worshiped the baby Jesus. The Bible tells us that when they entered the house where Mary was, they knelt down and worshiped the baby Jesus.
How many of you kneel when you pray? Before we go to sleep, many of us kneel and thank Jesus for such a wonderful day. We also pray for others like our mothers, fathers, relatives, and friends. If we have something very special to ask God we use that time while we are on our knees to ask him to consider it. The other night when I prayed I asked God if he would consider helping me with a problem. I explained the problem to him and prayed that he would have an answer for me. I haven't heard yet what God's answer will be but I know I will find out.
The wise men came a long way to worship Jesus. They followed a star for many days until it led them to where the baby Jesus was beginning his life with us. They knew that God sent signs and the star, called the star of Bethlehem to lead them right to his bed. Mary was surprised to see such grand visitors but it was another sign to her that the baby Jesus was something special. She also knew how special he was when they got down on their knees and worshiped Jesus.
Let's all take a moment to kneel down and worship Jesus. We can pray to God and thank him for sending us the love in such a wonderful Savior.
The next time you look at your knees remember what the wise men did when they came to the house where Jesus lived as a baby. They knelt down on the ground and thanked God for sending the Lord Jesus.
Second Sunday after Christmas
The true light
Object: a flashlight and a Bible in a box with small holes
Based on John 1:(1-9) 10-18
Good morning! The Bible tells us that Jesus is the true light, a light that enlightens everyone. Why do you think Jesus is called a light, a true light? (let them answer) Jesus came into the world to show us the truth about God and God's plan for our salvation. Showing people the truth is what it means when it says that the light enlightens everyone.
Let's see if we can illustrate this for you. I have here a box, and there is something important in it. Look through these holes and see if you can tell me what's in the box. (let them try to see through the holes. Check it out beforehand to be sure they can't see what is in there) It's too dark to see, isn't it? Let's see if I can help. I will shine this flashlight through some of the holes and then let's see if you can tell me what's in there. (shine the light as they peer into the box)
So now we can see that there's a Bible in there. Well, just as you could see the Bible when I shone the light, Jesus is the light that makes it possible for us to see what's in the Bible. Because of him, we can understand what God is telling us in the Bible. He is the light that enlightens everyone. Without him and what he has done for us, nothing in the Bible would make any sense. Let's thank him for that.
Dear Jesus: Thank you so much for coming into the world as a light that enlightens all of us. Because of you, we can all understand what God is telling us in the Bible. Amen.
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The Immediate Word, January 2, 2005, issue.
Copyright 2004 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., P.O. Box 4503, Lima, Ohio 45802-4503.
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