Re-Gifting Christmas: The China Plate
December 11, 2016
Dr. Tom Pace
Luke 1:39-49

We are continuing our series on re-gifting joy, and I wanted to ask you a simple question to think about. What is the difference between happiness and joy? Listen now as we hear our Scripture read. It is the conversation between Mary and Elizabeth. Listen for words that speak of joy.

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill countrywhere she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spiritand exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.And blessed is she who believed that there would bea fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
And Marysaid,
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.” Luke 1:39-49 (NRSV)

Psalm 118:24 - you all know that. I’ll start it, and I’ll let you finish it. “This is the day that theLordhas made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
That’s pretty good, that’s pretty good. At the early services it sounded like gibberish. We had more Aggies at that service than we have at this one, so I had to do it that way. “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
Let’s pray. Gracious and loving God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see, our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel, and then, Lord, open our hands that we might give. Amen.
Mary was in trouble. She was in deep trouble. She was a young girl.
You know, it’s funny. We’ve all been taught she was in trouble, because she was pregnant and not married. That really isn’t the case. She was in trouble because she was pregnant and betrothed. In other words, a contract had already been signed, a formal document had already been established between Joseph and Mary’s family that she would be his wife. And as soon as that is signed, it is a legal binding document.
So this for Mary was adultery. That’s what people thought of – that’s what people assumed. And the penalty for adultery is death. So Mary is a girl in trouble.
So it says she goes “in haste” to a town in the Judean hill country, the town of Zachariah and Elizabeth. We think to her aunt’s or cousins of some sort – a kinsperson. We know that. It’s a five day journey at least, actually it’s a five day journey to Jerusalem, and the hill country may be another day or two journey into the desert. So we say the hill country of Judea. Don’t think Hunt, Texas or Fredericksburg. This is not beautiful country; this is harsh, and barren, the cave community of Qumran where they believe John the Baptist came out of. Elizabeth is the mother of John the Baptist, so this is the town where they lived, this little desert in the wilderness.
Here’s why that’s important. Mary has gone there to hide out. She has gone away to the wilderness to hide out, out in the boonies where no one could find her.
So she walks in, and Elizabeth sees her, but Elizabeth doesn’t say “Ah, Mary, man, I hear you are in trouble.” She doesn’t say that at all. Elizabeth is pregnant with John the Baptist, and Elizabeth says, “The baby inside me leaped for joy when you walked in!”
It doesn’t seem like a very joyous time. Look, there is a difference between happiness and joy. There’s a difference between happiness and joy. Happiness has to do with circumstance – things are going well. Here’s what I want you to take home – I think I even printed it in your Sermon Notes. Joy is the experience in our soul when by the power of the Holy Spirit we become aware, consciously or unconsciously, that we are in the very presence of God. Joy is that experience in our soul when the Holy Spirit leads us to know we are in the very presence of God.
You can see that in the passage we read just a few minutes ago. It says, “When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit…” Then she says, “Why is this happening to me that the mother of my Lord has come to me?” She is the first human to declare that Jesus is Lord. That’s amazing. She knows that she’s in the very presence of God, and that’s why she’s full of joy.
So happiness is like winning the lottery, circumstances are going well. Joy is taking those winnings and using them for God’s purposes, knowing that this was something that you want to be about God’s work. You want to be connected; you want to experience the presence of God as you do that work.
Happiness is falling in love with someone. Joy is the realization that this person and you together experience God’s very presence and that not even death can separate you. So you can be grieving and deeply sad at the same moment that you’re experiencing joy, because you know in that very moment you are in the very presence of God.
Do you see the difference between happiness and joy? So it’s important to realize that, because in this room today there are people whose circumstances are wonderful. They have a great nice family, everything’s going well, and all is well in your life. And there are people here for whom that is not so. And every one of us can experience joy.
The world that Jesus came into was not a pretty place, it wasn’t that all was well there. Herod goes about the business and kills all the first born babies, that’s what comes next. It’s violent, broken, and it is not a good world. Yet in the midst of that we hear shepherds proclaiming joy, because God chose to come into that place.
