Isaiah 11:1-10
Matthew 3:1-12
Romans 15:4-13
Every year, at about this time, the people get restless. We, the pastors, can smell the restlessness in the air; we can feel it coming on, with something like a sixth sense. There it is, again, we say to each other, and sigh. The choir director sighs too. The annual tug of war over liturgical correctness has begun. It’s Advent again.
For me, it starts with my growing irritation at the way in which Christmas carols and Christmas decorations get pushed farther and farther up into the fall, until you begin to see Santa Claus competing with Halloween costumes in store displays. This year, my particular pet peeve was with my favorite radio station, 97.1 FM, which switched over to all Christmas music all the time the day before Thanksgiving. How can we poor pastors and choir directors compete with this onslaught of the Christmasization of the entire culture from Halloween on? And yet we doggedly hang on to Advent inside the walls of the church, and hopefully send home Advent calendars for families to enjoy, almost as a form of cultural guerilla warfare. Advent is not Christmas! we proclaim, as we refuse to let the people sing Christmas carols until Christmas Eve. Advent is not Christmas! we proclaim, as we hear the murmers that our Advent hymns are too somber and not joyful enough. I heard the murmers this week at our lectionary Bible study. Not from the good folks in attendance, of course, they just heard it from others. People think Advent is too dreary, they reported. Now, I could quibble with all this. How could anyone call our beautiful Isaiah text from today dreary, with its beatific vision of the peaceable kingdom? And many of our Advent hymns, while reflective and infused with a kind of wistful yearning, are not so dreary, in my opinion. But then, I am confronted with today’s text from Matthew, and I have to admit, the people have a point!
“In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is fast approaching…’ Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance…Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.’”
John’s a tough guy, and he delivers a tough message. Our focus for this Sunday in Advent is supposed to be on Hope, and one has to dig kind of deep to find a lot of hope in John’s message, on the surface at least. John the Baptist epitomizes what is difficult for a lot of people about Advent—it’s the fact that mixed in with our four themes of peace, hope, joy and love, you also run into some harsher themes of judgment and repentance. You not only get texts that look towards Jesus’ first coming on earth as a humble child, but you also get texts that look forward to Jesus’ promised second coming in glory and power and judgment, an emphasis that we liberal Protestants often overlook. After all, as someone from the church said to me this week with refreshing honesty, “I just want the baby in the manger, and the star, and the shepherds. I want some happiness!” So what are we supposed to do with John, and what are we supposed to do with Advent, when beyond the church walls, we’re deep into the season of Christmas already? And perhaps most importantly, where is the hope?
I think that in order to get at those questions, we have to ask a prior one. That question is, why do we need hope in the first place? What is it about the condition of being human that makes hope an utter, nonnegotiable necessity for a meaningful and productive life? The need for hope as a fundamental part of our human make-up is indisputable, because we have seen all too clearly what happens when people lose hope. We have only to think of the VA Tech massacre, or the Omaha mall massacre, or the actions of suicide bombers, or the dark depression that leads to personal suicide, to understand the consequences of life without hope. Those who are completely happy and content in their present circumstances may not need hope, but how many of us fall into that camp? And even those of us who are relatively happy cling to hopes about our future happiness. Why do we need hope? We need hope because each one of us knows deep down that something in our world is awry, something is broken, something is not as it should be, and as a result we suffer from fear, or anxiety, or depression, or grief.
