New Beginnings
By Rev Julie Yarborough
January 1, 2006
Luke 2: 22-40
r text for this sermon is Luke 2, verses 22 through 40:
And when the
time came for purification according to the Law of Moses, Mary and Joseph
brought Jesus up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord, and to
offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the Law of the Lord, a pair of
turtle doves or two young pigeons.
Now there
was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, and this man
was righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon
him. And it had been revealed to him by
the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord
Christ. And inspired by the Spirit, he
came into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for
him according to the custom of the law, he took Jesus up in his arms and
blessed God and said, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,
according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast
prepared in the presence of all people; a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
and the glory of thy people Israel.”
And Joseph
and Mary marveled at what was said about Jesus. And Simeon blessed them, and
said unto Mary his mother, “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising
again of many in Israel; and for a sign which is spoken
against; and a sword will pierce through thy own soul also; thoughts out of
many hearts may be revealed.”
And there
was a prophetess Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of
the tribe of Aser. She was of great age, and had
lived with a husband seven years from her virginity; she was a widow of about
84, who did not depart from the temple, but served God with fastings
and prayers night and day. And she coming in that instant gave thanks likewise
unto the Lord, and spoke of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem. When they had performed all things
according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city Nazareth. And the child grew, and waxed
strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him.
Please join me in prayer. Gracious
and Loving God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our
hearts be acceptable to you, our rock and our redeemer. Amen
A couple weeks ago I was listening to Public Radio as I was driving in my car,
and I heard the end of an interview with a woman who has just written a book on
Feng Shui. Now I don't know a lot about
Feng Shui, but I understand that it is an Eastern philosophy of how you
decorate your house and place your furniture in order to best tap into the
energy of the universe. She said
something that was really fascinating to me. She was talking about clutter in our homes, and how clutter keeps us
from tapping into life's energies, into that universal force. And she talked about the need to clear out
clutter in order to make yourself ready for new possibilities in your
life. She was talking about physical
clutter. And she talked about people who
have financial trouble and how if you clear out stacks of old bills or receipts
that are just accumulating in your house (either file them away, or just toss
them, shred them, whatever) that you can open yourself up to new financial
possibilities.
She talked about a woman she
had worked with who was desperately wanting to get married, but there was no
one in her life. And so she helped her
clear away figurines of single women in her house that she said were taking up
space and that they were impeding her access to “couplehood”. I don't know if that works, but it sounded
like an interesting theory to me, and I began to think about the spiritual and
emotional clutter in our lives that gets in the way of our tapping into the
possibilities of new opportunities in our lives. And I do think that there is something to that,
clearing out of clutter in order to be open to the new. So as a New Year's resolution this year,
I've already started clearing out clutter – physical clutter – in our home
office. We spent all day Friday working
on it, and it felt good just to get rid of some of that stuff and do some
cleaning and organizing.
So, back to
spiritual clutter. I think that
there is a need to say goodbye to things that are holding us back from fully
experiencing life. What kinds of
emotional or spiritual clutter are we holding onto? What do you need to let go of in order
to make room for new possibilities in your life, as this new
year is starting?
One of my favorite books is by
an author named Joyce Rupp. The book is
called Praying Our Goodbyes. I've
used it a lot with the women's retreat. She has some really practical exercises for saying goodbye to old grief
or loss – things that hold us back from experiencing life fully. She says that saying goodbye is seldom easy,
but it is part of life, part of our daily life. We say hello and goodbye all the time,
everyday. We say hello when someone
walks in the door, we say goodbye when our spouse leaves for work or our
children leave for school. Our lives are
a process of saying hello and saying goodbye, and you can think about that on
any level.
As I was preparing the sermon
for this morning I came up with some quotes that I thought were fun, that had to do with saying hello and goodbye. The first is from T.S. Elliot, from Little Gidding,
part of the Four Quartets. “What we call the beginning is often the
end. And to make an end is to make a
beginning. The end is where we start from.” Here's another one that all you Beatles fans will be familiar with (Sing
along with me!): “Hello, hello! I don't
know why you say goodbye. I say Hello.” And one from Joyce Rupp, from Praying Our
Goodbyes: “For the Christian, hello
always follows goodbye in some form, if we allow it. There is or can be new
life, although it will be different from the life we knew before. The
resurrection of Jesus and the promises of God are too strong to have it be any
other way.”
Joyce Rupp gives four steps in
the process of saying goodbye.
The first step is to recognize
what it is that we need to let go of. Perhaps it's old resentments or grudges, perhaps it's
need for control in a certain situation. Maybe you have emotional scars from your childhood that you've been
holding onto for a very long time. Maybe
you have fear or anxiety about something in your life, something that's coming,
for instance, or something that you have no control over. Maybe you're in an unhealthy relationship,
and you need to let go of people around you who are holding you back from doing
what you need to do in your life. Maybe
you're in a dead-end or life-draining job and it's time to quit and move on and
find something else that gives you more life. Perhaps you're dealing with old grief or loss from a divorce or a job or
a move. Perhaps you need to let go of a
person, someone who has died, a friendship that has ended, or a child who has
gone off to school or who has gotten married. Maybe it's the loss of health
that you need to say goodbye to, or the loss of your youth – the aging process
is certainly a time for saying goodbye. Or maybe it's simply the image that you had of where you would be in
life by this point, or who you would be at this point in your life, and it
hasn't been realized. You could come up
with your own things that you need to let go of, things that are holding you
back from experiencing life to the fullest. I'll let you think about that.
