GLAD TIDINGS

When something especially good happens in the course of the day, I am almost beside myself with the excitement of wanting to tell it to someone.  Usually I will call Maureen immediately.  If she’s not available I go down the list of other people that I want to tell.  I feel so bad for people who don’t have intimate companions who can become co-celebrators when good news comes, because it’s almost as if a good thing isn’t quite fully real until you get to share it with someone else who will get as excited about it as you are.  One of the main reasons that I so miss my mother is that she was high on my list of “people to tell things to.”  Now, when there is good news I still almost reflexively start to dial her number, knowing how much she will want to hear it—how much I will love telling her—how I will hear the excitement in her voice.  Alas, now only in my imagination.

The day that my book was accepted by a publisher, I was almost bursting with it.  I ran to tell Maureen. We planned a celebratory dinner for that night.  I called my mother. And then I decided to tell others in my life more casually, over time, sort of parceling out the preening pleasure that I would feel in breaking my news to them.  I would get a little joy in telling someone tomorrow and then save some more of that joy for the next day and the next.  But when my daughter was born, that was a whole different level of joy.  I couldn’t hold it in for even an hour.  I called every person I knew that very day and even broke the news to strangers in the hospital hallway and then in the street.

What we discover is that the telling of good news is more joyful even than receiving it.  When I occasionally buy a lottery ticket and pay that dollar for the opportunity to fantasize about great wealth for a few minutes or so, my most pleasurable fantasies are not about spending the money or changing my life—they are about telling Maureen and telling the others that I would want to give big chunks of money to.  I think about the myriad ways in which I might break the news creatively and imagine their reaction.  That’s the fantasy that warms my heart.  Giving the gift of joy to others may be the greatest pleasure life has to offer.

Isaiah speaks of bringing good news to the poor, or “glad tidings” as the ancient phrase so beautifully has it.  For him, the Messiah is the bearer of such tidings.  The glad tidings are that God is not off in some heaven but right here among us.  The good news is that no one is really poor because the most important wealth is within and around each one of us, and the poorer we are, the more likely we are to discover it.  The glad tidings are that every life is shot through with grace and holiness; that every moment reeks of eternity; that every least creature bears the spirit of God; that this whole world is alive with blessings. 

Those are the glad tidings that God’s anointed one brings, and every day brings again.  And we are now blessed to be the bearers of such good news.  We should be bursting to tell people.  We should be climbing that steeple to shout it out to passers-by.  We should be pealing the bell around the clock to alert everyone to this extraordinary thing.  We should be on our little cell phones to every loved one saying, “Have you heard it yet?”  “Have you found it out?”  God is all around you and in you and under you and over you and your house is holy and your children are sacred and your backyard is a paradise and your dog is a holy dog.  Because the real treasure of life, the purpose, the blessing, the joy and meaning, is right here within you.  And, my God, we are so lucky and so graced and so blessed. 

There is good news.  There are glad tidings.  Find your own way to feel the joy—but feel it indeed. And then, in your own way, burst out and share it, because sharing those glad tidings is the greatest pleasure life has to offer.  

ADVENT

When I was a child Christmas Eve was a particularly strange emotional mixture.  There was the usual overwhelming excitement that came with the thought of presents the next day as well as the magical quality of that night filled with carols, eggnog, and the putting up and decorating of the tree.  But in my somewhat dysfunctional family there were other feelings as well.  My father, a construction worker and an alcoholic, would invariably receive a Christmas bonus from the contractor he was working for and it was usually in cash.  That meant that after work let off early, he would head to some local bar with a few of his co-workers for some “Christmas cheer.”  Sometimes he would arrive home relatively early, in a great mood and a little tipsy.  Other times he would get home late, completely falling-down drunk and in a very volatile state.  We could never know what strange mixture of anger or good cheer or affection or violence would pull into the driveway or when it would come.  And so, amid the wonderful anticipation and magical mood of the holiday also came this agonized waiting to see what the night would really hold.

