Tag: Church Year

Why the Christmas Tree Is Still Standing in January

On By Rev. Dr. Jarrett BanksIn Sermons Year BLeave a comment

Chrismon TreeEphesians 1:3-14 NRSV

There are many influences in this world that guide our lives, inform our thinking, and give us direction and meaning.

One of those influences is the distinct seasons of the year. Seasons result from the yearly orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the center of our universe, and the tilt of the Earth’s rotational axis. In other words, the changing of seasons means that the entire world is changing. Seasons change us in a powerful way, because the world changes. Winter, spring, summer and fall influence the things we wear, the things we eat, our hobbies and recreation, even our general mood.

The proprietors of capitalism realize the tremendous power and influence the seasons have over our lives and culture. Notice how they have manipulated them in the name of profit. For example summer begins not on June 21st but with Memorial Day sales in the department store and the opening of the tourist season. Autumn begins not on the 23rd of September, but with Labor Day sales. And winter did not begin on December 21, but actually on the day in November we call Black Friday.

A long time ago the Christmas season began on Christmas Eve and then was celebrated for 12 days until January 6 when Jesus’ baptism was observed. However, the money makers understood that there would be a greater payback if they could convince us that the Christmas season actually begins the day after Thanksgiving and lasts through New Year’s Day.

This is the reason that Christians in mainline churches that observe the Christian calendar are often a bit frustrated during Advent and this second Sunday after Christmas. Christians, who have been influenced and conditioned by the world, wonder why we have to sing those painful, solemn, anticipating, waiting hymns of Advent instead of the more cheerful Christmas carols during those Sundays after Thanksgiving. And we wonder why on earth the Christmas tree is still standing in the sanctuary and we are still singing carols days after the black-eyed peas have been consumed. After all, we have been taught by our world to believe that having any Christmas decorations up after New Year’s is, well, tacky.

However, what guides our lives, informs our thinking, and gives us direction and meaning is not anything that is of this world. The main influence on our lives is the birth, the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In Ephesians we read:

With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory (Eph 1:13-14).

Like winter, spring, summer and fall, Jesus change everything. When we embrace Jesus as our Savior and Lord, it is like the whole world tilts on its axis. Our whole world revolves around Jesus the Christ who is the center of our universe. We live for the praise of his glory. We believe Christ is God’s plan for all time.

Thus, our new year does not begin on New Year’s Eve watching a ball drop in a square shining bright with the lights of commercialism and materialism joyfully singing Auld Lang Syne with a few friends. Our new year has its beginning on a dark November morning around a simple Advent wreath, lighting one meager candle solemnly singing Come Thou Long Expected Jesus.

Our new year does not begin with a celebratory toast commemorating our accomplishments of a past year. It begins with a small cup of juice confessing our sins and our shortcomings, recognizing our need for repentance, forgiveness, and a savior.

Christmas is not about the exchanging of many gifts or even the love our family and friends have for us. Christmas is about one special gift of God’s self in the birth of that Savior revealing the love of God for all people.

The first Sunday in January is not about putting Christmas and an old year behind us and looking forward to a new year. It is about reflecting on the influence the birth of the Savior has on our lives, our community and our world.

The month continues with the season of Epiphany where we witness this Savior go down the banks of the Jordan River to begin fulfilling God’s plan for all time through his public baptism.

We watch with amazement, as although he is the Savior of the World, he is still driven into the wilderness where he experiences the trials and temptations of this world, the same ones we all experience.

Then, astonishingly, we hear our names called when he calls the names of Simon, Andrew, James and John asking them to drop everything to follow him wherever he leads them. And with the other disciples, we follow. We follow courageously, anxiously, unwittingly, even somewhat reluctantly. But we follow.

We were with him when he healed the sick. We were there when he gave sight to the blind, touched and restored a leper, brought peace to a man possessed by demons, defended and forgave a sinner. We were with him when he lifted up the poor and challenged the establishment by speaking truth to power. We were there when he became angry at the religious people and turned over tables in the temple of organized religion.

The month of February features Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent. It is a season of acknowledging that we were also with the disciples when they deserted him. We, too, left him in the garden of Gethsemane when he was arrested. We acknowledge our association with Peter who denied that he ever knew him, and we confess our connection with Thomas who betrayed him on that dark night.

Lent is the season that our need for forgiveness is most fully revealed, as is our need to renew our mission to deny ourselves, to pick up our own cross and die to self.

