Prepare The Way (2nd Sunday in Advent)

Scriptures:     Malachi 3:1-4,  Luke 1:68-79,   Philippians 1:3-11,  Luke 3:1-6

Today, on this second Sunday in Advent, we meet John the Baptist, the wild man in the wilderness who was to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus.  John reminds absolutely nobody of Santa Claus – while we don’t actually hear from him today, he’s loud, demanding, uncompromising.  We hear from John’s father, Zechariah – that was the first of the two readings from Luke, a paraphrase of which we also sung today as our 2^nd hymn. Zechariah, addressing his newborn son John, says, “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins.”  Similarly, the second reading from Luke quotes from Isaiah: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”  It sounds like a project for PennDOT, and a large one at that, but here we’re talking about preparing pathways to human hearts.

God did not just send Jesus out of the blue; the way for Jesus had to be prepared, and that preparation was done by John.   Our reading from Malachi warns that this preparation would not be easy or painless:  “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap.”  Of course, the way to remove impurities from metal is to heat the metal to very high temperatures so that the impurities burn off.  And fuller’s soap was the laundry detergent of its day.  So indeed, who can endure the day of the coming of God’s messenger?  It’s like being baked in an oven and having your mouth washed out with soap, all at the same time.  Not exactly a day at the beach.

But it’s necessary – in order for us to receive Jesus, our hearts must be prepared.  Until we realize we are ill, or someone points it out to us, we will not seek a physician.  Unless we realize how broken and twisted and sinful our lives are – or someone points it out to us, we will not seek forgiveness and restoration.  And that’s what John did – pointed out to anyone willing to listen that their society, and they themselves as individuals, were sick and toxic and needed to change.  John’s baptism of repentance was not just the formality it often is in our churches, but a symbolic act of turning away from society, polluted as it was by toxic Roman values as well as toxic interpretations of Jewish values, turning away from all of that, washing off all the spiritual slime that had collected in peoples’ lives, and starting over fresh and clean. 

Unfortunately, and tragically, I think we can see this need for prepared hearts, our need to repent, our nation’s need to repent, in our nation’s response to this year’s wave of mass shootings.  This week, a mass shooting by radicalized Muslims, a husband and wife, at an agency in San Bernardino, California, that worked with developmentally disabled persons.  Earlier that same day, in fact, there was a less publicized shooting in Savannah, Georgia.  Before that, the killing at the Planned Parenthood clinic by a white conservative Christian extremist.  Shootings at schools, shootings at churches, shootings at job sites, on and on.  According to the website Mass Shooting Tracker – which tracks shootings in which four or more persons, including the shooter, are killed or injured by gunfire – as of December 2 across the country there were 355 mass shootings this year – at that point an average of more than one a day.  Now granted, there’s a lots of room to quibble about their definition of mass shooting, which was a former but not the current FBI definition – it would include terrorist attacks, but also robberies.  Even so, that’s an awful lot of shootings.  It’s telling that former Australian Prime Minister Tim Fischer advocates warning Australians about the dangers of travel to the United States – he was making a political point, but still.  Perhaps even more dismaying is that, in our capitalist society, someone has found a novel way to make money off the threat of mass shootings – a company called ProTecht offers what it calls the Bodyguard Blanket, a bulletproof 5/16” thick pad, of the same material used by our military – but in sizes for kids to strap over themselves for protection against those annoying school shooting incidents.  They’re red, and when the kids wear them, they look like little red box turtles.  Perhaps if you buy two, they’ll throw in a Ginsu knife.  And no, except for the part about the Ginsu knife, I’m so not kidding.  It’s come to this – parents being offered for sale little mini Kevlar bulletproof blankets for their kids to take to school so they can maybe come home alive at the end of the day.  We’d rather do that than try to get at the root of the problem.

And what do we do?  Our politicians solemnly trot out each time and offer thoughts and prayers for the families.  Pastors do the same.  We post memes on Facebook.  And life goes on.  And nothing changes. More to the point, our behavior doesn’t change.  Our society’s behavior doesn’t change.  And, it’s been said, a definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  A New York Daily News cover from a few days ago read, “God Isn’t Fixing This.”  Shocking as it sounds, I partly agree with the New York Daily News – God isn’t fixing this, because we won’t let God fix this, because to let God fix this would mean, not just prayers, but change, drastic change, at a societal level – and we’re not willing to change.  We’re only willing to mouth prayers.

Other countries don’t have incidents like this on a regular basis.  Other countries also don’t have anything like the number of guns floating around among their citizenry.  Other countries don’t have their politicians bought and paid for by the gun lobby and the military lobby.  But we do.  It’s part of our American exceptionalism…..a chicken in every pot, a gun alongside every pillow.

