Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12
I think God is trying to get my attention
this Advent. It started off with the odd
juxtaposition of ancient words coming through the earbuds of my iPhone.
I’ve shared with you before that I pray
Morning Prayer as I take a walk with my dog in the pre-dawn darkness. Well, it just so happens that, as we enter
this season of Advent and prepare for the coming of Jesus Christ among us, the
podcast of Morning Prayer that I use has evaporated. I wonder what’s happened to the priest who’d
been dutifully providing it each day.
So, on Monday, I went looking for another podcast of Morning Prayer, and
the only one I could find was from the 1928 prayer book. OK, I thought, this will take me back to my
childhood. So I subscribed. And as I began my walk in the darkness, these
are the words that welcomed me into Advent:
Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth
us, in sundry places, to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and
wickedness; and that we should not dissemble nor cloak them before the face of
Almighty God our heavenly Father; but confess them with an humble, lowly,
penitent, and obedient heart; to the end that we may obtain forgiveness of the
same, by his infinite goodness and mercy. (BCP 1928, 5-6)
It went on like this for several more
sentences, imploring me to confess my manifold sins and wickedness. And then the voice launched into the old
words that shaped the humble hearts of generations:
Almighty and most merciful Father; we have
erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the
devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws.
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done
those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us. But
thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou those, O God,
who confess their faults. Restore thou those who are penitent; according to thy
promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesus our Lord. And grant, O most
merciful Father, for his sake; that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous,
and sober life, to the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.
So, here we are today, gathered to offer
our prayers on this second Sunday of Advent.
You’ll notice some variety in the colors the clergy are wearing this
morning. Many of us of a certain age
will remember an earlier day when the season of Advent was bedecked in purple,
just like the penitential season of Lent.
In fact, Advent was seen as a mini-Lent, with people preparing for the
coming of Jesus Christ with a sense of holy foreboding. The readings still implore us to get ready,
or else. As we heard in the Gospel
reading last Sunday, Advent begins with a vision of the end of days, when Jesus
returns in judgment; and we are told to “keep awake, for the Son of Man is
coming at an unexpected hour” (Matthew 24:44).
Today, we hear the prophet John the Baptist calling us to account, along
with the Pharisees and Sadducees. He
says, “You brood of vipers! Who warned
you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Matthew 3:7). Yikes – that’s pretty intense for people with
Christmas parties on their minds. So, a
generation ago, many Episcopal churches switched to blue to shine the light a
little more fully on the expectational sense of Advent. Blue is the color associated with the Virgin
Mary, and it helps us join with her in waiting hopefully for God-With-Us. But whichever
color we choose, Advent is a “both/and.”
In these four weeks, we live in the tension of repentance and
expectation, aware of God’s judgment and God’s unending love for the people and
the world God has made.
Love and judgment certainly run through
the words of the Old Testament prophets, including the prophet Isaiah. In the reading this morning, it’s loving hope
we hear, the promise that the ideal king from the house and lineage of David
will come to rule God’s people – a shoot from the stump of Jesse, King David’s
father. But the prophet’s hopeful promise
also comes with judgment implied. This coming
faithful and righteous king will stand in contrast to the kings who had led
Israel and Judah into the state in which we find them by Isaiah’s time. The king was thought to be God’s viceroy, the
descendant of David anointed to lead the people into faithful obedience to
God’s law. If the people followed
faithfully, so God would bless the nation. But faithfulness and blessing hadn’t exactly
been the story in the years following kings David and Solomon. Israel became divided. Both the northern and southern kingdoms
suffered invasions, and Isaiah lived during mass deportations of his people by
the invading Assyrians. Not long after
Isaiah, the people of both kingdoms would find themselves in exile, their
nations destroyed. Eventually, the
judgment of exile gave way to God’s faithful and loving restoration of the
people to their promised land. But they
came back without the restoration of God’s monarchy. The people waited and hoped, but a national
monarchy was not going to inaugurate the kingdom of God.
We see a similar truth today. We can’t rely on secular or governmental efforts
to inaugurate God’s rule and reign in our time.
