Many years ago, on an episode of the famous show Seinfeld my favourite character, Kramer, went to a car dealership to test out a new vehicle. The salesman said to him, as they often do, “Would you like to take the car for a test drive?” Well, Kramer’s eyes lit up! He got behind the wheel and he and the salesperson drove and drove and drove. Kramer wanted to check out this Saab to make sure that it would stand up to the rigours of his requirements. Now, the irony is that he had no money at all! But, he had the salesman convinced that he was going to buy this car. After considerable time the red light came on to show that the car was low in gas. Kramer said to the salesman, “We should just keep on driving it. You say it gets good mileage, let’s just keep on driving it.” The salesman was enthralled with the prospect of seeing how far one of his cars would go on a tank of gas, and the two of them got into this almost adrenaline filled ecstasy as they drove further and further, deeper and deeper into the E-zone of the tank. Red lights were flashing, the car was spluttering and shaking, but still they were going to go on. They were going to hit the thruway. They were going to make it. Of course they ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere. And the show ended.
I thought there was something clever about this Seinfeld show. It took human reality, human aspirations, and exaggerated it just a little bit. In this particular case, you were caught up with the same sort of adrenaline as if you were hurtling towards something, and then suddenly: Crisis! Everything goes wrong! Fear steps in, and uncertainty with it – just like human experience. In many ways, I think what happened to Kramer in Seinfeld is a wonderful example of how in our society, particularly in the western world, but maybe in the whole world, we are thrilled by the ecstasy and the happiness and the joy that we crave so much, but also the danger and the fear and the uncertainty that we face.
We are living in a time when we are perplexed with the nexus between two seemingly irreconcilable things. These seem to be the two great longings of humanity. One of them is freedom, that innate desire that we have, not to be constrained, to live to our full potential, to be able to do what we want to do and be what we want to be. We love freedom. But at the same time, we want security. We want to know that we can live our freedom without the constraints or the worry of tyranny. We are often torn, because on the one hand to have freedom, you have to have security. There has to be a boundary that protects the freedoms you have. On the other hand, you need the freedom to have the security, because security without freedom is tyranny. So we live with these two incredible longings; these two incredible needs.
I sense, but maybe I am wrong, maybe I am reading the signs wrong, a craving, a longing in our society for some very basic things: happiness. We want to enjoy life. We want to have all the benefits that come from our freedom, and we want to be able to live in happiness all our days. We want to live, do we not, with freedom, with peace and security, and we crave a world of peace and security, one we don’t have to think about because it is automatically there. We crave a clean environment, a clean world that can be passed on to children, and children’s children. We want a world that is going to sustain itself for years to come. We want all these things. We want freedom and cleanliness and security and happiness and joy. We want these things; we have a deep longing for them. But in our deep longing for them, there are times unfortunately when we actually turn in the wrong direction to bring those very things about or to preserve those very things for which the heart longs, we make mistakes. The great preacher Stephen Farris wrote the following, and I think he is right. “Our longing or anxiety for comfort and security leads to practices of accumulation that both in their means and their ends are forgetful of the coming of the Lord. We are living in an exhausted, depleted, polluted world, largely losing in our efforts to accumulate.”
Stephen Farris has preached from this pulpit, and will again next summer, and is absolutely right on the mark!
The things that we often crave lead to errors and we make decisions that are ill advised. For example, in our desire for security one of the great dangers that we have is creating something that is as ancient as the Book of Leviticus in The Old Testament: we try to find a scapegoat in order to have our security. The scapegoat in biblical terms was the goat that would be picked out of the herd and ultimately sacrificed so all the others might be safe and secure. The classic example in human form of the scapegoat is Jesus of Nazareth. After all, what is the Cross but the scapegoat of Jesus bearing the sufferings of the world for the salvation of all the rest? Jesus was the ultimate scapegoat! We create scapegoats. It doesn’t matter what form they take. In every era human beings have done this. The scapegoat is a manifestation of the fear of insecurity. In that fear, we turn on a group, a movement, a faith, a race, because we think by creating a scapegoat we are going to have security. It has happened for thousands of years and it is happening again now
It is the same with freedom. Freedom is one of the great virtues of life. It has been the foundation for complete societies and their constitutions. But freedom that becomes licence can become dangerous. When there is no sense of responsibility or accountability, this can happen. I did not realize, and do not misunderstand me, I am not equating something with a direct action here, I am just bringing out a point that, at the Bataclan on the night the terrorists attacked, the performing band was singing songs in praise of the devil. Freedom has its responsibilities. It is the same when we crave a wonderful environment and want a beautiful world and we make great schemes and wonderful statements. But of what value are these wonderful statements when on our own doorsteps, in our own nation, there are groups of people who live with water that is undrinkable, and cannot sustain family life in their communities, right on the doorstep of our own First Nations, never mind grand schemes. At times, we become so vague in our gestures that we forget the specifics of what is around us.
