"A place where you can be yourself and express true emotions."
About halfway through my Friday afternoon Rotary meeting, I received a phone call from the hospital. "Would you please come over and be with a family whose mother is nearing death," asked the nurse. I sensed the urgency and so went right over and met with three daughters who were gathered around their mother's bedside.
We prayed together with the Sacrament of Last Rites, then sat in the waiting room for a while talking. Reflecting on her mother's imminent death, one of the daughters said, "Well, here's another hard Christmas season for me. That's three in a row now!" We talked some more, hugged one another and I left to return to my office.
On the way back to the office I was aware of how many of us will approach this Christmas holiday with pain, loneliness and anxiety. Some of our family members are in the hospital or in critical care, one is in Hospice, many of us have lost loved ones and are truly alone, some live in or come from dysfunctional families where Christmas isn't always the kind of fun depicted in model TV families, and many of our nests are empty. The list seemed endless.
When I returned to my office and opened the mail, the first letter I opened was a simply-written anonymous letter requesting that I postpone my sermon series on marriage and deal with this very issue of holiday loneliness. The coincidence was clear and direct and thus it seemed right and proper to follow that request. How are we to survive Christmas?
I'll begin with a practical suggestion. Try The Great Expectations Advent Seminar this week as advertised in the Bulletin: "Give yourself an early Christmas gift with this program which can be helpful to all who struggle with 'Holiday Spirit.'"
This seminar is presented for all those who cannot "capture the Christmas feeling you want to have." Along with learning something about yourself and about loneliness, this is an opportunity to meet others who struggle and form a caring group with and for each other.
My second suggestion for those of us struggling with "Christmas Spirit" is to recommend that you attend as many holiday worship services as possible. I say this for two reasons. First, it gets us up and out of ourselves, out of our homes and neatly-constructed walls and into a loving, caring community. Every time I suggest this I get the response, "But, Brad, I can't do it. I cry in church. I can't seem to control myself and my feelings."
And I want to respond, "Thank God, that you have a place where you can be yourself and express true emotions. I'm convinced that at any one time in church, probably twenty percent of the congregation are crying or at least moved to tears."
We priests are fortunate, you see. We are so far away up here you can't see our tears and we've learned to hide them just as you do. Maybe we all need to admit to ourselves and to each other that worship is an emotional experience which brings up the worst and the best in us. When we gather in this community and within God's strong presence, His Holy Place, I don't see how anyone can last for long behind emotional walls and barriers.
I think it is also important to be aware of a natural human tendency to assume that everyone around us is doing just fine. They look happy and healthy and I am the only one here with pain, problems, anxiety or tears. But that is just not so. At one time or another, every one of us has dragged ourselves to church with a heavy burden. And if we are not feeling pain now, we have in the past, and probably will in the future. We are all of us in the same boat.
I remember seeing a classified ad once that read:
For Sale: Hope Chest--Brand New
Half Price--Long Story!
Well, we all have our long stories and I hope that the one place where those stories can be told and shared and understood is within the community of the church. Thank God, this is not yet one more place where we must cope and hold firm no matter the inner cost.
One theologian says we must view the church more as a hospital than a social club. It is the one place in the whole world where the sick in spirit and wounded of heart might come for rest and healing within a community which cares.
And that brings me to my second reason for attending worship services, especially during hard times. Church is a special place where we can experience God's healing presence, where we can hear the Word of God in Scripture, prayers and sermon, speaking directly to us. Church is the place where miracles happen, where Jesus Christ presides and rules in our lives.
Oh, yes, I do understand and agree that God's presence is everywhere and a part of all life, private and public, but there is something special about a church community. For when Jesus promised his disciples that where two or three were gathered in his name, he would be in the midst of them, that is the truth! He meant just that. And I believe we experience Christ's presence most strongly when we gather in a place which is intentionally religious, where each of us expects to encounter Christ's strong presence in Word and in the Sacrament and in fellowship.
And when we choose to attend worship, it is important to "attend," to pay attention, to participate with all our heart and mind and soul, allowing God's love and presence to enter within our struggling hearts.
Listen, for example, to the comforting words you will hear in today's lessons:
"Behold, I create new heavens, a new Earth and former things (adversity) will not be remembered...Be glad and rejoice for no more shall be heard the sound of weeping and the cry of distress...A time shall come when the wolf and the lamb shall feed together...and we shall not hurt or destroy (each other) in all my Holy Land...Thus says the Lord!" (Isaiah)
And from Paul this exhortation to a community which struggled to see beyond themselves:
"Rejoice always, pray constantly and give thanks in all circumstances for this is the will of God."
Paul then goes on with some rather specific directions:
Do not quench your spirit...
Hold fast to what is good
Abstain from all evil
Respect each other and
Be at peace among yourselves.
Theologian James Christiansen puts it so well:
"The purpose of Christian worship is not to avoid pain and difficulty, but to help us live in such a way as to produce the character adequate to meet adversity head-on. Christianity does not make life easier; rather it tries to make us great enough to face life."
We'll speak some more about survival in suffering in the future. I'll close with a helpful image from the Old West.
Remember the old Conestoga Wagons which were the primary transport of Western deserts and mountains? I discovered recently that they had a unique feature--a built-in safety bar. It was a strong bar of steel which hung down from the back of the wagon and dragged the ground as it moved along.
Often, when heavy wagons were pulled up steep hills, they would begin to slip backwards. At this point the bar would dig into the ground, taking the weight off the wagon and preventing it from sliding back down the hill and crashing. With the safety bar in place, the wagonlaod could be lightened until the horses could regain their footing and continue up the hill.
And so it is for us. In worship we have a built-in safety bar, a "mechanism" which will hold us when we slip and falter, giving us grace, the time and opportunity to unload our burdens and regain our footing so that we can get on with our lives. Amen.
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