I rise to taste the dawn, and find that love alone will shine today.                                                                      
              - Ken Wilber






READING:
This is how much God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son.  And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life.  God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was.  He came to help, to put the world right again.  Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted; anyone who refuses to trust him has long since been under the death sentence without knowing it.  And why?  Because that person’s failure to believe in the one-of-a-kind Son of God when introduced to him.

This is the crisis that we’re in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness.  They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God.  Everyone who makes a practice of doing evil, addicted to denial and illusion, hates God-light and won’t come near it, fearing a painful exposure.  But anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes God-light so the work can be seen for the God-work it is.
                                      - John 3.16-21 (The Message)


REFLECTION:
We of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) …whoa Nellie! This title requires some explanation. It would be easy to read this title as a claim to be the only true disciples, but that would be a mistake. We firmly believe that we are not the only Christians, but Christians only, serving humbly beside Christians of any other stripe or color.

Anyway, we Disciples recently lost a saint – a truly awesome man! – Fred Craddock, who both inspired and humbled us all. He inspired us with some of the best preaching around; and he humbled us with his commitment to serve “The least of these” in practical, hands-on ways. How he managed to write as prolifically as he did and still find time to serve others remains a mystery God alone can penetrate.

Dr. Craddock begins his commentary on John 3.16 with the caution that it is easy to trivialize this verse. Boy! He could say that again. Most of us know this verse in some form, and most of us trivialize it by reading our meanings into the text. We typically think of God as loving… unless you cross him (sic); in which case God can be a harsh judge. And we trivialize it by thinking of the salvation of the Christ as a pie-in-the-sky reward in the distant future for confessing that we believe this statement about Jesus.

We do this, however, at the expense of its context in John’s theology, losing any chance of recognizing the profundity, subtlety, and radically challenging content of this verse. We need to step back and tease out John’s thought on the nature of the God who loves the world, and what he means by salvation.

I invite you to try this in preparation for Sunday’s worship. Reflect on your notion of the God who loves. Is that all God does? What is this God like? And what is this love John speaks about? Is it sentimental and weak, or profound and powerful? And try to summarize what you think of as salvation. Then on Sunday we will examine this verse, and the passage in which it is nestled, with a view to discard any trivializing tendencies, and catch a glimpse of something both inspiring and challenging that can be embraced by all, including those who think long, hard, and reasonably about spiritual things… and expect preacher types to do the same. Join us, won’t you? 

There are those times when all the stars are torn from our skies, and morning will not come. We try to make our way in unlit passages, frightened, desperate and despairing. And yet it is into this impenetrable night that the Child is born. Tearing through the seams of darkness, the Morning Star appears in our eyes and in our hearts. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light!
                                                             - Ann Weems    

READINGS:
O send out your light and your truth; let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling.
                          - Psalm 43.3
 
Even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.
                           - Psalm 139.12

Light dawns for the righteous, and joy for the upright in heart.
                            - Psalm 97.11

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness— on them light has shined.
                             - Isaiah 9.2

REFLECTION:
In a classic series of fantasy novels for children – The Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis spins a tale of life in the imaginary land of Narnia. Narnia, a land of enchantment, magic, and talking animals; yet a land frozen in unrelenting winter; for in Narnia control has been wrested from Aslan – the son of the high king – by a wicked witch. Under her dominance light pales, biting winds blow without cease, the snows pile higher and deeper, and despair creeps ever closer to the hearts of the land’s inhabitants.  Narnia, as Lewis so vividly describes it, is a land in which it is always winter, yet never Christmas.

Always winter, yet never Christmas.  This is a haunting and powerful metaphor, a metaphor appropriate not only for the imaginary land of Narnia, but as well for the actual lives of exile, bondage, and darkness endured by many individuals, some closer to you than you might imagine.

Narnia lives in hearts obscured by darkness, hearts condemned to exile and bondage by their own misused freedom, by forces beyond their control, or by both.  Yet, as diverse as their stories may be, one thing is held in common by all people who walk in darkness.  To a person, they understand that someone has to love them if their darkness is to be truly dispelled; someone has to gaze openly and honestly into their hearts – to see them as they are – and still love them.  Only then, being loved, will they be able to love themselves, to regain a sense of wholeness, and even to reach out in love to others.

It is true; someone has to love you.  If the people who walk in darkness are to see a great light - if we are to complete our journey to Bethlehem and find wholeness and peace - someone must first love us; someone must enter freely into the brokenness of our lives, see us as we truly are, and embrace us in love.  The good news of Advent, my friends, is this: that someone is God.  God, who finds us in our darkest hour of despair and gives us hope; God, who bestows on us peace, not because we deserve it, but simply because we need it; God, whose presence in our lives overflows in joy and celebration; God, who sees us as we are, cherishes us as uniquely valuable; and invites us into a future in which our lives will be both transformed and fulfilled in love.

We continue this week with a sermon series entitled, "God's Cameo's: Finding the Spiritual in Reel Life" and we will discuss a movie which is currently running in theaters now, The Fault in Our Stars. 

I will attempt to give you a quick synopsis of the movie (without having to give a spoiler alert in case you have not seen it yet) which is based on the book of the same title by John Green. The central characters are two teenagers, Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters, who are dealing with cancer. They struggle with the deep questions of life and even though their lives are filled with uncertainties, they find joy in the world around them. While this movie will cause even the strongest person to cry, it is filled with an underlying love that is so deep that you will leave the theater with a heart full of hope.

