four small sermons by Carrie Eikler
Matthew 1:18-25, Isaiah 7:10-16
Fourth Sunday in Advent
One
Last week Torin told you about a new billboard that went up just around Thanksgiving outside the Lincoln Tunnel in New York. Above an outline of the 3 magi on their way to the stable, reads the words “You know it’s a myth. This season celebrate reason.” It was put up by the organization called American Atheists. You may be relieved, or humored to know, that a few days after that billboard was put up the Catholic League put up its own sign saying: “You know it’s real. This season celebrate Jesus.”
I have followed some of the dialogue going on about these billboard wars and it is interesting to see how people feel: at least those who blog, tweet, and comment on articles about the signs. Of course, some were furious with the atheists’ billboards and were relieved to see the pro-Christmas sign. Supporters of the pro-reason board laugh at the pro-Christmas billboard but under much of the poking fun, one can sense a seething frustration at misguided and righteous Christians. But a surprising number of people had messages like “I’m a Christian, but the reason sign doesn’t bother me” or “I’m an atheist, but am not offended by the Christian holiday. I say live and let live.” Or “It seems to me this tit for tat is completely against what Christmas is supposed to be about: about love, hope, and generosity.”
While there are a good number of loud voices rallying around each of their signs, it seems, like is often the case, many of the people are stuck somewhere in the tunnel, just wanting to get home to families, or get to work on time, or find some quiet from the all the noise the world throws at them: job layoffs, divorce, unplanned pregnancies...
choir sings "The angel Gabriel"
Two
Signs – "that by which anything is made known or represented; that which furnishes evidence; a mark; a token; an indication; a proof."
Our scriptures are laden with sign imagery. King Ahaz is the king of Judah. Threatened with invasion, the prophet Isaiah tells him to for a sign from God. And he refuses. Why would he refuse? Was he so faithful that he wouldn’t ask that of God? He had a lot to lose, so maybe he is taking the easy way out: “What I don’t know can’t hurt me.”
But Isaiah gives him a sign anyway, at least, a prophecy. And a strange one at that. In Hebrew the translation reads: “Look, the young marriageable woman pregnant, and will bear a son” Before that happens, his kingdom would be spared from invasion. What was this about? Was it to be a messianic prophecy, like Matthew later points back to? Was it simply to be a political prediction? It is not clear, but we can imagine. We can imagine…
Joseph didn’t request a sign. But he got an indication of what was to come. He had a lot to lose. Reputation, respect, honor. He could have her stoned to death, but he chooses to dismiss her. “Quietly” it says. Discreetly. Hush-hush. Maybe the neighbors won’t see. And then it comes. A sign, in the form of an angel. “It can be different than what you expect, Joseph” the angel whispers. “How?” he muses. We might ask the same. How can a baby coming be different than what we expect? We can imagine…
Three
Signs – "that by which anything is made known or represented; that which furnishes evidence; a mark; a token; an indication; a proof."
Christopher Hitchens is one of the most popular atheist thinkers of our time. In his 2007 book called God is Not Great: How religion poisons everything, he wrote “Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important.”
Religion no longer offers an explanation of anything important. What do you think about this statement?
Hitchens argues that the only signs we need to look for are those found in the material world. They only things worth explaining are things that can be explained through reason.
I appreciated what some of the contributors to the Mennonite Church Leader magazine had to say about this dualistic debate. Here are some of their thoughts. “Unfortunately, this brand of debate between since and religion, fact and revelation, faith and reason portrays the [conversation] as an either/or [debate]. [It oversimplifies] complex issues and [leaves] us with answers that do not satisfy. Yet the truth is that science and faith have something significant in common: [that is] their shared passion for mystery. Both religion and science seek to open up Mystery, understand it, know it, and in some form integrate it into the meaning of our lives. And both science and religion must at some point make a leap of the imagination to connect Mystery either to reason or to faith.”
Imagination – "Ability to form mental images, sensations, and concepts in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing, or other senses. The work of the mind that helps create."
