41 Musical Selection: I Will Sing New Songs

"What's New?!"

Happy New Year! This is the beginning of the church year -
which begins with the season of Advent - filled with the anticipation of the
arrival of Christ into the world. He came and He comes again - whenever
we invite Him. Even the saints like to have an invitation - a welcome.
But Jesus was rejected while still in the womb - the Inn was full
you remember - and his mother delivered him in the stable - among the
friendly animals. Animals know so much more than we give them credit
for - witness the animals who went to higher ground before the gigantic
tsunami. How does my god know to go which day to go the door to wait
for the maid to come - whom she loves dearly because Elsa stays home
and keeps her company all day, whereas I run off to church. How do the
swallows find Capistrano? How do pengins know where to march to?
In this world of ours, there's a miracle around every corner -
something new to be discovered - something different to understand.
Jesus was something new - something different - we've never
quite gotten used to him. That's because He was none other than God
walking among us - God with us - Emanuel! - which is what Emanual
means - God with us! Because we as mankind never got ourselves to
God, there was only one solution - God had to come to us.
We tried to be faithful. We tried our best to follow God's laws as
we understood them, but we failed.
We poured over the sacred books seeking a better understanding
of God, but things there seemed so strange and incomprehensible.
We built a grand temple in the hope of containing God, a house
grand enough for God to reside in, but following the rituals of the temple
was a pale substitute for the living God.
We listened to the prophets and nodded in assent to their demands.
But agreeing with them was one thing: obeying them was another.
So many of our attempts to get close to God, to walk with God,
to obey God only seemed to drive us further from God. What could we
do?
The answer is that we could do nothing. Something had to be
done for us. We could not come to God, so God came to us.
Advent means, that caught in our old ways, following our
accustomed scripts, going through the motions, God came to us. God
reached out to us, despite the futility of our groping toward him, God
embraced us, stood beside us, and became one with us.
It's that closeness that Communion accomplishes for us if we have
the eye to see the miracle in the common place.
Before His physical departure from the Earth, Jesus chose elements
by which we could remember him - two things that were at every meal -
bread and wine. He gave symbolic meaning to each - a symbol of his
Presence.
Shortly after my father died, I found my mother sitting sadly in a
chair, holding my father's shoes. They weren't his dress shoes - but his
work shoes which didn't smell all that great from years of sweaty use - but
still they were the perfect symbol of the dedicated, hardworking husband
and father he was - who was up before light and finishing after dark to
support a family of nine children.
What would symbolize you? What is the essence of who you are
that could be capsulized into a symbol?
And how does that essence relate to the fierce directions given us
in the Scripture today "We should prepare ourselves to fight evil with
the weapons that belong to the light."
The weapons that belong to the light are the principles of Jesus
that are the only things powerful enough make it possible for our world to
survive - for the earth to be preserved and for wars to cease that could
cause the end of civilization. God doesn't have to bring the end of time,
we're doing a very good job of heading for it entirely on our own.
When I was a kid, we were always crying wolf - saying there was
a crisis when there was none. Once such day, my next older brother
shouted out from the old swimmin' hole that he was drowning. His cries
of "Help - Help, I'm drowning" didn't fool any of us. He went under. We
waited eagerly for him to come back up. The only problem - He didn't!
He WAS drowning - whereupon a family member dived in, found him
below the surface, and dragged him to shore - where he coughed up a lot
of water, came to and continued on in the land of the living.
But he had been through quite an experience. Thinking he was
going to meet his Maker, he said that every mean and terrible thing that
he had ever done passed through his mind in an instant. God didn't have
to judge him, he had already judged himself.
God doesn't have to bring an end to things...we're doing a fine job
of that ourselves....thinking we can war our way to piece - totally op...