Our text this week comes from John 15:1-8:

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the vineyard keeper. He removes any of my branches that don’t produce fruit, and he trims any branch that produces fruit so that it will produce even more fruit. You are already trimmed because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, and I will remain in you. A branch can’t produce fruit by itself, but must remain in the vine. Likewise, you can’t produce fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, then you will produce much fruit. Without me, you can’t do anything. If you don’t remain in me, you will be like a branch that is thrown out and dries up. Those branches are gathered up, thrown into a fire, and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask for whatever you want and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified when you produce much fruit and in this way prove that you are my disciples."

This text brings such imagery. A vine can take on many forms. It can be long and sinewy making it difficult to clear. It can be luscious and thick creating a beautiful covering on a fence. It can be dying in places and needing to be trimmed. Whatever the vine looks like, Jesus tells us in this text from the book of John that he is the central vine and we have been created as branches reaching out from this central vine. The vine provides the strength for the branches and gives the nutrients that sustain them. The vine does not exist without the branches reaching out.  What does this vine provide for us to keep us moving forward and reaching outward? Hope? Love? Strength? Compassion? I think our list could be exhaustive.

The Fault in Our Stars has so many teaching opportunities that we could focus on but Sunday morning we will narrow our focus on just a couple. Love and hope. Hazel Grace and Augustus show us that even through suffering, they continue to reach out through basic human relationships. They show us that even through suffering, love and hope remain. 

If you have not seen the movie you may watch the trailer here:

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
                      - T. S. Eliot



READING:
“Don’t be troubled. Trust in God. Trust also in me. My Father’s house has room to spare. If that weren’t the case, would I have told you that I’m going to prepare a place for you? When I go to prepare a place for you, I will return and take you to be with me so that where I am you will be too. You know the way to the place I’m going.” Thomas asked, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus answered, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you have really known me, you will also know the Father. From now on you know him and have seen him.” Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father; that will be enough for us.” Jesus replied, “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been with you all this time? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words I have spoken to you I don’t speak on my own. The Father who dwells in me does his works. Trust me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or at least believe on account of the works themselves. I assure you that whoever believes in me will do the works that I do. They will do even greater works than these because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask for in my name, so that the Father can be glorified in the Son. When you ask me for anything in my name, I will do it.
                - John 14.1-14 (Common English Bible) 


REFLECTION: 
I adore the words of T. S. Eliot cited above in which life – and all its pursuits – is portrayed in broad strokes as a journey of discovery whose end offers a new vision, a fresh perspective, a more profound understanding of the life we thought we knew so well. When and if we finally make our way home, we find it both strange and familiar; as if we are seeing it – truly seeing it - for the first time.

I wish we students of the Christian bible would take this wisdom to heart, and approach our studies as a journey of discovery in which we dare delve beneath the surface of the texts to the wonder, mystery, profundity, and challenge that reside within. I wish we would just own up to the fact that we never exhaust their meaning; and that there is always more to discover. More often than not this fresh perspective challenges our smugly held beliefs about the meaning of a passage of scripture, and how it informs our faith.

I’ve been thinking in this vein all week, because the gospel reading for Sunday is John 14.1-14; and I don’t want to preach from John 14. I don’t want to preach from this passage because of the many ways its meaning has been coopted, misused, even abused for the sake of supporting a cherished belief, or from the unwillingness to look beyond a traditional reading of the text.

And, let me tell you, several aspects of this passage have been misrepresented and misused. The first section about the troubled heart has been used so often at funerals that we think of it in a morbid sense as a reference to a smattering of comfort during a period of mourning. Released from this mindset, the passage offers a vivid, expansive hope of life lived in fullness both now and into the future. No modicum of comfort is offered in this passage; but rather a bold affirmation of fullness, meaning, and joy! Too often this is overlooked, and this passage becomes to funerals what Paul Stookey’s Wedding Song (a.k.a. There Is Love) is to weddings; bland, boring, and played on the wrong instrument altogether.

Would that this was the worst abuse this passage has seen. This oversight pales in comparison to the rigid, absolutist claims that have been made about Jesus’ self-proclamation as way, truth, and life. The profundity and subtlety of John’s message here is oversimplified, suppressed, or missed altogether so that the passage can be used to support a flat-out condemnation of a big chunk of the world God loves so much (at least according to Jesus). Isn’t it possible that life in its fullness is about something more than a statement of belief about Jesus? Is it inconceivable that God’s grace and compassion have just a bit more wiggle room than this reading allows?

Jesus as the way is an affirmation to be lived out in our life. Jesus as the way is a Jesus to be followed, not simply affirmed as an article of belief. This is underscored by the reference later in the passage to the disciples of Jesus doing the same works – even greater – as Jesus. And folks, this work is not that of a creedal statement. This work, exemplified throughout the life and ministry of Jesus, is an overflowing of compassion and grace; a refusal to allow any individual to go unrecognized and unvalued (like the Samaritan woman); the courage to stand for and with the marginalized and oppressed; and the will to let the love of God flow through us into the world.

Wow! I think I see something new here; or at least a profundity I have missed before. Perhaps there is more depth to be plumbed; perhaps this passage can inform our life of faith in new and powerful ways. I invite you to explore this possibility with me in worship on Sunday.