“Imagination in the hands of science opens up new avenues of knowledge. [says the authors in "The Leader"] "Imagination in the hands of religion opens up new avenues of hope. ‘Immanuel, God with us’ is more than a neatly packaged theological insight; it is an imaginative leap on the part of humanity and God both.”
The power of imagination, whether through science or religion, is that it opens up new and beautiful vistas of what it means to be human. And discovering new ways to be human, it seems to me, is at the heart of the mystery of Advent.
Four
Last Saturday, Lois Harder, a member of our congregation, took Torin and me to a concert of the Renaissance City Choir in Pittsburgh. And while the voices were enough to draw my eyes closed and send me into the heavens, I found myself wide awake, staring at one person on stage. Not one of the singers, but an important member of the choir, nonetheless: the sign language interpreter.
And at first I thought, how funny, that people who couldn’t hear, or at least who had difficulty hearing, would want to come to a choral concert. I quickly admonished my thought, recognizing that there are those who use sign language who can still hear the music, but can’t hear the words clearly. But maybe even those who were totally deaf could relate to what was going on through the signs.
But why? I thought? If they couldn’t hear the music, why come? If they couldn’t experience it like the rest of us, to experience the audible sound of a 1oo-person choir, how could they experience the beauty?
And I kept watching her—the sign interpreter. I watched how her body moved with the rhythm of the song. How her facial expressions mimicked the tone of the story within the songs.
I watched how there was a wide space of imagination created to connect the signs of her hands to the spirit of the choir’s singing. But I also recognized how that wide space of imagination allowed for an entirely new experience—while I accessed the beauty through my hearing, the signs, and the body, and the expression…the imagination allowed for another way of relating to beauty for the deaf and hard of hearing.
In this wide space of imagination, I realized that two people can come to the same beauty in different ways. And strangely, it was through the signs that I couldn’t understand…that I understood.
Advent is the time to cultivate the imagination. Not to put aside reason in order to blindly believe in a virgin birth or stories of angels. But to imagine about the possibilities. To open up to the mystery and encounter beautiful vistas of what it means to be human. Imagination is sacred because it opens us up to see the sign of God’s advent in our midst.
Where is your imagination being stretched this Advent to see the sign?
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Hope, Doubt and Expectation
sermon by Torin Eikler
Isaiah 35:1-10 Matthew 11:2-11
Patience and I have had a long and strange relationship. When I was a child, I thought like a child. When I wanted something I wanted it, and I wanted it right now. But I was the oldest, and it didn’t take long for me to begin to learn how to wait. That began my long struggle to learn about patience – a journey punctuated by failures and moments of recommitment, and up till just a few years ago, people would have commented regularly on how understanding and tolerant I was … in my work … in my relationships … with my children. That was a matter of pride for me since I had been cultivating a laid-back approach most of my life.
These days, though, I find that I am easily goaded into irrational and even vindictive responses. Sometimes the littlest things (a small foot touching my leg under the table, for instance) spark a dark look or a snappish, “stop it now!” Sometimes my anger nearly gets free, and my voice takes on a life of its own, thundering things that I never expected to come out of my mouth at people who really don’t deserve the stormy response they are getting. If patience is a cardinal virtue than I have most certainly fallen from grace as I suspect we all have from time to time.
Patience doesn’t seem to have been an issue for John the Baptist, though – mostly because he doesn’t seem to have had much to begin with. From the beginning he shouted out his angry frustrations in tirades laced with threats and epithets, preaching fire and brimstone and the judgment to come. Strangely, his angry rants seem to have drawn crowds of people. Some came just for the show. Others took his message to heart and left with new resolution to change their lives. Eventually his critiques got the attention of the rich and powerful landing him in prison, and this man of the wilderness found himself in a dark cell, locked away from the freedom he had known.
I think it must have been hard for him to sit there day after day. No sunlight to order the rhythm of his life. None of the honey he was used to eating (though I suspect he might have appreciated exchanging bread for the locust that had been his mainstay). No one to talk to but the guards and an occasional visitor. If he didn’t know patience before, he must have learned a measure of it there as he waited for the Messiah to fulfill the promises of Isaiah and set the prisoners free.
