An Altogether Hope by Rev. Gabrielle Martone at Pearl River United Methodist Church on Sunday 8 December 2019
Jump to
Scripture of the Day
Sermon
1 Peter 1:3-5, Romans 15:4-13 NRSV
1 Peter 1:3-5
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
Romans 15:4-13
For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.
May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, “Therefore I will confess you among the Gentiles, and sing praises to your name”; and again he says, “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people”; and again, “Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples praise him”; and again Isaiah says, “The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope.”
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Last week when we talked about The Advent story we were talking about peace, and we talked about Mary and Elizabeth, and what it must've been like to be two women on opposite sides of life but in very similar predicaments. This week I want to talk to you about the shepherds. The shepherds who were the outcasts and those that did not belong in society. Those who never made it into town when they were supposed to be there for the right religious ceremonies, those who were the kinds of folks that when you pass them you would turn your nose up and walk away. They were the people that would walk into a space and immediately smell like wet farm. You all can imagine that scent, right?
There were not the people that were special or important. They were a lowly and outcasts. They spent more time in the hills by themselves tending sheep that are not that smart and being rejected by the folks in the main towns and areas. Shepherds were not well educated, they were not well loved, they were the people that you shut your door at and walked on the other side of the street against. There were the people that you purposely avoided. And yet, and yet, when Jesus Christ is born, the first people to hear of the news are the shepherds. The outcasts, the lowly, those who do not belong.
What does it mean for us that when God incarnate was birthed into life on the earth, that the first people who heard of His coming were the people most of us would never welcome into our homes. The beautiful and incredible and amazing thing about what God does in the birth of Jesus Christ is He completely shifts everything. He takes everything that the world thinks it should be and He flips it on its head and He says, "Those that you think belong, do not. And those who you have outcast are the ones that will first greet the Messiah."
The hope of the whole world resides not in King Herod's temple, not in Kings Herod's castle, not in King Herod's place of righteousness and power, no. The little baby shows up to an unwed mom, born in a stable. His first bed is a feeding trough. The first people to come and bring gifts were shepherds.
If the King of all Kings was going to be born, people expected that it would happen in a place of great power and authority. The power that is given because we have money and wealth and influence, the power that is given of humans and not of man or of God. The power and the authority that we give because we have played games and we have focused on the wrong things, because we are more concerned about our own stuff than we are about our brother and sister who has nothing.
One of the most important places in my own personal faith, growth and transformation has been this really special place in Southeastern Kentucky. Nestled into the hollers of Leslie, and Bell, and Clay County, sits this mission. And it is a mission that has existed for over 95 years. It was first started by missionaries on a horseback who came to a place that no one else was going to be able to offer medical care and education. Pleased to remind people that while the rest of the world had forgotten about them, they were still loved. And this is a community and a mission that has existed there and has educated countless children in a way that they probably would not have received elsewhere.
It is a place that has employed people. It is a place that has helped people out of dire and complete poverty. It is a place where people's needs are met and their souls are fed. And every year we send a group of people down there to do rebuilding of homes. Okay? My very first year is 12 years old. My dad and I went, and the story of how my father who does not go to church regularly, it was when we were kids he would come if we were about to sing or do something fun. And then all of a sudden I started preaching week and that was not enough to draw him to church.
But when I was younger, my home church went every year. And I got so excited hearing about the adventures that the people I looked up to in church went on, that one day I came home and I said to my father, "Daddy," I'm the oldest, I have those daddy eyes. "Daddy, when I'm old enough, will you take me to Red Bird?" And he was like, "Yeah, sure." Right? "Let's make the child happy and it will be fine."
The year that I am finally old enough to go, I come home in January and I hand him the papers and I go, "Okay daddy, we're going." And he kind of looked at me and said, "Excuse me?" And because he had promised me a couple of years ago hoping that I would forget that he promised that he would come on this trip with me, my father, the lapsed Roman Catholic who grew up with Latin mass and I got into a van, a 15 passenger van with 12 other people and all of our luggage. And we drove 16 hours to Southeastern Kentucky where there was no cell phone service, there was no internet, and we prayed before every meal. We had devotions every morning, we had devotions every night, we had Jesus singing all the time.
And you had to be in a small group in which you had to talk about your feelings, right? All of this and my father is a recipe for disaster. But I really, really wanted to go. And I loved Jesus, and I loved getting to talk about Jesus. And I thought when we were headed down there that it would be a fun experience and we would do some good, and that I was going to help people because that's what you do when you go on a mission trip, right? You help people.
On Monday I have my brand new work boots, put them on and we went to our very first job site and I met TJ. And TJ was a man who had lived on this property his entire life and he lived in an 8 by 10 room. No heat, no electricity, no running water. Grew all of his own food, didn't have a driver's license, didn't have a vehicle. He had an outhouse and he washed all of his clothes in the creek behind his house. It's the first time that I came face to face with a deep sense of poverty.
But TJ, happiest man I've ever met in my entire life. Loved his life, lived an incredible and amazing time, had great relationships with his family. And while we're there, he's telling us our job was to add an addition to his house, so we're going to double the size of it by adding an 8 by 10 structure. He told us his sister from London was coming. Now, all of us who are sitting on that job site are going, "Okay, if your sister lives in London, why is it that you live here in the middle of nowhere with no running water, and no heat, and no electricity?"
