Reading Signs

Jeremiah 33:14-16

Psalm 25:1-10

Luke 21:25-36

In today’s lesson from Luke, Jesus is talking about a new day coming.  He is announcing what that will look like when the new earth begins.  But the pictures that he draws are not pretty.  “On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea.   People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken.”  These catastrophes, these crises, these traumas, they are the sign of the new world coming, a new life coming.  They are the sign that things are changing.  Do we experience these things now?  Of course we do, as did the Israelites in their time as well.  People are in anguish.  People do become terrified, anxious and perplexed.  This happens in all times.  And the message to us is two things.  First, when horrible things are happening, these are invitations for us to rely more fully on God, to trust in God knowing that God is with us in these changes, in these challenges.  And second, we are called to remember that these difficult signs and hard times are actually fertile ground for new birth, for new life, for a resurrection that comes again and again, and again. 

I’m reminded of a quote I saw recently. “When you’re in a dark place, you sometimes tend to think you’ve been buried.  Perhaps you’ve been planted.  Bloom!”

Today we begin the new church year.  The church year begins with Advent, not New Year’s.  But like New Year’s day, in the church we are called to begin the new church year with anticipation of the new life that is coming, as we look towards Jesus being born anew into our lives.  We remember that out of whatever chaos we have and do experience, new life will come, is coming, has come.  And we are invited to celebrate that today. Today is a chance for a new start, a new look, a new approach to our lives.  It is not that we forget what has gone on before.  Trying to avoid what has happened rather than incorporating it into our beings means that we fail to heal from it.  Denying things that have happened leads to them coming out in strange and unresolved ways. Instead, we have to take our experiences, all of our experiences, incorporate them into our beings and allow them to help God in transforming our lives for the better. 

In the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Toula struggles to find balance between family traditions and desires for her, with what she hopes for and sees as fulfilling a dream for her future.  She falls in love and decides to marry a non-Greek man, and her father, in particular, feels betrayed by this, forbids it at first, is angry and hurt by it.  Toula struggles because she loves her family and does not want to hurt them.  But as her brother finally says to her, “don’t let your past dictate who you are but let it be part of who you will become.”

            We carry our past with us.  But we decide, by our choices about how to deal with that past, if it will hinder us, bind us, control us, hold us captive and refuse to let us go or heal; or if it will inform our future, lead us into a place of new growth, new healing, new challenge, and new life.  There is a wonderful book that I’ve shared with you before called The Beethoven Factor.  In it Paul Pearsall talks about the different responses people have to crisis.  He says we are aware of two of those responses: we’ve all heard of victims and we are also aware of survivors.  Victims are people who stay in that place of being victims, who cannot heal from their pain, cannot get past it but live in that.  They often become bitter, cynical, dysfunctional and stuck in an endless cycle of loss.  Survivors are people who fare better, but who still wear their experiences in a way that limits them and continues to define them.  But he then identifies a third group of people, a group that he believes is exemplified in the person of Beethoven.  As he tells it, “There stood Beethoven, gravely ill and totally deaf.  Eyes closed, he kept conducting the orchestra even after they had ceased their performance and the audience had risen to its feet in thunderous applause.  As a singer stepped from the choir to turn him around to see those whose shouts of “bravo” resonated throughout the concert hall, tears of elation filled his eyes.  Perhaps the worst loss a composer could experience had been the catalyst for a remarkably adaptive creativity that allowed him to transcend his tortures to become immersed in the thrill of conducting the premiere of his Ninth Symphony, the “Ode to Joy”.  At that moment, and not only in spite of but because of his adversity, Beethoven had experienced the thrill of thriving through adversity.”  Thrivers, people who are able, with God’s help, to take their challenges and create new life from them, be part of resurrection, be part of seeing the new, that is what we are called to be.

            In the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding Toula discusses with her mom the struggle she is facing between the needs or concerns of her family and her own decisions about what will lead her into the life she wants for herself.  And her mother, in her wisdom, says this, “My village saw many wars.  Turkish, German.  They all made a mess.  And my mother said, ‘We’re lucky to be alive.’ And I thought, we’re not lucky to be alive.  We’re not lucky when they are telling us where we should live, what we should eat!  Nobody has that right!  And then I see you and I see your sister and your brother.  We came here for you.  So you could live.  I gave you life, so that you could live it.”

            God came to give us LIFE so that we could LIVE it.  That doesn’t come without going through pain and struggle.  It doesn’t come without challenge to our understandings of the world, to our very being, to our comfort.  But we are invited to move through pain and into a new year, into new life, into a new beginning.  

I want to end today by reminding you of the Old Testament readings.  From Jeremiah we heard:  “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.  In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety.  And this is the name by which it will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.” 

And from the Psalm we heard:  “All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his decrees.”  When we trust in God, we can live in the hope that the new life will be glorious and full of God’s love and care.

            Sister Joan Chittister said, “The essence of happiness... is having something to do, something to love and something to hope for. At the outset of the liturgical year, the church presents (us) with a model: a Child who lives only to do the will of God, who opens his arms to love the entire world, who lives in hope of the coming of the reign of God by giving his life to bring it.”  Jesus gave us his life, his teaching, his love: he risked his own life and died because of those commitments: he did all of that, that we might live.  We honor Jesus then by choosing the new life, a life of hope, that he would have us live.  As we begin our new year, I invite all of us to begin again, to search for meaning not by letting go of the past but by incorporating it into our beings, moving through all of the lessons and challenges and gifts we’ve been given, and inviting God to make us new.  Amen.