But time wore on, and the prophesies that John had made did not come to pass. He began to wonder, and his patience wore thin. And that was reason enough for John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus who had jumped for joy when he recognized the messiah while the two were still in the womb, to begin to doubt.
Doubt may seem like a strange theme to bring into Advent with its promises of joy and love and peace for all humanity, but I think it has a place here. There are surveys that suggest that anywhere from 15-30% of people in attendance at any given church service (clergy and laity alike) would say that they don’t really believe in everything the church teaches about Christ: angelic visitors, virgin births, kings following a star to visit a baby god on the strength of a dream. There is a billboard that just went up at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel in New York that pretty well sums it up for many people. It has the well-known Christmas card scene of men on camels headed toward a stable with a star overhead, and it reads, “You KNOW it’s a MYTH. This season celebrate REASON!”
You may or may not be part of the 15-30%, but I think it’s probably safe to say that most of us have our doubts about the story of the nativity, about many of the stories in the Bible, and even (or maybe especially) the some of the teachings of the church. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Doubt is a part of faith. There are some who even say that those of us who experience doubts are closer to the Kingdom than those who are absolutely certain about their beliefs. Doubts drive us back to God, asking again and again: “Is this for real? Are you really that kind of God? Is your love so great that you would actually become human and die for us?” “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” And the same doubts leave us questioning ourselves too. What do we believe? Does it matter what we believe? Should it really change how we live? If it is all true – if Christ really did become human to bring us salvation, what does God expect of us in return?
Expectation … now there’s an idea we are more comfortable with. We’re all about expectation in Advent. We expect snow and cold. We expect crowds of people shopping for the gifts that are expected under the tree on Christmas morning. We expect warmth and holiday cheer in those we meet (though we don’t always find that at the mall). We expect to hear the story of how God came to live among us as a helpless baby in a lowly stable.
But things don’t always meet our expectations. They fall short, or they go beyond. Sometimes events just go in an entirely different direction than we imagined. That shakes us up, gets us out of sorts. I think that’s part of my struggle with patience. My children – other events and other people too, but mostly my children don’t live up to my expectations. They don’t always eat the food we have lovingly prepared. Sometimes they throw it on the floor. They don’t always play nicely together. They hit each other, and they won’t share toys. They don’t always listen to me (that’s a big one). They are generally lovely and well-behaved boys for everyone else, but they just aren’t for me, and somehow that seems to be reason enough for me to get … shall we say “frustrated.”
“Frustrated” might be a good word for John’s response when Jesus didn’t fulfill his hopes. There he was in prison for taking on Herod – for starting the revolution that he expected Jesus to lead and Jesus was healing people, raising them from the dead, and … teaching them. This was not the Messiah that John envisioned. Where was the righteous cleansing? Where were the winnowing fork and the burning chaff? Where was the ax laying waste to the forest of corruption that had so fueled his anger? If this was the one anointed to bring redemption to the Jews, then that redemption was totally different than he had expected.
But God … God is not bound by our expectations, and as maddening as that may be, it’s a good thing. If things always went according to human expectations, who knows what kind of mess we would have made of the world by now. None of us would have envisioned the god-baby Jesus. None of us could have predicted the depth of divine love and mercy. None of us would have framed redemption in terms of the reconciling grace brought by Christ.
In an email discussion this week, one of my colleagues described Mary’s Magnificat as a song of revolt – a song that rejoiced in the promise of change – of human vision broken open by the power of divine love. The Messiah she proclaims would not be what … would not be who people expected. He would come scattering the proud-hearted, bringing down the powerful, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry, and sending the rich away hungry. He would not lead a grand rebellion overthrowing the Roman authorities and gathering the people once more into a great nation. His revolution would change the world in a different way: bringing sight to the blind, healing the lame, cleansing the leprous, raising the dead. Restoring the outcast to society and reconciling humanity to God, he would change the world one person at a time.