But we pray for peace, and for an end to the shootings.  Oh, do we pray.  We’re so good at praying.  But nothing happens.  Why, we ask?  Why doesn’t God answer our prayers? 

There are a number of places in Scripture where it’s clear that God makes no promises whatsoever that our prayers will always be heard, unconditionally.  I know that this sound shocking in light of our society’s popular notions of an all-loving, all-accepting God, just sitting around waiting for our prayers – but shocking though it may be, true it is.  And here are some citations, chapter and verse.  From Isaiah 58, referring to the people of Judah: “Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God; they ask of me righteous judgments; they delight to draw near to God. Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”  The people are praying and even fasting – wow, that’s some dedication, huh, surely God’s gotta pay attention to that, praying and fasting - but God ignores them, and the people ask why.  And God replies: “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. You fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high.”  So God rejects prayers that come from a place of hypocrisy, especially when our behavior contradicts our prayers.    And we remember Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the Temple – Luke 18, beginning with verse 9 - and the prayer of the self-righteous Pharisee – “Lord, I thank you that I am not like other men” - was rejected while the prayer of the penitent tax collector  - Lord have mercy on me, a sinner” - was heard.  And James 4:3 reads, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend what you get on your pleasures.”  So prayers that come from a place of hypocrisy and greed – such as those of political leaders who solemnly mourn gun deaths in public while cashing in on gun lobby donations in private – will not be heard by God.  They just won’t.  Every time our national leaders pray for peace while cashing in on violence, God says to them, “Talk to the hand.”

How about our prayers?  It’s easy to mock political hypocrisy, sometimes harder to look at our own lives.  And yet, a big part of the mission of John the Baptist was to hold up a mirror to his listeners and let them see the ugliness in their own lives.

We pray for peace, and we should pray for peace.  But God will be more apt to hear our prayers for peace if we cry for peace, not only with our lips, but with our lives.  Ultimately, change begins with each of us. Our lives, and not only our words, need to be a prayer for peace.  And although we fool ourselves otherwise, ours is an incredibly violent culture…and the politics will never change if the culture doesn’t change, and the culture won’t change if we as individuals don’t change.  Change begins with us.  Most of our entertainment – TV, movies, computer games – is about bullets and bombs.  Can you imagine how quickly a proposed TV series about a specialist in mediation and non-violent conflict resolution would be rejected?  The series would never make it past the pilot, if it even got that far.  So instead we get shows about Jack Bauer.  Our entertainment tells us that the way to resolve problems is to kill the bad guy, and preferably torture him a little along the way.  We think this way on an individual level – see a robbery, shoot the bad guy – and we think this way on a global level – some country behaves in a way we don’t approve, we bomb them back to the stone age.  Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King said that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world was his own government – our own government – that was during the Vietnam War – and fifty years and multiple wars in the Middle East later, it’s still true. While we have to look really hard to find clothing made in the USA or household products made in the USA or furniture made in the USA, it’s easy to find or to name guns and weapons made in the USA.   Here in the USA, we’re good at killing people, and we’re good at making stuff that kills people.  Indeed, much of our country’s gross national product is linked to killing people, linked to death…a national product that’s indeed “gross” in any number of ways….and I would say that’s a sign of a sick culture….cultures are supposed to promote life, not death.   Indeed, Martin Luther King said that “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Since then, our military budget has only grown while our programs of social uplift have been gutted or eliminated.   The shootings and terror attacks, then – and our unwillingness to change our ways – are perhaps signs that spiritual rigor mortis has set in on a national level.

There’s the saying that, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  In our culture, when the only tool to resolve conflicts that we’re willing to use is a gun, everything looks like a capital offense – and so, if somebody looks at somebody else wrong on the street, they waste ‘em, if someone has a grievance at work, they go postal.  If someone is cut off in traffic, road rage takes over.  Christian theologian Walter Wink says that America’s true national religion – the national religion we really believe in, the national religion we really trust, the national religion we really practice and live by – is not Christianity or Judaism, but rather what Wink calls “the myth of redemptive violence” – basically violence as a sacred act, the myth that lasting good is brought about only through acts of sacred violence…the American version is the cowboy myth that salvation comes when the good guy kills the bad guy, saves the town, gets the girl, and rides off into the sunset.  Walter Wink says that in America, that’s our true national religion.  Redemptive violence was also the true religion of Jesus’ day – which is why Jesus made such extreme statements against violence of any kind, telling his followers to turn the other cheek and go the second mile and give one’s shirt if someone took your coat…why the earliest Christians outright refused military service, and were martyred for it…..so much of Jesus’ ministry and that of the early church was about challenging the extreme violence of his day, and the extreme violence of ours.   In the circle of violence that consumes our world, Jesus wants his followers to be circuit-breakers, to absorb the pain without passing it on.  A difficult place to stand, but without circuit breakers, circuits overload, buildings burn, people die.  Similarly, our call to serve as spiritual circuit-breakers to end the cycle of violence is a call to preserve life, not end it.  And Jesus showed us the way, absorbing the worst violence the Roman Empire could dish out, without passing it on to others.

