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"A CHILD IS BORN" -- Christmas 2022

12/25/2022

Luke 2:1-14
In those days a decree went out from the Roman Empire that all the world should be registered.   All went to their own towns to be registered.  Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child.

While they were there, the time came for her to give birth to her firstborn son, and she wrapped him in bands of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no place in the guest room of the inn.

Now in that same region there were shepherds in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.  And an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.  But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for see, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people:  to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.  This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with this angel a multitude of angels, praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
    and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

And now it is Christmas. This is what we have been leading up to all these past weeks. Lighting candles of Hope, and Peace, and Joy, and – finally, Love. Candles lit against the darkness.

And now the Child is born – Love is born and the Light of God’s love shines among us – and, hopefully – in us, once again. And so we light the Christ candle, completing our Advent candles.

But there are yet more candles to be lighted. In the beautiful words given us by Howard Thurman:

I will light candles this Christmas,
Candles of joy despite all the sadness,
Candles of hope where despair keeps watch,
Candles of courage for fears ever present,
Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days,
Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens,
Candles of love to inspire all my living,
Candles that will burn all year long.

And now, having lighted our candles, let us share bread and cup one more time in this turbulent year, because the next time we gather here it will be in a brand new year. Let us give and receive one more blessing of fellowship, one more promise of God’s unending presence with us and in us as we share the bread, which is the very being of Jesus, and the cup, which is his life and his love, and let us join God’s promise to be One.

My name is Cherie Marckx, and this is The Church of the Open Door in Ukiah, California. We are blessed to have you with us.

Merry Christmas and blessings for all....
.

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A Candle for LOVE (4th Sunday of Advent)

12/18/2022

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Luke 2:15-19

The shepherds who were in the field and had heard the angels announce the birth of their savior, said to one another, “Let us go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.

But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.

Today is the fourth (and last) Sunday in Advent for this year and the theme for this week is LOVE. Hope, Peace, Joy – and now Love. We are almost to Christmas. And by the way, we will have no in-person church next weekend on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, but there will be a message and communion, here on YouTube.

It’s been a long journey over these few weeks, and I believe we have each traveled some distance—spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually in our understanding of these first three words--hope, peace, and joy—and that they are not just words, they are concepts we use in forming our lives.

I’ve mentioned each week so far that these are multi-layered words, with different intensities of meaning ranging all the way from deeply intense to casual. I think this applies to love most of all. Just think of how often we use that word – everywhere from something like “I just love chocolate-almond ice cream” to “I am overwhelmed with love every time I see a photograph of my new great-grandbaby.”

There’s the romantic kind of love, the love of lovers; there’s the friendship kind of love; and there’s the giving ourselves for the good of all humankind kind of love—the one that often gets called “charity.” There’s an over-sentimentalized huggy-squishy “I’ll do anything for love”; and then there’s tough love. Frederick Buechner once wrote, “When Jesus talked to the Pharisees, he didn't say, "There, there. Everything's going to be all right." He said, "You brood of vipers! how can you speak of good, when you are evil!" And he said that to them because he loved them.”

As far as the Christmas story is concerned, our hymns and carols are all about the love of the young mother for her newborn child—our cards and illustrations show us the tenderness of that mother’s love, over and over, and yet, in truth, that love may be best shown years later, as Mary stood at the foot of the cross and watched that beloved son die in tortured pain, while her own heart was being ripped out. Still she was with him—loving him to the end and beyond.

Love can be sweet and tender and it can also be agonizing. I suspect that we have all of us lived through some part of both extremes of that emotion. And so it is with God’s love for us and for all God’s creation.

I don’t have a story this week as I have had the past three weeks—just a couple of quotes, and a fragment of poetry. I’m not sure that I could find one story that tells us all there is about love—not even Luke’s gospel account of this holy birth.

There is a poem that I think of every year as soon as this season rolls around. Written by Christina Georgina Rossetti in the middle Victorian years, it is deceptively simple sounding but incorporates a lot of love in its three short stanzas:

Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, love divine;
Love was born at Christmas,
Star and angels gave the sign.