It’s a revolution that is still going on. One person at a time, the Child of Hope bring healing and reconciliation. One person at a time, the Prince of Peace brings love and peace into the world. One person at a time – one you and one me – Christ comes into the world, and the promise of the babe in the manger is born.
In little ways – little unexpected ways, the Kingdom of God is coming near. That is reason enough for hope. That is reason enough for faith in the face of doubt. That is reason enough for joy in the midst of our waiting.
Isaiah 35:1-10 Matthew 11:2-11
Patience and I have had a long and strange relationship. When I was a child, I thought like a child. When I wanted something I wanted it, and I wanted it right now. But I was the oldest, and it didn’t take long for me to begin to learn how to wait. That began my long struggle to learn about patience – a journey punctuated by failures and moments of recommitment, and up till just a few years ago, people would have commented regularly on how understanding and tolerant I was … in my work … in my relationships … with my children. That was a matter of pride for me since I had been cultivating a laid-back approach most of my life.
These days, though, I find that I am easily goaded into irrational and even vindictive responses. Sometimes the littlest things (a small foot touching my leg under the table, for instance) spark a dark look or a snappish, “stop it now!” Sometimes my anger nearly gets free, and my voice takes on a life of its own, thundering things that I never expected to come out of my mouth at people who really don’t deserve the stormy response they are getting. If patience is a cardinal virtue than I have most certainly fallen from grace as I suspect we all have from time to time.
Patience doesn’t seem to have been an issue for John the Baptist, though – mostly because he doesn’t seem to have had much to begin with. From the beginning he shouted out his angry frustrations in tirades laced with threats and epithets, preaching fire and brimstone and the judgment to come. Strangely, his angry rants seem to have drawn crowds of people. Some came just for the show. Others took his message to heart and left with new resolution to change their lives. Eventually his critiques got the attention of the rich and powerful landing him in prison, and this man of the wilderness found himself in a dark cell, locked away from the freedom he had known.
I think it must have been hard for him to sit there day after day. No sunlight to order the rhythm of his life. None of the honey he was used to eating (though I suspect he might have appreciated exchanging bread for the locust that had been his mainstay). No one to talk to but the guards and an occasional visitor. If he didn’t know patience before, he must have learned a measure of it there as he waited for the Messiah to fulfill the promises of Isaiah and set the prisoners free.
But time wore on, and the prophesies that John had made did not come to pass. He began to wonder, and his patience wore thin. And that was reason enough for John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus who had jumped for joy when he recognized the messiah while the two were still in the womb, to begin to doubt.
Doubt may seem like a strange theme to bring into Advent with its promises of joy and love and peace for all humanity, but I think it has a place here. There are surveys that suggest that anywhere from 15-30% of people in attendance at any given church service (clergy and laity alike) would say that they don’t really believe in everything the church teaches about Christ: angelic visitors, virgin births, kings following a star to visit a baby god on the strength of a dream. There is a billboard that just went up at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel in New York that pretty well sums it up for many people. It has the well-known Christmas card scene of men on camels headed toward a stable with a star overhead, and it reads, “You KNOW it’s a MYTH. This season celebrate REASON!”
You may or may not be part of the 15-30%, but I think it’s probably safe to say that most of us have our doubts about the story of the nativity, about many of the stories in the Bible, and even (or maybe especially) the some of the teachings of the church. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Doubt is a part of faith. There are some who even say that those of us who experience doubts are closer to the Kingdom than those who are absolutely certain about their beliefs. Doubts drive us back to God, asking again and again: “Is this for real? Are you really that kind of God? Is your love so great that you would actually become human and die for us?” “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” And the same doubts leave us questioning ourselves too. What do we believe? Does it matter what we believe? Should it really change how we live? If it is all true – if Christ really did become human to bring us salvation, what does God expect of us in return?
Expectation … now there’s an idea we are more comfortable with. We’re all about expectation in Advent. We expect snow and cold. We expect crowds of people shopping for the gifts that are expected under the tree on Christmas morning. We expect warmth and holiday cheer in those we meet (though we don’t always find that at the mall). We expect to hear the story of how God came to live among us as a helpless baby in a lowly stable.
