Advent 4 (Annunciation): The Blessed Virgin’s Yes

Matthew 1:18-25

TRANSCRIPTION

For those of you who have come in, later Deacon Grace is a dear friend to our church. Five years ago, probably about this time when we were getting started, we were still meeting in a conference room in Fairfax County Park. Deacon Grace was with us learning as she was doing her schoolwork about what it was like to play at the church in a pandemic.

We're really grateful that you endured that year with us. She preached her first sermon with us, and so she is now a deacon and married to Colin, who is also a deacon. We're grateful to have both of you here this morning.

I'm really excited. Let me pray for you. Heavenly Father, I thank you for Deacon Grace, the ways that you've called her.

Thank you that she's here with us. As we think about the Annunciation this morning, would you bless her and fill her with your spirit. Lord, may we hear from you this morning.

In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Yes, as Father Morgan said, I have loved getting to be a friend of Corpus Christi.

And it's so good to see you all this morning. And I just want to thank you all for seeing me this morning. You have seen me through being a very excited college student and seminarian.

Chip and Peg, you got to see me through discernment. And now it is just so fun to get to be here as a deacon. So thank you all for always welcoming me back in different ways.

And now would you all pray with me. Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us. Amen.

This past year, I got to spend the week between Christmas and New Year's at Mepkin Abbey, a monastery in South Carolina. Mepkin is home to about two dozen Catholic monks who open their home to those seeking set-aside time for retreat and prayer and rest. Guests are invited seven times a day to join the brothers in the Liturgy of the Hours, beginning at four o'clock in the morning and going until eight o'clock at night.

At the end of the day, just before their service of Compline, before bed, the day's prayers finish with the brothers bidding all those who are gathered to turn toward a statue of the Virgin Mary. Her arms spread and welcome, the smile on her face as the lights are turned down. All are invited to sing the Salve Regina, an ancient prayer, and for them somewhat of a bedtime lullaby, which, since I heard it for the first time, often makes its way into my mind.

They sang, Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To thee we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.

Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us. And after this exile, help us to see Jesus, the blessed fruit of thy womb. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.

The song of these brothers and of other Catholics around the world is appropriate for today, as we have reached our final Sunday in Advent. We began our first week with the call to stay awake and watch for the Lord. Moving toward the flame of our second candle, bringing the light and the promise of a kingdom that is not of this world, where violence will be no more, and a little child will be crowned as king.

Hearing again last week on our third Sunday, the call to rejoice in the midst of the dark chaos of this world, and beholding the altar covered in rose-colored cloths. And today, hearing twice, the Virgin shall conceive and shall bear a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel. This particular Sunday at Advent's end is traditionally devoted to the Annunciation, remembering the Blessed Virgin Mary's resounding yes to hear the will of God and do it.

Mary, as heard in this devotional lullaby and in our scriptures, helps us to see Jesus. In her yes, as she proclaimed, behold, I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your will.

Saint Mary's role in salvation's story was a role unlike any other. Chosen to be the mother of God, saying yes to receiving God in Christ in her very being, and going before all those who would come after her who would also receive God in Christ, beginning the family of the church. As Saint Augustine writes, she gave milk to our bread.

In our Protestant context, Mary's role can be difficult to discuss, as it is often passed over or put to the side. Yet this Sunday in Advent is an invitation to not pass Mary over, to look to her as she is told of in scripture and in the tradition of the church, and to enhance our devotion to Jesus through her devotion to him, and to echo her resounding yes. The yes that came from the lips of she who is blessed among women, the first to receive the Holy Spirit within her, the one whom Jesus chose to be closest to first, and in many ways, who is the first disciple, the mother of the firstborn of a large family, in whose yes the church echoes her own resounding yes.

In our scriptures today, Saint Mary's yes is not the only yes that we hear. We cannot forget the yes of Saint Joseph, son of David, spouse of Mary, who echoes Mary's yes in his own, leading the train of all who would come after Mary to say yes to God. Today in our gospel reading, we find Joseph asleep, perhaps sleeping fitfully, after receiving the news that the woman he was engaged to was expecting a baby that was not his, and turning the unlikely story she told him of a visit from an angel over in his mind.

