Sermon-of-the-Month for December, 2007
SPIRIT AND FIRE
Text: Matthew 3:1-12
In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming,
"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.' " 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. Do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. 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. "I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."
"Christmas is everywhere -- in the malls, on broadcast airwaves, in the big box retailers, in the magazines and newspapers. It's everywhere but one place: Churches! Instead we have Advent. The season of waiting for Christmas. What a killjoy!
We're Americans. We hate waiting. Nobody waits for Christmas, except churches! We want Christmas NOW. No wonder nobody comes to church anymore.
So what happens is, while the rest of the world goes hog wild with Christmas, churches play this game of pretend -- quaintly waiting for Christmas. As a consequence, by the time the churches catch up to Christmas, on Dec. 25, everybody else has had it up to here and is ready to move on. After saturating us with Christmas trees, Jingle Bells and Santa for six weeks, the stores lose the decorations PRONTO!
So my proposal is to do away with Advent entirely. Beginning with the Sunday after Thanksgiving, it's the season of Christmas. Let'er rip! Let's get the church calendar in line with the commercial calendar once and for all. It'll be good for us all.
That way, we can end the Christmas season when the advertisers, retailers and media do -- on Dec. 25. While we're at it, let's adjust the rest of the church calendar to fit the commercial calendar...
Taking the cues from the stores, the Sunday after Christmas will be the first Sunday in the new liturgical season of Valentines. Liturgical colors will be red (of course!) and the season will ponder the sweet after-Christmas shopping deals and the syrupy goodness of Jesus."
(Copyright (c) 2007, the Rev. Robert Blezard, www.stewardshipoflife.org. Used by permission.)
So writes Rob Blezard in a satirical poke at our culture's Christmas celebrations in a publication Stewardship of Life, which someone sent me after reading my December newsletter article on" keeping Advent purple." We buy into our culture's commercially driven Christmas practices at risk to our own spiritual health - and quite often, our physical health as well.
So what in the world is full-blown and full-grown John the Baptist doing here in our Advent? Isn't he just a bouncing baby boy at the time Jesus is born? Isn't he supposed to show up closer to Lent, when things start to heat up and Jesus is a grown up sparring with Satan in the wilderness? No one could embody the "purpleness" of Advent more than John the Baptizer. He didn't wear purple but he may as well have because his message was a penitential one: "Repent, the kingdom of heaven has come near!"
In his excellent sermon a few weeks ago on the Song of Zechariah, John's father and a temple priest, Ryan spoke of the two movements of that little oratorio: the thunder of the Hebrew prophets of old...and the new thing coming to which John would be herald; a looking back and a looking ahead; both a communal restoration and a personal transformation. Here John arrives out of the wilderness as an Old Testament figure, one of God's fierce prophets, and specifically here dressed as the prophet Elijah is described in 2 Kings: "a hairy man with a leather belt around his waist." So make no mistake, people of Judea, what is happening with this bizarre figure from the wilds is very much related to your old, old story of God and God's love for his people. This is not something totally new that John just thought up yesterday to get some attention. And for centuries the Hebrews had known that when Elijah would reappear, it would be the sign of a new and glorious age about to happen. Well...look at John and know that centuries of hope and longing are about to come to fruition. That's the first movement of Zechariah's song now taking on flesh and blood in John, crying in the wilderness.
Let's pause and think of the importance of wilderness. In the Bible, wildernesses are known to be what the Celtic Christian tradition calls "thin places," places where the boundary between the human and the divine is thinned to the point of communion. The wilderness is where the despairing Hagar is ministered to by the angel of the Lord (Genesis 21:14); where Moses meets the presence of the Lord in a burning bush (Exodus 3:1); it is where the Hebrews wandered for fifty years, led by God as cloud and fire, sustained by God's gift of manna, and blessed by the gift of God's Law, the Ten Commandments; it is the place where the Hebrew exiles are called by Isaiah to make a way for the Lord, a way of restoration and return home; and of course it is the place where Jesus spends forty days wrestling with the Temptor in discerning what it means to live out his messianic calling. Wildernesses are places where we can expect to meet God, and we all live through wildernesses now and then, places, seasons of our life that are distressing without the familiar landmarks and assurances, places or seasons when we feel lost or lonely or wounded or weary, helpless or hopeless, perplexed or purposeless. The good news is: this is where we are most likely to encounter the God who wants to make us whole and healed and transformed in spirit. What has been or may now be your wilderness?
Getting out of a wilderness means turning in a new direction and that is what John's message of repentance is about. If the kingdom is coming near, if God is reaching across a thin place, we need to turn to receive the gift of God's grace. Repentance, as I said last week, is not a matter of feeling bad about ourselves but thinking differently about ourselves, our life and its possibilities and priorities. Matthew writes that those who repented were baptized by John in the Jordan, confessing their sins. And again, confessing sins is not simply feeling bad about ourselves, or making a list of all the bad thing' we've done. In the words of Tom Long, confessing means "coming to the recognition that one has been basing one's life on a lie, on a flawed view of what is true and of lasting value." It's not wallowing in guilt, but recognizing the need to change, to make a turn in life, maybe a U-turn.
John then has some especially hard words for the Pharisees and Sadducees, the religious establishment, who have come to be baptized. Maybe it is we who are the insiders of faith, the most comfortable with spiritual business-as-usual, the keepers of the church keys, those who used to be called "the pillars of the church" - who are most at risk of missing the call to be changed and transformed. But the Pharisees and Sadducees did come to be baptized - was John's perception that a baptism for them was just one more religious ritual to enact without any soul-shaking consequence? We can't get into their minds, or John's; but John is clear that past connections and credentials mean little when it comes to God's transforming work, the kingdom drawing near. "God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham." Don't assume you are indispensable to God's work.
Then John points with high drama and vivid image to the new thing unfolding in Jesus, the new creation, as Paul calls it, that is the future secured by God's promise. "I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire." The Spirit sustains us, the fire purifies us. Living into this new reality is life's greatest joy because it is more closely attuned to God's way of grace and abundance and lovingkindness. But at the same time, living the new reality entails the fire that burns away the "bad stuff" that impedes our freedom. We will be winnowed, as will all who come through the waters of baptism. These words of John that may seem ominous and hard are really words of hope. We won't have to live carrying around the burden of those stubborn ounces of our sin. The chaff of our life will get thrown up by the Lord's winnowing fork, carried off by the Spirit-wind, and then burned, leaving only the good wheat of our lives, the parts that make for peace and joy and blessing and purpose and love. Has this happened? Of course not, not in fullness. But the winnowing is happening and we can live into it and be thankful that God will use Spirit and fire to make us new creations in Jesus Christ.
To quote Tom Long once again:
"Matthew...understands that those who belong to Jesus Christ have already begun to experience the freedom and confidence of those who belong to the kingdom of heaven. They can live in a world of people all around them climbing over each other's backs to grasp a little more cash and know, nonetheless, that true treasure lies elsewhere. They discern that anonymous life teaching children in an inner city school is of more value, in the kingdom sense, than being famous enough to appear on the cover of a glitter magazine. They realize that dishing out meals in a soup kitchen for the homeless will stand eternally, long after the satisfaction of pulling down a six-figure income cutting corporate deals has been burned away. They can even stand at gravesides, peering into the terrible face of the final foe, and affirm, 'if we have died with Christ, we shall surely be raised with him.' "
Advent is purple for a good reason: it gets us ready to receive the fullness of the meaning of the coming of the One whom " God sent into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world - our particular lives and all creation - might be saved through him." And that's the real Christmas gift we prepare to receive in Advent. Amen.
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