Worship we the Godhead,
Love incarnate, love divine;
Worship we our Jesus:
But wherewith for sacred sign?

Love shall be our token,
Love shall be yours and love be mine,
Love to God and to all men,
Love for plea and gift and sign.

And finally, a quote from Thomas Merton who was a twentieth century American theologian, social activist, poet – a brilliant writer – and I’m sure he would have put this before all the rest – a Trappist monk. This is one of his takes on the subject of love:

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.

So in this fourth week of our Advent waiting and learning and preparing ourselves, let us love. As we await the birth of love itself into our so-needy world – let us love.....just let us love.

Amen.

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A Candle for JOY -- 3rd week in Advent

12/11/2022

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Psalm 30:4-5
Sing the praises of the Lord, you faithful people;
praise God’s holy name.
For disfavor lasts only a moment, but favor lasts a lifetime;
weeping may stay for the night, but joy comes in the morning.

Today is the third Sunday in Advent and the theme for this week is JOY. Just as with the two previous Advent themes we’ve looked into recently, Hope and Peace, Joy is a word that can have a multitude of different applications for different occasions and different people.

Joy is closely related to happiness, and it would be easy to think the two words are interchangeable but they truly are not. Things make us happy – usually things on the surfaces of our lives. People, and experiences, and spiritual revelations can bring us joy – a response from deep within us.

We are used to thinking of joy as our response to the birth and life of Jesus --- especially at this time of year. Joy is one of those “church-y” words that we sometimes think are only connected to bible stories. But again, as we’ve found out in the past two weeks with hope and peace, joy definitely has its place in our here-and-now world too – often in circumstances that might not leave us happy, but bring us joy regardless.

I’ve enjoyed finding stories to illustrate this point for both Hope and Peace, so I hunted down another story for today. I found it in several slightly different versions all over the internet. The original story appears to have been written by a Rian B. Anderson but it’s gone through a lot of alterations from a lot of people. It’s a long story so I’ve had to do a lot of editing and whittling to make it fit our time and space here:

It was Christmas Eve 1942. I was fifteen years old and feeling pretty down because I knew there hadn’t been enough money to buy me the rifle I’d wanted for Christmas. We did our regular chores early that night for some reason, so after dinner when Daddy bundled up again and went outside, I stretched out by the fireplace and wallowed in self-pity.
But soon Daddy came back and told me to bundle up good and come out and help him. So not only wasn’t I getting the rifle I wanted for Christmas, now he was dragging me out in the cold, and for no earthly reason that I could see.
There in front of the house was the work team, already hitched to the big sled. Whatever it was we were going to do wasn't going to be a short, quick, little job, I could tell. Daddy pulled the sled around the house and stopped in front of the woodshed. Then he went into the woodshed and came out with an armload of wood -- the wood I'd spent all summer chopping and sawing and splitting.
“You been by the Widow Jensen's lately?" he asked. Her husband had died a year before and left her with three little children. "I rode by just today," he said. "Little Jakey was out digging around in the woodpile trying to find a few chips. They're out of wood, Matt." That was all he said and then he went back into the woodshed for another armload of wood. We loaded the sled so high that I began to wonder if the horses could even pull it.
Then we went to the smoke house and he took down a big ham and a side of bacon and told me to put them in the sled and wait. When he returned he was carrying a sack of flour over his shoulder and a smaller sack of something in his left hand.
"What's in the little sack?" I asked. “Shoes, they're out of shoes. Jakey just had gunny sacks wrapped around his feet this morning. I got the children a little candy too. It just wouldn't be Christmas without a little candy."
When we got to the Jensen house we unloaded the wood, and took the meat and flour and shoes to the door. Mrs. Jensen opened the door and hesitantly let us in. She had a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. The children were wrapped in another blanket and were sitting in front of the fireplace by a tiny fire that hardly gave off any heat at all.
“We brought you a few things, Ma’am,” Daddy said, and set down the sack of flour. I put the meat on the table. Then he handed her the sack that had the shoes in it. She opened it and took the shoes out one pair at a time. There was a pair for her and one for each of the children – sturdy shoes, shoes that would last. I watched her bite her lower lip to keep it from trembling as tears started running down her cheeks. She looked up at my Daddy like she wanted to say something, but it wouldn’t come out. “We brought a load of wood too, Ma’am,” he said. Then turned to me and said, “Matt, go bring in enough to last awhile. Let’s get that fire up to size and warm this place up.”
I have to say, I wasn’t the same person when I went back out to bring in the wood. I had a big lump in my throat and much as I hate to admit it, there were tears in my eyes, too. I kept seeing those three kids huddled around the fireplace and their mother standing there with so much gratitude in her heart that she couldn’t speak.
I knew then what people mean when they say their heart swelled within them. A joy that I’d never known before filled my soul. I had given at Christmas many times before, but never when it had made so much difference.
I soon had the fire blazing and everyone’s spirits soared. The kids were giggling when Daddy handed them each a piece of candy and Mrs. Jensen looked on with a smile that probably hadn’t crossed her face for a long time. She finally turned to Daddy, “God bless you. I know the Lord sent you. The children and I have been praying that he would send an angel to spare us.”
In spite of myself, those tears welled up in my eyes again. I’d never thought of my Daddy in those exact terms before, but after she mentioned it I could see that it was probably true. I was sure that a better man than my Daddy had never walked the earth. Tears were running down Mrs. Jensen’s face again when we stood up to leave.
On our way back home that night, Daddy turned to me and said, “Matt, I want you to know something. Your Mother and me have been tucking a little money away here and there all year so we could buy that rifle for you, but we didn’t have quite enough. Then yesterday a man who owed me a little money from years back came by to make things square. I started into town this morning to buy you that rifle after all, but on the way I saw little Jakey out scratching in the woodpile with his feet wrapped in those gunny sacks and I knew what I had to do. Son, I spent the money we meant for your rifle for shoes and a little candy for those children. I hope you can understand.”
Oh, I understood. That rifle seemed very low on my list of priorities now. From then on, whenever I saw any of the Jensen’s, or split a block of wood, I remembered, and remembering brought back that same joy I felt riding home beside my Daddy. He had given me much more than a rifle that night. He had given me the best Christmas of my life.

There is so much in that story that is sad that at first glance maybe no one would think it’s a story about joy. And yet there is also so much beauty – the deep kind of beauty that brings us a deep joy.

According to the bible story, Jesus came to live among us because we humans weren’t getting the message. We thought the important things were things like power and wealth or even just avoiding trouble for ourselves when the reality was (and still is) that God wants us to care for each other and help each other through this life. This why Jesus lived with us and suffered all the pain of being human.

The boy in this story, Matt, wasn’t a bad kid but he was wrapped in his own wants to the point of not noticing anyone else’s needs. He doesn’t wish anyone ill – he just doesn’t see them. It isn’t until his father places him right in the middle of another family’s desperate need that he begins to understand – and then – when he sees and becomes part of doing something about the family’s need – then he experiences true joy – maybe for the first time in his life.

This is what God wants from us and for us – that we learn to care about each other. Whether the world says they are our responsibility or no is irrelevant – it is our task and our joy to join our lives with theirs in some way so that, in the words of Ram Dass: We are all just walking each other home.

This is where we find joy – in our own hearts – when we reach beyond our own wants and needs and discover there is so much more to care about.

May your heart be filled with God's Joy --- in this season and always.

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A Candle for PEACE - 2nd Sunday in Advent

12/4/2022

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Isaiah 26:3-4
You will keep in perfect peace
those whose minds are steadfast,
because they trust in you.
We will trust in the Lord forever,
for the Lord is our Rock eternal.

Today is the second Sunday in Advent and the theme for today is PEACE. Peace is a lovely concept, I think we can all agree on that, but peace does not always mean that everything is butterflies and rainbows. True peace is something much more profound, and here – a little under three thousand after Isaiah’s words were written down, we still live in a world where peace can be pretty hard to find.