In his dreams, Joseph too receives an angel's visit, carrying the command of the Lord on his wings, as he says, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for what has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. This child, the angel says, is the fulfillment of centuries-long waiting for God to come to be with his people and to bring their salvation.

Today, the day of salvation has arrived, held in the home of Mary's womb. And Joseph, we hear very simply, wakes from sleep and does what the angel of the Lord commanded him, taking Mary as his wife and calling the child's name Jesus. These yeses of blessed Mary, mother of God, and Saint Joseph herself, a preteen girl and a man in his early twenties, or by some traditions, a widower, those chosen among women and men to be the mother and the guardian of the Christ, who received the one whom all the world had been waiting for, were yeses to God and yeses for the sake of all who would belong to him through Christ, helping us to see Jesus and to say our own resounding yes.

Yet, these yeses were not easy ones to say, for as both said yes to God and Christ, both also were saying yes to public shame, to gossip and ridicule, to an inexplicable and improbable situation of a virgin conceiving and bearing a son, saying yes to lives that would be marked forever by receiving Christ as their own. Ultimately, they said yes to being associated with Jesus. They said yes to a life of destitution, fleeing a violent king and seeking safety in a country far from their home, and living life as refugees.

They said yes to the promised Messiah, born on a straw-covered stable floor, whose childhood was spent not in the soft clothing of king's houses, but among the wood and the nails of a carpenter's shop, who grew up to be a poor man with no place to lay his head, who came to his own and whose own did not receive him, whose words were both gentle enough to calm the raging of the seas and hard enough to refine the hearts and the hands of his hearers as precious metals tried in the fire. Who came to save his people from their sins and who said that anyone who does the will of God is his mother or sister or brother. Our own yeses to God are not easy yeses to say, for we too say yes to the inexplicable and the improbable, that the virgin did conceive and is born a son.

We say yes to lives marked forever by receiving Christ as our own, to love and to serve him with all that we are, to bring ourselves before him in daily prayer, to affirm our faith of he who came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit, and was born of the Virgin Mary. We say yes to the discomfort of opening ourselves before Christ in the confession of our sins, shoulder to shoulder with one another on Sunday mornings, in the quiet of our own homes, or in the hearing of a priest, to seek to be those who, as the psalmist says, who have clean hands and a pure heart. We say yes to receiving the challenge of the scriptures, to seeking Jesus and seeing him as he is, not what we wish he might be.

Trusting in his words, both gentle and hard, and allowing ourselves to be refined as precious metals in the furnace, that we too may be numbered among those who do the will of God, be made members of his family. With Blessed Mary and Saint Joseph, we too say yes to association with Jesus, he who is the king of glory, whose earthly throne was in the depths of dust, heeding his call to embrace those who, like him, are hungry and thirsty, whose need is very visible, who are strangers longing to be welcomed, and who, like him, have no place to lay their head. We say yes to seeking his face in theirs, standing with and for the least of these, as we stand with and for him.

Yet, above all else, our yeses to God are yeses to the life that really is life. They are yeses to the Christ who came that we may have life and have it in full measure, who is the light of the world, whom the darkness cannot overcome, to whom, in Saint Paul's words, we are called to belong to, and through whom we have received grace, who is the son promised so long ago through the prophet's lips, whose name is called Emmanuel, our God with us, who desires nothing but the love and devotion and resounding yes, of those whom he has loved and devoted himself to and has already said a resounding yes to. In just a moment, we will be invited to the altar to receive God in Christ in the Eucharist, the pledge of his yes to us, receiving him again into our very bodies as Mary received him into her womb and being given the chance again with our outstretched hands to say our yes back to him.

