ADVENT 4 - THUS
REJOICING
Luke 2:15-20
Our theme song for Advent has been the hymn, “Infant Holy, Infant Lowly.” You’ve heard it every week during the lighting of the Advent Wreath. Tomorrow night on Christmas Eve we are going to sing it. The hymn ends with these words:
Thus
rejoicing, Free
from sorrow, Praises voicing Greet the morrow;
Christ the Babe was
born for you.
Those words describe the shepherds that Christmas
night after
they had gone with haste to
Last Sunday in my sermon I described a current
exhibit at
the National Gallery of Art featuring the paintings of the nineteenth
century
English artist, J.M.W. Turner. This week
I want to tell you about another exhibition at the National Gallery of
Art,
this one in the
Like J.M.W. Turner, Edward Hopper excelled in
watercolors
and oil paintings, and he also incorporated contrasts between light and
shadow
in many of his works. But there any
similarity between the two artists ends.
While Turner’s landscapes were infused with a sense of majesty
and
mystery and awe and fear, the paintings by Edward Hopper seem flat and
stark
and strangely inanimate. The brochure
for the Hopper exhibition says that his pictures are “filled with
audible
silences and pregnant pauses.” Many of
his paintings are of vacant buildings with no sign of human
life—whether lighthouses
and cottages in New England, or deserted streets and empty storefronts
in
In one painting, titled Automat,
a woman sits alone in a
Some months after our son Marc moved to New York
City to
begin a new job there, Linda and I went up to visit him for a couple of
days. Marc showed us all over
One morning we were scheduled to meet Marc at a subway station midway between our hotel and his apartment. Linda and I arrived there a few minutes early, so we were standing on the street corner watching all the people go by. To our surprise, a native New Yorker came up to us and said, “You look lost! Can I help you find your way?” We were surprised first of all because we really weren’t lost (even though we may have looked like it). Even more we were surprised that a Gothamite would stop to offer to help some befuddled tourists. It kind of restored our faith in humanity that even in such an uber-urban setting, someone would stop to help his fellow man (and fellow woman).
What I’m talking about here is our fundamental need for human contact, for community, for meaningful relationships with other people. The poet John Donne wrote that “no man is an island,” but in the paintings of Edward Hopper, and in the experiences of many people, that is not true. Isolation and alienation and estrangement and loneliness and emptiness are common feelings for many people. Even in a crowd it is easy to feel disconnected and alone.
Jesus was born to change all that.
Jesus was born to create community, to draw
people into meaningful relationship with God and with each other. It began when those shepherds made their way
to
I used to think that it was all quiet around the
manger, but
now I’m not so sure. Now I’m guessing it
was a pretty lively place—shepherds babbling, cattle lowing, maybe even
the
baby crying (despite the carol that implies Jesus didn’t cry—I’m sure
he did
cry at times, because he was fully human).
We know the shepherds raised a ruckus when they left the
place—the
scripture says they were glorifying and praising God.
No, I doubt it was all that quiet that
night—angels singing, shepherds praising, maybe even a few animals
raising
their voices too.
On the night that Jesus was born, a lively community began to form around the manger, and in a sense that community continues today. That’s part of the reason for the existence of the church, to provide a place for community to develop and grow. In a sense every time we come together we gather around the Christ to worship him and to tell our stories of what the Lord has done for us and to share in a common experience of faith. And in that worship and telling and sharing we rejoice. We rejoice for what the Lord has done. We rejoice that we are not alone in our faith; we rejoice that we have fellow worshippers around us to share in our joy.
Christmas is a community experience because our joy is meant to be shared. We do not rejoice in isolation but in community and in relationship with one another.
Walter “Buddy” Shurden, the eminent Baptist church historian, was asked why involvement in a local church was a priority with him. With all of his teaching and preaching and speaking and writing, why does he still choose to stay active in his local congregation? Dr. Shurden replied that he agrees with the biblical scholar, Marcus Borg, who wrote, “The single most important Christian practice is to be part of a congregation that nourishes you even as it stretches you.” The single most important thing we do as Christians is to be part of a local church! Buddy Shurden also quoted his wife, Kay, who said that even if we woke up on Monday morning and discovered that the atheists were right—that there is no God—we would still need to meet in church the next Sunday because we so desperately need each other.
Of course, the atheists are not right—there surely is a God, for he sent his Son Jesus to show us how much he loves us. And when we do meet together Sunday after Sunday here in church, we meet to nourish one another, and to stretch one another, and to rejoice with one another in the good news of great joy that we have to share.
Thank God that we who follow Jesus are not alone in our journey of faith, but we are in community with other Christians who nurture us and encourage us and challenge us and walk beside us as we rejoice in Christ together. No Christian is an island, alone unto himself or herself, because we are all part of a church, a community of fellow believers who become a family of faith.
When those shepherds gathered around the manger the night that Jesus was born, they were the beginning of the Christian community that continues even today. Jesus was in the business of drawing people into relationship with himself and with each other, and we who love and follow Jesus are in relationship with him and with each other too.
So, from the very beginning Christmas has been
about drawing
people together. Our family gathering
this year is not as large as it has been in years past, but we are
still coming
together. My mother has come up from
Whether you are part of a large family, or whether you are a family of one, you are not alone this Christmas. You are part of Christ’s family, and in this community we gather around the manger and worship the newborn King.
Thus
rejoicing, Free
from sorrow, Praises voicing Greet the morrow;
Christ the Babe was
born for you.
December 23, 2007