Those sometimes beautiful and sometimes terrifying nights in my childhood home are the images that invariably come to mind when we sing about “the hopes and fears of all the years” being gathered on Christmas night.  And that is what the season of Advent is all about.  It is not just a time for the ever-growing glow of Christmas celebration to come upon us.  It is not just a time of preparation for the warmth and coziness of our family Christmas customs.  It is far deeper and more ominous than that.  It is much closer to the confusingly mixed mood of my Christmas childhood.

Advent is the season of waiting and hoping.  It is waiting as the world darkens, as the leaves fall, as the coldness comes, as things close down and close in and the year moves toward its ending.  It is a time when the winter that invariably comes surrounds us visibly with the cold and dark and death that we live with invisibly every day and in all seasons.  It reminds us of the whispering fears, the darknesses in us, the echoing chasms where we seem to stand on the edge of all the world’s grief.  It is that dark time in which we do not know what is coming next, but we face it with that mixture-- hope and dread striving within us.  As the Advent song has it, “Watchman, tell us of the night, what its signs of promise are.”  Or as another Advent carol has it, “Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trembling stand.”

The particular spirit of this anticipatory season is that we look to the future.  We acknowledge the uncertainty.  We do not know what is coming but we know that the future holds our own deaths and the deaths of everything and everyone that we love.  It is so telling that when old Scrooge is visited by the ghost of Christmas yet to come, that ghost is the embodiment of the grim reaper and leaves him trembling in terror.  The spiritual challenge is to look courageously and unflinchingly into the growing cold and darkness, and to see there not just the endings but the coming of the presence of God.  The challenge is to find the source and fuel for a hope that is stronger and deeper than the dread and despair that is at the heart of life.  Advent means “coming.”  We believe that even in the midst of death and decay and destruction, what is coming is the love and grace and joy of God.  That is not an easy hope to affirm against all the odds of what we think we know, but that is the real locus of faith.

Most of the time, faced with the hard realities of the future as we age (and age) and the constant trickle of the sand through the hour-glass of our lives, we just change the subject.  We seek diversion or entertainment or things that keep us otherwise occupied.  Dostoyevsky once said that our whole lives are mostly spent finding ways to look away from what lies before us.  The Advent season is when we open our eyes, look straight ahead, struggle with our fear and choose.  We choose how we want to face it.  Do we choose dread and fear or do we choose hope?  Do we choose to avoid the subject or do we face it with the stunning affirmation of our faith that the future belongs to God’s love?  Advent is about finding that hope and standing on the tip-toes of expectation, waiting to drink deeply from a future laced with grace, spiked with love, and brimming over with the joy of God’s coming again and again among us.  That future holds the miracle of incarnation, the birth of light and life, the glow of grace born right here in the darkness.

All these years later, while I remember some scary and ugly times when my father came home late on Christmas Eve, mostly I remember the joys.  I remember his half-drunken crooning of “White Christmas.”  I remember him holding me up over his head so I could put the star on the top of the tree.  I remember the hugs that came so seldom on other nights of the year.  I remember joys.  And so I know that hope is the name of the season.

Scared and Loving It

Halloween is here.  There was a time when Halloween seemed like a fairly minor event, but recently, more and more people put out lavish decorations, orange lights, ghosts and goblins on their lawns, and strange things hanging from their trees.  It is beginning to rival Christmas in its visibility in the neighborhood.  Here at the church, of course, it has also become a major holiday because of the Senior PF Haunted House.  The size, ambition, and scariness of this annual extravaganza have grown each year since its inception some ten years ago.  Each year, I am amazed by how involved, excited, and committed our kids are in making this an extraordinary event.  They seem to love this stuff; putting on makeup that makes them look like zombies, wearing truly creepy costumes, and hiding in dark places ready to terrify passers-by. 

What is the powerful appeal of all of this?  I think it is that Halloween always seems just a little magical.  There is a temporary suspension of all of the usual rules of reality.  The nights are filled with mysteries.  We behave as if witches and zombies were real.  Nothing is what it seems.  Surprises lurk behind every bush or around every corner of a darkened church hallway.  The night seems alive.  And one of the mysteries is oneself, behind the mask or the make-up or the costume.

