12/4/2024
When my folks got married, my mom didn’t know how to cook. She bought a Better Homes and Gardens cookbook and a Good Housekeeping cookbook and became a terrific cook! Especially her desserts. No one could touch either her coconut cake or her pecan pie (although my sister-in-law comes mighty close!).
And it’s the memories of all those meals that got me while I was hauling my stove out the back door.
You see, I’m remodeling my kitchen. I don’t have people over to my house because the kitchen has been in bad need of a remodel for 30 years. I bought the house from my folks when their health began to decline. They wanted to remodel it, but just waited too late. So, now here I go . . .
But, as ugly as that kitchen was, and as old as everything was, there were lots of really good meals that came out of it, and that’s what gets me.
The memories of all those meals. The delight in my mom’s face when she pulled the perfect pecan pie out of the oven (here’s the key: decades ago, she almost left one in the oven too long. But instead of burning it, she ended up toasting the pecans on top. Try it. You’ll never eat one any other way).
I can get paralyzed by sentimentality. Can you? Sentimentality can cause us to freeze up and not move on. There’s that personal attachment we have to an object that has little or no value in itself. The object – the ratty t-shirt, the 40 year old baby clothes, the worn-out oven – becomes valuable to us because of the association it has with a place or an event or a person.
Turning loose of that stove distances me just a little more from mom.
Now all of this is ridiculous, because the stove is not my mom. In fact, she would have loved to replace it before she died. So, in a sense I’m honoring her memory by replacing it . . . but there surely were a lot of wonderful pecan pies and chocolate cakes and coconut cakes that came out of that oven.
But dang it, I can’t let sentimentality freeze me up!
Sentimentality in our Christian lives can freeze us up as well. Some folks are C and E Christians – we only see them on Christmas and Easter. They love Jesus on December 25 and on the first Sunday after the first full-moon after the Spring Equinox (Easter). . . but that’s as far as their Christianity goes.
You don’t even have to be Christian to do that. I have an atheist friend who loves Christmas services. Why? Because of the music and the memories from his childhood. He doesn’t believe in Jesus, but he loves the warmth of everything associated with sweet baby Jesus in the manger.
That’s not faith; that’s sentimentality.
Christian scholar and author, Dr. Stanley Hauerwas, wrote that “Sentimentality, not atheism, is the deepest enemy of the Christian faith.” Sentimentality ties us to the outward trappings of our Christian faith, without any real commitment to our faith.
Remember that faith is really about commitment. It begins with belief, but it’s a belief that inspires us onward to faithfulness, loyalty and allegiance to Christ.
But we can get caught in the webs of warm, sentimental feelings and never really experience true faith.
For example, Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” This is pretty straightforward. We have experts I could check with, but I’m pretty certain it's not rocket science. If you say you love Jesus, but don’t obey him, then do you really love Jesus? According to Jesus, the answer is plain: no, you don’t.
But it’s easy to get caught in the sentimentality of “loving” Jesus. You might say you love Jesus. You might even think you love Jesus. You might sing, “O How I Love Jesus,” or any other song that is upbeat or makes you feel (and that’s the key word) warm and cozy, but if you don’t follow the loving example of Christ, you’ve mistaken faith for sentimentality.
If you want the hallelujahs of Easter morning without the horrors of Good Friday, you’ve mistaken faith for sentimentality. If you want sweet baby Jesus in the manger without the loving battered Jesus on the cross, you’ve mistaken faith for sentimentality.
I could go on, but you get the point.
As we look at the gospel of Luke this Advent season, we’ll see that Christmas is so much more than sentimentality over warm childhood memories (and there’s nothing wrong with them!). But the message of Christmas is a message of revolution! Let’s get beyond the sentimentality of Christmas and realize what a revolutionary movement was launched in that manger. It’s a revolutionary movement that God invites us to be a part of, calling for a faith beyond, “I believe in little baby Jesus in the manger” to “I pledge my life to Christ and to His kingdom.”
Blessings!
Pastor Terry