It is the same with one of the other great challenges of our time: Boredom. People feeling that there is no value or worth in their life. It happens to different generations at different times, so what do we do, “we entertain ourselves to death” – to quote the great Neil Postman. In other words, we try to find meaning in escapism rather than dealing with life and our neighbors, and society, or even ourselves. Our longings for good things can easily become distorted, and in our desire for a happy song and a good life, we lose our way.
This is why I love today’s passage. It is like a song. It is perhaps a little tacky to say it, but it is a happy song that has reverberated through our faith for two thousand years. There is no greater passage of scripture I don’t think than the passage from Philippians today. It was written after all by a man sitting in a Roman prison facing a capital charge. The Apostle Paul clearly had an amount of money on his head, and he was sitting, waiting to die. Talk about stress! He was writing to a group of Christians in Philippi, this great pluralistic city where the whole world would meet, people who were profoundly generous, who had sent one of their members to comfort him, but at the same time they were poor and often had menial jobs. The Philippian Church wasn’t wealthy, but they were generous. They didn’t have great resources, but they were kind. They were living in an uncertain world, not knowing if they are going to see their great leader again. Paul writes these epic words, and surely they will help us as believers deal with this world and this longing that we have: “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again, I say rejoice!”
The first line in this lyric is rejoice, and like all great rabbis, he repeats it, “And again, I say rejoice”, which means you better take this word seriously. Rejoice in the Lord again! On what did Paul predicate this rejoicing? “The Lord is near”. For Paul, no matter what the people faced or whatever great stresses and insecurities he encountered, he always knew this one fact, “The Lord is near.” It is not that the Lord is distant; it is not that the Lord has left him alone; the Lord is present and his rejoicing is predicated on that. He would be thinking I am sure of the great passage that I read before our sermon today from Isaiah. Paul, a Jewish teacher, would have known this passage, and that the joy of the people of God is that God will create a new Jerusalem, a new world. For Paul, he sees this new world, this new Jerusalem, in none other than the very Son of God, Jesus Christ himself. God has become human.
I don’t know about you, but over time, hymns and carols that once were meaningless take on new meaning. There was one such carol played at the magnificent concert last night that I have thought about a great deal recently. As a young person, I thought it was schmaltzy, saccharin, just horrible. No man in his right mind would sing Away in a Manger! I disliked it intensely I never sang it! I didn’t want anyone to see me singing Away in a Manger. Didn’t have guts! Hark the Herald Angels Sings, one of David’s favourites, that is fine, but Away in a Manger? No! Maybe I have softened, because now I read one of those lines and I realize that this is powerful: “Be near me Lord Jesus, I ask you to stay close by me forever, and love me I pray.”
As I read that, it became an entirely different thing. The nearness of Christ is what makes Christmas so powerful. The nearness of Christ is what makes the rejoicing so meaningful. I think of all the wars and rumours of wars and fears and insecurities and longings in our hearts. Sometimes we forget the simple reality that the Lord is near. C. S. Lewis put it this way: “ God cannot give happiness and peace apart from himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”
In other words, happiness and peace are from the nearness of God. Powerful! But then he says something else, and it is a word that even in translating this over the years I’ve passed by. I have read this passage a thousand times, and it never seems to strike me! But somehow this year it resonated! It is the word “gentleness”. Let your gentleness be known. Another translation in Old English is “Let your forbearance be known.” Oh, how desperately we need some gentleness in our world! For Paul, gentleness was not an idea; it was rooted in Christ. Read earlier in the Book of Philippians and there it all is. This is the Lord who did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but took the form of a servant, and humbled himself, even to the point of death. For the Apostle Paul, gentleness is manifested in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Gentleness is evidence of all that Jesus did. Gentleness is present in the parables, such as, The Good Samaritan, where it seemed like the one person in the whole world that would care for you, represented everything that you thought was terrible in the world, and the Samaritan was the one who did the work of God. When Jesus was asked the question, “Who is my neighbor?” he points to the one that you actually don’t want to recognize. That is gentleness. That is forbearance. It is what this world is craving.
