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.
No comments:
Post a Comment