December 11, 2011
Love Requires Character
December 11, 2011
I want to take a moment this morning as I begin my message to engage your ears in a slightly different way than normal. I want you to close your eyes and just listen to some sounds – some are going to be recorded, and some are going to be live, but just listen.
(Live sounds – cow bell; counter call bell; dinner bell; singing bowl)
Okay, open your eyes. Those are all bells of our world, and there are a thousand more where those came from. We hear them every day, and they speak to us of different things. Some bells sounds awaken memories in us; some are soothing; some speak to us of joy or solemnity; some call us to action or duty; and some set our teeth on edge and either drive us away or make us willing to do just about anything to get them to stop! On the other hand, if you want to hear an expression of unbridled joy, hand a four-year-old a bell and tell them to ring it as loud and as long as they want – it may indeed be a joyful noise, but I guarantee you, you will get tired of the sound long before he does! But I chose bells as the symbol for this week for us, to go with the candle of Joy, because I want to focus on the idea of John and his words “ringing out the joyful message” of God’s love for His people.
Bells and Christmas have gone together in my mind for, well, my entire life. I remember my father playing his record of “Snoopy’s Christmas” over and over again – it came out four years before I was born and sang of how Snoopy had gone out to duel the Red Baron on Christmas Eve, only to find himself at his sworn enemy’s supper table for a Christmas dinner. The chorus sings, “Christmas bells, those Christmas bells, ringing through the land / Bringing peace to all the world, and good-will to man.” Christmas decorations everywhere include bells– bells on trees, bells on wreaths, bells on garlands; I’m pretty sure my father-in-law has a long garland with tuned bells along its length that you can plug in and it will play Christmas carols if you turn it on (and he always does!). We have bells, bells, everywhere, ringing out the good news that Jesus has been born.
Now, there is another use for bells that I want to touch on for a moment, and it comes to us from our brothers and sisters in the faith down at the Roman Catholic church. If I had ever heard of sanctus bells before reading about them this week, I had long forgotten it, but these are a set of bells that are rung at the moment of the consecration of the elements, especially when the priest is using the old Latin Mass – the person in the pew may have no clue as to what the priest is saying, but the moment the bells are rung, everyone knows that the wafer of the Host and the wine have been fully consecrated and, according to Catholic belief, are now actually the body and blood of Christ; in other words, it is believed that Jesus is actually present in that service of worship. And it’s not just the sanctus bells, but often the bell in the belfry was struck once to let everyone who wasn’t at that mass but was at least within earshot know that the blessed event had occurred. One priest who was commenting on the use of bells around the sacrament referenced Psalm 98:4, “Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth, burst into jubilant song with music…”
Ring your bells.
Sound out your joy.
And let everyone hear you!
I found myself comparing John the Baptist and his message to a bell, sounding out not the birth of Jesus but the coming of God’s messiah. As we were saying last week when we read Mark’s version of this passage, despite what some people wanted to believe about him, John was not the messiah himself but rather the herald, the messenger, the crier jangling his bell and proclaiming his news to anyone who would listen. Repent. Confess. Turn away from sin. Turn to God. His message rang out loud and clear and strong and we’re told that people came from miles around to be baptized in the Jordan as a symbol of their desire to repent of their sins.
Now, given some of what I’ve been reading this week about bells, I found myself wondering at points about how harsh John’s words actually were. I mean, I’ve occasionally seen him portrayed almost as a howling madman, as though he were trying to get people to listen with the mere force of his words – fling enough invective at those that the common people don’t particularly like and you’ll win them over without a problem, or so it seems in those portrayals. Except the Temple people were coming to see John too! Tax collectors, merchants, farmers, fisherman, soldiers, as well as Pharisees and scribes were coming to see him. Those who heard him and heard something that applied to them and that they could get behind were baptized; those who had questions that received what they thought were unacceptable answers went away in dismay, though whether it was with John or with themselves could be a matter for debate. But John’s message rang out true to many people: You are sinners; repent! You are lost, but God’s messiah is coming to find you!
God wants us to “ring out true” as well – whether we are a little tinkler or a great big monster bell, we are called to ring out true with the gospel of Jesus Christ. I mean, like John, we are not the messiah, but our lives, our words, and our examples set the stage for the words of Christ Himself to take hold in the hearts of those around us. If we want to “ring out true” as John did, then we need to take some lessons from his character: who he was and what he showed out.