But things don’t always meet our expectations. They fall short, or they go beyond. Sometimes events just go in an entirely different direction than we imagined. That shakes us up, gets us out of sorts. I think that’s part of my struggle with patience. My children – other events and other people too, but mostly my children don’t live up to my expectations. They don’t always eat the food we have lovingly prepared. Sometimes they throw it on the floor. They don’t always play nicely together. They hit each other, and they won’t share toys. They don’t always listen to me (that’s a big one). They are generally lovely and well-behaved boys for everyone else, but they just aren’t for me, and somehow that seems to be reason enough for me to get … shall we say “frustrated.”
“Frustrated” might be a good word for John’s response when Jesus didn’t fulfill his hopes. There he was in prison for taking on Herod – for starting the revolution that he expected Jesus to lead and Jesus was healing people, raising them from the dead, and … teaching them. This was not the Messiah that John envisioned. Where was the righteous cleansing? Where were the winnowing fork and the burning chaff? Where was the ax laying waste to the forest of corruption that had so fueled his anger? If this was the one anointed to bring redemption to the Jews, then that redemption was totally different than he had expected.
But God … God is not bound by our expectations, and as maddening as that may be, it’s a good thing. If things always went according to human expectations, who knows what kind of mess we would have made of the world by now. None of us would have envisioned the god-baby Jesus. None of us could have predicted the depth of divine love and mercy. None of us would have framed redemption in terms of the reconciling grace brought by Christ.
In an email discussion this week, one of my colleagues described Mary’s Magnificat as a song of revolt – a song that rejoiced in the promise of change – of human vision broken open by the power of divine love. The Messiah she proclaims would not be what … would not be who people expected. He would come scattering the proud-hearted, bringing down the powerful, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry, and sending the rich away hungry. He would not lead a grand rebellion overthrowing the Roman authorities and gathering the people once more into a great nation. His revolution would change the world in a different way: bringing sight to the blind, healing the lame, cleansing the leprous, raising the dead. Restoring the outcast to society and reconciling humanity to God, he would change the world one person at a time.
It’s a revolution that is still going on. One person at a time, the Child of Hope bring healing and reconciliation. One person at a time, the Prince of Peace brings love and peace into the world. One person at a time – one you and one me – Christ comes into the world, and the promise of the babe in the manger is born.
In little ways – little unexpected ways, the Kingdom of God is coming near. That is reason enough for hope. That is reason enough for faith in the face of doubt. That is reason enough for joy in the midst of our waiting.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
The Gift of Repentance
Sermon by Carrie Eikler
Isaiah, 10:33-11:9, Matthew 3:1-12
Second Sunday in Advent
I think that each generation has a crisis that defines them Actually most generations have a multitude of crises. For people my age, 9-11 was decisive, but we were adults in our early 20s. We analyzed, criticized, pointed fingers with the rest of the adult world we were growing into.
I’d venture to say that for people my age, a critical moment of our childhood was in January 1986 when millions of school children gathered around televisions sets to watch the first public school teacher fly into outer space.
As you know, Christa McAuliff and the rest of the crew of the Challenger never made it. The Challenger exploded in the first few minutes of take off, leaving this eight-year old, and other eight-year olds at the time, forming a critique of technology’s limits because of what we witnessed, because of the fear it caused us.
For my mother, it was the death of John Kennedy. She remembers crying in her cafeteria when she heard the news. And yet for others, in the year before that event, what was going on south of Florida, in Cuba, that shaped the tenor of their fear. In 1962 the Cuban missile crisis brought the threat of nuclear war, literally, to our back door. A new crisis was born in the lives of Americans.
Some of you remember this time. Some of you were children. Some of you feared for your children. The future, undoubtedly, seemed a fragile hope.
It was this fear that prompted the songwriters Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne Baker to write a peace hymn, which became a beloved Christmas song. You probably know it “Said the night wind to the little lamb ‘Do you see what I see?”. This song has been recorded by over 100 different artists.
