Celebration Sunday

01/29/12 Celebration Sunday Grace UMC

As you all know, the topic of celebration has been in the forefront of some of our conversations in the church over the last month or so. One of the things I have noticed in the time that I have been a Christian is that we, as people of faith, tend to develop a specialized vocabulary that we use when we talk about things. As we get more and more involved in our community of faith, as we spend time reflecting on what we believe in the company of other believers, we begin to assimilate this vocabulary into our lives and begin to use it for ourselves. What we don't always realize is that there are times when we use words and we don't necessarily notice that we are using them in a way that is not quite how the rest of the world uses them. As we have talked about in the theology class, the English word for love has a huge range of meanings but when we talk about God's love, we don't mean the same thing as if we were to say, "I love pizza" or, "I love this movie." But if someone didn't know that Christians mean something very specific when they say "love," there might be quite a bit of confusion.

I wonder if the same might be true, at least sometimes, with our word "celebration." After all, there aren't all that many churches that make a point of making celebration a regular part of their life together. In fact, if you look throughout history, you will find that celebration has not tended to play a major role in our Protestant heritage. How can this be, especially since we find celebrations and festivals all throughout the Bible, especially the Old Testament? Do we think that, somehow, God used to be excited about celebration with the people of Israel but, now that Jesus has come, isn't so interested in it anymore? I think it is far more likely that God has never stopped being interested in our celebration but we have pushed it to the side for one reason or another.

Why would we have done this? This trend started so long ago that we might not even be able to understand how it started. I wonder if this might be at least a partial explanation. It doesn't take much for most of us to notice that there are some ways that people in our world celebrate which, when compared with what we are taught in the Bible, are not exactly completely compatible with the gospel. For example, there are those in our world who cannot comprehend the idea that one could have a good time, or that one could celebrate, without consuming their weight in alcohol. I met people like that when I was in college and you may have also. For all I know, you may have been one of those people once upon a time; that isn't my point. My point is that if we take that kind of view of celebration and use it as the way we understand the whole idea of celebration, we might feel that we have to reject celebration altogether as Christians. It hasn't been all that long since many churches included statements in their constitutions that outlawed their members from drinking of any kind, dancing of any kind, or even card games of any kind.

But there seems to be a sense in which we may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Just because there are some people in the world who do not feel they can celebrate without simultaneously engaging in sinful behavior, that doesn't mean that it has to be that way. The Bible teaches a lot about joy and celebration. The Psalms are absolutely full of whole songs dedicated to calling the people of God to celebrate and to rejoice in their God. In fact, the New Testament, far from reducing the importance of celebration, actually increases it. Paul writes to the Christians in Philippi, "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice." He is saying, "It is so important that you rejoice in the Lord that I am going to repeat it. I don't want there to be any chance that you could possibly miss this." The joy that the apostles wrote about wasn't like standing around with a smile, real or otherwise, pasted to our faces. It was a joy that was not stoppable, a joy that endured, even in the midst of tragedy. It is a joy that abides in your heart, even while you are weeping, a joy that enables you to celebrate in the midst of grief. Paul rejoiced in the prisons, Stephen rejoiced even while he was being executed. This is in no way a lesser understanding of celebration but one that is so strong that nothing in all of creation can overcome it.

I want to draw your attention to a book that has gotten something of a bad name among Christians, the book of Leviticus. Leviticus is the book that people talk about when they want to talk about how the Bible can get boring, though usually people say that, even if they have never read it for themselves. In chapter twenty-three of Leviticus, we have all the festivals that God had instituted for his people listed together to remind them to celebrate what God has done. We have the Sabbath, a day of celebration and rest that happens every single week, we have the Passover, the festival of Unleavened Bread, which takes place in the Spring, the same week as Easter, where the people rejoice that God had delivered them from slavery in Egypt. We have the offering of the first fruits, which takes place at the very beginning of the harvest season, where the people were commanded to rejoice that they had another crop that year.