Ironically, the manic happiness of the Christmas season may only heighten our empty or sad feelings and increase our need for hope. As Jewish philosopher Roger Gottlieb explains, “Sophisticated production and mass consumption of gadgets can coexist, we have come to realize, with drug abuse, casual violence, and deep veins of unhappiness. Many of us have so many ‘things’—yet are, much of the time, harried, frustrated, or depressed. Instead of calm enjoyment and appreciation, we are gripped by ever-increasing desires that are only temporarily satiated by new acquisitions. The Christmastime orgies of consumption leave a lingering sense of emptiness.” 1
In his book, A Spirituality of Resistance: Finding a Peaceful Heart and Protecting the Earth, Gottlieb also lifts up the deep sense of frustration and hopelessness many of us feel as we look at the world around us. “Hope for the future,” he writes, “confidence in the moral standing of our civilization, a sense that there is a place where we really can belong with grace or harmony, such things become increasingly difficult to come by. How are we to find a peaceful heart while facing the full—and bitter—truth?" 2
Facing the full, and sometimes bitter, truth of our own lives, or the lives of those we love, or the society that we live in, requires courage and the sustaining power of hope—hope to imagine new truths, new realities that might yet be born. What is it that you are afraid to face in your own life? What is it that you hope for, yearn for? When you are faced with hard or uncomfortable truths, what is your response to them? It’s easy and tempting to turn away, to soothe ourselves with all the distractions at our disposal, to paper over our fears with mounds of material goods, especially at this time of year. Yet that famous Catholic priest and holy man Henri Nouwen warns us that, “there is no hope in denial or avoidance, neither for ourselves nor for anyone else…new life can only be born out of the seed planted in crushed soil. Indeed God, our Lord, ‘will not scorn this crushed and broken heart.’”3
If you understand hope in this way, then you might begin to understand the importance of Advent as a time of preparation before the feast of Christmas. Just as Lent precedes Easter as a period of time for self-examination and preparation for the resurrection of Christ, Advent provides us with a reflective and expansive space to prepare our hearts for the birth of the Christ child as the incarnation of God’s very Self in our broken and twisted world. Before we get to the baby in the manger, and the star and the shepherds, we have to spend some time in the wilderness. And that brings us back to this hard question of repentance, and the preaching of John the Baptist, and the question of how in the world we can find hope in John’s message.
I picked up a great resource recently at the American Academy of Religion meeting on how to preach the lectionary, and believe me, we pastors need help sometimes in preaching from the lectionary! And this book had a very helpful chapter on preaching in Advent that deals with our text from Matthew today. I want to share with you the insight that I gained from this book on the John the Baptist story, because it really struck me with an “aha” moment that helped reorient my whole way of thinking about this text. The author lays out the message in a series of neat steps, as follows:
“So what is John’s message? First, the Lord is coming, so get ready. Second, getting ready means having one’s sins forgiven. Third, being forgiven means repenting and having a ritual bath to signify this cleansing of one’s soul.” The author continues, “Perhaps the key word here is repentance. I think when we hear that word we oftentimes think it means, ‘stop doing the bad stuff you are doing and clean up your act!’ But that’s not really what John the Baptist is doing. John is preaching repentance all right, but the word repentance is far deeper, far more profound than that. The Greek word for repentance is hard to translate. Literally the closest thing would be ‘change your mind,’ but that doesn’t really get it. Repentance is more like ‘rethink everything.’”4
Wow! When I read that, it stopped me in my tracks. Repentance means “rethink everything”? Not, I’m a horrible person and I have to beat up on myself and feel terrible all the time? That was a novel concept. I had to read on. The author continues, “Rethink everything about how you relate to other people, the people you work with, the people you love, the people you run into casually, the people who are different from you, the people who ask you for things, the people who frighten or threaten you.” “Rethink everything about how you think the world operates….Rethink the issues of greed and poverty. Rethink the purpose of your life. Rethink how hard you work. Rethink whether you are doing what you really want to do with your life and for the people you love. In other words, rethink, reconsider, and reevaluate every assumption you make. See the world, see others, and see yourself differently. That’s what repent really means.”