And on Good Friday, we learn that if we give ourselves away, if we die to self, if we join Jesus in that prayer to our God, “not my will, but yours be done,” when the evil of this world throws everything that it has to throw at us, when evil comes to destroy us, when evil finally seeks to take the very life from us, evil does not and cannot win. For what it has come to destroy has already been given away. Our lives have already been placed into the hands our God who holds them for all of eternity.

During the season of Easter, we celebrate this good news. We celebrate the good news that God is always working in this world working all things together for the good. God is always wringing whatever good can by wrung out of life’s most difficult moments. God is always lavishing our sins with grace, transforming our sorrows into joy, our despair into hope, our defeats into victory and our deaths into life.

During the season of Pentecost we celebrate the good news that Christ continually comes to us through God’s Holy Spirit. God continues to guides this world. We believe that the same grace and love that Jesus taught and lived out throughout his ministry is still alive in this world today.

Then we enter into a season that the Church calls “Ordinary Time.” It is a season to reflect on what the birth, the life, the death and the resurrection of the Lord mean to us and our world. However, when one truly does that, one discovers that there is no such thing as any ordinary time. All time, when Christ is influencing it, guiding it, informing it, giving it direction and meaning, all time is extraordinary. There is no secular time. There is only holy time. When our lives are directed by Jesus, even our darkest, most dreadful, difficult days are divine days.

And our year does not end on December 31, but on a Sunday in November we call Christ the King Sunday. We celebrate the good news that when it is all said and done, in the last analysis of it all, Jesus Christ, the God who is fully revealed in his birth, life, death and resurrection, is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.

Thus, the good news for all of us this day is that it is January 4th, and the Christmas tree is still standing, the lights are still burning, and it is not tacky or even strange. Because like winter, spring, summer and fall, when Christ came into our lives, the whole world tilted on its axis and everything on this earth, including us, changed forever. We are no longer on the world’s clock, on the world’s schedule or calendar. Our hope and our calendar is set on Christ, God’s plan for all time, and we live for his glory. It is Christ, and only Christ, who guides our lives, informs our thinking, and gives us direction and meaning. Thanks be to God.

Reigning from the Cross

On By Rev. Dr. Jarrett BanksIn Sermons Year CLeave a comment

world_in_handsLuke 23:33-43 NRSV

Today is the last Sunday of the Christian Year.  It is called “Christ the King Sunday” or “The Reign of Christ Sunday.”  It signifies that at the end of it all, Jesus Christ has the last and final word.  And in this world of so much suffering and pain, oh how we need a day like today!  Oh how we need to be reminded that when it all boils down, when it all pans out, Jesus Christ is our ruler and our king. When it is all said and done, Jesus the Christ is ultimately in charge. Today is the day that we reassure ourselves that no matter how bad life gets, no matter how distressed, fragmented and chaotic life becomes, Christ is always in complete control.  “He’s got the whole world in his hands,” as we all like to sing.

Now, in this world of heart ache and heart break, the truth that Christ is the king and ruler of it all is always supposed to bring us great assurance and peace.  However; although none of us good God-fearing, church-going folks like to admit it, this truth of God’s complete reign over this world usually brings us the exact opposite.

Think about those times you were reminded by someone, albeit with good intentions, that “God is in control.”  When Lori and I lost our first child two months before the due date, people came up to us and said, “Don’t let this get you down.  Just remember that God doesn’t make any mistakes.”

After the doctor gave you the news that the tumor was malignant, people came up to you and said, “Don’t worry, God knows what God is doing.”

When people learned that you were going to lose your job, they reminded you, “It is going to be alright, for God is in control.”

At the graveside of a loved one, your friends and family lined up between you and the casket and whispered: “God has a reason for this.”

And very politely, we nodded. We even thanked them for their words with a hug or a handshake.  But then, a short time later, after we dried our tears, after we came to our senses, while we were sitting quietly at home or while we were out on a long drive, or maybe sitting in church, we began to reflect and to ponder those well-intended words. We began to think to ourselves: “If God is really sitting on some providential throne in complete control of this fragmented fiasco called life, this disastrous debacle called the world, then what type of ruler is this God? What type of king sits back and allows so much evil to occur in their kingdom?

Christ the King—what is supposed to bring us great strength, peace and comfort, instead brings us frustration, anger and doubt.  Christ the King—what is supposed to bring us assurance and hope brings us utter misery and despair.  And we are very much tempted to join all those who laughed and ridiculed Jesus: “Umphh!  King of the Jews! Some King!”