Abigail is a Jewish woman who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. She doesn’t really practice many of the Jewish traditions. She has grown up relatively secular in her life. But she does practice one and that is that every Friday night as soon as the sun goes down they light the candles, and they have a marvelous Shabbat meal. All of her family gathers, they drink wine, they celebrate, they laugh, they pray every Friday night without exception.
Why? Abigail’s grandmother was a woman named Gila, and she grew up in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and when Gila was only twelve, the Nazis came and Gila became a part of something that was called kinder transport. This was an organization with many Quakers who took 10,000 children from Czechoslovakia, Austria and Germany and spirited them out of the country in 1939 into Great Britain where they lived with foster families.
Gila was a part of kinder transport, and she never saw her parents again. They died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Gila before she left her mother gave her a plate, a china plate. And it was the plate on which they had always celebrated the Shabbat meal. Her mother said to her, “Gila, you take this plate, and you always celebrate Shabbat. You always celebrate the presence of God, no matter what. Good times, bad times, no matter what we celebrate the presence of God.”
This china plate is not a Shabbat plate. My grandmother had painted it. She gave it to my mother; my mother gave it to us. A china plate is a sign that no matter what, we celebrate the presence of God. That’s joy, the experience in your soul when the Holy Spirit leads you to know you’re in the very presence of God.
So how do we re-gift that? Because here’s what I want you to see, and this is what I think is so awesome about this whole passage. So Mary walks in. She has been running away, she’s full of fear, she is full of confusion, and Elizabeth says to her, “It’s awesome! It is awesome. The baby in my womb leaped for joy when they heard your greeting.” Listen to what she says, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me that the mother of my Lord comes to me?”
And all of a sudden Mary experiences things differently. Now she’s not afraid, or terrified. Now she says, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” You see Elizabeth has re-gifted joy to Mary.
Now how do we do that? Two things I want to show you. One is that we do it by being joyous ourselves. That is exactly what Elizabeth does. She was joyous and it spread.
There’s a woman in Falmouth, Massachusetts, who teaches dance. And there’s always a waiting list for her dance classes. She teaches a variety of different ages. She teaches at the Senior Center because she’s 86 years old – her name is Margaret Rogers. She’s been teaching dance all of her life, and people come to learn from her, not because she’s an incredible dancer. They come to learn from her because she’s so full of life, because she’s such an inspiration.
Five years ago she fell and broke her hip. She thought, “Oh, I’ll never dance again.” But they put a new hip in her when she was in her 80s, and she began to teach dance some more. She says, “It really aches when I dance, but I’m going to dance anyway.”
It spreads. People come because they want to be around her – they want to experience the joy that she has in her life no matter what.
Many of you have heard or read the commencement speech by Admiral William H. McRaven in 2014 at the University of Texas. I understand that he’s not a very happy boy today because Army beat Navy yesterday.
Anyway, Admiral McRaven was a Navy SEAL and in his commencement address were ten things he learned from Navy SEAL training. I want to read to you just a part of it.
He says, “The ninth week of training is referred to as Hell Week. It is six days of no sleep, constant physical and mental harassment and one special day at the mud flats. The mud flats are an area between San Diego and Tijuana where the water runs off and creates the Tijuana Slews, a swampy patch of terrain where the mud will engulf you. It’s on Wednesday of Hell Week that you paddle down the mud flats and spend the next 15 hours trying to survive the freezing cold mud, the howling wind and the incessant pressure to quit from the instructors.”
“As the sun began to set that Wednesday evening my training class, having committed some egregious infraction of the rules, was ordered into the mud. The mud consumed each man till there was nothing visible but our heads. The instructors told us that we could leave the mud if just five men would quit, just five men. And we could get out of the oppressive cold.”