In order for Jesus to come, John had to prepare the way by bringing the people to repentance.  In order to pave the way for God to hear our prayers for peace, our lives need to become prayers for peace.  Everything we say and do needs to come from a place of peace – peace with ourselves, peace with neighbors, peace with our community.  Where there is conflict, we need to be willing to work for a peaceful resolution.  When our alleged national leaders stir up conflicts, we need to tune out their hateful rhetoric and challenge them to consider non-violent alternatives.   We need to advocate for peace – with our voices, with our letters, with our bodies marching in the streets, with our lives if need be – and we need to be peaceful and at peace ourselves while doing so.  By doing these things, our lives can become prayers for peace, and then, in words from Scripture, 2 Chronicles 7:14  “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

I’ll close with these words from St. Francis, which I shared earlier with the children:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy;

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.  Let it begin with us, all of us, right here, right now. Amen.

Stand Up! (1st Sunday in Advent)

Scripture:  Jeremiah 33:14-16,  Psalm 25:1-10  I  Thessalonians 3:9-13,  Luke 21:25-36

Today is the First Sunday of Advent, and the first Sunday of the church calendar.  Advent, and especially the first Sunday of Advent, is always a reminder that the church and the world have different agendas, that calendar time – the Greek word is chronos – and God’s time – the Greek word is kairos – are out of sync.   On one hand, in some ways the church is ahead of the calendar – our year begins the first Sunday of Advent, usually the last Sunday in November, while calendar year 2016 doesn’t start until January 1, more than a month from now.  On the other hand, in some ways the world’s agenda pushes ahead of the church’s agenda.  Momentum for Christmas sales has been building for some weeks now, and with the coming of the retail calendar’s holiest day – Black Friday – it’s all Christmas, all the time, with Christmas music across the dial on the radio and as background music at the mall.  But in the church, we don’t just fast-forward to Christmas, but celebrate Advent – a time of waiting, a time of anticipating, the coming of the promised Messiah.  And so we do not begin Advent with Christmas carols, but with the plaintive Advent hymns – O Come, O Come Emanuel – requesting God to come and be with us.  We sing hymns of anticipation – “Watchman, Tell Us Of The Night”.   We sing, believing that while God’s fulfillment of our requests and anticipation do not come on our schedule,  they will come at the right time, which is not calendar time, not chronos time, but kairos time, God’s time.

And if Advent in general throws our sense of time out of sync with the world, today’s Gospel reading will really do a number on us:  “"There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken…..”   This doesn’t sound anything like “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.”  Indeed, each year, the Gospel reading for the first Sunday of Advent comes, not from the beginning of the Gospel, but toward the end, when Jesus makes predictions of a time of dislocation and upheaval soon to come – predictions that began with Jesus saying that the Jerusalem Temple, glorious as it was in Jesus’ day, would be destroyed, with not one stone left upon another…and these predictions were fulfilled, at least in part, by the invasion of Jerusalem by Rome and destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD.  The destruction of the Temple, the center of Jewish life, would have been far more wrenching than the departure of a pastor or the closure of a church would be to us….because no matter how beloved, there are always other pastors, and there are always other churches.  But for the Jews of that day, the Temple was the focus of their religious life, the center of all that was good and holy in their lives, the house where God was literally thought to dwell – and Rome’s invasion of Jerusalem literally leveled all of that to the ground.  For them, it really was like the sun, moon and stars falling from heaven, and utter darkness prevailing upon the earth.

As we read this passage, with its graphic images of destruction and fear and foreboding, I think we can relate.  The world, the nation appears to be becoming increasingly unglued. Here in Philadelphia, many were shocked by news footage of a van of women and children setting upon a homeless veteran, hitting and kicking him until he was taken to the hospital, where he died of his injuries.   While the news media stoked fears of terrorism in the United States by radical Muslims, a homegrown terrorist – let’s call him what he is – one Robert Lewis Dear – white, male, and Christian, attacked a Planned Parenthood site in Colorado, killing three people, including a police officer, Garrett Swasey, age 44 and injuring nine others, including (if I remember correctly) five police officers.  It’s disconcerting when the news media primes us to fear Arabs and Muslims, and then we find terrorists that look like me, that look like many of us, even though a recent survey of law enforcement agencies states that as concerned as they are about violence from Islamist groups,  they are more concerned about homegrown terrorists - white supremacists – many of whom profess to be Christians.[i]  And international tensions are high after Turkey shot down a Russian plane….and these were just a few of this week’s news stories.   While we haven’t seen signs in the sun, moon and stars, climate change is bringing the roar of the sea and waves to places that never anticipated or intended to become beachfront property…and absent rapid and radical change on the part of human beings and human institutions such as corporations and the military, worse is to follow.  The possibilities for world war and for the destruction of life on earth are surely enough to make people faint with fear and foreboding, if we allow ourselves to be conscious of them. And yet, it is at this exact moment that, according to Luke, Jesus said, “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

