Meighan Pritchard                                                          Eagle Harbor UCC

Isaiah 61:10-62:3                                                      Bainbridge Island, WA

Luke 2:22-40                                                                       January 1, 2012

Blessings and Possibilities

A few years ago I saw a bumper sticker that said, “I’m trying to be the person my dog thinks I am.” This morning I would like to explore with you these scripture readings from Isaiah and Luke and what they say about who we can be with and in and for God.

We spend Advent trying to live into some image of a better world. We do our best to meet expectations that are completely unreasonable. Christmas cards, cleaning, cooking, charities, extra church services, school performances, parties, gifts, everything happy, goodwill everywhere. And that’s in addition to the usual workload, the usual grocery shopping, laundry, closing out year-end budgets at work, etc. It is exhausting. What a lot of pressure! We need this whole past week to recover and perhaps all of January--or longer--to pay the bills. But there is something in all of this that is about longing for a better world, even just for one month. Even just for one day.

What is it we’re longing for, waiting for in the birth of the Christ child? The glad tidings that the angels bring are of peace on earth, goodwill to all, or, as the NRSV puts it, “Peace among those whom [God] favors” (Luke 2:14). Amid all the parties and gifts, all the food and cards, are we not trying our best to live into that idea of peace on earth and goodwill to all? We are longing for a world that is peaceful, loving, connected, in balance, happy, and all through Advent we throw a lot of energy into trying to make it so.

Isaiah talks as well about that same kind of longing. The passage we read today comes from what scholars sometimes call Third Isaiah. First Isaiah was written before the exile in Babylon, and that prophet was warning that bad things were coming. Second Isaiah was written years later, anticipating the end of exile and a glorious return to Judah. Third Isaiah was written after the return to Judah, when the reality of a destroyed Temple, ruined cities, and a desolate landscape had all started to sink in. And maybe in January in particular, we can relate. We spent all of December in Advent, in anticipation of Christmas. Christmas has now come and gone, and the realities of our lives, which we may have tried to gloss over in December, are now staring us full in the face.

So it is instructive to look at what Third Isaiah actually says. “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God.” he talks of salvation, vindication, righteousness, glory. And this: “You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.” This is not about despair, but about a longing for God’s realm to come, for God to step in and make things right, restore the world to harmony. It’s a desire for a Cinderella-type story, where someone who is poor and wretched, oppressed and abused, suddenly gets given a new life. You shall be a crown of beauty and a royal diadem in the hand of your God. Who doesn’t want that?

The savior we welcome at Christmas comes in answer to that longing for justice for the oppressed, restoration of balance, and peace on earth. “For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations,” says Isaiah (Isaiah 61:11). God’s righteousness is as unstoppable as the shoots that come forth from the earth every spring. Martin Luther King, Jr., was fond of quoting Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, who said, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” I think that’s what Isaiah is getting at here: you can’t stop God’s righteousness--God’s energy for love and justice--any more than you can stop spring from coming. From our vantage point on January 1 we know that spring may take a while, but eventually spring and justice both will come.

In the Luke text, when we see Simeon, a “righteous and devout” servant of God, holding up the 8-day-old baby Jesus in the Temple, we see new hope that the longing of Isaiah will be fulfilled--the longing for righteousness and justice, for deliverance from oppression, for peace and harmony. Simeon sees in this 8-day-old baby something amazing: He sees God at work. This is a child of blessing and possibility. As is every child, every one of us.

“The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him” (Luke 2:40). What does it mean to be one who finds favor with God? In the annunciation, the angel says to Mary, “Do not be afraid, for you have found favor with God.” For her, this means having a baby out of wedlock--a sin punishable by death, not to mention the scandal both to her and to her family. Finding favor with God does not mean wealth or happiness or a life of bon bons and pedicures. Jesus also finds favor with God. As an adult, Jesus apparently had no fixed home, no income that we know of, no security. In speaking truth to power as he did, he so upset the authorities that they killed him.

It is tempting to not want to find favor with God if that’s what favor is all about. And yet… look again at Isaiah. In the midst of all these difficulties, he writes, “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God.” He’s celebrating. He’s counting his blessings. And do we think either Mary or Jesus would do anything other than what they did, which was to say Yes to God with all their being? Finding favor with God meant finding a purpose for living that was bigger than just the everyday, ordinary life.

Finding favor with God and being called to follow God’s path is not a safe, comfortable proposition. It takes everything we have and then some. So as we stand at the dividing point between two years, looking back at our blessings, looking forward at our possibilities, let us dare to say Yes with our whole being. As we are writing out our New Year’s Resolutions and mapping out our year to the extent we are able, let us consider what it would mean to give our whole being to the work of loving and praising God and doing God’s work in the world.

“I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God, who has clothed me with the garments of salvation and covered me with the robe of righteousness.” This is not about saying we are righteous, but that God is righteous, that God works toward love and justice in the world, and we can be a part of that. Imagine that we, like Simeon, take that Christ baby in our arms and hold him and love him. Imagine that we take the grown Jesus into our hearts and do our best to study his teachings and follow the path he lays out for us to be in relationship with that God of justice and love.

Perhaps we need to revise the bumper sticker. Instead of saying, “I’m trying to be the person my dog thinks I am,” it could say, “I’m trying to be the person my God knows I could be.”

Who is that person? The answer is different for each of us. January 1 is often a moment to reflect on the year that was and to make resolutions for the year to come. What blessings have brought us this far? What love and support have come from expected or unexpected places to guide us this far? What possibilities beckon to us in the coming year? How can we be people who work for God’s love and justice in the world?

It is easy to live day to day without thinking too much on these things. But we do need to think about them, and now is as good a time as any. Recently I read on a blog by a nurse named Kelly Oxford the top five regrets of the dying:

• I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
• I wish I didn’t work so hard.
• I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
• I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
• I wish that I had let myself be happier.

[Kelly Oxford.tumblr.com blog]

The gift that we are given in 2012 is one of time. We can ask ourselves the question that Mary Oliver puts to us:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

[Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems]

Or we can listen to the Rev. Howard Thurman, who says, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Jesus came alive as an example of divine incarnation, the Word made flesh. There is something of the divine incarnate in us. As we look back at the blessings of 2011 and look forward to the possibilities of 2012, we can keep asking ourselves what will make us come alive? What will help us embody God’s call to love and justice, to a world of peace on earth and good will among those whom God favors?

Howard Thurman wrote another often-quoted poem called “The Work of Christmas“:

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the Kings and Princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flocks,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To teach the nations,

To bring Christ to all,

To make music in the heart.

Happy New Year. May you find favor with God in 2012. Amen.