Movin' On Up

I post this a bit bitter-sweetly.  This is the sermon I delivered on the 30th of December, just a few days before my dreaded and ultimately not great meeting with my DCOM.  But it's a damn fine sermon about how to embrace 2013 and I still stand by it.  There's a few things I might have phrased differently had I not been in a southern, predominantly older, white UMC congregation, as per usual.  Such is the way of things.

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So let’s talk about December 21^st.  Chances are, you’re pretty sick of hearing about it by now, but come along with me for a second, I think there are still depths we can mine from this particularly interesting letdown.

Apocalypses are huge in our culture right now.  Perhaps the most obvious is the prevalence of the zombie apocalypse.  It’s pretty much everywhere – movies, TV, video games, comic books, novels, short stories (even entire anthologies!); they have been done, ironically, to death.  But this isn’t the only kind available.  There’s an apocalypse for every kind of taste!  Television series have featured new apocalypses every season, and they’re always averted.  Writer-Director Joss Whedon has made an entire career out of apocalypses in his various shows and movies.  Sometimes the end of the world comes from space, or the center of the earth, or within the hearts of man.  You name it, and there’s probably an apocalypse related to it.

And of course we can’t forget all the apocalypses we find in Christianity.  Whether it’s the Book of Revelation or the Millerites and Seventh Day Adventists or Harold Camping, there are stories upon stories of people being absolutely certain that one day, God’s going to come back, Jesus descending on a cloud to bring about the end of the present, broken world and the start of a glorious new one.  The Mayan Apocalypse was only the most recent incarnation of this popular belief that things are coming to a close, that our chapter is at an end.

Sure, we could make jokes at their expense, and indeed that has been done, and will continue to be done each time someone decides to put a date and time to it.  Without a shred of irony, it would seem, despite Jesus telling people over and over that we would not know the hour.  But that’s hardly constructive, and it’s the jokes that made me sick and tired of hearing about December 21^st long before it ever rolled around.  Because there WAS something to be said.

See, whatever comes to mind when someone says apocalypse has very little to do with what the word actually means.  The original Greek word, apokalupsis, literally translates to “unveiling”.  The zombies, fire, and brimstone are ancillary at best and tangential at worst.  And with that in mind, I would say that we not only experience tens if not hundreds of apocalypses a year, but that we have survived each and every one of them.  The Revelation to Saint John is not about the end of the world, it’s an assurance that everything is going to work out just fine in cosmic terms.  Whether or not we live in the best of all possible worlds, the world is nonetheless getting a little better every day.  Things are looking up.

So what does all this have to do with today’s scripture?  The link does seem a bit odd, but I promise we’ll get to it.  Truth be told, this isn’t the first version of this sermon in the slightest.  I was initially struck by the pairing of two stories about young men, one in ministry, the other learning from clergy.  Clearly I can relate.  But my original plan wasn’t really working out, because it ended up being far too much about my own personal experience and wouldn’t have had much in the way of instruction.  Frankly, it was a bit too “whiny”.  But both accounts have an interesting conclusion in which Samuel and Jesus are both reported to have come away from their experiences growing in years, stature, favor, etc.  They became better people through their faith and work.  And that’s definitely something I can work with!

After all, we’re coming up on the end of the year.  Tomorrow night everyone will be partying and staying up til midnight to watch the ball drop, and most importantly of all, making resolutions for the coming year.  And I’m sure I’m not the only one whose found that the process of making resolutions to be much more engaging than actually KEEPING them.  I know I’ve certainly had more than a few failed attempts at bettering myself around the turn of the new year.  However, I think we can learn some very helpful lessons from today’s readings.  Instead of New Years Resolutions, I want to propose some New Years Revelations.  A forecast for the apocalypses of 2013.

First, let’s look at Samuel.  We might think of his story as the first step on our journey of revelation.  After all, we are told that he “grew in stature and favor with the Lord” and those around him.  But… um… how?  Well, the very next chapter, we have one very important answer.  Technically, we were introduced to him today not so much as a boy in ministry as servitude to the temple.  He doesn’t even really know who God is yet.  It isn’t until later that he finds himself sleeping one night and hearing someone call his name.  He believes it to be Eli, the priest, only to have the old man tell him he’s hearing things and to get back to bed.  Again, he hears, he goes to Eli, he’s told to go back to bed.  Only on the third time does the lightbulb go off over Eli’s head.  He tells Samuel to respond to the voice.  He does, and thus his journey of greatness is begun. 

In a way, his response is a very simple thing.  “Here I am,” he says, “Speak, your servant is listening.”  If only Samuel could understand what he was getting himself into, he might not have been so eager to respond!  But still, with that great, vast unknown before him, he responded to the call anyways.  It is said in that same chapter of 1 Samuel that the voice of the Lord was rare in those days.  Yet it was revealed to Samuel that day, and I truly believe it is available to all of us today.

Earlier this year I took part in a preaching competition up at BU, because what else are seminarians going to do for fun?  I preached on the value of silence, something I think we severely lack in our lives these days.  I won’t launch into the whole thing, because we’d be here all day.  But I hinted that it is only in silence when we can truly hear the still, small voice of God.  Not necessarily with the ears, but with the soul itself.

