Third Week of Advent 2005                                                                             December 11, 2005

Christmas Restoration Project                                                                                     Psalm 126

CHRISTMAS’ MIXED BLESSINGS

I think we can all easily agree that the celebration of Christmas, as it is practiced in our culture, is very much a mixed blessing.  We enjoy many aspects of it; the family, giving of gifts, Christmas Eve Worship services, the focus on the Christmas story in scripture.  But, it is almost a hackneyed truism that Christmas has become over-commercialized.  We all remember Charlie Brown’s Christmas and how he discovers the true meaning of Christmas in the midst of all the commercialization.  This is a time of year that puts on display all that is best and worst in us.  We’re all disgusted, in one way or another, by the foolish self-indulgence of the season.

Christmas has a very spotty past.  I remember hearing a Christmas Children’s sermon where the pastor talked about the legend of the candy cane.  In his telling, the Celebration of Christmas had been outlawed by that terrible Oliver Cromwell because he was trying to stamp out Christianity and stop the worship of Jesus Christ.  Kitty coined the descriptor of me as the “history police” when I told her that I had told my friend that, in fact, Oliver Cromwell was a devout Puritan who outlawed Christmas because he believed it was overly influenced by pagan traditions.  By law, church doors were to be locked shut on December 25.  Even mincemeat pie was banned from England for the twelve days of Christmas.  But Cromwell didn’t do this as a Christ-hater but as a person who was concerned about Christmas’ sordid background as a Christian celebration.

Even we Methodists have had mixed feelings about Christmas.  It was only to be a religious observation with a few modest gifts given and received.  One was not to make it too big a deal; no ostentatious display of décor or dancing were allowed.  Much of these things (use of holly and Christmas trees) were seen as being too close to pagan practice and were downright worldly.  Perhaps we have today over-reacted; we are so acculturated to our excessive commercialized self-indulgent culture that we don’t know how to reign things in and focus on Christmas as what it is meant to be; a celebration of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.

OUR CHRISTMAS TEXT??

Again, I have chosen a passage of scripture that is traditionally read and pondered on the third Sunday of Advent; Psalm 126.  It is again a passage whose connection to Christmas isn’t self-evident; that is, its association to the season doesn’t jump off the page at you.  But if one looks through the eyes of faith, one can often find the reasons for such associations and draw from the wisdom of those who have gone before.  I hope in this sermon to transform this passage into a Christmas message for us; and that this time will become for you and I a Christmas Restoration Project.

In order to do this, let’s spend some time with Psalm 126 and try to understand it in its original context.  Let’s listen to it closely to determine what it meant, then we can ask about what it means especially in terms of its relevance for this third Sunday of Advent 2005.

This Psalm deals with the re-entrance of the Jews into their homeland after their 70 years of exile in Babylon.  Cyrus the Great, the first Persian to conqueror the Babylonian Empire in a completely unexpected and very swift tidal wave of military victories, brought about a new policy of restoration.  He determined that humanity was the best policy; he elected to return those who had been exiled with military protection and complete restoration of what had been stolen.  He literally ordered that every item stolen from the Jerusalem temple would be returned to its original place.  He provided the technical wherewithal for all Jews who wanted (or any other exiled nationality) to return to their ancestral home.  Isaiah the prophet refers to Cyrus as a Messianic personage even though he was not a worshipper of the Jewish God.  Yahweh had still anointed him for this task and the restoration was God’s handiwork.

When the Lord brought about this restoration, the Psalmist said they were like those who dream.  I can just picture people walking into Jerusalem – even though it had been destroyed and was a shell of a city – and feeling a dreamy joy and elation.  I’m reminded of being in Berlin in 2002 and talking to Tomas who described what it was like for him to walk through the Berlin wall for the first time.  He said he had heard it was possibly coming down, and later that it was coming down, and he didn’t believe it.  He worked three blocks away, but he didn’t even walk over to see.  He simply didn’t believe it.  Then, the next day as he walked to work, people were running from all over East Berlin toward the wall wild with joy.  He knew something was up and he joined them.  He walked for the first time in his life to the other side, to West Berlin.  He said it was, “Wie ein Traum.”  Like a dream.

What a similar historical parallel.  This was the period of great restoration.  This was such a great restoration that even those from other nations took note and said, “Look at the amazing things the LORD has done for his people.”  The Psalmist agrees saying, “Yes!  Look at these amazing things the LORD has done for us!  What joy!”  The theme “restore the fortunes” is one that is repeated in this Psalm and is of importance.  It is also a fixed kind of idiom which is used in prophetic literature to mean something very specific; it means the radical change from being under divine wrath for rejection of the covenant to a restoration of being under divine favor.  It refers to a restoration towards a previous situation when one lived in God’s favor and in faithfulness to the covenant.  It means, “we are returning to rebuilding with the central role of Yahweh in the front-and-center of who we are.  We’re returning to our original covenantal faithfulness and being restored by Yahweh as a result.”

PAST AND PRESENT: THE CONTINUING RESTORATION

This passage has been associated with Advent because, similarly to the return from exile, the coming of Christ is a major event in the spiritual restoration of the world.  Both the restoration from exile and the coming of Christ are historical events of spiritual restoration which caused the deserts of our hearts to blossom and come alive.

Yet even though one might think in reading the first three verses that the restoration is complete, the last few verses are not what you would expect.  You might expect a “Thank-you so much, LORD, for allowing us to return.”  But what we encounter is a prayer for restoration!  Have they been restored or not?  Why pray for restoration when you’ve just thanked God for being restored?  Some translations actually make the whole Psalm a prayer for restoration since it is a bit tricky to figure this out.  Hebrew verbs are very tricky and this is a possibility almost.  There is a grammatical reason why the first three sentences almost certainly refer to something the Psalmist considers to be past.  Most of the first three verses could be thrown into the future tense, except for the first part of verse three: “The LORD has done great things for us. . .”  It is in the perfect tense, and as a perfect it isn’t going anywhere.