And as we go forth from this place, sustained by his sacrament to love and serve the Lord, awaiting the arrival of Christmas in this week to come, we will receive Christ again as we remember his birth, his yes to us as he came here to make his home. Amidst the gifts given, the strains and song of carols, the scent of pine and the candlelit faces, the loved ones visited or welcomed, the family and friends whom we grieve, and the faces that we are not able to see, we will be invited to say yes again to the one who said yes to us in his first coming, entrusting ourselves and all that this week stirs up in us into his loving care. And finally, as this season of Advent ends, anticipating Christ's second coming in extra measure, and as we have been reoriented to look together towards the day when he will come again to be with us, when we will see him face to face and we will stand before him with his arms of welcome and his eyes of mercy and his lips that have already said yes to us, we will be invited again to say yes to God.

May our answer now and then and always be a resounding yes.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

Advent 3: A Testament of Faith — The Power of a Loving Church Community

Matthew 11:2-19

cONTENT

Good morning friends, it is an honor and a privilege to be able to share my story with you all today. As Morgan said, my name is Spike Douglass, and together with my wife, Nasya, we are on staff here at Corpus Christi as your worship music directors. I am somewhat of a rarity here at Corpus Christi, in that I am what you would call a “cradle Anglican.” Both sides of my family have deep roots in the Episcopal and Anglican church, especially through my grandfather, who was an Anglican priest his whole career. However, in spite of that deep familial connection, (or maybe because of it), I didn’t really find a home for myself in the Anglican church until after college and into adulthood, which is when I really made my faith my own.

Today, as I share part of my story with you all, I want to frame it in the context of our passage from James, where we are called to be people of integrity in loving community who pray with faith. And within that call, there are three main ways of being that I want to focus on: the first is that the church community is patient, the second is that our community is prayerfully compassionate and confessional, and thirdly that our community is restorative. With that in mind, let me pray.

Lord, let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

So firstly, the church community is patient. I think one of the main ways my childhood faith journey was formed was really through patience. When I was quite young, about 5 years old, my family belonged to a small church mission. It was about the size that Corpus Christi was when I first started attending back in early 2022, about 30ish people on a good day.

This mission was a small group of people who were part of a well-established church on the far side of the Las Vegas Valley who were tired of driving an hour across town on a Sunday morning. I think a lot of my waiting during this time really came from waiting to see how, or if, our mission would grow and become more well-established.

As a kid, I remember my parents feeling proud that our little mission kept finding ways to survive, moving from hotel conference rooms to more permanent office space, and even being able to march in the annual Nevada Day parade in town one year! But overall, I also remember feeling the frustration of my parents on the stagnant size of the mission, and I think the effects of the 2008 recession drove the nail in the coffin for this small group, as our members were scattered across the country, and the world.

That scattering included my own family, as my dad was transferred to the international department of his company, and we moved to Doha, Qatar. Our patience looked different here, as the church family we found ourselves a part of was the largest Anglican church in the country. Our waiting here was for our permanent church building to be completed, which took 6 years from when we joined that church to the opening of that building.

The patience was well worth it, as the permanent building gave us a chance to centralize our church community in one place, support the smaller Anglican congregations in the country by providing them with a place to worship as well, and be a true representative of the Anglican Communion in Qatar.

But perhaps the biggest area of my faith journey where I exercised patience with the prayerful support of my church community was with my early relationship with Nasya. For those who don’t know, Nasya and I were high school sweethearts. We met in our youth group and started dating at the end of my senior year of high school, right before I moved away for college. For seven years, we were in a long-distance relationship, with Nasya in Doha, and then Canada, and myself at school in Virginia.

When people say long-distance relationships are hard, they’re not kidding! But thankfully, we both had a strong relationship with the Lord, and we were able to find comfort in him while apart, and the times we were together were even better because we were able to be in each other’s presence and get to pray together, worship together, and spend precious time together.

One of the things I remember most about that time spent apart from each other is actually how truly welcoming and excited all of you were in the lead up and anticipation of Nasya moving here to Northern Virginia! I will never forget the kind words you all shared with me during this time, whether it was sharing your excitement that she was coming, asking about ways to help her transition to life in the US, and especially the ways this church supported us last year during the lead up to our wedding. I know that this community was one of the main reasons Nasya and I were able to so quickly become comfortable living in this area and “doing life” with all of you.

