A sermon based on Matthew 3:1-12, with the help of Eucharist Church's "Maranatha" from the album Table Songs.
Last week after church I overheard somebody saying
that our service for the first week of Advent
felt more like funeral than celebration.
There was the Bishop’s letter, of course,
a letter that suggested the impossibility
of business as usual, and that throughout the
region, our parishes are discerning a path forward.
But then there was the music I chose.
Abide with Me is a funeral hymn, I was told.
And I sure have heard it at a funeral or two.
It is a hymn for the evening. A hymn for those who find themselves
In the shadow of death. A hymn for those who need hope
To make it through another dark cold night.
And perhaps it’s my addled brain, but
that is the kind of mental space I imagine
Mary and Joseph found themselves
in the days leading up to Jesus' birth.
As we look around all that’s going on in our world,
a world in which the Collins Dictionary has chosen
“Permacrisis” as the word of the year,
it is perhaps no wonder we acknowledge
that we are a people waiting in darkness,
Even as we cry out, in joyful expectation,
“Lord let there be light.”
Abide with me, written by Scottish Anglican minister
Henry Francis Lyte, was composed as he was nearing his end,
contemplating his mortality,
approaching the dark embrace
of his Creator’s arms.
Lungs spent with exhaustion, body failing,
consumed by the tuberculosis that would
take him home, Lyte penned
words as a way of honouring
The God of birth and the God of death
The God of youth, the God of age,
The God of fidelity, the God of rebellion
The God of the darkness, the God of light,
and every gradient in between.
What Henry Francis Lyte captures in this hymn,
and especially in the verses excluded from our hymn books,
is God’s expansive love, a love that accompanies us
through all of life’s seasons, towards mountain tops
and through valleys, all part of the journey we must take
if we are to be more than automatons,
if we are to be, like our ancestor Jacob,
one of the wrestling faithful on life’s winding path.
Out on city streets, in stores and shopping malls,
on radio stations and Netflix specials
we absorb the commercialized front-loaded glitz and glam
overloading our senses with giant blow up snowmen
and men in fuzzy red suits
while at church this week, we light only two candles.
Why do we light two candles?
to remind us to watch and wait for signs of hope
to remind us to watch and wait for signs of peace
We light these candles believing
with Isaiah, that a dimly burning wick
God will most certainly not snuff out.
But in this season of watchful waiting
and faithful preparation, in this week we focus on peace,
the world around us overwhelms with light shows
and bombards us with noise.
All too often we gloss over the reality of what is,
we skip ahead to the end of the story,
to assure ourselves of the happy ending.
Our theology, our understanding of the relationship
between God and God’s people is impoverished as a result.
When we pretend that God is born in triumph and not
human vulnerability, we deny God’s ability to use
mystery and uncertainty to express the fullness
of divine love, a love that overwhelms
but does not
overpower.
For it is in uncertainty, not triumph,
that faith is born.
It is in invitation, not marketing or coercion
That good news is proclaimed
And so in Advent, we draw our attention as much to the dark
as to the light. To the night and day, to dawn and dusk,
to the shortening of days, the bare earth and frosty weather,
the cycles of life and death, that will give way once more to life.
But not quite yet.
In Advent we dwell here without skipping ahead,
believing that the fullness of God’s mystery,
a mystery revealed in light,
is incubated and nurtured in the darkness of night
and so, for now we wait in darkness.
In joyful expectation we dwell.
In Advent, we dwell in the darkness that comes
before the birth of God’s dream in our midst.
For it is out of darkness
that God creates the heavens and the earth.
It is out of the dark soil
that God breathes life into the first peoples.
It is out of shroud and tomb
that Jesus will be raised to new life
after three days in the ground
It is in the dark of night,
in the shadow of oppression,
that Jesus will be born.
As we look back on the expansive witness of the biblical story
It is in darkness that God prepares the world to receive unexpected gifts.
And so I need to be honest with you all.
I’ve found myself wrestling this year with the challenge
of preaching the light without neglecting the dark
or, put a little more strongly, I’ve found myself
wrestling with how to preach the light
while drawing attention to the dark.
Lest we assume that darkness is somehow bad,
that blackness is somehow deficient.
Lest we assume that all gradients of tone and colour are
not somehow created in God’s own image,
Lest we ignorantly assume the superiority
of light over dark, of white over black
a plague of our own making that inflicts not just Advent,
but our society as a whole.
And so, as we enter more deeply into the darkness of Advent,
we seek to honour both darkness and light.
We seek to recognize, acknowledge, and celebrate
the gifts of darkness from which our very faith is born.
the gift of blackness that bears the divine imprint, that carries divine spark
The gifts of Advent, this little Lent, our altar shrouded in purple
preparing us for Easter but also for Christmas,
plunges us into an earthy spirituality, a faith that is both
transcendent and immanent.
Ours is a faith that acknowledges the reality of the here and now
yet remains watchful, pointing towards God’s
Creation dream, a dream of what might be,
a dream born in the dark that will one day soon
see the light.
In those days, Matthew writes, John the Baptist appears
in the wilderness, on the margins, out on the fringes of society.
In those days, John appears in the shadowy wasteland
not illuminated by the city and its bright lights,
but surrounded by wild beauty,
of palm and thistle,
henbane and pomegranate, caper, sage and wild oat.
John appears with wildness in the wilderness,
in the shadows of the occupying forces.
John appears with wildness in the face of
the Roman executioners who had recently murdered
all the men of the neighbouring town of Sepphoris.
The Romans, those powerful slaveholders and torturers,
stripping children of their culture,
imposing stories of their own, leaving the people
demoralized and tormented, made to hunger and thirst
not only for some sort of spiritualized righteousness,
but for justice.