So what do you think? Maybe repentance, in this light, is something that we can find value in. After all, it has almost a Socratic ring to it….something like, the unexamined life is not worth living. I can get behind that. Maybe repentance, in this sense, is about opening our lives up to the piercing light of God’s love and asking whether and to what extent our lives express the love of God, and where we fall short, asking for help to live better, more loving lives. When we recognize where we fall short, we are able to admit to ourselves that part of repentance is acknowledging our complicity in the destructive habits of our own lives and of our society. And yet, in spite of that complicity, God’s love for us is inexhaustible. As the author of the lectionary book says, “Real repentance is a lifelong opportunity to ask ourselves how well we are loving and to seek the forgiveness of God and others as we fail and the grace to love yet again.”5
And that brings us back to the question of hope. Because the very fact that we need to repent, to rethink everything, is a sign to us that life as we know it still doesn’t line up with God’s hopes for us. The lion and the lamb do not yet lie down together, and little children still bring up the back of the line when it comes to the world’s priorities. That’s why Isaiah’s prophecy of the peaceable kingdom is messianic, future-oriented, utopian in its vision of a different world…it is the world of the not yet, not the world of the now. Even the coming of Jesus as the Christ child didn’t change all that. The coming reign of God is present in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, but only in incipient form….his life on earth was the seed, the firstfruits, the downpayment of the reign of God’s peace and love that we still yearn for and wait for. As Christians, we live in the in between times, in between Christ’s coming into our world as a powerless child and the future coming of God’s reign of peace with justice.
In this in between time, the church has a special mission. Our mission is to be the people who hold open an imaginative space of hope and hold at bay the hopelessness that drags people down. Our mission is to challenge all powers that absolutize their authority and to resist all barriers that divide people from one another, and in so doing, to give hope to those who are trampled upon. For as Paul exhorts us in Romans, we are to welcome one another as Christ has welcomed us, for the glory of God. Our mission is to become a community of love, hope and resistance that models a different way to be in the world than the communities of fear and greed and cynicism that surround us. One way we are concretely doing this at Rock Spring is through the acts of kindness we engage in through contributing to many community organizations that assist the poor throughout the year and by making Christmas brighter for many children each year through our Secret Santa program. Another way is by helping an Iraqi family that had to flee Iraq because of death threats and who are seeking political asylum in this country. You’ll hear more about them very soon….about Salam, Nahida, Haida, Noor, Ahmed, Doha and little Marwa. You’ll hear about how we are joining with some other churches to help them make a home in this country, how we are finding one concrete, meaningful way to respond to a vicious war and to give hope to a family who have become innocent victims of this war. You’ll find, I think, as time goes on, that involvement with this one family will give us a sense of hope, a sense that we can make a difference in the world, that we can model love and hospitality and moral courage to a family who may not have seen the best side of Christians or of Americans. It’s a small step, yes, but it’s real. It helps us to embody true hope, which comes, as Gottlieb tells us, when we “seek to know the bitterest of truths but…embody in our actions our… commitment to create new, different realities.”
Well, how do we sustain our hope? Paul teaches us in Romans that we “abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” It is the Spirit of God inhabiting us that enables us to hope in the darkest circumstances. It is a power that transcends our limited minds and connects us to a divine promise and presence that tutors our hearts in the art of hope. Emily Dickinson said it well.
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words
And never stops at all….
May your soul be a place that welcomes hope and gives it room to perch and sing. May your mind be blessed with the capacity to rethink everything and to imagine a different future than the world we currently inhabit. May your heart be strong enough to encounter the pain of life with courage and to avoid all temptation to despair. For while our world is harried by the forces of death, yet we hope in the power of life to overcome all that is twisted and deadly. And so we pray, come, Emmanuel, God with us, come. Amen.
1. Roger S. Gottlieb, A Spirituality of Resistance: Finding a Peaceful Heart and Protecting the Planet (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 31.
2. Ibid., 30.
3.Henri J.M. Nouwen, Reaching Out (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1975), 40.
4.Gail R. O’Day and Charles Hackett, Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: A Guide (Nashville: Abindgon Press, 2007), 84-85.
5. Ibid., 86.