If you know it well, you likely have the cool crooning of Bing Crosby in your mind, singing one of the most familiar recordings of the song—a version that, ironically, was recorded on the day Kennedy was assassinated.
But as many times as it’s been reinterpreted and recorded, it has at its core an unwavering message: “I am amazed that people think they know the song” said the song’s author Noel Regney, “and not know it was a prayer for peace.”
But more than the images it evokes of shepherd boys and night winds and mighty kings, we are left with a question: do you? Do you see what I see? Do you hear what I hear? Do you know what I know?
Do you?
Do you see the possibility of predators protecting their prey? Of coal companies healing the mountains? Of people actually restraining their consumptive habits? Do you see the possibility of Christians transforming their good intentions into radical acts of faith?
Do you see what God sees?
Do you see the possibility of living without shame? Of bedding down your envy with your potential? Do you see the possibility of living in peace, with yourself?
It’s a sweet, perhaps too sweet, vision, isn’t it?
So it is with questions like this that we cross the threshold into the season of Advent. And like honey dripping off a prophet’s lip we encounter, not a polite invitation, but an urgent demand.
Prepare. Get ready to see what God sees because you’re going to see God. It’s all going to be clear.
Those things you’ve hidden from yourself, you’re gonna see them.
Those things you’ve denied about yourself or the world around you, you’re gonna have to deal with them.
The potential you’ve neglected, the purpose you’ve pushed aside, the blind eye you’ve given to the world’s misery—all of it is going to be crystal clear to you…and where will you be then?
What will you construct to protect yourself when you’re seeing what God’s seeing?
Do you really think you’ll be spared this new sight?
Who warned you to flee the wrath to come?
[pause]
Now I don’t know if this was the most effective way for John the Baptist to proclaim the coming of Jesus. Generally, fear tactics have initial success but don’t really give long term payoffs. But who am I to judge his PR skills? We have to assume that his audience was receptive, at least in part, because their spirits longed for such an invitation, albeit a scary one.
Though, honestly, I can appreciate the invitation to prepare. It assumes some measure of time involved, a process, an orderly sequence of events.
But while we often say that John’s message is about preparation, if we look closely at the text, he does not say “prepare”. The author of Matthew describes this wild-eyed prophet by quoting Isaiah saying this is the one Isaiah spoke about, a “voice of one crying out I the wilderness; ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”
No, John himself does not say "prepare." John says "repent."
That’s a whole another thing, in our minds.
Preparation probably means you know what to expect.
Repentance means anything could happen.
Preparing is logical.
Repenting is messy.
Repentance is not something we think of when we enter into Advent. And it is here that I think we have let the consumer calendar overshadow the church’s calendar. The commercials will tell you that Christmas celebration begins around Thanksgiving, or earlier.
But the church reminds us that to get to that celebration (which begins on Christmas) we move through Advent. A time of waiting. Of preparing our hearts. It is not a time of making orderly lists of gifts, but entering the messy tangle of repentance.
Which is probably what John would say is the best way to prepare ourselves. Like the saying “honesty is the best policy”, John the Baptist tells us “repentance is the best preparation.”
But there is a problem, I think. Most of us don’t like the word repentance. As I forced myself to encounter my hangups about repentance this is what I came up with in some of my writing earlier this week: “Repentance seems like an unobtainable demand , and I am set up for failure. There will always be something I did wrong. Hearing about repentance beats me over the head with my mistakes and constantly reminds me of how unworthy I am.”
What do you think of when you hear the word “repentance”?
How would you feel if someone demand you to repent?
Kathleen Norris writes about helping young children in a parochial school encounter the Psalms by having them write some of their own. One honest little boy wrote a poem called “The Monster Who Was Sorry.” In his poem he talked about how his father would often yell at him, and his response to this, in the poem, was to “throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town. The poem concludes: ‘Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, I shouldn’t have done that.’”
“’My messy house’ explains it all,” Norris reflects. “If that boy had been[a young monk] in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?” (A Vocabulary of Faith, 70).
