I got to a stuck place several times preparing my sermon for yesterday and started thinking about adapting the Godly Play Advent lessons to do with the congregation. But that got complicated in terms of what I'd need to bring and where I'd actually present it. Still contemplating my options, I looked up at the mantlepiece where I put out a few of the nativities from my collection, my eyes stopped on one that proved to be ideal for a theological reflection.
Here is what I presented to the congregation. We had some really good converstion.
I wonder what your thoughts might be?
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May the Words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
It’s the third Sunday of Advent, and I’m preaching. It’s a tradition!
And why do I preach on the third Sunday of Advent, Tevye the Dairyman might ask? Well I’ll tell you, he would continue. I don’t know, but it’s a tradition.
For those of you who don’t know Tevye, he is the narrator and main character of the musical Fiddler on the Roof, which is based on the short stories of Sholem Aleichem. Sholem Aleichem was a contemporary of Mark Twain and came from the Ukraine region of Russia. Fiddler is the story of life in Anatevka, a shtetl, or small town in Russia, where everyone’s lives are rooted in traditions.
I had a whole sermon prepared about the traditions of Grace Church and how today’s reading from Isaiah serves as a lens for us to view those traditions. But the more I thought about it, the less it sounded like something we, including myself, needed to hear today in the middle of Advent. So I brought something from a tradition that legend says goes back to Saint Francis and was probably brought to the Americas by the Spanish. This particular one is from Peru and is called a retablo.
I’m going to pass this around, so you can all look at it, touch it, hold it, examine it. While you’re doing this, I’d like you to think about these four questions:
What is the world like here?
What can go wrong in this world?
What challenges us in this world?
What could fulfill the promise of this world?
Don’t worry about remembering them all, I’ll repeat them once you’ve all had a chance to see the piece.
What is the world like here?
What can go wrong in this world?
What challenges us in this world?
What could fulfill the promise of this world?
When we look at our modern culture, what does it how does it view this world we’ve been talking about?
Drawing from this conversation, what are some of the things we believe? What positions do we hold?
What does this mean for us when we walk out those doors and return to the world?