Even in scriptural writings peace has many meanings and usages that often contradict each other. In Isaiah 26, the chapter from which today’s opening reading comes, we hear that the Lord who establishes peace does so by leveling cities, and wiping whole peoples even from human memory by consuming them with fire. Not my idea of peace.

Our Christmas hymns and our iconography also seem to completely overlook the realities of Jesus’ birth, which is that Joseph and Mary were forced by their Roman overlords – the occupiers of their conquered homeland -- to travel from Nazareth in Galilee in the north, to Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem, most likely for tax purposes. And once there, Mary ended up giving birth in a cow-shed with not one of the woman of her household to assist her. I’m not trying to be the Grinch here – just pointing out that the images of peace that we are given at this season are often unlikely, not to mention improbable.

That’s why I want to share another story I found on-line. This time it’s a story about peace. And Just like last week’s story, I have no idea who actually wrote it. I found it several times on different sites, but none cited an author or source. It goes like this:

There once lived a king who announced that he planned to give a prize to the artist who could paint the best painting depicting “peace”. Many great painters sent the king several of their very best art pieces.
One of the pictures among the various masterpieces submitted was of a calm lake perfectly mirroring towering snow-capped mountains. Overhead was a clear blue sky with lazy, fluffy clouds. The picture was perfect. The feeling of peace was profound. The viewer could breathe deeply and simply relax into the view.
Most of the people who viewed the picture from this artist thought that it was by far the best among all that were offered. They all assumed it was the obvious winner, but when the king announced the actual prize-winner, everyone was shocked.
The picture which won the prize had mountains too, but they were rugged and bare. The sky looked very angry and the trees lashed in the high winds. There was clearly a storm. This painting didn’t appear peaceful at all. It looked like the artist had mistakenly submitted a painting depicting a violent storm rather than peace. How could this painting be the winner?
But when everyone went back to look more closely at the painting, to try to see what the king saw, they found a tiny bush they had all overlooked. It was growing in a crack in the rocks at the base of the mountain, and in that bush a mother bird had built her nest. And in the midst of the threatening storm, the bird sat on her nest in peace.
The first painting – the one everyone expected to win -- depicted a world untroubled by storms. But in the second painting, it was shown that even in the presence of all the turmoil the outer world can throw at us, it is still possible to be calm in one’s heart and spirit.
Peace doesn’t always mean to be in a place with no noise, no threat, no fear. Peace also is the ability to be in the midst of all the chaos and turmoil, and yet be still and calm in the heart. Real peace is to be found in trust, not the state of our surroundings. The mother bird sitting calmly on her nest, despite her chaotic surroundings, was indeed the best representation for peace.

The bird was just a bird. There was not one thing she could do to control the world around her. So she built her nest as securely as she could in the circumstances, then she settled in, covering her eggs to keep them warm and safe. She did all that she could do. Then she rested.

The people to whom Isaiah was speaking so long ago could do little to control the often frightful and brutal circumstances of their lives – all they had was trust. Trust and absolute faith that God was with them, regardless of whether God’s presence was obvious or not – and that trust allowed them to live with a sense of inner peace.

So it is for us. I’ve known people (and I’m sure you have too) who lived in a constant “the sky is falling! the sky is falling!” state of panic – always living in fear because the worst is surely about to happen – whether it ever does or not. They live very sad lives.

There are also, of course, times in all our lives when fear is a rational response – when we’re facing a bad health diagnosis, or when the destructive forces of nature are headed our way. Fear may be natural, or even logical, but it does not need to rule us if we truly believe that God is with us. If we believe that, and live our lives in that understanding, then we know that when God is with us then all shall be well. Not necessarily as we want it to be – but well – and safe in the love of God we can be at peace.

This is the peace the Advent and Christmas remind us of. Not the peace that comes of being the winner, but the peace that is ours from having our hearts set in God’s promises of safety and love. The peace that truly does pass all understanding.

May that peace be with you all, this special season, and always.

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"A CHILD IS BORN" -- Christmas 2022

A Candle for LOVE (4th Sunday of Advent)

A Candle for JOY -- 3rd week in Advent

A Candle for PEACE - 2nd Sunday in Advent

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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