Where's the Fire?

a Sermon for Advent 3A
Text: Matthew 11:2-11

[Note: the original sermon was preached from sparse notes. What follows is a reinvisioning based on those notes.]

GOD of Hope and Wonder, you invite us into waiting and watching. Help us to see in our expectations true joy and new understanding. Amen.

John
Where’s the fire? Where’s the fire, Jesus? You promised me a fire and a cleansing of the world. You said it! So where’s the fire, Jesus?

John speaks from anger, hurt, anxiety, fear—has he wasted all this time? Has his ministry of preparing the way for this Messiah, this liberator and conqueror been in vain? Because…well…look at this guy. Jesus sure wasn’t matching John’s expectations of a liberator and a conqueror. The very word

Messiah=military leader.

And let’s speak plainly here: John is a man of action. He most certainly would do the work of GOD himself—not send his disciples instead. What kind of Messiah is this Jesus, that lets the disciples do the dirty work?

The Baby
In this season of expectation, we have the opposite expectation. Who are we expecting? A fragile baby. An innocent, innocuous baby that can’t threaten us or frighten us or challenge us or transform us. We expect the innocent pastoral image of a baby welcomed into the world by loving parents.

So John expected a powerful conqueror and received a healer.
We expect a healer and forget about the conqueror.

Jesus
After John’s people leave, Jesus turns to the crowd and asks them about John. He asks three times: “What did you go out [into the wilderness] to see?”
A prophet!
And what did you find?
A prophet!

Jesus isn’t just messing with our expectations, he is inviting us to deal with them. Because, once we see something, we are changed by it. He says that what they found was more than a prophet—a way prepared for them to follow. A road is being paved for us.

Advent is a season of waiting and watching, of expecting and seeing.

The opportunity to watch something is the opportunity to process something. To prepare ourselves for that road. It is the opportunity to be changed—and transformed forever.

Mark Bozzuti-Jones, in his Advent devotional, compares Advent to an expectant mother. That this season of waiting and anticipation is also a season of planning and dreaming and hoping; a season of cleaning and building and gathering. We are changed in the waiting.

For many of us that have had the fortune of being part of a child’s birth, it isn’t in the birth where the real transformation occurs, it is in the expectation.

Rejoice in repentance

a Sermon for Advent 3C
Text: Luke 3:7-18

Let’s begin this morning looking back 20 years. It was a particularly memorable Christmas for me. We had extended family around, including cousins, which was unusual. And on the morning of Christmas Eve, I came down stairs to find a big box under the tree with my name on it.

As every 10 or 11 year-old knows, the hardest thing about seeing a big box for you under the tree before Christmas morning is having to wait all day, staring at it. It was like a beacon, calling out to me. “Drew! Here I am! Open me!” And I could hardly resist. I couldn’t stay in the same room with it.

Making matters worse was this was 1988/89 and my Christmas list contained only one item. Normally the list was full: GI Joe, Transformers: but not this year. This year contained just this: The Nintendo Entertainment System.

I had been bugging my parents for months and talked about it constantly. We had inherited an Atari 2600 the year before, but this was evolution! This was proof of progress! This was countless hours of entertainment and fascination! Well, when I saw that box, I became convinced that what was inside was the NES with its two controllers, the light gun, and Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt. I could hardly wait to finally make that game mine.

The next morning, the first thing I race for was that big box, and when it was my turn to open a present, I ripped the paper off of the front and inside was a big model of the space shuttle. I was heart-broken. And I’ll admit it—my expectations kept me from appreciating the present that was given to me. More tragic is that my Dad had bought this model to build with me and my 10 year-old self couldn’t get that. I was focused on other things.

In many ways, our expectations get mixed up in the “holiday season”. We’ve had some challenging readings here in Advent so far, and this morning’s is no exception. We’re all looking ahead to Christmas with its carols and its egg nog and its presents and its fellowship. The season is naturally pregnant with expectation. At the same time, that expectation leads us to ignore the signs around us. Just as my 10 year-old self knew that the box was the wrong shape—hours spent staring at the NES box behind the counter in KB Toys told me that—we look at life, and the season, through expectant eyes, not eyes of observation.

This morning, we finally get to hear that grating and persistent message of John the Baptizer’s that we talked about last week. We get to hear the jarring language (“You brood of vipers!”) and the threats (“but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire”) that we might be quite tempted to overlook—to ignore in our attempt to get happy about Christmas. To be joyful at the coming of Jesus.