First, he was Honest, with himself and with the crowd. He knows who he is and where his relationship should be with the messiah, which is proclaiming His coming but then being willing to follow and not insist on leading. In the same way, we are called to be honest with ourselves and with the world around us – we’re not better than those around us just because we follow Jesus Christ, but we are forgiven for the sins that we have turned over to Him, and we seek forgiveness from those we have wronged in this world. I’m going to call this coming to terms with our shape, and I’ll clarify this in a few moments.
John’s honesty goes hand-in-hand with his Modesty – no matter what people tried to say to him or how much they tried to elevate him to a higher position, he knew, in his heart of hearts, that he was below the messiah, and that he needed to stay there. Now, we often use the word ‘humility’ in the place of modesty, and the story that usually goes with that word is Jesus’ encouragement not to sit at the high place at a feast but to sit lower down and let the host of the feast say, “No, you come up and sit by me,” and raise you to the position he sees fit for you. Some people take humility to an extreme, though, and refuse to let themselves be praised for anything that they might do, and I don’t think that’s quite right. Modesty, to me, is an acceptance of, “I am what God has made me, what He has allowed and empowered me to be.” I found myself thinking of some of the chefs who have appeared on some of my favourite cooking competition shows – I never cheer for the one who says aloud that he or she is better than the other competitors, but always root for anyone who says, “I’m just here to prove that I’m at least as good as the others on the show.” Modesty, to me, is saying, “I’m not perfect, but this is what I can do!” And people are looking and listening for that in us as we walk our walk with Jesus Christ and talk our talk with them. And that’s knowing our “tune.”
The tricky part, though, is trying to emulate John’s courage – John had a message calling people to repentance and was willing to stand up for that message. We need the courage to speak or to act when the situation calls for it. Now, as I wrote that in my notes, I realized that this is not always easy to determine based on the moral and philosophical climate of our day. We live in a very fractious society, where we are supposed to tolerate just about everything, except of course the things that are intolerable. Unfortunately, your personal list of those things is probably different from my list of those things, and while you have to tolerate me, I don’t necessarily have to tolerate you. So, yes, I am a little cynical about the issue of “tolerance” and have been for some time. Jesus did preach forgiveness, but some things were still wrong – lying was wrong; stealing was wrong; adultery was wrong; murder was wrong; hate was wrong; greed was wrong; ignoring the needy was wrong; and consciously turning away from God to exalt yourself was wrong. They were wrong; they’re still wrong. Courage is seeing something on this list and saying, “That’s not what’s supposed to be.”
However, I’m not going to stand up here and tell you that I have always had the courage that John had – I know of several situations in my life where I have failed to act or speak because I was afraid of what the response might be. I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, and the Canadian in me would rather be hurt than inflict hurt. But John spoke, and he wouldn’t recant, and it cost him his head, and I can’t help thinking that if more people had also been willing to speak and stand by the truth, his death wouldn’t have happened.
But, of course, if more people had been willing to speak and stand by the truth, we wouldn’t have needed Jesus.
As I said earlier, the world needs us to ring out true. Now, I originally entitled this message “Love Requires Character” because your ‘character’ is who you are when nobody is looking. If it helps, think of it as two bells – one for the public ‘you’ and one for the private ‘you’. If they don’t ring the same note, then what is heard is dissonant, hurtful to the ears, and will drive people away. It’s not a joyful noise, and yet we are here praying to be ‘joyful noises’.
We’re asking to be tuned.
We’re asking to be shaped.
But after this has happened, we also have to have the courage to ask God to “ring” us, to have us ring out together with the chiming glory of Jesus Christ within us, inviting others to ring with us. When we ring together, amazing things can happen. Consider, as we close, something that Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote in 1990, in his book entitled “Crying in the Wilderness.” He said…
The Church of God has to be the salt and light of the world. We are the hope of the hopeless, through the power of God. We must transfigure a situation of hate and suspicion, of brokenness and separation, of fear and bitterness. We have no option. We are servants of the God who reigns and cares. He wants us to be the alternative society; where there is harshness and insensitivity we must be compassionate and caring; where people are statistics, we must show they count as being of immense value to God; where there is grasping and selfishness, we must be a sharing community now.
In the early Church people were attracted to it not so much by the preaching, but by the fact that they saw Christians as a community, living a new life as if what God had done was important, and had made a difference. They saw a community of those who, whether poor or rich, male or female, free or slave, young or old – all quite unbelievably loved and cared for each other. It was the lifestyle of the Christians that was witnessing.
Let us be servants.
Let us be witnesses.
Let us ring out true with the word and love and joy of Jesus Christ, now and always.
Amen.
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