I feel like we occasionally need the opportunity (especially we adults) to suspend our usual sense of reality.  The world often loses much of its excitement and mystery in the minds of sober, rational, practical people like ourselves.  I think a big part of us longs for a world where anything can happen; where things are not so predictable; where there are a host of things unseen and things are not always what they seem.  That sort of world is frightening, but that is part of its fascination.  Of course, the real world is pretty much that way, but we have worked hard to tame our little part of it.  We are conditioned to see only what we expect to see.  We have rational explanations for everything.  We have tried to domesticate our environment to make it maximally useful and minimally frightening.  But that also makes it poorer and a little more boring.

I’m not going to suggest, of course, that we return to a belief in witches and demons (even though the notion has some appeal), but perhaps we can find more ways to marvel at what we don’t know (which is most things) rather than reducing our notion of reality to what we do know.

One of the reasons why children on Halloween night or during the haunted house can deal with their fears, and even enjoy them a little bit, is that they are disguised (hiding behind masks or make-up).  A mask can be a very freeing thing.  It’s not just something that hides your identity.  You fear less because, in some way, behind the mask, you are not really you.  You can behave in ways that you would never dare otherwise, because the mask can take on a life of its own and draw you out of your own restrictions and fears and inhibitions.  You can “try on” another you.  I’ve seen totally shy and quiet kids behave in amazingly bold and assertive ways while roaming the church hallways as a zombie, not seeming like the kids that I knew at all.

We adults tend to get locked into the identity that we have chosen.  We burden ourselves with the need to be consistent.  We can only be how we think we are, as if that where only one thing or as if we really knew what that was.  And so we lock away so many of the surprising and unpredictable elements in ourselves.

Maybe we all need a little dose of Halloween in our lives; some sense of unreality; some more room for the mysterious in us and around us to break through.  For the fact is that God is most alive in all of those unpredictable, surprising parts of our world and of ourselves that we have so often shut out or explained away.  Finding God may well depend on our being able to experience mysteries rather than explain them.

So come to the Haunted House or take a walk on Halloween night (or any night).  Allow your imagination to see a world again that is alive with things unseen and where everyone or everything is not just what they appear to be.  Let yourself feel the presence of some of those parts of reality that we usually choose not to acknowledge.  God is there.

OUR FAITH STORY

In the front of the sanctuary, each Sunday, either Larry or I preach from a somewhat ornate pulpit made of cherry wood.  I love that old pulpit.  It was the new, modern, pulpit in 1885.  At that time, all of the current furnishings and pews in the sanctuary were introduced.  I don’t know who made it, but it is exquisitely made.  When I stand there on Sunday, sometimes I like to imagine other ministers standing behind it down through the years. 

There are two somewhat worn and discolored areas on the pulpit; on the rear outside corners where the preacher might put his hands as he leans in toward the congregation to say something particularly important or to pray.  I imagine Rev. Henry Huntington placing his hands there for the first time in 1885.  The dynamic Rev. George Reynolds (another Union Seminary man) placed his hands there when he explained to the congregation how the entire Board of Deacons had resigned to protest his “highhanded ways.”  Rev. James Gregory laid his hands there to offer a prayer for President William McKinley the Sunday after he was assassinated.  Rev. Carnes leaned on those spots to pray for the soldiers from Gorham who dies in the Great War and Rev. Harrison Dubbs prayed the church through the terrors of World War II.  I had my hands on those two places on the pulpit as we prayed for the victims of 9/11.

As we begin another church season, I always like to remember that when we gather here, we do so as part of a long and wonderful tradition that connects us in one community to the pioneer settlers here in the early 1700’s, the family farmers of the 1800’s, and the small town folk of the 1900’s.  The town has changed, the nation has been transformed and the church is not quite what they would recognize, but has all been one continuous journey.  We are still the same community of worshippers that started here 263 years ago.  We owe them everything that we have and everything that we are. 

Our own individual journeys of faith are simply parts of that bigger picture and legs of that longer trek.  If social justice and equality are important to us today, it is because of the seeds sown in the thinking of those abolitionists of the 1850’s and those campaigners for women’s suffrage of the 1890’s.  If we live out a faith in a God of love and a Jesus of compassion, it is the blossoming of a faith preached here two hundred years ago that moved beyond the judgmental Puritanism of its time.  If we can open our hearts and minds to broader truths and other ways of finding and experiencing God, it is also because of the lessons of tolerance and acceptance that sprang out of the democratic, covenantal heart of the faith of our forbearers.  It is magnificent and humbling to contemplate the whole saga of which we are only the latest little chapter.

