GIFTS THAT MEAN SOMETHING

A Sermon by Rev. James D. Brown

Market Square Presbyterian Church

 

The Second Sunday in Advent

December 9, 2007

 

Scripture:  Isaiah 11:1-10 and Matthew 3:7-12

 

In anticipation of today’s lighting the Advent Candle signifying hope, I have been pondering just what the word means.  Hope.  What comes to mind when I say the word, hope?  My ruminations led me back to a poem I’ve always loved:  “Hope Is The Thing With Feathers,” by Emily Dickinson.  You may want to focus on today’s candle as I read it to you.  The imagery in her poem and the light of our candle point us to one of life’s most important and enchanting truths.

 

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

 

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

 

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest seas;

Yet, never, in extremity

It asked a crumb of me.

 

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.”  Dickenson begins the way the dictionary would.  Hope is….  But then she surprises us with “the thing with feathers” singing in our souls.  She is suggesting that hope is a feeling, something so hard to define that it is like a tune without words, something that tugs at us, a feeling of desire for something better combined with the mysterious expectation that things could and will come out right.

 

The song is sweetest in the gale, in the storms of life when we need to hear it most.  And it comes as a pure gift.  Even in the most extreme circumstances it’s just there.  It never asks a crumb of us.  It must be, pure and simply, something implanted in our souls by our Creator.

In this regard, the biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann, claims that the Old Testament is a Book of Hope.[1]  Isaiah writes to people exiled far from home and cheers them on with an astonishing message.  You couldn’t have missed the presence of “the thing that perches in the soul” when Rosie read lines like “A shoot shall come from the stump of Jesse….”  Jesse was King David’s father.  A descendant of David will come to live among us, cries Isaiah, and the “Spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding,…the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.” 

 

You can hear the tune of hope being awakened in your soul, can you not, especially as the prophet Isaiah takes us back to the Garden of Eden where paradise is being regained.  It’s unbelievable, the wolf is living with the lamb and small children are playing by the dens of snakes and no harm befalls them!

 

Both Isaiah and Emily Dickinson point us to one of the basic aspects of human nature.  We can never fully describe in words what it means to be human, to be alive, but we can say this:  A human being, a child of God, is one who hopes for a better day.  To be fully alive is to believe that a better day is coming, that God is at work to make all things new.

 

It is this reality that permeates the opening chapters of Matthew’s Gospel.  Brueggemann is of the mind that John the Baptist is the central character in Advent.  He is the one who picks up on Isaiah’s theme about a Messiah who will save his people, about the incarnation of God’s righteousness into the everyday world, and drives it home in the out-of-the way wilderness between the Jordan River and Jerusalem some 2000 years ago. 

 

“I’m baptizing you with water,” he shouts, “but get ready, there is one on his way whose sandals I’m not worthy to carry.  He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit, and you will never be the same again.  The lame will walk, the deaf will hear, the poor among you will be astonished by the good news that they are favored by God.” 

 

All of this is a call for us to come home…“to Jesus, to the neighborhood, to peaceableness” as Brueggemann puts it.  To peaceableness we ask, in a world where a so-called war on terror has created an overriding sense of malaise as the conflict drags on and on?  Are we therefore doomed, asks Brueggemann, “to an endless state of amorphous anxiety?” It just so happens that it is in this very moment that we are being called home to peaceableness by “the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.”  Yes we are.

 

If this is to happen, we have work to do during the next two weeks.  If we are to make it home, we’d better take stock of what our assignment looks like.  To help us think about this, I’m going to focus on giving gifts that mean something.

 

It goes without saying that gift giving has become a bit of a tangle for many of us.  The Sunday Times on November 25 contained a funny and yet not-so-funny article about some of the pitfalls of giving and receiving gifts.  Did you happen to read “Jolly and Green, With an Agenda?”  I’ll give you a taste.  You’ll see why I used the word tangle.

The article begins with the story of Donna Hoffmann, an ardent environmentalist who last year gave each member of her family an unlikely gift:  an energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulb.  That’s right, a light bulb. 

 

“I wanted to connect through the gift-giving tradition,”

said Ms. Hoffman, 45, who works as a coordinator for

the Sierra Club.  “I also wanted to communicate my own

deeply-felt environmental conviction.”

 

In particular, Ms. Hoffman said, she hoped to make a

point to her sister, Cynda, who works for a construction

company that builds ‘a lot of nasty, old-style fossil fuel

related stuff,” including highways and coal-fired

electricity plants.

 

While Cynda, 50, found the light bulb an amusing gift,

and even useful (she has since replaced all the incandescent

bulbs in her house), she said she wondered if the holidays

were the time to preach austerity.

 

“We spent so many years so poor, where we didn’t have

the money to do much,” Cynda said.  Now that she and

her husband, Steve, a lawyer, are doing better financially,

“we’re at the point now where we can be a little more

extravagant,” she said.  “It’s just a joy.

 

Cut back now?  With all due respect to her sister, Cynda

said, “We thought she was nuts.”

 

Frivolity versus severity.  Materialism versus sacrifice.

Welcome to “green” holidays.

