December 27, 2021
Today’s sermon, “The Victory of Faith,” was preached at St. Mark United Methodist Church. The Bible reading, Psalm 3:1-8, is one of my favorite texts, a passage from which I’ve preached more than 30 times.
💖 Today The Bro and CJ, Kyle and Cathy, celebrate, as Paul Harvey used to say, 46 years on the road to forever together. Congratulations! You have a good start!
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| Bundled up for hiking in St. George, Utah |
👉 In countries with historic connections to the United Kingdom, December 26 is “Boxing Day,” another celebration of Christmas.
And it has nothing to do with the Boxing Day of Peter and Jason Fox.
Boxing Day got its name when Queen Victoria was on the throne in the 1800s and has nothing to do with the sport of boxing. The name comes from a time when the rich used to box up gifts to give to the poor. Boxing Day was traditionally a day off for servants – a day when they received a special Christmas box from their masters. The servants would also go home on Boxing Day to give Christmas boxes to their families.
👉 You’ve heard the familiar with the tale that “To Insure Promptness” was a phrase written on dishes for coins at shops, thus creating the acronym of “tip,” but that’s just a myth.
Well, about two weeks before Christmas, a waiter practiced “tip shaming” of a customer who couldn’t afford to pay the full 20 percent gratuity suggested on the Applebee’s receipt. The customer left a nine percent tip, and wrote a note saying, “You was great holidays are rough right now.” The waiter posted the receipt to TikTok and asked for comments.
I don’t TikTok, even though some of my best friends TikTok, but I wouldn’t let my daughters marry a TikToker – if they were single (insert smiley face here). I am a generous tipper for good service, and if service is bad I’ve been known to very kindly ask the wait-person (don’t you love PC) if they are okay, since they seemed to be distracted in serving me (One time – we had gone to Pittsburgh to watch the Pirates – a waitress sat down, gave me a heartbreaking story, and after she finished I asked if I could pray for her. She accepted. The next day I went back to the same restaurant, asked for the same waitress who greeted me with a smile and said although things hadn’t changed, she felt better knowing someone was praying. When I got home from that trip, I asked Macedonia UMC for an offering for her, got her address from the restaurant and mailed it. We got back a great thank you letter).
There are many reactions to tips and tipping. I once was a frequent diner with a couple whose wife routinely picked up part of the cash left because she said her husband was too generous. After her second such behavior I stopped accepting invitations to accompany them to a restaurant.
As you might imagine, there were basically two types of responses to the post.
First, the supporters. “I read this on Google and I instantly came here to say, no one owes you anything except your employer.” “You’re paid to do your job, and people pay for.” “Y’all be mad at the wrong people.”
Which leads to the second group, those who chastised restaurants for paying such small wages that servers very much depend on tips to make a living wage. This one was typical: “If restaurants paid a decent wage it wouldn’t be the responsibility of the customer to solely compensate with tips. Once again corporate America wins.”
Amy asked about the origin of tipping, and I’ll take a look at that tomorrow.
👉 Several of my Christmas gifts were books, so it seems appropriate today to have a couple of Book Toons.
👉 After the Steelers’ embarrassing defeat by the Kansas City Chiefs yesterday (which no doubt caused celebrations from Fran, one of our favorite blog readers), I was tempted to end the series on how NFL teams received their nicknames, but I decided that would be unfair to the rest of the league (as the Steelers performance was unfair to the Nation – oh well).
A name-the-team contest drew nearly 20,000 entries and resulted in the nickname for the Miami franchise. More than 600 fans suggested Dolphins, but Marjorie Swanson was declared the winner after correctly predicting a tie in the 1965 college football game between Miami and Notre Dame as part of a follow-up contest. Swanson won a lifetime season pass to Dolphins games. Miami owner Joe Robbie was fond of the winning nickname because, as he put it, “The dolphin is one of the fastest and smartest creatures in the sea.”
👉 A trio of Blackouts:
👉 “I Am about to Do a New Thing,” was the Christmas Day reading from Celebrating Abundance by Walter Brueggemann.
Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert (Isaiah 43:18-19).
Christmas is especially for those of us whose lives are scarred and hurt in debilitating ways. Of course that means all of us. You see, Christmas is about a word from God addressed to the world in its exhaustion. This word from the book of Isaiah is addressed to displaced persons who were mired down, and beaten, and about to give up. They kept playing old songs and going over and over and over the old hurts and old quarrels and old failures and old sins and old defeats.
The word of God at Christmas, for all those who are disqualified, is in two simple parts.
The first part is this: Do not remember former things. Think how much energy we use on “former things.” We may do this in two ways, neither of which helps us. We may remember “good old days,” back when it was all right, and likely remember things as much better than they really were. Or conversely, we remember all the negatives. We go over the past in shame, wishing we had not said what we said or had not done what we did. We know our guilt, and we go over it, or we remember how hurt we were, and angry, and we remember how badly we were treated. We enjoy the past either way, in anger or in guilt, because it is so precious to us, and we treasure our hurt.
But then the gospel comes! Do not remember former things. Christmas, when God speaks clearly and when God acts decisively, is a time for letting go and forgetting and giving up and releasing all that is past.
The second part of this word from God, spoken on Christmas day, is this: Behold I am doing a new thing. That word is the central fact of the Bible and the key to our gospel faith. That is the good news for us. The reason we may forget what is old and past is that it is being powerfully displaced by what is new and healing and liberating. The poet adds, with a little impatience, “Do you not perceive it?” Haven’t you noticed the newness God is working? Christmas is a day to stop and notice the newness that God is giving, that lets our life start over in a fresh place.
The newness that God wrought at Christmas was sending into the world this Jesus who is beyond our imagination, who brought healing and grace everywhere he went, who forgave and transformed and called people out beyond themselves to a newness they could not have imagined. “I am doing a new thing!”
It is easy for us to be held down and held back by the pain or glories of the past. Aid us in perceiving the wondrous new thing you are doing in our world through the birth of Jesus, the one who comes to make all things new. Amen.
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