The second way we are called to be a church community is by being prayerfully compassionate and confessional.

Some of my biggest faith moments have been through compassionate prayer. I remember in high school, I joined my youth group on several mission trips to Nepal, where we spent time meeting with the Nepali people in Kathmandu and the surrounding villages, taking time to talk with them, help with chores, hear about their daily struggles, and pray healing prayers for them.

I’ve seen the true power of prayer at work in these moments, where we heard that folks who prayed with us there saw miraculous healing of their injuries and maladies, and where we were able to discern through prayer the needs of the local community there and help in any way we could.

Prayer also doesn’t just need to be silent or spoken. One of the most powerful areas of prayer I have seen not only in my own faith journey, but in all the church communities I have been part of, has been through praise and worship. Some of my closest “come to Jesus” moments have been during worship. I regularly find myself overcome with emotion during the communal singing of hymns and songs of praise. In high school, Nasya and I were both worship leaders in our youth group, and it has been such a blessing to be able to continue to share the love we have for leading worship with Corpus Christi.

Confession has also been a powerful time of prayer and reconciliation for me. While in college, I did not have a church family, but I was part of a campus ministry in which I was heavily involved. The pastor here was a great man, strong in his faith and always ready to lend an ear to the students in his care. I felt very lost in my walk with Christ during college without a strong church foundation, and there were definitely times where I made some less-than-questionable decisions. But having a strong mentor in the faith to confess my shortcomings to and work through scripture together to find reconciliation helped me be able to set my heart right for post-graduation, and open my heart to finding a new church community again.

And this leads into my third point, which is that the church community is restorative.

After I graduated from college, I moved back to Las Vegas and back into my parents’ house. I found work on a ranch in central Nevada, where I lived and worked 4 days on and 3 days off at home. Since I was on the ranch over the weekends, I still did not have a church family to really plug into. I like to think of that summer working on the ranch as my days literally wandering the wilderness, not knowing what I was really doing with my life yet or how to get started.

After deciding I should actually figure out how to use the degree in Political Science I had just spent 4 years earning, I quit that job on the ranch and decided to take a leap of faith and move to the DC area to start looking for work. I had no job leads, no housing lined up other than my best friend’s couch for a couple of weeks, and no real community here. For the first three months living in Springfield, I was unemployed, living off my meager savings and whatever gig work I could occasionally find, and feeling like I had made a huge mistake. I consider this period of time as my days of figuratively continuing to wander the wilderness.

Eventually, I was able to find employment, and I was able to start getting back onto my feet. That Christmas was when I proposed to Nasya, and after returning to Springfield after the holidays, I decided that I was done finding excuses to not find a church to plug into. It was time to see if I had any real connection to the faith that my parents tried to instill in me growing up.

After literally googling, “Anglican churches near me,” Corpus Christi popped up as only a mile away from where I was living at the time, so I said, “What the heck,” and went to check it out that following Sunday.

I still vividly remember Morgan being taken aback that anyone would visit this little mission! The first thing he said to me after hello was, “How did you even find us??” I could tell even on my first visit that this church was where God was calling me to be.

I was instantly comfortable in the liturgy, finding it very close to what I was used to growing up, but with enough differences from how any church that I attended with my parents worshiped that I could call this church my own. I started becoming a regular attendee of Corpus Christi and participated in our first Members Sunday. I threw myself headfirst into being a member of the body of Christ in a way that felt completely natural and unforced. This congregation, you all have become a family for Nasya and me in a way that means so much to us, especially with our own families so far away.

In closing, the church community that has been built at Corpus Christi is one of the strongest, healthiest, and godliest communities I have been lucky enough to be a part of. Our call to be people of integrity in loving community who pray with faith is truly realized in the day-to-day interactions of the body of Christ here in Springfield, and I find myself lucky and blessed to be able to call this church my home.