The United States is not the kingdom of God, no matter how much we love
our country, no matter who our elected leaders may be. The message of Advent is this: that God’s
king has already come and will come again, inaugurating a new kind of kingdom,
a peaceable kingdom; a new kind of community, God’s beloved community. The world around us will not follow him, and
we have the Cross to prove it. But this
ideal king asks each one of us to choose to follow him instead. And when we do, we bring to light the true
kingdom that stands in contrast to the world – and we can invite others to join
us in its light.
How?
It starts with our repentance, our turning in a new direction, which is
why John the Baptist and Jesus both begin their ministries with that startling
call: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!” (Matthew 3:1; 4:17). John is dressed in camel skins, and he
survives in the desert on locusts and wild honey. To us, that makes him sound crazy. But to the people of John’s time, the crazy
get-up said something else. In the Old
Testament, the prophet Elijah dressed like this (2 Kings 1:8), and the return
of Elijah was the sign that God’s messiah, the anointed king, was about to make
his appearance (Malachi 4:5). So, the
people, the regular folks, go out to the wilderness to see John, and confess
their sins, and be baptized as a mark of turning their hearts in a new
direction, getting ready for the king.
And that’s great, as far as John the
Baptist is concerned. But along with the
regular folks, John sees the religious elites coming out for a piece of the
repenting action. The Pharisees and
Sadducees were ones who set the rules, the burdens too great to bear for the
peasants trying to follow the Law of Moses (Matthew 23:1-36). Conveniently, those rules included practices
that took resources from poor peasants and enriched the aristocratic religious
leaders instead (Mark 12:38-40). So John
the Baptist stops them short: “You brood
of vipers!” he says to the religious elites. “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to
come? Bear fruits worthy of
repentance.”
Bear fruits worthy of repentance. It’s not enough to feel badly for the poor choices
we make, says John the Baptist. Guilt is
not God’s bottom line. Don’t come to the
Jordan confessing your sinfulness unless you intend to do something about
it. The trees that don’t produce for the
kingdom will be “cut down and thrown into the fire,” John says (3:10). The one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit and
with fire is coming soon. “His winnowing
fork is in his hand” to separate the wheat from the chaff, says John, and “the
chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (3:12).
Well, if you think I’m going to try top that sermon, think again.
I can’t say precisely what repentance
looks like for you, but I’ll bet you’ve already got a pretty good idea. This much I do know: It involves bending
the knee of your heart to God, listening to what God has to say about your
journey, and being willing to change your life in ways that align with the
practices of God’s kingdom, God’s beloved community. In your own life, what doesn’t align with the
reign of a king who seeks “equity for the [poor and] meek of the earth” (Isaiah
11:4)? In what specific ways might God
be asking you to turn in a new direction?
In Advent, even as the world calls us to shop and decorate, God calls us
to do some interior housekeeping and sweep out the dark corners of our lives to
make them ready for the king who’s about to come.
So, I’ll ask again: In what specific ways is God asking you to
turn in a new direction? Maybe it’s
about mending broken relationships. Maybe
it’s about saying “no” to habits and practices that isolate us from other
people’s struggles. Maybe it’s about being
and working with people who are poor or sick or imprisoned. Maybe it’s about paying more to the people we
employ. Maybe it’s about raising our
voices when you see injustice. Maybe
it’s about quieting our voices so others might be heard.
We might want to write off John the Baptist,
with his bizarre foods and his crazy prophet’s get-up. But his call to the religious authorities
applies to all of us who find ourselves in the category of the elite: Bear
fruit worthy of repentance. Bear fruit
worthy of the kingdom of heaven that has now come near and will come nearer
still. In these next three weeks before
the king comes into our world and into our hearts once again, ask
yourself: What would it look like for me
to join the wolf that lives with the lamb?
What would it look like for me to follow the little child who leads the
peaceable kingdom? What would it look
like for my life to reveal God’s reality in which people do “not hurt or
destroy on all [God’s] holy mountain” (Isaiah 11:9)? How can my brief time on this side of
eternity help bring about the day when “the earth will be full of the knowledge
of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9)? What fruit of repentance is God asking me to
bear?
No comments:
Post a Comment