We know John comes to prepare the way for Jesus. And talking about John at the beginning of the church year is appropriate. It makes chronological sense. It makes theological sense. But I wonder if we take seriously the notion that he came to prepare the way for Jesus…to lead us on the way. That the Good News is first revealed by John and begins here.

John has this big crowd of followers who are all wondering if he is the long-expected Messiah. He looks like what they expect the Messiah to look like, and he talks like what they expect the Messiah to talk like, and he behaves like what they expect the Messiah to behave like…but they still aren’t sure. That’s interesting, isn’t it? So this disparate group has just been put in their place by this potential Messiah and they still ask “What then should we do?” John responds by telling them to be generous and fair with what they have. If you have two coats and you see somebody without one, give it to him. Pretty simple. Then the tax collectors ask what they should do, and John tells them not to cheat people. Take only what you are instructed to take. And the soldiers are told to be happy with the wages they receive, and not bully others and take from them. John’s instructions come to us as no-brainers, don’t they? Especially in light of what we know our faith to be about. But let’s pause at this window for a minute. If we look inside, we see a culture in which safety and security required that you look after yourself first. Having two coats meant you had a spare in case something happened to the first one. It meant having coats for different kinds of weather. It might have even meant that it was the only luxury you had. As for the tax collectors, most of their income came from collecting more than was prescribed—marking up the taxes. Like a merchant that sells goods from a manufacturer to a store, the income has to come from somewhere. And for the soldier, brutal treatment and extortion was a means of keeping the peace. John’s teaching isn’t so common sense in that context—and can seem eerily similar to our own world.

But John’s teachings here are about fairness. We should read them in the way that our guts tell us to. Despite the expectations the world has for us, we should be fair and generous to others, collecting only what is needed, while taking nothing for ourselves. That’s a pretty solid way of operating. But I think it does more than that—I think it gets our focus off of ourselves and onto other people. It isn’t what I can do for them, but for what can be done for them. See the difference? Just take the ‘I’ out.

John is preparing the way for Jesus, not physically: scuffing the ground from Bethlehem to Jerusalem or sweeping the dust off of the road: and not emotionally as a pre-Messiah herald because people couldn’t figure it out. John prepares the way by helping people let go of themselves. Letting go of self-sufficiency. Letting go of personal consumption. This is repentance. This is John’s preparation. For us to see Jesus as the Messiah, we must first repent and give up that devotion to self and materialism and macho bravado and ladder-climbing and all of that stuff. So we can just let it go. Hand it over.Because that understanding of expectation, that sense of ‘what I’m going to get’ keeps us from understanding Jesus as the Christ. John prepares Jesus’s way by altering our expectations of the Messiah.

This morning, we celebrate Gaudete, as is traditionally symbolized with a pink candle in the advent wreathe and is an ancient practice that is being renewed in the church. The word gaudete is Latin for “rejoice” and has been used to infuse some joy into an otherwise penitential season. I’ll admit that I had a hard time seeing the joy in this reading when I started. The others, I definitely could. But this Gospel lesson is about joy. John reveals the Good News that will be brought to new life in Jesus. That is joyous. That our calling is to give to others what is missing in their lives is joyous. That our calling is to not take from others and to treat them honestly and fairly is joyous. And most of all, that we can give away the pressure and the anxiety of self-sufficiency to our Messiah so that we might live our lives in joy and generosity—that is joyous.

Today, we can rejoice in our new expectations for the coming of our Lord. May his name be praised forever.

Stand up and raise your heads

a Sermon for Advent 1C
Text: Luke 21:25-36


We have a promise that God is with us, that we have a teacher and a guide. We have a promise that dreams can be fulfilled and that tomorrow can and will be a better place. We have opportunity and responsibility in our hands. We have the time and the place for this action: today, right here: to prepare ourselves. And we have one instruction: “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

So here we are, at the end of Jesus’s ministry. On the first day of Advent. New Year’s Day in the Christian Calendar. New year, new gospel, so we dive into Luke; and in the gospel, we’re starting toward the end in chapter 21. This is one of the strange components of a Lectionary in which we don’t actually tell the story in order. We begin the year with Jesus telling us how it’s all going to end, and then we jump back to the beginning. And in the Spring, we have Lent, which hits the Temptations, and then jumps to Jesus’s final days. Then there’s Easter and Pentecost, which are chronologically sound, following Jesus’s death and resurrection, but then we get into the Season of Pentecost, where we rewind and go through Jesus’s actual teachings. All of which lead up to this one. At the beginning.

