You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!
In
your mind’s eye, put on your red and green plaid wooly bathrobe and your comfy
fuzzy slippers. Now - turn the clocks
back a couple of months – to December – and, finally, wipe the sleep from your
eyes. Take a deep breath: It is Christmas morning.
You are nestled in
an overstuffed living room chair, and your hands are wrapped around a steaming
mug of coffee – or tea – or maybe cocoa.
It is snowing outside. The
flurries began yesterday after the late Christmas Eve service and continue
today with tiny dry flakes – a small detail, but one that makes this the
perfect Christmas morning scene.
Underneath
the balsam fir tree that smells so wonderful and is all tinseled and decorated
with ornaments that hold a host of precious memories – lying about beneath the
branches are the gifts – the gifts for you.
Which one to open first?
The
big one with gold foil wrapping paper and a huge store bought bow? Oh, you hope that inside is that
state-of-the-art crockpot that you have wanted so badly for so long – the one
that would make your life so much easier.
Or maybe you ought to open the tiny present in the distinctive sky blue
Tiffany box? It could only be jewelry: Earrings?
Bracelet? And what about the flat
shirt box? Could it contain that sweater
you circled a few times in bright orange marker in the LL Bean catalog last
fall?
You
reach for one gift, then another, and another.
You open each one carefully, and you cannot conceal your surprise. They are all empty! Nothing!
All those boxes: Empty!
Think about that for a moment,
will you? And be honest now, too! How disappointing would such an experience
be? No crockpot. No jewelry.
No sweater. Every package with
your name on it: Empty!
I mean, seriously, finding only empty
boxes under the tree on Christmas morning would be a jarring departure from all
of the words we use to describe that well-loved holiday – words like rich,
overflowing, full. Empty boxes: and the
Christmas vocabulary is shot!
We do not often think that a holiday or
a season would have its unique vocabulary, but they all do. I mean, what words come to mind when you want
to describe the season of Lent, for instance?
Not rich, but plain. Not
overflowing outward, but regrouping inward.
Not full, but empty. Come to
think of it: How dull!
No wonder we shy away from Lent. No wonder that for us Protestants in
particular, Lent has traditionally been an almost forgotten season in the
church. No wonder we would prefer to
just bounce from Christmas directly to Easter – with maybe a stopover for Mardi
Gras - from one time of light to another time of light – and never have to
venture into the darkness, especially when in that darkness we will, at some
point, confront that Christmas morning would be downer: emptiness – our own
personal emptiness, the emptiness of our hearts, the voids and black holes in
our souls.
Face it: Lent does not make a good first
impression. After all, are we not taught
that being full is good - and overflowing is even better? Like Christmas, for
example?
And are we not also taught that being
empty is like being parched, sucked dry in the desert, having nothing –
particularly nothing of value – left inside?
One definition of emptiness I found in
my reading this week was this: Emptiness is “an
unfilled space; a total lack of ideas, meaning, or substance; a desolate sense
of loss.” Are we not taught then that being
empty is tantamount to a character flaw?
That being empty may also be like being cheated out of something?
That being said, is it any wonder that
most of us fight emptiness when we feel it coming on. When we know that dreaded abyss is forming
inside of us, when we sense that void, we try desperately to fill ourselves up
– with food, alcohol, work, work, work.
Or we clutter our lives with so much stuff to fill the emptiness that
the storage business has become one of the fast growing businesses in the
world.
However, emptiness is part of being
human, and so none of us escape that deep primal sense of nothingness – no
matter how hard we may try. As Baptist
pastor Robert Dyson noted, “I submit to you that life has its empty spots, in spite of
all the glitter and glamour; deep beneath the surface lays an empty reservoir
of lost dreams and hopes. Void and lack, plague our lives and prohibit our
pursuits of fulfillment and satisfaction. All of us, in spite of our ages,
wages, races and ethic identities, have to wrestle with the issue of emptiness.
Empty marriages, ministries and even empty careers sadly are the norms of our
times. Life with all of its commotions and promotions still leave us empty.
Nike says “Just Do It” yet we are empty. Burger King says “Have It Your Way”
yet we are empty. We pep and step, bling and ching, style and profile yet we
are empty. The butler, the baker, and even the
candlestick maker, lottie and Dottie and everybody are wrestling with this
thing call emptiness! All the subjects, servants and those whom are served
can’t escape the cold harsh winter winds of emptiness.”
And yet, here on our Lenten journey
this year as we learn together to walk in the dark and collect the unusual
gifts we find along the way, we include emptiness as one of those precious
presents. How can it be so?
I remember the Christmas that our older
son, Padraic, had just turned three. Oh,
he had more Christmas presents to open that you could shake a stick at: big
ones, small ones, and every size in between.