For life’s basic necessities—food and water—
hungering for a safe place to sleep, enough resources to live,
after towns and crops have been
decimated by the roaming Roman hordes
another plague of biblical proportion.
And what does John do, but turn these
livelihood-destroying locusts Into a snack.
He proclaims a gospel that declares the impossible:
that the people of God will be fed, even by their oppressors.
John appears with wildness in the wilderness
rough in appearance, displaced and homeless,
suffering with his people, trauma after trauma,
feasting on the locusts who had come to seek and kill and destroy.
This is an aside, but there was a time
my brother worked at a restaurant
where one of the bar snacks was called Bugs and Bites
crickets and other bug protein to go with your beer
I’m sure the Baptist would have liked it there.
In those days, the people of Jerusalem and Judea came out
to the wilderness, to perceive the wildness of the one
who painted a picture of a new way of living.
Not a way of comfort and ease. Not a way of passive
acquiescence to the colonizing force, not quiet resignation
to a society working as it was designed to,
leaving people destitute in its wake.
They have come to follow John’s way of
active resistance, in response to the consuming fire of faith.
A faith that God is living.
A faith that God is active.
A faith that God will make all things new.
A faith that puts this radical belief into action.
And so when the people join him
down by the riverside, they come in joyful expectation
of a salvation and a peace that they have not yet seen,
a salvation and a peace of which they have only ever dreamed.
a salvation and a peace that is not simply about a far-off time,
in the sweet by-and-by
but salvation that takes root in the midst of this life,
salvation in the lives we are living in the sweet here and now.
What is salvation for someone who is displaced or homeless
but a home filled with friends, and a fridge full of delicious food?
What is salvation for someone who is isolated,
but companionship, and the opportunity to give and receive love?
What is salvation for someone stripped of their culture
but a community recovering the ancient ways, making them new?
What is salvation for people estranged,
but the first steps towards reconciliation
What is salvation for a church no longer sure of its place in the world
but the assurance that God is up to something new
wven when the path forward does not seem clear.
What John does is paint a picture of a world
yet to be born. A world where all have enough.
A world where all know that they are beloved.
A world where all know that they are enough.
Knowing the tradition, he is envisioning a world
where Lion and Lamb lay down together,
neither one the other’s snack.
John paints a picture of a world not yet tasted, not yet seen,
a world that doesn’t come incrementally, but that will
break in on the world as it is, so that we might all experience
The world as it ought to be.
A world of care.
A world of love.
A world in which people experience connection and intimacy
A world in which people have enough to make it through the day.
A world where people are not discriminated against
because of any of the intersections of their personhood and identity,
but accepted, embraced, because of the uniqueness of the way
they embody the beauty of God in all their darkness,
and in all their light.
This advent, for me, is darker than most
not because of the state of my heart, so much as my acknowledgment
of the state of the world.
And here’s the thing.
This world is messed up, but God’s vision is so much greater.
And this is the tightrope we're walking this season. The world is as it is
and God’s dream is for the healing of the nations,
of our communities, of our relationships, of our selves.
And this is why we pray, and this is why we work.
This is why we cry out throughout this season,
Maranatha: Lord Jesus, Come Soon!
Because the vision that we have, though it is not here yet,
is one worth praying for. It is a vision worth working towards.
This is the call of Advent.
When we ask the question: What are we waiting for,
the question we're asking throughout this season,
for me it’s this:
A church, a community fully dependent on the Holy Spirit
and on each other that we might embody hope for ourselves
and or the world around us. To demonstrate in real and practical
terms that we and our neighbours (however annoying) are beloved of God.
But what that requires is that we reach out.
What that requires is that we get in touch with our own vulnerability
What that requires is that we respond when we are called
What that requires is that we find words and ways to share with others
What this coming king, this vulnerable child of Mary and Joseph
Means for us, and for how we live our lives.
It means bearing witness to God’s active transformation
of our lives, and our communities.
If our lives and the life of our community is not
being transformed, that begs a few other questions.
The warning in today’s gospel is that we can’t rely
on beingAbraham’s children,
We can’t simply rely on our going to church
as a guarantee of our community’s salvation.
God loves the whole world and will lead it to salvation
with or without a particular congregation.
And yet I have to believe that God desires for faithful people
waiting on God, attentive to the holy spirit, following in the way of Jesus
to be present in every community.
Not simply relying on the assumption
that people will come and join us, and be part of this
radical Jesus movement, when they have no concept
of what that means.
If they have not experienced that radical and intimate
Love for themselves.
How are they to know if no one tells them?
and how are they to know if they know no-one living
a transformed cruciform, a cross-shaped life?
What John is doing, and what we are invited to in this time,
is to turn our hearts, to turn our lives, to turn our efforts
ever more towards the things of God.
We hear John crying out against the religious and political
leaders, criticizing them for their indifference to the people
criticizing them for the suffering caused by
the things they have done and failed to do.
And what he invites them, what he invites us into—in
the way only a prophet can—is to become a new people
a new people with a renewed sense of God’s vision
For a world where all have enough,
not more, not less.
A world where all know they are enough
neither bloated with self importance
nor deflated with self-deprecation
But beloved. Enough.
And so we start there. Acknowledging what God has been saying
from the beginning. You are enough. You are beloved.
And so are the rest of my children. Live your lives in a way
that lets them know. No strings attached. No bait and switch.
No clever marketing scheme.
For God so loved the world, he sent his son.
God sent his son, and called us and all people
to become what we are.
Beloved, Enough.
As we wait in this moment, may we listen
and as we get up from this place, may we act:
Listening for God’s word of hope
in the midst of this so-called permacrisis
Acting as though God’s kingdom is coming,
as though God’s kingdom is near,
as though God’s kingdom is already within our grasp.
In joyful expectation of his coming, we pray to Jesus.
Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus.