 

However you cut it, our gift giving is a complex undertaking.  Bill McKibben hits the nail on the head when he observes that we are all afflicted with the cultural notion “that transcendent joy comes from things.”  And things have a way of obscuring the true spirit of Christmas, don’t they?

 

The Presbyterian preacher, Michael Lindvall addresses the same idea when he meditates on the ritual of opening presents at Christmas time.  They often come with instructions of some sort regarding how to put them together (what parent has not agonized long into the night on Christmas Eve about what to do with 10 bolts and 9 nuts!), and warnings telling you things like “Not Suitable for Children Under Age 6”—which you find just after assembling a gift intended for your 5-year old.

 

Thoughts like these on instructions and warnings led Michael Lindvall to suggest that maybe every present we open should come with a different set of instructions.  “You are a fortunate consumer to have the ability to own this fine product.  Remember to share what you have.”  And also this word of caution:  “Warning:  This thing, like all things, could be dangerous to your spiritual health.”[2]

 

If it is true that the things we desire and acquire will never bring us the true happiness we long for, never enable us to hear clearly the tune without words singing in our souls, then what are we to do with ourselves in this season of gift giving?

 

I’d like to suggest three steps we might take.  And it’s not too late for any of them, even though Christmas is just a few shopping days away.  First, put aside common sense and let fancy guide your choice of gifts for those you love.  John Buchanan, writing in the latest issue of Christian Century, [December 11, 2007] quotes a preacher from a generation ago, Halford Luccock, who said that the best gifts “show a lovely lack of common sense.”  So if you are thinking of giving grandma who’s in a nursing home a pair of slippers, put your practical instincts aside and buy her perfume.

 

I had just read Luccock’s advice when later that day I found myself walking down the corridor of a nursing home.  As I passed by the beauty parlor I saw a woman way on in years slowly easing herself out of the beautician’s chair, having just gotten her hair done.  There was an inner glow about her, a cute smile forming on her lips that gave the inescapable impression that she felt pretty.  One of the best gifts I can imagine is a hair appointment for a friend in a nursing home.   

 

Secondly, examine your gift-giving with an eye toward those with the greatest need.  I have so appreciated the staff here at Market Square Church coming to me with the suggestion several years ago that we stop giving each other Christmas presents and instead pool our funds for a gift to help those in desperate straights. 

 

When Lois Gayman first came to me with the idea, I can remember saying to myself, “I wish I’d thought of that first!”  Again this year we will be buying a heifer or pigs or chickens or a goat that will assist a family somewhere in the world to fend for themselves in the way Isaiah had in mind long, long ago.  And in addition to our gift for the Heifer Project, this year we will have a pleasant noontime pot-luck during which we can savor our delight in one another as part of the Market Square family.

 

Finally, in all of our gift giving, in all our hustle and bustle, in every festive gathering, we must be listening for “the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.”   In other words, we must move through this season with the determination to that all our holiday activities will reflect our deepest values, especially the hope engendered in us by the coming of the Christ Child.  If we do this, everything will fall into place.

 

Those of us who made the pilgrimage to the Holy Land last summer decided to pool our resources and send a special Christmas gift to Father Emil and his parishioners in the West Bank town of Jifna, where we are in a partner church relationship with St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church.  As you are so well aware, they are facing some of the hardest times they have had in years.  Unemployment in neighboring walled off towns like Bethlehem is over 50%, travel and commerce are at a stand-still.  Our gift was for the needs of the parishioners at St. Joseph’s Church.  Our congregation has also recently forwarded funds for gifts for children in the parish, gifts made by local West Bank artisans so they too can benefit.

 

When our check arrived, Fr. Emil sent me an email overflowing with thanksgiving.  In it he said some things that touch on some of the deepest values I can imagine this time of the year.  Picture Jifna in the Israeli occupied West Bank with its Catholic Church perched on a hillside looking across a little valley to a settlement of Arab refugees forcibly located there way back in 1948.  Father Emil, writing in this cauldron of tension and conflict, has a word of grace for us:

 

“Tomorrow is the first Sunday of Advent.  We are distributing a

Candle for each family, so Advent won’t be only in Church but

also in their homes.  I’m asking them to light it every night and

to sit down as a family to pray and read the Bible.  With the

Candle we are also giving them a box in which to put their daily

contribution to a mission in the South of Jordan we are sponsoring.

Though we are poor and in need, they are also poorer than us, and

we also can help.  For me it is important to educate the members

of St. Joseph’s about giving, not only asking.  Last year we were

able to raise $1000 and we sent it to help the parish of Ader in

Southern Jordan.  The youth group started two months ago their

fundraising for this purpose and with what the families will be

raising in Advent and one Sunday collection we hope to be able to

raise also this year $1000 and send it to Ader by Christmas.

 

Father Emil closes with a blessing that can send us on our way to Christmas with joy in our hearts:

I wish you and your family and congregation a Blessed Advent

                        time, full of Hope [there’s that thing with feathers!] and

                        Blessings.  And thank you a lot and please extend our deep

                        gratitude to your lovely congregation.

 

This is exactly what I’m doing.  Thank you! 

 

MARKET SQUARE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Gifts That Mean Something