SERMON
Arlie
Sims
3rd
Sunday of Advent
Every
year individuals from the congregation get together sometime early in the fall to choose a theme for the approaching Advent
season. Everyone is invited. We
sit together and read through the lectionary readings. We discuss the scriptures
and how they connect to our experiences, to our world, and to our particular faith community. Then we agree on a theme for
the season.
This year
the group came up with a phrase with four parts, and each week during Advent we are building on the previous piece:
So far
we have covered the following pieces:
LIVING
LIVING
IN HARMONY
LIVING
IN HARMONY AND CONNECTING
And next
week, LIVING IN HARMONY AND CONNECTING BY GOD’S GRACE.
At first
glance, it would be easy to see these words as sweet and untroubling, a greeting card sentiment. But that would not give proper credit to those who came up with the theme.
Just as scripture seems either mysterious or safe, sometimes, until we scratch the surface, this goal of living in
harmony and connecting by God’ grace is deeply challenging. Think of the
term “shrinking planet,” words often used to describe our new experience of the global community in the 21st
century. This connectedness that is now impossible to deny is not easy,
it is indeed a great challenge.
In Isaiah
35, we are presented with a vision of a state of harmony and fulfillment.
In the
Psalm, there is a proclamation, too, that God brings harmony by making things right.
IN the
gospel, there is a question. Has the time come?
Have we arrived? Jesus, are you the one to bring us this harmony? Jesus’ answer harkens back to the descriptions of harmony from the former two
passages. The harmony comes because of healing the sick, strengthening the weak,
and correcting what is wrong:
You tell
John, he says, and I can imagine that if he did it today, or maybe I mean, in a congregation like ours, he might snap his
fingers to illustrate his point: snap, snap, snap! You go tell John, that I’m BRINGIN’ IT! Go on, tell him!
And in
the gospel, there’s an important answer to a really significant question. John
had emphasized judgment and repentance and so, perhaps his question was not so surprising.
From his jail cell, he had likely heard about all the healing and feeding and helping the most vulnerable that Jesus
had been doing. Apparently this was not the main thing John was expecting from
the Messiah. He wanted judgment! Jesus is bringing what we might call restorative
justice. He is making things right!
Still, John is in prison. And he is going
to die. And Jesus did not, after all, wipe all sickness and injustice from the
earth. And so, neither in Isaiah nor in the gospel passage has that which is
hoped for yet fully arrived. Something good has arrived but that great, all-consuming good that has not yet arrived is now
more intensely anticipated.
It reminds
us that advent is one part lived experience and three parts hope.
Let’s
talk about Advent for a minute or two:
Advent is the first season of the Christian calendar year. During
this time we prepare ourselves for the coming of God. We ponder the incarnation,
the coming of God among us, as one of us. We spend a month anticipating
the day when we will celebrate the arrival of that Emmanuel, God with us.
We usually think of the Birth stories of Jesus as the place where Advent finally arrives at its end. After all, Christmas means “The coming of the Christ.”
But Jesus, throughout his life and in all his teaching and preaching and healing, WAS ALSO LOOKING FORWARD REFERRING
TO THE COMING KINDOM.
He believed, as did many Jews of his day, that
a day was soon approaching when time as we know it would end. Not in the kind
of chaotic, damningly destructive end that the Left Behind novels describe, in which those who believed in Jesus are swept
away to heaven and the rest are damned to their own destruction, but an end in which the point of time is fulfilled in the
re-ordering of the world, the healing and transformation into what God truly intends.
So Advent has a quality about it that is at once NOW and in the FUTURE.
Advent is a time of remembering the arrival of God among us in Jesus and of looking forward, of expecting and hoping,
for the arrival of God’s new, full reality.
1) Now, the thing that all of the scripture from today’s
lectionary have in common is this: In order to get to that hoped for future,
that arrival of God’s reign in our midst, the fulfillment of God’s time, and the healing of the world, something
will have to change!
35:4 Say to those who are of a fearful heart, "Be strong, do
not fear! Here is your God. God will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. God will come and save you."
I think this verse is important.