“Looking around the mud flat it was apparent that some students were about to give in. It was still over 8 hours till the sun came up – 8 more hours of bone chilling cold. The chattering teeth and the shivering moans of the trainees were so loud it was hard to hear anything. Then one voice began to echo through the night. One voice raised in song. The song was terribly out of tune but sung with great enthusiasm. One voice became two, and two became three and before long everyone in the class was singing. We knew that if one man could rise above the misery the others could as well.”
The instructors threatened us with more time in the mud if we kept up the singing. But the singing persisted and somehow the mud seemed a little warmer and the wind a little tamer and the dawn not too far away.”
Friends, it’s contagious, this joy. When you start to dance, the people will come. When you start to sing, people will join in singing. That’s how you re-gift joy – by being joyous, by rejoicing.
There’s one more thing. I love it where she says, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, and why is this happening to me that the mother of my Lord comes to me?”
It’s as if Elizabeth got hold of Mary’s shoulders and said, “Don’t you get it? You are the mother of the Messiah!”
See, sometimes we have to re-frame life. We see it one way, and somebody else comes along and sees it a different way and re-frames it, puts it in a different frame for us.
You know how the movie directors walk around using their hands in a square to form a frame and set up the shot in that. Sometimes they want a wide shot. Sometimes I know our TV people will want a wide shot, because they want to see the whole congregation. People can feel all the things that God is doing in the room. Sometimes we need a wide shot. We become so focused on this one terrible thing going on in our lives, and we miss all the amazing things that God is doing all around us. And what we need is to be able to see things differently and get a wide shot.
There’s a great verse in II Kings 6 where the king is under attack, and Elisha the prophet says to him, “Lift up your eyes and see the chariots of fire all around you. The angels are coming to rescue you. Lift up your eyes and see.” You need a wide shot to see some things other than the enemy ahead and to begin to see all the things that God’s doing around you.
Sometimes you need a tight shot. I see it a lot in documentaries now. They’ll show a face that fills up the whole screen, kind of off center off to one side as you see the person talk. So you can focus just on that one thing. And sometimes what happens is that we get so distracted when we’re looking all around us at all the stuff we have to do and all the challenges and all the difficulties and all of these things, and we miss the most important thing at the center – the presence of God.
That’s what happens at Christmas. Somehow in the midst of celebrating the birth of Jesus we see everything but the birth of Jesus. We get distracted by all the shopping and the decorating and the parties and all the money we have to spend and all the stuff that goes on and we miss the joy, the very presence of God. We have to re-frame.
I like the term “to frame it up.” Some of us “frame it down.” Before our week even begins, we decide that we’re going to have a terrible week. We say, “I’m going to have a terrible week this week. It’s really going to be bad.” Probably it will. I suspect so. You’re going to have a terrible week.
What we do is as we begin to re-frame, others begin to be able to see things from our frame, too. That’s why we come to church. That’s why we come and sit in the congregation. We bring all our challenges and all our stuff into this place, and others around us bring all their stuff, and we share what God is doing in our lives, and we begin to see things differently, because we hear other people, we hear what the Scripture says. It’s the prayer I say every week: “Open our eyes that we might see…” what you’re doing, God. “Open our ears” that we might hear your voice in the midst of all this chorus of shouts around me. “Open my heart” that I might be filled with the Holy Spirit and recognize your very presence among us. “Open my hands” that as I serve I might be a part of your work. That’s where joy comes from when we realize we’re in the very presence of God.
So what I want to invite you to do is to look round at your life and your world and see if you might by the power of the Holy Spirit catch a glimpse of all that God is doing, all of the ways God is at work in your life. Dance a little, and maybe teach some others to dance. Sing and others might sing along with you. Celebrate God’s presence with a Shabbat meal, and no matter what just recognize that God is with us.
Let us pray. Lord God, we confess that sometimes we frame our lives incorrectly, and we see all of the things and miss your very presence in the midst of them. God, help us by the power of your Spirit to just recognize that you are at work within us and around us. And help us to understand that, God, and in the midst of that be overwhelmed with your joy. In the name of Christ we pray. Amen.