So, in the year 2013, I want you to open yourself up to the revelation that comes with truly listening to God in those moments of silence we can actually manage to wrestle out of our busy days.

Next, we have the incredibly fascinating story of Jesus as a teenager.  This is a rare treat in our Gospels, a story about the Son of God as a precocious youth.  Come to find out he’s a bit of a juvenile delinquent with a bizarre idea of fun.  Unlike Samuel, I think we have a pretty good idea of why Jesus grew in favor.  But even within this story I think there is a very crucial point.  When Jesus’ parents find him in the temple, one gets the impression that he isn’t merely there because he wants to pull out his divine powers and school the religious leaders for fun.  He is engaging with them in a very real and powerful way.  He’s listening to them and asking questions.  He’s not about to let nepotism be the only reason he’s so learned in the Scriptures.  It’s hard to believe that the Word itself would have anything to learn from mere mortals, but there he is.  And if Jesus felt the need to engage those who would become his very downfall, then who are we to avoid doing the same?

The thing I love about being up in the heathen north of Boston is the absolutely breathtaking variety of people I interact with on a daily basis.  I’ve made friends with Baptists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, UCC and UU Christians, Agnostics and Atheists, even a Pagan or two.  These beautiful people come from across the country and across the globe.  They’re straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender; intellectuals, slackers, hooligans, party animals, bookworms; liberals, conservatives, moderates, and I don’t even know what else.  You name ‘em, we’ve got ‘em.  And each and every one of them has taught me something.  Being at seminary is about learning, and the classroom is only half the battle.  We engage one another in theological sparring matches, not in an effort to prove who is the wisest in all the land, but because it’s a chance to learn something new and strengthen our own beliefs in the process.  We may not agree, we often don’t, but we find a way to get along in spite of it.

It’s a big, scary world, and there is a very real fear that spending too much time among “the enemy” will turn you into one of them.  In cases like this, it can be helpful to remember that Jesus spoke earnestly as a kid with those who would have him killed, then spent his adult life with tax collectors and prostitutes, and I’d say he turned out just fine. 

So, my second hope for this coming year is that you allow yourself the revelations present in true engagement with the world. 

Finally, I think there is a vital message to be found in our Psalm for today.  We don’t preach on the Psalms nearly enough, and that’s a shame, because they are beautiful and necessary for everyday faith.  They are religious poetry full of believers and sinners expressing their love, their worship, their anger, even their hatred, at the ground level.  And what is church, if not faith at the ground level?

And today’s Psalm is perhaps more necessary than ever.  A recent article posted in the New York Times, titled “How to Live Without Irony” discussed the prevalence of “hipster” culture and the widespread application of irony to daily living.  Needless to say, it was not a glowing report.  Perhaps the article was lacking in generosity, but there is still something to be learned. 

We live in a culture of the ironic.  It’s easier, in some ways, to find small pleasures in the enjoyment of the seemingly un-enjoyable.  It is safer by far to laugh sardonically at tastelessness.  Safer, because being earnest means opening yourself up to criticism and judgment.  You can’t really be judged if you’re already the one judging.  That, I think, is what I love so much about the Psalms.  They are so honest.  Some of them feature boundless depths of sorrow and rage, and we hesitate to read them in church anymore.  The violent imagery is disturbing, to say the least.  But, on the bright side, we still have Psalms like the one we read today.  It features a joy rarely seen in this day and age.  There’s nothing wrong with the occasional ironic experience, but there is also nothing quite so thrilling as the feeling of honest happiness, to love something unironically, to the very core, with body and soul.  Pure, unadulterated joy can be so wonderful.

It’s always a bit dangerous to bring in outside faith systems into a sermon, much less one from a fictional book series, but I can’t help feeling this quote from a novel by Terry Pratchett neatly encapsulates a state of mind that might help avoid this kind of “hipster mentality”: 

“There is in truth no past, only a memory of the past.  Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them.  Therefore the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise.  The only appropriate state of the heart is joy.  The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now.  Be glad of it.”

The same can be said of Sunday mornings – or whenever else you might attend worship.  It’s SO EASY to get bogged down in the routine of it all.  Intro, hymn, prayer, hymn, Scripture, sermon, hymn, benediction.  It can take a lot of energy to shake off this feeling of “Yeah, I get it.”  In reality, the problem, I think, lies in the bigness of God, the realness of Jesus, the infinite presence of the Holy Spirit.  How do you wrap your mind around it???  So we slip under the oh-so-comfortable blanket of hipster-like irony and smother ourselves with it.  It is comfortable yes, but a bit thick, and it doesn’t breathe too well.  It gets pretty stuffy under that blanket.  We need to climb out from under it once in a while and breathe deep the air of joy.

So, in this, the year two thousand and thirteen, be honestly joyful once in a while.  Let the revelation of joy wash over you and see what you start to notice.

After all, we made it through another year more or less intact.  A few scrapes, cuts, and bruises, but here we all are.  So praise the Lord – for real, I mean – along with the angels and the sun and moon and stars and fire and hail and snow and frost, men and women alike, old and young together. 

Let there be apocalypses each and every day.  We’ll survive them just fine.  Be silent and listen.  Engage the world.  Praise the Lord and be joyful!

Amen.