So what we are left with is a completed yet continuing restoration.  You see, often with the Bible, when you have an interpretation problem, the result can often be exactly where the sermon is.  That is the case here.  My sermon flows directly from this interpretive problem.  What has occurred in the past needs to continually be a recurrence in the present.  By that I mean, God’s restoration is only partially complete.  This is always the case.  The Psalmist asks for restoration to be as streams renew the desert.  The picture here is of the every-recurring rhythms of renewal that come like the seasonal freshets (or seasonal torrents of water) in the Negev.  In this region south of Jerusalem, down near the Sinai peninsula, there are seasons in which there is very little rain.  But in the spring when the rains come, torrent beds (called “wadi”) flow for a few weeks and spread out the freshness.  The whole grassland regions will explode with flowers and heavy grasses as a result.  It brings about complete renewal and the landscape is completely changed.

The Psalmist draws on that image of the seasonal rains for spiritual renewal.  It isn’t enough to have been renewed, spiritual life has hills and valleys, spring and winter.  The Psalmist ties this in to sowing and reaping time of year (v. 5-6).  There is an allusion to ANE mythology here.  In Ugaritic and Egyptian myth, seedtime was associated with the death of the fertility god and harvest was associated with the reawakening of the fertility god.  So sowing was often carried out with tears to express grief over the death of the fertility god, and harvest associated with joy at the revival of the fertility god.  While the Bible reject polytheism, it does sometimes draw upon images from the general cultural background and transforms them as we see here. 

But the cycles or patterns of sowing and harvest, sadness and joy, are drawn upon here as a pattern of spiritual life.  Our own spiritual lives have the same patterns and rhythms.  What can we apply from these verses?

RESTORATION: A NEVER ENDING PROCESS

When the Psalmist prays, “Restore our fortunes God, as streams in the desert” he is praying something like, “Lord, restore us now and restore us later when we need it again.  We’ll continually be in need of restoration, because we’ll forget what you’ve taught us in a few years, and probably be back where we started.  So continue this process of spiritual restoration in our lives.”  God knows we all naturally go through spiritual highs and lows.  But what I get out of this is quite simple.  No matter what kinds of spiritual highs you may or may not have already had and no matter how disciplined your daily spiritual life is, your continued walk with God will demand something very simple; spiritual restoration.  This is something you and I must seek together.  I seek it for myself and for this church. 

The deepest prayer of my heart right now is that this church can begin a new period of true spiritual restoration.  As I prepared this sermon, I prayed over and over with these very words: Lord, let there be here in this place a restoration of our spiritual fortunes.  May we be restored to an new state of spiritual vigor and vitality.  May be find joy and excitement in our walk with you.  May our fellowship be like a wadi in the springtime: just exploding with new flowers and wildlife.  May those who have gone forth sowing with tears now come in harvesting with shouts of joy!  May we sing over the harvest.  May everything good that has happened here be simply a precursor to what you intend to do. 

I’m going to be preaching a series of sermons on prayer in the spring.  I choose that topic out of a sense that the kind of spiritual restoration I long for goes far beyond anything that can be achieved by the daily rigors of pastoral life – no matter how well executed.  You don’t execute this; it pray it into existence – just as the Psalmist is doing here.

I believe God always leaves us – intentionally leaves us – with a sense of spiritual longing.  Spiritual longing is a good thing.  It is the kind of discontent that drives us to our knees and humbles us to prepare us.  God could make prayer easy; you pray it, God does it.  In case you hadn’t noticed, it isn’t easy.  Spiritually alive life is not easy and it does not get easier.  It is an interesting combination of faith, discipline, longing, and sheer persistence.  No matter how wonderful our mountaintop spiritual experiences are, we soon find ourselves in the valley again.  Like the torrent bed which enjoys its spring freshets – seasonal deluge of rainwater – but later dries and withers, so we continually come back to the fountain of life for another drink.

I think we need to realize and appreciate the important role of the rhythms, the longing, the dry times.  They are what spur us forward to seek God again in this new situation.  Don’t be discouraged if you don’t feel like you used to, if you are not as spirit-filled as you used to be.  There are patterns of spiritual life that remain.  But seek God again.  Seeking after spiritual renewal is something we never outgrow.  I certainly haven’t. 

WHAT WOULD IT TAKE?

What would it take to transform your Christmas this year into a spiritual “stream in the desert”?  What could you do that would alter your Christmas season into spiritual restoration?  May I recommend the obvious?  May I recommend the wisdom of the early Methodists who understood that the typical cultural celebration of Christmas is way way too complicated, too overdone, too expensive, too self-indulgent.  Increasingly, Kitty and I purchase for people – my parents in particular – a gift from Samaritan’s Purse.  Last year we got my parents a few goats for Christmas.  Now my dad actually would love a few new goats.  But he didn’t get them.  A family in Africa got them, and they got a card telling them so.  They absolutely loved it and asked for it again.  If any of you have considered getting our family a gift, if it is a baked item, we would love it!  But we would prefer a goat, or a hoe, or a well – in our name.

I encourage you to do something different this year at Christmas.  Sing carols and read the Christmas story.  Go even further.  Maybe you should leave your home and help in a shelter of some sort – perhaps not on Christmas day but you might even do that!  Let’s stop doing the same-old-same-old.  Let’s celebrate Christmas in a whole new way and say, “Lord, let the waters flow again through these old worn-out trenches.  Let the desert explode with new life.  May my spiritual life blossom in a whole new way this year.”  Make spiritual restoration the point of your Christmas celebration this year.  Nothing would better honor the Christ of Bethlehem better.