The line of God’s relationship to humanity as seen in scripture from the Garden of Eden on is a dynamic relationship, of God knowing we are more than our messy houses: God making creation good, God being disappointed, God encouraging, God being disappointed, God praising humanity…God being disappointed.
And then as if God knew nothing else to do, God- because of love- came to us.
and bedded down in our messy house.
God probably came in anticipation. God probably had some questions: Will they see me? Will they be prepared for me? Will they repent of those things that keep them from really seeing me? Will they start to see within themselves what I have always known, always heard, always seen?
And—like that honey dripping off the lips of the prophet-- the sticky invitation (slash) demand comes, telling us how to prepare. How to make ourselves ready for the divine and the human to dwell together, without consuming each other, without overpowering, or exploiting.
Prepare for God to lay down with your troubled soul with the gift of repentance.
Repent, not so you are ashamed of what keeps you bound
but to free you so you can begin to see what God sees in you.
Repent, not so you are constantly reminded of how unworthy or wicked you are but
repent
so you can encounter God’s insurmountable love for the world.
[pause]
It would be arrogant to believe that we will see entirely with God’s eyes.
But it would be denying the miracle of the incarnation to believe that we can’t, in some small way, with some small hint of clarity, look for what God sees and hopes for in this world.
And you—can you begin to see what God sees in you?
If not, receive God’s gift.
Prepare.
Repent.
And see.
Isaiah, 10:33-11:9, Matthew 3:1-12
Second Sunday in Advent
I think that each generation has a crisis that defines them Actually most generations have a multitude of crises. For people my age, 9-11 was decisive, but we were adults in our early 20s. We analyzed, criticized, pointed fingers with the rest of the adult world we were growing into.
I’d venture to say that for people my age, a critical moment of our childhood was in January 1986 when millions of school children gathered around televisions sets to watch the first public school teacher fly into outer space.
As you know, Christa McAuliff and the rest of the crew of the Challenger never made it. The Challenger exploded in the first few minutes of take off, leaving this eight-year old, and other eight-year olds at the time, forming a critique of technology’s limits because of what we witnessed, because of the fear it caused us.
For my mother, it was the death of John Kennedy. She remembers crying in her cafeteria when she heard the news. And yet for others, in the year before that event, what was going on south of Florida, in Cuba, that shaped the tenor of their fear. In 1962 the Cuban missile crisis brought the threat of nuclear war, literally, to our back door. A new crisis was born in the lives of Americans.
Some of you remember this time. Some of you were children. Some of you feared for your children. The future, undoubtedly, seemed a fragile hope.
It was this fear that prompted the songwriters Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne Baker to write a peace hymn, which became a beloved Christmas song. You probably know it “Said the night wind to the little lamb ‘Do you see what I see?”. This song has been recorded by over 100 different artists.
If you know it well, you likely have the cool crooning of Bing Crosby in your mind, singing one of the most familiar recordings of the song—a version that, ironically, was recorded on the day Kennedy was assassinated.
But as many times as it’s been reinterpreted and recorded, it has at its core an unwavering message: “I am amazed that people think they know the song” said the song’s author Noel Regney, “and not know it was a prayer for peace.”
But more than the images it evokes of shepherd boys and night winds and mighty kings, we are left with a question: do you? Do you see what I see? Do you hear what I hear? Do you know what I know?
Do you?
Do you see the possibility of predators protecting their prey? Of coal companies healing the mountains? Of people actually restraining their consumptive habits? Do you see the possibility of Christians transforming their good intentions into radical acts of faith?
Do you see what God sees?
Do you see the possibility of living without shame? Of bedding down your envy with your potential? Do you see the possibility of living in peace, with yourself?
It’s a sweet, perhaps too sweet, vision, isn’t it?
So it is with questions like this that we cross the threshold into the season of Advent. And like honey dripping off a prophet’s lip we encounter, not a polite invitation, but an urgent demand.
Prepare. Get ready to see what God sees because you’re going to see God. It’s all going to be clear.
Those things you’ve hidden from yourself, you’re gonna see them.
Those things you’ve denied about yourself or the world around you, you’re gonna have to deal with them.