Our reading from Mark’s gospel two weeks ago sounded very similar – it was a parallel passage to the one read today from Luke’s gospel – and it included the words, “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”  And so it is.  We are living in a time of transition, when much of what is familiar and comforting to us is passing away, and something new is being born.   And those of you who are mothers know that birth is neither predictable nor painless.   And so we are in the midst of the birth pangs of change, and for many, the pain is excruciating.  We’re used to the map of the world looking a certain way, and due to climate change and rising sea levels, it almost certainly will not look the same in the future…residents of long-inhabited islands are finding the sea lapping at their door fronts, and even here in America we’re seeing flooding of a kind we hadn’t seen in the past.  Remember Hurricane Sandy in 2012 – I dragged my fat, aging carcass up to New York for a day or two to help with cleanup efforts organized by Occupy Sandy – basically volunteers from across the country coming in and organizing residents to help one another, because government and Red Cross efforts were completely inadequate…and I well remember the devastation I saw…and three years later, many residents are still dealing with the aftereffects.  We’re used to the flow of our lives looking a certain way, organized around work and school and church schedules - and they may not in the future.    

And as much as we may try to stave it off, life in the church is changing as well; religious writer Phyllis Tickle has written, looking back on church history, that every 500 years or so, the worldwide church has a giant rummage sale, as long established forms of worship and church organization are set aside and new ones emerge.  Around the year 400 it was Constantine converting to Christianity and the church becoming accepted – some would say coopted by – the state – and going through a process of standardization, by adopting the creeds – the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed - that we still use today.  Around 1100 it was the split between the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Western Roman  Catholic churches.  Around 1500, the Reformation.  And another 500 or so years later, we’re going through another giant rummage sale.  It doesn’t mean that the core of our faith will change, but the way we express it very well may.  Many churches across the country, Protestant and Catholic, are closing, and we’ve seen this even in our own neighborhood with the closure of All Saints and Bridesburg Baptist.   And yet many younger people have a deep faith and spirituality and are yearning for ways to express it. 

What will the church of the future look like?  Will we go back to house churches, of the kind that nurtured the faith of the earliest believers?  Will worship take place online?  I think it’s safe to say that many of the denominational structures and hierarchies will either change or go by the wayside….and what new forms of church governance may emerge, one can only guess.  The faith will go on, but the ways we express it may not look like what we grew up with.  

All this is deeply unsettling, but our Saviour tells us, “when you see these things, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”  When everyone around us is fainting and falling and generally freaking out, our faith tells us to stand up and to look up, to look to God.

For one my age, who was not around at the time, it’s interesting to look back on some of the pivotal moments in world history or in American history – say, the time of Hitler’s reign in Germany or the McCarthy era, when paranoia over the “red menace” of communism destroyed so many careers and lives, or the civil rights movement in our own country – times when the actions of individuals and churches could really make a difference in either letting lives be destroyed or saving them, letting injustice continue or standing up for justice, and wondering what we would have done had we lived in those tumultuous times. Would I have sheltered Jews in Hitler’s Germany, or turned them in?  Would I have named names and turned in my neighbors on suspicion of being godless commies, or refused to testify?  Would I have marched with those advocating for civil rights, or been among the crowds attacking them? 

Well, we need not wonder, because we are again living in such a pivotal moment, when “business as usual” will not be sufficient, when our faith will be tested, whether our faith is made of gold or of fool’s gold.  It may not be people holding a weapon to our heads and asking if we are a Christian…..I think it will more likely be members of unpopular and hated groups asking us for help and refuge and sanctuary, as Jews asked Christians in Germany during the Nazi era, and forcing a decision on us whether to go with what our neighbors want, and say no, or to do the difficult but Christian thing and help.  “When we see these things, stand up and lift your heads, for your redemption is drawing nigh.”

I’ll close with Paul’s prayer for the church at Thessalonica, also living in tumultuous times:  “And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.”  May it be so among us. Amen.

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[i] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/tally-of-attacks-in-us-challenges-perceptions-of-top-terror-threat.html?_r=0