There is a third word that hits you in this lyric: Prayer. In everything by prayer and supplication make your requests be known to God. In other words, pray for yourself. Pray a sense of thanksgiving that God was already accomplishing things. Pray for others. I have thought about Christ and what he said about prayer. I have gone back and I re-read my Gospels again, and Jesus is absolutely and totally radical in his notion of prayer. He even says at one point that you should pray for your enemies (Matthew 5:44). I wonder if, deep down in our hearts, that is something that we have done. When you look at the world and its conflicts, are we actually pouring out our hearts in prayer for those who we see doing wrong? I challenge you, I challenged myself, in the midst of all of this, have we ever stopped and prayed for ISIS, that God would do something miraculous and heal and change them? Have we asked God, through prayer, for the leaders of this world who have had to make enormous decisions about those two things, freedom and security? Do we lift them up in prayer? Do we get on our knees and say, “Lord, help those who are trying to protect and help us? Are we praying for people who find themselves in positions of danger, the first responders in our society? Can you imagine how stressful it must be for them in a time of insecurity and uncertainty? Pray for them, says Paul.
Remember we are not praying to the people; we are praying and we are asking God. I love Bill Moyers, who was the Press Secretary for Lyndon Johnson while he was President of the United States. Moyers tells a lovely story of how he was asked to say grace before a meal. He stood up and started to say grace, and the President jumps in and says, “Speak up, man! I can’t hear a damned word you are saying!”
Moyers just looked at him and said, “I am not actually speaking to you.”
When we pray, we are not praying to somebody; we are praying to God. We are asking God to do even beyond what our longings suggest.
The fourth word is: Everything. Paul says, “In everything by prayer and supplication.” In other words, there is nothing beyond the grace and the rejoicing and the love and the healing of Almighty God. There’s nothing! There is no one, no group, no nation, and no subject. Nothing is beyond the power of God to touch. Nothing! “In everything by prayer and supplications, let your requests be made known to God.” I think that is a radical call to a whole new hymn, to a whole new song, that in fact we can pray for everything. And at times when we do that, we say “How effective are our prayers? What change does it really make? How much difference does it create?”
Some time ago I heard one of the great Christian speakers of the last fifty years, Tony Campolo, in an interview. He was talking about prayer. He recounted a story of when he was an itinerant preacher and went to Oregon to preach at a church that he didn’t know with people that he had never seen. After the service, a woman, with a husband who was very frail, came up to him and asked him if he would pray for her husband, who was right there. Tony prayed, he laid hands on him, he talked to him and listened to him. He ended it with a closing prayer. A few days later, he received a telephone call in his hotel room, The woman said, “You know, your prayers have made a big difference to my husband.”
Tony said, “It had made an impression?”
She said, “Yes, he is dead. He died last night.”
Tony felt grief-stricken. He felt inadequate. He had doubts. She continued, “But there is something you should know. Before this last Sunday, my husband was extremely angry that he wouldn’t see some of his children and grandchildren graduate, that his business partners would left in the lurch, that he wouldn’t see the next Super Bowl, that he was being deprived of all these things. After you prayed with him, he came home and he rejoiced in all the things that he had in his life. He thanked God for everything he had been given. Rather than looking at the disappointments that were ahead, he looked at the accomplishments that were behind, and recounted stories of wonderful things that had occurred. He knew that he could leave the people that he loved in the hands of God. You see, Doctor Campolo, your praying didn’t bring a cure, but it did bring healing.”
I believe prayer can heal, and I think the Apostle Paul knew that, and that there is nothing outside the grace and the love and the concern of God, because God is near. In our world’s longing for the things it desires let these longings be known to God, and let us emulate the One to whom we pray in this happy, happy song! Amen.