I have said it before, and I do not mind saying it again—If  God is the one who willed our first baby’s death, causes tumors to be malignant, gets us fired from our jobs, and takes our loved ones from us, then I really do not believe I want anything to do with a god like that!  I think I would rather join the millions of people who have chosen not to be in church on this Sunday before Thanksgiving.

The good news is that I am here. And I am here to thank God that God is not the type of King who decrees the death of babies, pronounces malignancies, commands layoffs and orders our loved ones to be suddenly taken from us. There is no doubt about it, Christ is King.  But thank God, Christ does not reign the way the kings of this world reign.

The reason I believe we allow ourselves to be tempted to give up on God in the face of evil is because we often forget that our God reigns not from some heavenly throne in some blissful castle in the sky. Our God reigns from an old rugged cross, on a hill outside of Jerusalem, between sinners like you and me. I believe we oftentimes become despairing and cynical about God, because we forget that our God does not rule like the rulers of this world.

The rulers of this world rule with violence and coercion and force.  Earthly rulers rule with an iron fist: militarily and legislatively and with executive orders. The kings of the world rule with raw power: controlling, dominating, taking, and imposing.

But Christ is a King who rules through suffering, self-giving, self-expending, sacrificial love.  Christ the King rules, not from a distance at the capital city, not from the halls of power and prestige, but in little, insignificant, out-of-the-way places like Bethlehem and Nazareth, and Fountain and Farmville.

Christ the King doesn’t rule with an iron fist, but rules instead with outstretched arms. Christ the King doesn’t cause human suffering from a far, but is right here beside us sharing in our suffering.

God possess what the late theologian Arthur McGill called a “peculiar” kind of power.

God’s power is not a power that takes, but is a power that gives.

God’s power is not a power that rules, but is a power that serves.

God’s power is not a power that imposes, but is a power that loves.

God’s power is not a power that dominates, but a power that dies.

And as Arthur McGill has written, this is the reason that it is “no accident that Jesus undertakes his mission to the poor and to the weak and not to the strong, to the dying and not to those full of life.  For with these vessels of need God most decisively vindicates his peculiar kind of power, [a] power of service whereby the poor are fed, the sinful are forgiven, the weak are strengthened, and the dying are made alive.”[i]

Christ the King did not take our first child.  The day our baby died, God cried with us in that hospital room.

God did not cause the tumor. The day the doctor said the word “cancer” was a day of anguish for God as it was for us.

God did not create the layoff.  The day you were told that your job was ending, God stayed up with you and worried with you all night long.

And God did not take your loved one.  When they died, something inside of God died too.

What we all need to learn are very different definitions of “king,” “rule,” “reign” and “power”—very different because they define the ways of the only true and living God rather than defining our false gods and their ways.

So when life gets us down (and if we live any length of time at all in this world, it most certainly will), we need to remember the great truth of this day—Christ is the King. And this King is reigning, suffering, sacrificing and giving all that God has to give from the cross.

crown of thornsGod does not make mistakes.  God knows what God is doing.  God is in control.  But God’s throne is not made of silver and gold. God’s throne is made of wood and nails. God wears not a crown of jewels but a crown of thorns.

This past week I visited a lovely lady in the hospital who is dying with cancer. Doctors have given her about three months to live. With great faith and assurance and peace, she told me that everything was going to be all right. No, she is not delusional. Her mind is not clouded with morphine. She is at peace because her King reigns from a cross. Her King is not far away from her sitting a throne removed from her agony. Her King is at her side suffering with her. Her King is not above her pain.  Her King is experiencing her every pain. Her King is not slowly taking her life away from her. Her King is giving the King’s very life to her, pouring out the King’s very self into her, and promises her every minute of every day to see her through.

Because of this, she told me that she has never known a time in her life when she more close to her Lord. All of her despair has been transformed into hope. And she is absolutely convinced that her death will be transformed into life everlasting.

After she described the intensified intimacy she now shares with her Lord, she then said something miraculous. With a hopeful joy in her smile and eternity in her eyes, she told me that she is really looking forward to celebrating Thanksgiving this year.  Think about that for a moment.

A woman, dying with cancer, told me that she has a lot for which to be thankful.

Don’t we all?

[i] Arthur McGill, Suffering: A Test of Theological Method, 61-63.