The second step that Joyce Rupp
gives us is to accept the wisdom and necessity of not clinging to whatever it
is that's holding you back, and to realize that it often takes more energy to
stay in one place than it does to move on. Consider the image of a hovering humming bird. Do you realize that it takes a hummingbird
over 1,000 heart beats a minute just to keep flying in the air? Imagine the energy that is expended by trying
to hover in one place, instead of moving on into the new – the emotional
energy, the psychic energy that we expend just trying to hold onto what we know
because of fears of moving on into the future.
The third step is to gather the
energy and the will to take action. Again, it's never easy, and it often takes awhile. It's a process, not something that happens
all at once. Prayer can be very helpful
in this regard. If there's something
that we need to let go of, praying about it can be a very helpful exercise.
The fourth and final step is to
surrender whatever it is, to give it to God, trusting that God will take care
of it, and take care of us, and that it is OK to move on. The Holy Spirit is that which enables us to
move on, knowing that God is with us. When Jesus left his disciples, he told them (in the Gospel of John) “Do
not be afraid: Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you, and when I go, God is going to send an advocate
to be with you, a comforter, a guide, and that comforter is known as the Holy
Spirit.”
In our text this morning,
Simeon is lifted up as a man who was full of the Holy Spirit. He was in touch with God's presence in his
life. In fact, he was so much in touch
with God's presence in his life that it was the Holy Spirit that prompted him
to go to the temple that day in order to meet this new messiah that was coming
into the world. And once he got to the
temple and greeted the infant Jesus, he knew that his role in life was
finished. It was time for him to
let go, to let go of his very life here on earth and move on into the life
which was to come. He was able to do
that because he was so much in touch with the Holy Spirit, with God's presence
in his life.
When I left my last church, in Connecticut,
I was reminded of a book that I first read in Seminary. It was a book called Running through the
Thistles by Roy Oswald. In the book,
Roy talks leaving a number of
churches over a number of years, and saying goodbye to people in different
churches. In fact he didn't really say
goodbye. He was so
bad as saying goodbye that he just left. When it was time for him to go, he just went. He didn't want to have any fuss to be made
over him, he didn't really people to grieve and he didn't allow himself to
grieve. So years later he was feeling an
immense grief, and he couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Suddenly he realized that it was all of the
grief that he had never dealt with as he moved from church to church. He had never allowed himself to feel the
grief that he needed to feel, and to move through it in order to move on. He had just carried it with him. He said it reminded of him of when he was a child and he walked
home from school. There was a short-cut
that he and his brothers would often take, but it meant running through a field
of thistles. For whatever reason, they
were often barefoot. They would be
coming home from school, and they could take the long way around but it would
take a lot longer, so they would run though this field of thistles thinking
that if they ran it wouldn't hurt as much. But the thorns would get imbedded in the bottoms of their feet, and it
would take a while for them to work themselves out. He said that's what this process is like
when you don't deal with your grief as it comes up. It's like running through a field of thistles. You think you're going to get there faster,
but the thorns get embedded and it takes a lot longer for them to come
out. Sometimes taking a short-cut is
really longer, in the long run.
Unresolved grief keeps us from fully
entering into the new. And when I talk about letting go of things,
you can't just let go of grief without dealing with it; you have to work
through it. Sometimes the step of
gathering the energy and the will to take action is a really long process
because we have to work through unresolved grief. You have to go through the pain and the
sorrow in order to get to the other side.
What is it that you need
to let go of? What is it that you need
to get rid of in order to fully enter the new?
I want to invite you to join me
this morning as we enter into this New Year together. When you came in you should have received
two pieces of paper – green and yellow – and a pencil. I'd like for you to take the yellow sheet of
paper, and draw on it a garbage can, large enough to write in. (It doesn't have to be a beautiful work of
art, since nobody else is going to see it, just you.) And on the green piece of
paper I want you to draw a picture of a suitcase. Now, take
the yellow piece of paper, with your garbage can. I want you to think about some spiritual or
emotional thing that you need to let go of. What do you need to leave behind, now that the New Year is upon us. Write this in
your garbage can as a symbol of letting it. In your suitcase, I want you to think about what blessings you have that
you want to carry into the New Year with you. I'll give you a few minutes to do this. Bob's going to play a little background music while we're doing this
exercise.
When you're finished I'd like
to invite you to fold up the green piece of paper with the suitcase on it and
stick it into your pocket or your purse and carry it with you as a reminder of
all the blessings in your life that you're taking with you into the New
Year. Then I want you to wad up that
yellow piece of paper, and if you wish, bring it with you when you come up for
communion. If you want to destroy it
yourself, that's fine, but if you would
like to bring it with you, you can put it into this metal waste basket here,
and I'm going to take it outside following the worship service and literally
burn it in a grill. You're welcome to come with me, if you like. I won't look at them, I promise, what you wrote
here is between you and God; it's a symbol of letting go.
This new year,
2006, brings with it many unknowns, but we can find comfort in knowing that no
matter where the new year takes us, God is already there. The Holy Spirit is with us as guide,
advocate, and comforter, and with God's help we can let go of whatever we need
to in order to move into the new.
Please join me in prayer. God,
help us to release whatever it is that we need to let go of, so that we might
fully embrace this new year, so that we might more fully live in the present,
and in your presence. Amen.
© 2005
Julie Yarborough.
All rights reserved.