Advent is about an expectation of coming reconciliation, harmony, healing, and growth.
But in order to get there, transformation has to happen.
In Isaiah and in Psalms, the words of hope are tied inextricably
to the transformation of the way things are.
GOD WILL COME WITH VENGEANCE, WITH TERRIBLE RECOMPENSE;
GOD WILL COME AND SAVE YOU.
There are two ways to read this juxtaposition:
1) A commonly held belief, and one that has brought immeasurable harm in
our world, is that God is going to come and save YOU, Arlie or you, Broadway Church, or you Jewish people, or YOU Christians,
or YOU liberals and the rest of the world can go to hell! Those bad people who
have caused the evil in the world will be wiped out, and you, God’s favorite, will be saved and blessed and the beneficiary
of a new, safe, heavenly existence.
OR
2) The terrible coming of God and the saving coming of God are one and the
same. You see, we do get a vision of an angry God in Isaiah and the Psalm, but God’s anger is against that which hurts God’s children and God’s
creation.
God does not demand the blood of human beings. There’s enough blood spilt in the world without asking God to spill more. God demands RESURRECTION. New life. New possibilities. New hope. TRANSFORMATION. In the words of Isaiah, there is destruction,
but it is in the dismantling of the systems that bind us ALL. Rather than focusing
on some clearly defined and external ENEMY, we must see that the world is much more complex.
As part of that recognition, we must look at ourselves and our complicity with our own dehumanization in complying
with oppression and harm to others or to God’s good earth.
While the Hebrew people may have
indeed understood this vengeance and recompense of God to be coming against the hegemonic Babylonian power that controlled
every aspect of their lives, destroyed their temple, and sent them into exile, the larger picture here is, in the words of
a certain lectionary commentary, “the will of God for the well-being of the world will indeed prevail over all that
is distorted and pathological” (Brueggemann 19). In our new, smaller world,
we must see the universality of this claim, and we must not bring violence against one another. I believe that God’s will is to save all.
And let’s not forget
that the first third of the book of Isaiah is largely a call to repentence and change for the people of Judah. Then, in the face of the exile, the emphasis shifted to the language of comfort and hope. So in this way, we must see that perhaps, if we are part of the problem, that this work of God may challenge
us even as it frees us. The saving work is also the work of tearing down that
which enslaves us!
GOD WILL COME WITH VENGEANCE, WITH
TERRIBLE RECOMPENSE;
GOD WILL COME AND SAVE YOU.
God may challenge me as a gay man to come out of my silence
so as to be no longer complicit in my own oppression and the oppression of others like me.
As a white man, even though I may feel sympathy for people of
color who are oppressed in our country and our communities and may send a check to an organization or be involved in community
work, if I think my involvement is for THEIR good, than I may not be prepared for the ADVENT transformation. The Christ of transformation must inspire my heart to see that the oppression of people of color
is a sickness that makes me—a white man--less human, too.
As a diabetic with health insurance I may from time to time
think about how fortunate I am and say a gentle prayer for all those who suffer disease without insurance or proper care,
but I may not yet be truly shaken up by the Advent hope, either. The distortion
that makes us think that poor health care is only the problem of the uninsured and not a dehumanizing reality for the rest
of us could not stand up to the bright light that Advent brings to our understanding.
Here is the thing: If
we think our work is about saving the poor, feeding the hungry, liberating the oppressed, we are both right and wrong. We are to care about our world and to try to make the world more merciful and just. But we must also recognize that God wants and needs to change us, too. If we oppress, then we are hurt and dehumanized by it as surely as the people we oppress are, though in
different ways. We are ALL complicit in our own ways with the world’s problems;
and to the extent that we “benefit” from injustice, we are mired in and harmed ourselves by the distortion and
brokenness of the world.
And here I anticipate next week’s theme, “by God’s
grace!” Only by God’s grace can we find the true Advent understanding
of our connectedness and begin to truly expect our shared liberation.
God does
want harmony in the world and in our communities and families. The danger is
not that we believe that. But there is a danger in other-worldly hope that doesn’t
deal with the messiness that is involved in transformation in the now.