So much to delight a young boy!
And yet, when all the gifts were
opened, and we had come to that down time when, as a parent, you hope your kids
are happily playing with all their new Christmas toys, Paddy was not. The trucks and games and books were lying
untouched in a pile.
You see, he and Joe had brought up from
the basement all of the empty delivery boxes those gifts had come in. They also had scissors, a knife for cutting,
and loads of duct tape. Out
of the empty boxes, they were busy creating what Paddy had wanted most for
Christmas – a lobster boat, which, when finished, he sat in, hauling in his
imaginary traps, until dinnertime. Out
of the emptiness had come something of great value.
Perhaps emptiness then need not be a
gaping hole or a cold absence tied to a bitter disappointment in oneself or in
others. Perhaps emptiness need not leave
one feeling like a rung out dishrag, twisted and squeezed until there is
nothing left. Perhaps emptiness need not
be the daunting conclusion that we have nothing left to give. Perhaps emptiness need not be the dark night
of the soul, sorrowful and sad, leaving us desolate and terribly, terribly
lonely. Perhaps emptiness can be
something different, something positive - something that has the potential to
buoy us up rather than pull us down.
Author Margaret Silf writes in her
book, Inner Compass: “I watched idly as the bottle bobbed up
and down on the water. Then I held it down and filled it up. I let it go and
watched it sink slowly down and settle on the bottom. I fetched it up again,
emptied it, and let it float. My childish pastime (in the bath tub) made me
realize that God sometimes does the same with me.
I fill up, gradually, with all the
things I desire and want to hold on to. The more I fill up, the deeper I sink,
until eventually I lie like a lead balloon at the bottom of the bath, quite
incapable of movement. Then something happens to “tip me up and pour me out.”
The little bottle bobs up again, freed
of its cargo of bathwater, light, floating, and responding to every wave. This
is the gift of emptiness; only in my emptiness can I be sustained by the
buoyancy of God’s unfailing love and move on as (God) created me to in order to
grow.”
Perhaps emptiness can be a place – a
precious and secret part of our resilient souls, a place waiting to be filled
with something we cannot put our finger on, so we can rise up like that bottle
in the bathtub and be more of what God wants us to be. Emptiness can be a gift.
Out of emptiness can come something of
great value. Emptiness can be where we
can re-boot, become refreshed, become filled with what it is that we really
need. Emptiness can be a gift as we
learn to see “the good in
what is left when everything you have has been taken away”, as one blogger I
read this week wrote.
Out of emptiness can
emerge the very promises of God. That, I
believe, is true, and that is why I chose as our Scripture reading this morning
the story of Jesus’ death. I chose it
because it reminds us so graphically that Jesus emptied himself of everything –
even his own life.
He cried out to God from the very depth of his
emptiness –“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” He had nothing left. He had lost everything. It was all stripped away from him as he
slowly and painfully died – his clothes, his dignity, even his friends and his
God.
However, born out of the emptiness of that terrible
day when the curtain of the temple was torn in two, born out of that emptiness
was Easter with all its light-filled promises. Out of emptiness came a
fullness, a richness, life overflowing.
When the world only seemed to offer
promises full of emptiness, Easter came around and offered emptiness full of
promise.
In Gretchen Rubin’s book, The Happiness Project, the author
goes on a yearlong journey to discover ways to be happier. She begins her search by spending the month
of January de-cluttering her home. You
see, she had a friend who told her how she always keeps one shelf empty. Rubin
writes “an empty shelf meant possibility; space to expand; a luxurious waste of
something useful for the sheer elegance of it.”
In a way, then, as she emptied her closets, she also emptied
herself.
Maybe we need to keep a part of
ourselves empty as well because emptiness, as Rubin discovered, is a gift, a
way through the darkness to what she called happiness, to what we as Christians
call God. Maybe that is what we can
learn as we walk in the dark together this Lent – that only in emptying
ourselves of the stuff that drags us down, only by losing ourselves, our lives,
can we find real life as God intended it.
After all, God cannot fill what has not first been emptied.
I do not know what you need to empty
from your life in order to make room for God.
Maybe there is someone who needs your forgiveness. Maybe there is something for which you need
to be forgiven. What about a
relationship with someone that you need to let go of? Or a relationship with a job that needs to be
let go? Something that just drags you
down?
Whatever you need to empty yourself of,
I invite you to write it down on that little piece of paper attached to your
bulletin. Then
you will have an opportunity to bring it forward, drop it in the water, and
watch it disappear before your very eyes in this ritual action of embracing the
gift of emptiness.
by Rev. Nancy A. Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine
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