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3rd Sunday of Advent, 12/17/00
Luke 3:7-18
Jim and I attended a wonderful Christmas concert last Friday right here in our sanctuary. The New Beginnings Women’s Choir presented a beautiful program of Christmas music of different traditions and diverse styles. (I was happy to see several of our church members in this excellent choir!) As I listened to the familiar and new melodies and lyrics, I was deeply struck by the awe and wonder of the Advent and Christmas season. I seem to have listened so intently, with my hand to my forehead, that several members in the choir observed me and asked afterwards if I had a headache. But, quite to the contrary, I had a head full of joyful thoughts and emotions.
I heard again, as we all do over and over again, especially at Christmas, the profound message of God’s incarnation-- that "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that anyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life." This was not exactly the text of any of their songs, but is the well-known way that the Gospel of John proclaims our Christmas message, that God, the Creator and Lover of our lives, came into our world as a tiny, vulnerable baby named Jesus; and that the Divine Love revealed then is an ever-renewed and renewing gift to us, even this morning.
Brian Wren, a contemporary poet of hymn lyrics, begins one of his contemporary poems in a more mysterious and paradoxical way:
"Joyful is the dark, holy, hidden God,
rolling cloud of night beyond all naming. . . "
His third verse focuses on Christmas:
"Joyful is the dark, shadowed stable floor,
angels flicker, God on earth confessing,
as with exultation, Mary, giving birth,
hails the infant cry of need and blessing."
On this third Sunday of Advent, despite whatever dark shadows there may be in our lives, we sense the joy and exultation of this season. Just a week before Christmas Eve, all of our Scriptures conspire to express this joyful anticipation of the coming of the Lord: Zephaniah proclaimed to the Israelites in exile: "Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem!" His prophetic words, even under the dark shadow of exile, were the assurance of God’s steadfast love. Isaiah similarly declared: "Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid, for the Lord God is my strength and my might; he has become my salvation. With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation." And Paul in his letter to the Philippians wrote to the New Testament church: "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice! The Lord is near!" If our ears and hearts are attuned to such messages, we are ready to celebrate with joy the coming of God into our broken world.
Yet, we also heard in our gospel reading a message with a very different tone that seems to emerge more out of the dark shadows. John the Baptist preaches to those who came to be baptized: "Bear fruits worthy of repentance!" Repent! Repent! The repeated heart of John the Baptist’s preparatory message evokes the image of the ‘dark shadows’ of Brian Wren’s hymn: it is a time to repent! But this was not only heard from John; in fact we can hear it also from his cousin Jesus. "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is near." Repentance was a strong theme in Jesus’ preaching as well.
"To repent"—in John’s and Jesus’ native tongue, "shub!"—is a Hebrew and Aramaic root that means to make a 180-degree turn. The Greek term for repentance, metanoia, means a change of mind. But repentance is never just mental. It means really to turn around; and as we turn in a new direction, our corrected vision alters everything, our thought processes are refocused, and our minds are changed.
Responding to John’s call for repentance, the crowds, the tax collectors, and the soldiers all asked the same question: "What should we do?" The answers John gave to these seekers were simple: food and clothing were to be shared with those who have none; taxes were not to be based on the insatiable greed of the powerful; and the military must stop victimizing the people by threat, intimidation, and blackmail. This was for them, and is for us, a call for a deep commitment to the vision of God’s kingdom characterized by a radical love and justice for both individuals and communities.
John’s call for repentance is a call for a change of life-style, a total turn from the darkness to the light, a complete turn to God. How do we do this? What does it mean to give ourselves fully to God even when we know our weaknesses and faults? This has been a struggle for me for a long time. I remember my shock when I first participated in sharing a meal with homeless families in a shelter. I had grown up in a rather well protected environment of comfort. I had heard from the Bible stories that we should share our resources with the hungry and the poor, but until I saw the poverty of my table companions, the concept of sharing was always abstract. Only then did I begin the spiritual struggle over guilt for my privileges, which has led me toward a deep commitment to social justice. Yet I still struggle in many different ways as I seek the meaning of full communion with God.
I was encouraged when I learned that even Henri Nouwen, an extraordinary priest, who seemed to me to have given himself completely to God, still had similarly constant struggles in his faith journey. The Genesee Diary is the spiritual journal he kept while he spent a sabbatical year at a Trappist Monastery in Rochester, New York. He expressed very honestly his fear that the road of total commitment to God is arduous, painful, and very lonely. He wrote "it is this type of extremism, of absolutism, of total surrender, of unconditional "yes," of unwavering obedience to God’s will, that frightens me and makes me such a wishy-washy soul, wanting to keep a foot in both worlds. But that’s how one stumbles."
Even as we may stumble, with one foot in the dark and the other in God’s light, our soul remains restless. We are all-too-well aware of our own imperfections. We are not always ready to follow the ways of God. Isn’t that why God keeps coming into our lives—not just once, but over and over again?
This third Sunday of Advent we are invited to turn to God--again. It is—again--a new time, a time to turn to God. To turn to God is to trust that God will again reorient our lives, redirect our goals, and re-create our hearts. However fearful we may be of the total implications for our lives, we are invited every Advent, over and over again, to make this movement of turning around, turning from our selfish ways and desires to God, where we find radical love, justice, and peace.
Now is the time to turn to God. May God strengthen our desire and our resolve to turn around as we complete this year’s advent pilgrimage. May God grant each of us a more complete reception of God’s saving gift of Jesus into our lives this Christmas. Amen.