Prepare our
hearts, oh God, to receive your word. Silence every voice in us but your own,
so that we may hear your word. Amen.
When Cass told me
she was coming here for my induction service, I gave myself a deadline of her
arrival to get as much of the rectory set up as I could before she got here. When
she told me she was bringing mystery guests with her, there was suddenly a new
and joyful pressure of making sure I was prepared. I set to hanging artwork, making
beds, gathering chairs, and putting away everything I wasn’t going to get to in
bins and stored in a couple of currently unused rooms. Once that was done, I
cleaned the house from top to bottom and filled the fridge and cupboards with
food. While it wasn’t perfect and I didn’t get everything done that I wanted,
when the first guest arrived, I was as prepared as I was going to be.
I’m sure many of
you have similar stories of preparing for guests in your home. They say that
nothing cleans a house better than incoming guests! This kind of preparation,
while hard work, is easy to do when you know the date of your guest’s arrival.
Perhaps some of you have family coming for Christmas so you know that
everything needs to be prepared by December 20th. Or maybe you’re
going on a trip and so you have preparations to make for that, knowing the date
and time of your departure. Or maybe you’re going for surgery and have a
preparation list the doctor has given you to do ahead of time.
These are all some
examples of how, with a specific timeline in mind, we can get ourselves
prepared for the event. But what if we don’t know the date of our guest’s
arrival? That’s how it is with Christ. We know that Christ is coming. We’re
waiting on the edge of our seats for his arrival. But we ask ourselves, when is
he coming and how do we prepare? Let me introduce you to John the Baptist, the
man who calls out to us, “prepare the way of the Lord!”
Following the
genealogy and a relatively long birth and infancy narrative during the first
chapters of Matthew, the writer jumps ahead over the decades to the time of
Jesus as an adult, starting with an introduction to John the Baptist. We are in
a desert area of Judea, east of Jerusalem, on the banks of the Jordan River. People
from all over the place have come down to see this strange man dressed in
strange clothes eating strange food. Word has gotten out that he is proclaiming
that the kingdom of heaven is near and that we need to get ready. What does he
mean? Why is he calling for repentance? Why are folks letting him dunk them in
the river? Worst of all, why is he goading the Pharisees and Sadducees? Calling
them a brood of vipers?! That’s not going to go over well!
If you read the
rest of chapter 3 and head into chapter 4, you will read about the baptism of
Jesus by John and the Temptation in the Wilderness, all leading to the ministry
of Jesus, which doesn’t begin until the middle of chapter 4 of Matthew.
Throughout the first 4 chapters, Matthew makes several connections between John
the Baptist and Jesus as Messiah. Jesus and John are cousins so they’ll of
course have familial connections, but it goes deeper than that.
The book of
Malachi closes with a divine promise, in which God declares: “Lo, I will send
you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” Matthew
makes the connection between that promise and John the Baptist. For Matthew,
John signifies the return of Elijah: “He is Elijah who is to come.” We know this
because of how John is dressed. The “clothing of camel’s hair with a leather
belt” is how prophets were described to be dressed throughout the Hebrew
Scriptures. God has sent John ahead of Jesus so that he could give instructions
on how to prepare for Jesus’ arrival. Not his cousin Jesus, but Jesus the
Messiah.
Advent is a time
to prepare for remembering and re-experiencing the birth of Jesus, and to
prepare for the second coming of Jesus and the final manifestation of the Realm
of Heaven. Throughout Advent, the church thinks afresh about how to join God in
the movement towards a world that is more like the realm of heaven. And who better
an Advent guide than John the Baptist, whose instructions for preparation are
condensed into one word: “Repent!” John’s message is that the time has come to
repent because the agent through whom God will affect the transformation from
this age to the next is now revealed. Repentance is the first step towards
joining Jesus in the community moving towards the Realm of Heaven.
The root meaning
of “to repent” is “to turn” or to have a dramatic change of mind and direction. To repent is turn
away from the values and practices of the old age such as idolatry, violence,
injustice, exploitation, slavery, and scarcity. To repent is to turn away from
those sins and turn towards the values and practices of the Realm of God. Repentance
includes feeling sorry for one’s personal sins, but it is much more than a
simple apology. Repentance is the action behind the apology. Repentance also
underscores that change isn’t necessary for change’s sake, but rather that
change is necessary because we’ve become aware that our actions are out of step
with God’s deep desire for peace and equity for all God’s people and for the
whole of creation. Repentance, in short, is realizing that you’ve been
traveling one way, that God is pointing you a different way, and that you
humbly change course accordingly.
Once named that
way, of course, repentance can get pretty daunting pretty quickly. I mean,
goodness, there are so many things I could repent of, we as a community and
nation could repent of, even we as a species could and should repent of.
• Pollution and climate change.
• Poverty and food scarcity.
• Racial and gender injustice.
• The lack of clean water.
• Crime and violence.
• And the list goes on.
I’m overwhelmed
just thinking about it! It’s mighty tempting to give up on the whole repentance
thing, hunker down with our current and comfortable friends and biases, and get
back to watching our favorite television series on Netflix.
But on this 2nd
Sunday in Advent, consider an element of your life of which you would like to
repent – that is, change direction.
• Is there an unhealthy relationship
you want to repair or address?
• Can you imagine using your time
differently and toward better ends?
• Is there some practice or habit you
might take up that would produce more abundant life for you or those around
you?
I’ll give you a few
moments to ponder those questions.
Now, can you
identify an element of our communal lives that needs repentance?
• How can we help that repentance?
• Volunteer at a local charitable
agency?
• Get to know someone who is quite
different from you – ethnically or politically or generationally – and try to
build a more robust community?
If we can think of
repentance more concretely and, indeed, engage in just two acts of repentance –
one personal, one more communal – we might go a long way in redeeming not just
repentance but Advent itself. Because Advent has shrunk, I think, in our
imaginations. For too long we’ve concluded that Advent, otherwise known as the
month of December, is the season when we are scolded for not preparing for
Christmas adequately – slow down, stop buying presents, make time for church,
don’t get caught up in the holiday glitz. Do you know what I mean?
We’re so worried
about the spirit of Christmas disappearing, but what about the spirit of
Advent. The preparation of making room for Christ’s arrival, to be surprised
again that God was and continues to be willing to enter into our lives and
history and take on our vulnerability in order to give us hope. The God we know
in Jesus comes down out of heaven to take on our burdens and give us hope by
being with us and for us, not screaming repentance but inviting a more abundant
life and helping us to see in the face of our neighbor not a competitor for
scarce resources but a sibling in Christ.
If Advent is a
time to slow down, it’s so that we can have more authentic life, not less
Christmas. Advent is a season of hope. And if repentance takes hold, then it
will lead to peace. It will place the neighbour before us, so that we might be
in peaceful relationship. Advent is a time of multiple preparations – for a
baby to be born; for the baby, grown into a man, to begin his ministry; and for
the Messianic Son of Man, crucified and resurrected, to return. This 2nd week
of Advent causes us to remember that because of Jesus we can experience a
Christmas free from turmoil and chaos. Regardless of our circumstances or our
situations, Jesus offers us peace and hope that passes all understanding.
Amen.