We also read about what is called the Festival of Weeks, which was also known as Shauv'ot, which corresponds to our Christian celebration of Pentecost. Seven weeks after the Israelites celebrate their exodus from Egypt, they celebrate the fact that God did not just deliver them and then leave them to their own devices, but gave them a law to live by, a law that set them apart from the other nations as the people set apart by God. We read about the festival of trumpets, a joyful and musical celebration. We read about the Day of Atonement, which isn't a celebration in the sense of a day of dancing and partying, but it is the day where the people remembered, in a very concrete way, that God did not simply leave them in their sins, but provided a way to atone, both for the sins they knew they committed and also those they were unaware of.

The last festival we read about in this chapter in Leviticus is the festival of Booths, called Sukkot, which was a time to celebrate the years the Israelites spent in the wilderness. Everyone constructs and lives in temporary shelters outside where the rain can get to them, all to remember that God has given them shelter and safety when their ancestors did not have it. It is a time for feasting and hospitality and a wonderful time of celebration. In subsequent history, Israel has added even more celebrations, perhaps the most well-known of which is Hannukah, which celebrates God's deliverance of his people from the rule of the Greeks.

The point is that there is major festival after major festival in the Jewish calendar and they aren't just holidays that human beings just decided were going to be special, like so many of ours in America are, but they are meant to reflect what God has actually done in the life of his people. Every time God moves decisively, every time God, in his interaction with his people, does something that shapes the very identity of those people, he institutes a celebration, a festival through which to remember who God is and what God has done.

What I think is amazing is the way in which celebration forms not only a key part of the Israelites' life together but that they are commanded to celebrate. God doesn't say, "Here is a holiday, take it or leave it; its up to you, but don't complain to me if you don't take advantage of it." Rather he says, "Here is a celebration, a festival; keep it." In some cases, failure to keep the festivals was to result in expulsion from the community. Clearly God took the celebration of his people incredibly seriously.

Sometimes we in America like to think that there is a big split through the middle of the human person, dividing body from soul or spirit. We like to think that our bodies don't have all that much to do with our spirits and that our spirits don't have all that much to do with our bodies. This is reflected in how we often approach the issue of faith. When we start to think about how we might grow in our faith, how we are to be more of who God has called us to be, often times we don't ask the question, "What should I do and how should I live that will make a difference." We tend to think in terms of reading books or attending classes, and while these things certainly are helpful, they only go so far.

The point is this kind of separation between our bodies and our souls is not something we find in the Bible. Whenever we see God doing something of spiritual importance, it always is corollated with a particular way of life. God doesn't just mark his people out for some kind of spiritual devotion to him, he gives them a law and a form of life in which to embody that devotion. The Israelites were not just a nation like all other nations, they were a people set apart ad God would never let them forget that distinction. Their spiritual lives and their physical lives were deeply and profoundly intertwined. You could not be a part of the people of God in a religious sense unless you also participated in the life and celebrations of the Israelite people. That is to say, you could not worship God unless you celebrated; it was a very command of God that was not to be ignored.

I think it is truly amazing to realize that God not only allowed celebration among his people, he not only commanded it, but that it was woven into the very fabric of their existence. Whatever else you might have been, if you did not celebrate, you were not an Israelite, you were not a person of the covenant. If this is the case, if to be a member of the community of the faithful, to be part of the people of God is to celebrate, to allow the spiritual aspects of your life to spill over into every area of your life, including your physical life and your celebratory life, then it challenges any attitude toward celebration where we relax and we celebrate so we can get back to work because we need to rest from time to time if we are going to be able to really work hard.

It is because of all of this that I want to encourage you to participate as fully as you can in the events and activities today on this Celebration Sunday. It is a moment, perhaps one we should have more often, where we affirm the physicality of our spiritual lives and the spirituality of our physical lives, where we bring our gifts and talents into relation with our faith and we bring our faith into relation with our gifts and talents. We should not think to ourselves, "Why do we feel the need to celebrate at church?" Rather, we should be asking, "Why doesn't celebration play an even larger role in our lives of faith?

Remember that our celebrations as Christians are not just free-floating expressions of joy. Rather, they are a testimony that the miracle that God has worked deep in our souls is not confined in our souls as if they were a separate compartment from the rest of our lives, but that the good news of Jesus Christ has overflowed into every aspect of who we are, that because our souls are glad, we as entire people are glad and that, through our celebrating, we give praise and glory to the God who has done so much for us. Let us pray.

AMEN