Advent 2: John the Baptist and the Repentant Remnant

Matthew 3:1-12

cONTENT

Introduction

         Good morning, friends. It is wonderful to be here with you on this second Sunday of Advent. Today, we hear about the ministry of John the Baptist. He is the forerunner, whose icon we keep on the Old Covenant side of the altar. He had a clear sense that his life and ministry were to call people to follow Jesus as the Messiah. He provided the foundation and base for the ministry of Jesus to be launched. John the Baptist invites us to prepare the way of the Lord in Advent by calling us to look beyond what we see right now, look around us and notice the ways things are broken, and look to the one to come who can and will deliver us. As we look at Isaiah and our Gospel text, let me pray for us:

“In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our Redeemer. Amen.”

Look beyond: John the Baptist is calling people into the new age Isaiah prophesied about

         First, we need to look beyond what we can presently see. We read Isaiah 11 this morning, which was meant to be a corrective and exposition on what the Messianic reign would look like. Some were tempted to think before Israel’s exile that there was be an unbroken line in the reign of the house of David until the reign of a Messiah, but Isaiah 7 and the encounter with King Ahaz would destroy that hope. As God would cut down the mighty tree of Assyria, he would also destroy the mighty tree of the proud and corrupt house of David.

         While it looked like there was no hope for the house of David, there would be a branch of Jesse, that a remnant would follow. Ahaz wouldn’t be the last Davidic monarch to ruin Israel’s hope. It would happen again as Israel went into exile, then hope was kindled again with Zerubbabel, who began the rebuilding process. The Maccabeans may have ruled like little kings, but they were not of David’s line and ultimately became corrupt. The Idumeans, who were Edomites, were forcibly converted by the Maccabees. This would come to bite them later as the Idumeans, who were pro-Roman and Jewish-adjacent, produced the Herodian dynasty who was ruling Judea in the time of John the Baptist. Everyone is still waiting and looking for the branch of Jesse because it cannot be located in the Herodians.

         Isaiah paints a glorious picture of the rule and reign of this Davidic King. It is a new future where the nations are streaming to the mountain of God, as we read about last week. One writer says, “What Isaiah envisioned was...the sovereign execution of a new act of creation in which the righteous will of God is embraced, and the whole earth now reflects a reverent devotion “as the waters cover the sea.”[1] John the Baptist shows up in this period as a prophetic figure who joins the prophetic voice of Isaiah 40, calling for people to go to the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord. There is an anticipation of the Davidic ruler coming. To be part of the movement, John is calling people into this new age that Isaiah prophesied about.

         His presence is a critique on the current leadership. Do not trust the Herodians, do not trust the corrupted temple system. Prepare the way because the Davidic branch is coming. Prepare through works of repentance. Josephus, the 1st century Jewish historian, actually writes more about John than about Jesus. This is probably indicative of how great John’s influence was and why he was seen as such a political threat to Herod Antipas. He says about John’s baptism, “...For  immersion in water, it was clear to him, could not be used for the forgiveness of sins, but as a sanctification of the body, and only if the soul was already thoroughly purified by right actions.”[2] He is asking them to look beyond the current rulers and authorities to live under the authority of the Messianic king in the midst of a corrupt and broken world. It’s still true of us as an Advent reminder that we are called to navigate living under the authority of Jesus in a world bound to sin. We are citizens of the Kingdom where Jesus is king, and we’re navigating the welfare of others as people in exile.

Look around: John calls them to register themselves among the remnant

         John was calling people to look around at the brokenness and to enroll themselves into this sacred remnant. His baptism has a surprising element to it. In verse 6, people are coming to him at the river as religious pilgrims looking for hope. They want something more than Jerusalem has to offer. John’s baptism is closely associated with what you would find in Gentile converts. But these aren’t Gentiles. The very fact that Jews are coming to a prophetic voice in the wilderness to prepare for the Messianic kingdom is a revival movement that draws the attention of both the Pharisees and Sadducees.