What we all later came to find out, is that approximately an hour away from where we were is London, Kentucky, and that is where she lived. None of us knew there was London in Kentucky. And that week of working on TJ's house and talking with him, and getting to fall in love with power tools, the first time I ever placed a saw in my hand my whole life changed. Forget being a pastor, it was beautiful.
What I learned that week was a very different idea of what it meant to have hope. TJ, didn't have a whole lot material wise, right? I went home to the camp that week, every night and I looked at that beautiful shower which was really not that nice because it's a work camp. Right? And I looked at it and I said, "How incredible is it we have running water."
What I learned that week was that while TJ didn't have a whole lot of material things, what he had inside of him was this deep hope about the world, a deep sense of peace about who he was and how he lived his life and what he needed and what he didn't need. And countless times over the last 15 years, I have gone back every summer. I've put roofs on houses, I've sent teams to dig out houses in the 2000s.
I have sent teams to work on homes that are powered only by an extension cord from their in-laws house up the trailer up the road, and this family only got their electricity for their newborn baby when they were having a good day, right? When them and the in-laws were having a good day. You all know how the in-law thing goes sometimes. When the father-in-law got mad, he'd unplug their electricity, with a newborn.
I was there in 2010 when their Christian school that they had been running for the last 90 years was this close to closing. It was the year right before I was getting ready to graduate high school and what I was being told is that these kids who had been going to school together since they were in kindergarten weren't going to be able to graduate together, and instead would be schlepped off to their county high schools in which there were a thousand kids per grade.
Over the years, I have seen extreme and deep brokenness. Poverty that is astounding and heartbreaking. But what I have also seen is the resilience of the people that have come to be my family. A place that I still call home, a place that when people ask me if I'm from Kentucky, I get that really excited feeling inside of me and I go, "Not really but I love it there." A sense of understanding that hope, the hope of the incarnate Christ is about that kind of work. The kind of work that shows up in the brokenness of people's lives and offers them wholeness not in their material world, but in their spiritual lives.
Hope is about showing up in the broken and neglected and marginalized places, and telling people that they matter not because they have what everybody else has but because they are beloved children of God. Hope is about finding the places in which people like the shepherds exist today and showing up and saying, "Let me extend myself to you. Not that I will fix it, not that I will cause you to be like me. That I will show up be with you and offer you the hope of Jesus Christ that says it's not about this world, but it is about the world to come."
Hope is about the writing and the balance of justice. About saying that for every person who is born, God offers a place at the stable, and a place at the table. When Jesus Christ shows up not in Herod's palace, not in the power and the authority and the wealth of His time, but shows up where hay, and animals, and the lowly exist. In the same way Jesus calls us not to exist in places of high wealth and in which we draw lines about who belongs and who does not, but tells us that we are to go out and to be aligned ourselves with the marginalized, broken. People none of us want at our table. To show up and to be the body of Christ.
Again, I've said this before and I will continue to say it until the day that I die. Church is not about our buildings, church is about what we do when we live here. We exist not so that people can become like us, so that through us people see the true nature and power of Jesus Christ who offers wholeness in all of the places that we are broken. Church is about going out and finding the people that do not matter, that do not belong, that we would least like sitting next to us. And extending to them and not saying, "Oh, you're welcome to sit over there in the back." But saying, "You're welcome to sit next to me. Let me take your hand and remind you that while you may not live the same kind of life I do, you still are a beloved child of God."
And what we find more often than not that all of the things that we find broken about our own lives, the places in which we are still searching for hope and for peace, and for love and for joy, somebody on the margins already has it. And while sometimes we spend our lives thinking that we will go out and fix things for people, what really winds up happening is when we walk alongside people like the shepherds we find, Emmanuel.
Remember this part of the nativity narrative. The wise men as they are following the star show up to Herod's place expecting that when the Messiah is born it will be there. The wise men are the ones who follow the shepherds. The wise men, the people who have great authority and power and wealth in the world wind up following dirty, stinky, gross weirdos. Okay? Because that's what they were. That's a biblical term there, to the stable.
When we find and take our cue from those who are lost, and last, and least, we find God. We find Christ. We find the hope of all of the nations. The hope that Jesus Christ offers to us is this. It doesn't matter how much money you have in your bank account. It doesn't matter who makes the clothes that you wear. It doesn't matter if you have shoes on your feet, it doesn't matter what kind of car you drive, it doesn't matter if you have a diploma. What matters is how you live your life. What matters is that God has reached into this world and called you good.
And our job is to go find the places in which people are being told that they are not good and offer them inclusion to belong here. Not because they bring in an offering check, not because they can drop money in the plate, not because they're going to teach Sunday school. Not because they're under the age of 30, but because they're a beloved child of God.
The hope is that the world isn't the way man has created it to be. The hope, the God with us is born in a stable to an unwed teenage mom. The shepherds greet Him. The Little Drummer Boy, while it's not in the Bible, it's still one of my favorite songs. This little drummer boy plays all he has to offer Christ. It's not about money or power, or wealth. It's about who and what is in your heart today and every day. Amen.
Explore services in this series