The teaching itself is a prophecy, not unlike the one from two weeks ago about the Temple. This one is bigger, though. This involves not just human stuff, but cosmological stuff: “the sun, the moon, and the stars”. And the global human response is distress—everywhere. The phrasing is truly appropriate for us as we deal with current warming trends in the oceans and news reports of icebergs that broke from the Antarctic ice shelf and are now drifting north toward New Zealand, while our region is still recovering from hurricanes and flooding: “The roaring of the sea and the waves” indeed!

I’m mindful of the fact that we don’t really know how we ought to take this type of talk. Some look at the Scriptures as something to decode. As if the secret to the end times is hidden within the text even though Jesus himself tells us that we won’t know “when the master of the house will come”. This is a cottage industry within Christianity, peaking of course with the Left Behind books. But this thinking has been with us for a long time—each time disproven by the world’s existence past the predicted date.

Another response that many have taken is to ignore this talk, either confining it to its time and place or by ignoring the graphic imagery. In either case, the purpose is to desensitize the scripture to something more palatable and less strident; depriving it of its power to affect us and make us feel a certain way. This seems just as harmful to the Scripture.

We seem to be less afraid of the details of the Scripture itself than we are about discussing what the end actually looks like. About what it means to stop being…us.

It is said that we have an obsession in our culture with youth. I think a more accurate expression of this is that we have an obsession with avoiding aging. We don’t want to be young, we just don’t want to be old. The now common practices of cosmetic surgery and taking pills to stave off the outward effects of aging serve as obvious proof of this. The issue isn’t about becoming children again (though for some, that may actually be the case), but something more elemental: our understanding of youth is that in youth, our sites are set on tomorrow. Youth is about promise and expectation and hope and anticipation. It is about what is coming in the future.

Middle age, then, comes to represent the potential realization of those dreams and hopes and expectations. It is the time in which we embody the future in a present. We then take on a caretaker roll—maintaining the world, the institutions, the practices of a person of a certain age. Our prescription for middle age is to live in the present.

This leaves our senior time as representing the past. Our bodies prevent us from doing the things that we did when we were younger and our appearance changes.

But the truth is that we prefer to think about what could be to what is and certainly prefer it to what was. We catalog aging as a process of losing hope and optimism, as we are overtaken by pessimism and “realistic” thinking. We fight idealism because our own lives have seen things that have brought anger into our hearts and tears to our eyes.

In the middle of this talk of destruction, confusion, and conflict, Jesus tells his disciples this: “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” Jesus talks about the end of things, not as a source of destruction and devastation, but of fulfillment of expectations, of hopes, and of dreams. A time of the old becoming new. In death, we are born anew. We talked about this two weeks ago when we tackled the “mini apocalypse” in Mark—the destruction of the Temple and the birthpangs—but in this one, Jesus gives his disciples instructions: to hold up their heads and stand tall.

This isn’t about arrogance, indignation, or confrontation. This isn’t about feeling special or chosen. This isn’t even about feeling righteous. This is about believing. Believing that hardship leads to reward. Believing that we have somebody that is there for us when we feel all alone. Believing that, in spite of today, tomorrow will be better.

When Jesus tells his disciples to be ready, he doesn’t couple that with “because tomorrow the world will end,” but with “so that your hearts may not be weighed down”.

As is often the case, Jesus may as well be speaking right to us. This may as well be a direct line to our own time. Because sometimes we feel bad, our hearts feel pretty heavy. We look at tomorrow, not with hope and optimism, but with anxiety: because we fear loss; that something will be stripped from us. For some, this is the fear of having the car keys taken by a son or daughter—that tomorrow might be the day.

But Jesus tells us not to fear: not to be afraid of tomorrow. That we must hold our heads up to the light and see the world as it truly is. What we long for about youth is that freedom to not fear tomorrow, to not worry about what will happen this time next year or the year after that, and to not worry about loss. But who says that we don’t all have that freedom? Who says that we have to look at tomorrow with death-colored glasses? Who says that we can’t be hopeful dreamers?

We have a promise that God is with us, that we have a teacher and a guide. We have a promise that dreams can be fulfilled and that tomorrow can and will be a better place. We have opportunity and responsibility in our hands. We have the time and the place for this action: today, right here: to prepare ourselves. And we have one instruction: “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”