The potential you’ve neglected, the purpose you’ve pushed aside, the blind eye you’ve given to the world’s misery—all of it is going to be crystal clear to you…and where will you be then?
What will you construct to protect yourself when you’re seeing what God’s seeing?
Do you really think you’ll be spared this new sight?
Who warned you to flee the wrath to come?
[pause]
Now I don’t know if this was the most effective way for John the Baptist to proclaim the coming of Jesus. Generally, fear tactics have initial success but don’t really give long term payoffs. But who am I to judge his PR skills? We have to assume that his audience was receptive, at least in part, because their spirits longed for such an invitation, albeit a scary one.
Though, honestly, I can appreciate the invitation to prepare. It assumes some measure of time involved, a process, an orderly sequence of events.
But while we often say that John’s message is about preparation, if we look closely at the text, he does not say “prepare”. The author of Matthew describes this wild-eyed prophet by quoting Isaiah saying this is the one Isaiah spoke about, a “voice of one crying out I the wilderness; ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”
No, John himself does not say "prepare." John says "repent."
That’s a whole another thing, in our minds.
Preparation probably means you know what to expect.
Repentance means anything could happen.
Preparing is logical.
Repenting is messy.
Repentance is not something we think of when we enter into Advent. And it is here that I think we have let the consumer calendar overshadow the church’s calendar. The commercials will tell you that Christmas celebration begins around Thanksgiving, or earlier.
But the church reminds us that to get to that celebration (which begins on Christmas) we move through Advent. A time of waiting. Of preparing our hearts. It is not a time of making orderly lists of gifts, but entering the messy tangle of repentance.
Which is probably what John would say is the best way to prepare ourselves. Like the saying “honesty is the best policy”, John the Baptist tells us “repentance is the best preparation.”
But there is a problem, I think. Most of us don’t like the word repentance. As I forced myself to encounter my hangups about repentance this is what I came up with in some of my writing earlier this week: “Repentance seems like an unobtainable demand , and I am set up for failure. There will always be something I did wrong. Hearing about repentance beats me over the head with my mistakes and constantly reminds me of how unworthy I am.”
What do you think of when you hear the word “repentance”?
How would you feel if someone demand you to repent?
Kathleen Norris writes about helping young children in a parochial school encounter the Psalms by having them write some of their own. One honest little boy wrote a poem called “The Monster Who Was Sorry.” In his poem he talked about how his father would often yell at him, and his response to this, in the poem, was to “throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town. The poem concludes: ‘Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, I shouldn’t have done that.’”
“’My messy house’ explains it all,” Norris reflects. “If that boy had been[a young monk] in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?” (A Vocabulary of Faith, 70).
The line of God’s relationship to humanity as seen in scripture from the Garden of Eden on is a dynamic relationship, of God knowing we are more than our messy houses: God making creation good, God being disappointed, God encouraging, God being disappointed, God praising humanity…God being disappointed.
And then as if God knew nothing else to do, God- because of love- came to us.
and bedded down in our messy house.
God probably came in anticipation. God probably had some questions: Will they see me? Will they be prepared for me? Will they repent of those things that keep them from really seeing me? Will they start to see within themselves what I have always known, always heard, always seen?
And—like that honey dripping off the lips of the prophet-- the sticky invitation (slash) demand comes, telling us how to prepare. How to make ourselves ready for the divine and the human to dwell together, without consuming each other, without overpowering, or exploiting.
Prepare for God to lay down with your troubled soul with the gift of repentance.
Repent, not so you are ashamed of what keeps you bound
but to free you so you can begin to see what God sees in you.
Repent, not so you are constantly reminded of how unworthy or wicked you are but
repent
so you can encounter God’s insurmountable love for the world.
[pause]
It would be arrogant to believe that we will see entirely with God’s eyes.
But it would be denying the miracle of the incarnation to believe that we can’t, in some small way, with some small hint of clarity, look for what God sees and hopes for in this world.
And you—can you begin to see what God sees in you?
If not, receive God’s gift.
Prepare.
Repent.
And see.
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