This fall, we will begin our new “Beyond Worship” program with three classes exploring and celebrating the history of this congregation.  This is an opportunity to get to know the spirits and souls with whom we share this building and whose stories lead directly to our own.  This church has been a community growing, adapting, innovating and leading for over two hundred and sixty years.  It is important, as we try to both adapt and lead in our time, to learn how we have done it before.  Karl Barth once said that it is the impulse toward faith that makes us human.  Part of that impulse is the need to see ourselves as a part of some larger whole, the need to connect to the meaning at the heart of all that is.  Right here, in our little church community, we also need to connect to the larger whole of our faith story as a community.  It is complex, difficult, but also inspiring.  Come and be a part of it.

WHAT WE OWN

Just a little more than a week ago, Maureen and I were walking along a beautiful beach in Connemara.  The beach was practically deserted.  Only two other people were strolling along a thousand yards away or so.  There were no houses near the beach, only farmer’s fields and a stunning backdrop of mountains.  While we were there a little group of three cows came by.  I’d never seen cows on a beach before. 

Now I’m not recounting this just to make you all jealous (although that’s good too), but because, while we were walking, it was hard not to think about how different the scene would be anywhere in our country.  Any unprotected beach this beautiful would have been bought up long ago and would be lined with cottages and houses worth millions of dollars.  Access would be restricted, parking would be impossible.  Keep in mind, this beach in Connemara was not a state park or a nature preserve or some other public space, the area all around was just comprised of several farms.  But in Ireland, you can’t own a beach.  You can’t develop the shoreline.  You can’t put up a fence or a no trespassing sign or restrict the access.  The sea and the shore belong to everyone, and so it’s never crowded.  The wealthiest people don’t get to buy the most beautiful places and keep the rest of us out.  Even the farmers are required to leave all of their gates unlocked so that walkers can pass through and freely trespass on their land.  Every ocean view is open to anyone who wants to walk there.

I bring up this difference because it is a great teacher for our spiritual lives.  Like ocean front real estate, most of us want to possess the things we love the most.  For so many people, life is about acquisition.  We spend so much time buying things and filling our houses with stuff.  We want our own plot of ground around our houses that is ours alone.  We want to own.  We are generously willing to loan things to others, but only if it is very clear that something belongs to us and will have to be returned.  We even get possessive about our families.  We want spouses who belong to us forever.  We want kids who are “ours” and spend all of the most important occasions with us.  We are possessive.  Many very rich people spend all of their time trying to get richer, even as their wealth already exceeds what they could ever spend.  And wealth, more than anything else, buys privacy.  It buys a separate section on an airline flight.  It buys a bigger chunk of land that is off-limits to others.  It buys “exclusive” resorts, and “exclusive” restaurants, and all the trappings of a life lived separately from the rest of us.

This is a spiritual disease.  It makes all the world a poorer place.  It is a truer joy to feel connected to everyone else by feeling like we are all in this together.  The adventure of life is about the people you meet and the unlikely encounters that change us and enrich us, that you can’t have behind the walls of exclusivity or the fences covered with “no trespassing” signs.  Spiritual maturity is about learning to love, appreciate and enjoy the gifts of life without having to own or possess or control them.  It is about learning to walk through this world as a pilgrim, without having to dominate it, or tame it, or control it, but only to experience it and take it in.  Can we love others fully without trying to control them?  Can we appreciate beauty without trying to buy it?  Can we live our lives in spaces that we share with everyone and find the company to be the enrichment that it is meant to be? 

I will never own a piece of that beautiful beach in Connemara.  But it was ours for a couple of hours one beautiful afternoon and maybe will be again someday for another few magical hours.  That’s enough.  I will hope a few dozens of other people will make it theirs each day in the interim and that sometimes it will just belong to the cows.  For I will trust that God will continue to fill this life with gifts that I don’t ever have to grab or hoard or buy, but just enjoy.  “Give us this day our daily bread.”

In Faith,

David