DO YOU STILL LOVE ME?
A sermon by the Rev. Dr. James G. Kirk
Harundale Presbyterian Church
Text: “Bring good news to the oppressed.” (Isaiah 61:1)
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This past week a friend of mine told me the following story. She and her husband have been reading “Night Lights” every evening before they turn out the lights. “Night Lights” is a devotional booklet with vignettes for every day followed by a prayer, much like the devotional booklets we sent you for the Advent and the Christmas season. The vignette for this past Wednesday told of an Alzheimer’s patient who’d been getting progressively worse during the past four months. It got to the point where she was almost non-communicative, which only made it that much harder on her husband. Then one day, when the husband came to visit her all of a sudden she looked him straight in the eye and with perfect lucidity asked him, “do you still love me?”
The poignancy of my friend’s relating this story to me is she and her husband have gone through quite a year together. Everything was going along quite well until April of this year. He’d been suffering some time with back problems and they’d both decided it would be better for him to have surgery and get his back fixed once and for all. Well, the surgery left him paralyzed from the waist down, unable to walk and unable to return to the classroom where he’d taught for the past 28 years.
When they got to the point of the vignette where the Alzheimer’s wife quite clearly asked her husband if he still loved her, John, my friend’s husband broke down crying. That was the very question that had been on the tip of his tongue for the past five months. “Do you still love me?” Of course, the both of them ended up crying and reassuring each other of their love no matter what the future might bring.
Which brings us to the heart of Isaiah’s message this morning. It’s as though God is speaking through Isaiah and asking that very question, “do you still love me?” If so then bring good news to the oppressed, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners, comfort those who mourn and give the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.
I’d daresay that since Thanksgiving most of us have been preoccupied with Christmas. It’s only ten days away and there have been cookies to bake, cards to write, gifts to buy, the house to clean, the tree to put up and the garlands to hang in time for the festivities. For some, this will be the first Christmas alone and that brings with it its own set of dynamics. Throughout the baking, the writing, the buying, the cleaning, the decorating, whether we realize it or not, the question has been there, “do you still love me?”
For example, with the baking each year, both Elizabeth and I have to bake certain cookies. This year it will be even that much more important, since some of the kids will be home, and they’ll have their specific requests. Each year we bake, using the recipes our respective mothers taught us, and it’s as though in baking them year after year we’re saying to our mothers, “See, I still love you.” Writing the Christmas cards, the other day we got a card from one of you that had the nicest poem inserted. The poem told how you sent out cards year after year as a reminder that each person you sent the card to had had a specific and important impact on your life. That’s why you sent the card. Not that it’s customary or expected or you’ll feel guilty if you don’t send out Christmas cards. No, each card brought to mind the recipient and how he or she helped to make you the person you are today. It was a very nice thought and, again, it was as you were reaching out and saying, “for what you’ve meant to me and who you’ve allowed me to become I love you.”
Of course then come the gifts. At what other time of the year do we spend so much time focusing our attention on so many people with specific gifts in mind? It’s as though no matter what has transpired throughout the year, no matter how often we’ve said “hello” or haven’t heard that much from someone, as this year’s about to end, it’s Christmas and it’s time to tell that someone, “Yes, I still love you.”
The other day I was reading the New York Times Book Review section of the Sunday Times and came across a review of Jody Rosen’s White Christmas. The book’s about Irving Berlin and the impact his writing White Christmas has had on the Christmas season. When Bing Crosby sang the song in 1942, it not only became the theme song for American troops in the World War, but also was the all-time best-selling record for over 50 years. But more than that the song helped to focus in people’s minds just what the American Christmas meant to them and their families.
For example, as the reviewer writes, “the
American Christmas now belongs to everyone—Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu,
Buddhist, atheist. In its public guise,
at least, it’s a holiday tied not to a particular religious tradition but to so
many people and things that are and aren’t: Clement Moore (who wrote “Twas the
Night Before Christmas’) and Nat King Cole, chipmunks and Charlie Brown, office
singalongs and secret Santas, neediest cases and a blip in the suicide rate,
grinches and Ebenezers, gargantuan conifers in the public
square…cholesterol-laden, life-threatening meals and one too many drinks at one
too many parties, the sweet banalities of
‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ and the happily-ever-after embrace of
Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed…It’s about peace on earth and people genuinely
making an effort to live up to their better selves. And, yes, along with everything else,
Christmas is a holiday about snow.” (The
New York Times Book Review,
“It’s about peace on earth and people genuinely making an effort to live up to the better selves.” Did you hear that? You were probably beginning to feel a bit uneasy with all the secular emphasis on Christmas, when just at the end of what I quoted you heard a familiar phrase, “It’s about peace on earth and people genuinely making an effort to live up to their better selves.” In other words, amid all the secularism of the American Christmas the writer has to admit it does come down to the simple question God asks us and we ask each other, Do you still love me?
Yesterday here in our kitchen and fellowship hall Isaiah’s words seem to come alive in a way that I’d not expected. It began with the men’s breakfast where we watched a tape of Ernie Pyle’s life and his war correspondence during World War II. After the showing, the men were silent, some of them remembering that they’d been in that war and seen what Pyle described. Others I’m sure were contemplating the fact that we face the possibility of yet another war and more deaths. It reminded me that we’re not yet ready to “proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
While the men were watching the tape four women and one man were in the kitchen preparing food for the next month’s free lunch programs. There was fish chowder, chicken cacciatore, hot roast beef with gravy, vegetable soup, turkey stew, ravioli casserole, hot ham sandwiches, and tuna casserole, all lovingly prepared so that for the next six weeks our clients who come for lunch would have a hot meal. Meanwhile back in the fellowship hall people from the Rotary Club of Glen Burnie were arriving to prepare for their annual Christmas Party. All year, we’d been collecting names of children from our free lunch program and those who visit our pantry each week, their ages and their sizes. This year there would be 98 children, each of whom would receive from Santa a piece of clothing and a toy.
Soon the children started arriving,
the games began, thirty-five pizzas were delivered and then Santa arrived. When
Why? Because the spirit of the Lord God was upon them and anointed them to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners, to give the children a garland instead of ashes, and the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.
Thanks be to God,
Amen