Broadway
is a community that is strong and hopeful and celebratory and kind; it is also a community in which many of us identify with
those that Isaiah and the Psalmist and Jesus describe as being in need of healing, of transformation, of liberation and justice. We are also a community of human beings in a world in which human beings both rely
on and are hurt by systems that are good and at the same time broken, systems that work better for some of us than for others.
In this
congregation, we have experienced our share of turmoil in the past decade or so. We
have experienced death and we have experienced resurrection. We are, as all disciples
of the Christ aspire to be, the body of Christ, together in our connectedness. As
we progress through this Advent month, we wait, we anticipate, we hope for the coming of God’s good reign of justice
and mercy. But we don’t sit back and simply enjoy the wait; we seek a place
where we can truly anticipate it and prepare ourselves to receive it.
WE EXPECT
TO RECEIVE BOTH THE CHALLENGE OF TRANSFORMATION AND THE PROMISE OF TRUE HARMONY. I
fear there is no way to have one without the other. The long tradition of the
Jewish scriptures, the cries of the Psalmist, the Magnificat prayer of Elizabeth, and the words of Jesus all tell us that
our harmonious future is tied to the deep stirring up of transformation. Without
transformation, we should not expect to find any but a shallow peace indeed.
Why is
today’s Isaiah passage so triumphant? So “over the top” with
great anticipation of a tremendous new reality, where the blind see, the sick are made well, the fearful are filled with hope,
the dry parched earth is suddenly covered with springs and rivers and lush flowers and vegetation, and a new, wide highway
appears on which there will be no threat of violence and on which no one will ever get lost?
Recently
I was watching a public television special on the life and work of Tony Kushner, the author of the great dramatic work, “Angels
in America.” Watching the special I was amazed by what a positive, tender,
loving person he appeared to be. I had seen Angels in America. It is not a soft touch. It delves right to the heart of so
much of the sickness in our culture. But it is also deeply hopeful. During the TV special, Kushner was interviewed by students at Southern Methodist University. One of them asked him: about the criticism he sometimes gets
from theater and literary critics for the amount of hope he portrays in his work. He
answered her by saying that he believes there is an ethical imperative to look for hope.
“We must commit to finding hope in the face of potential despair,” he said.
It could
not have been stated more clearly if Isaiah had said it himself. Hope is
not optional. It’s a commitment. Hope
can see us through the sometimes scary processes that God can use to transform our community for greater harmony and deeper
love.
I tried
to think of an image that brings together those two images of challenge and harmony.
As I sat and pondered it, I received the image of water. I remembered
the time I drove along the Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles to San Franscisco.
If you ever need to travel between these two cities, please do not fly and do not take the highway. Take Highway One. It is a dramatic and beautiful road trip,
indeed. My senses were overwhelmed. There
was the cool fresh air blowing through my hair, the pungent smell, the taste of salt on the lips, the sound of constantly
rolling waves and great walls of water crashing against high cliffs of stone and soil, violent churning waves that reminded
me of the great sea monster Leviathon of the pre-creation chaos suggested in early chapters of Genesis.
This scene
left me with two impressions:
First,
the gentle, rhythmic sound of waves approaching and retreating, approaching and retreating, flowing and rolling and lapping,
as if to the rhythm of a heartbeat. It was calming. I could have lain down to sleep.
The other
part of that experience was the powerful, high waves that crashed against the rough, hard cliffs again and again and again.
Both ordered
harmony and insistent transformation abide there together, as they have for a thousand years.
Those cliffs that look so permanent to us have never been truly static, not in the long arc of God’s time. They are both enduring and constantly changing.
“We
shall not be moved,” says the old spiritual, but those who sang it were insistent in their hope for transformation,
even as they dug their roots deep into their community and stood firmly on the Rock which is their Redeemer.
God is
with us as we, like Isaiah, proclaim our Advent hope, and as we, like Jesus, go about our hopeful work.
AMEN
REFERENCES
Brueggemann,
Walter, Charles B. Cousar, Beverly R. Gaventa, James D. Newsome. Texts for Preaching:
A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV: Year A. Louisville: Westminster John
Knox Press, 1995.