         The Pharisees sit in the seat of Moses as interpreters who are helping people live out the law in a decentralized way. The Sadducees hold power over the temple, priesthood, and cultic life in Jerusalem. They’re frenemies who send a delegation to investigate what is happening. John has quite the greeting: “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” He isn’t diplomatic, but he sure is clear. The idea is that they’re like snakes lurking in the shadows, who are alerted to a coming fire and flee the scene. When the Messiah comes, there will be judgment. Do they think they’re really safe? They need to amend their lives, note the corruption and injustice they’ve caused, and bear fruits worthy of that repentance. He says that the axe is laid at the root of the tree, which again brings us back to the felling of the tree imagery, and the house of Judah, which we saw in Isaiah 11.

         This attack on people’s fragile strongholds of confidence is instructive for Advent. It invites us to examine what we cling to for validation and comfort. The delegation from the Pharisees and Sadducees relied on their status and familial ties; they prioritized comfort before renewal. We are all prone to this. While I am a huge fan of religious ritual and rhythm, there is also something good about momentary, holy disruptions. For example, each week we have sacramental confession as part of the liturgy. But to make a good and right confession, we need to prepare for it throughout the week. This is why I encourage people to come to confession outside of Sundays on occasion. It is out of these times of confession that I like to work with people on the spiritual rhythms they have. It is available to all of you; some of you should probably do it, but of course, none must do it. You can still prepare for confession each day before morning and evening prayer as well. Even if you don’t come for private confession, perhaps there is an opportunity each week to make a habit of writing our sins down in preparation for Sunday. Are we able to name patterns or wrath,  overreactions, overindulgences, workaholism, or other addictions, places where we continually deny how broken things are? Making space for this kind of preparation is the holy unsettling we need to prepare the way of the Lord.

Look at the One to Come

         John the Baptist calls the people to look beyond the current circumstances they’re in. He calls them to look around them at the world in its brokenness, and enroll themselves in the remnant that is going to experience the salvation of the one who is to come. Finally, he calls the people to look at the one who is coming. The most surprising thing to me about the prophetic ministry of John the Baptist is that someone with such a large following and impact could have such a clear vision that his ultimate goal was to lead people to deliverance under the Kingship of the Lord’s anointed one. How many leaders in human history would have taken their large following as an indicator that they themselves are a messianic figure?!

         John knew the scope of his ministry. He was preparing disciples to prepare the way for the Lord’s kingdom. This Sunday of Advent invites us into this ministry of preparation as well. We prepare ourselves for the kingdom of God to prepare others to see Jesus as well. 

         We have things in our calendar that are routine maintenance to keep things healthy: flushing water heaters, opening and closing water valves, oil changes, weeding, waterproofing fences, brushing teeth, etc. We understand routine maintenance in the physical world, but preparing well for the king who is coming involves spiritual routine maintenance. Where have we allowed seedlings of resentment to sprout up? What addictions have kept us from naming harm done to us honestly? What routines have developed that keep us from connection and friendship with others or from regular silence and solitude with God? Giving attention to these spaces is the work of preparing the way for the king who is coming to free us from bondage to sin and death. And the good news is that while he is coming to do this ultimately, he actually does this now in his death and resurrection, by the power of the Holy Spirit who is his presence in and among us. Preparing to meet the Lord gives proper scope to all the areas of our lives.

Conclusion

         On this second Sunday of Advent, John the Baptist invites us to turn from the works of darkness to bear fruits worthy of repentance as preparation for the return of the Lord. We need to look beyond what we see right now to what God is doing in our souls through the situations we encounter. We need to look around us and notice the ways things are broken and how we long for God’s kingdom to come. This is our invitation to enroll in the remnant that Jesus is reigning over as king. We need to look to the one to come who can and will deliver us. Just like in Isaiah 11, it might seem hopeless when we feel the discontinuity between God’s plan and the reality we are experiencing, but in the purification of God’s people, Jesus is still reigning over all. The work of God in the repentant heart is a small glimmer of hope that Jesus, the branch of Jesse, will not fail. His kingdom is sprouting and growing even when we wonder where hope is or when it feels like the tree has been chopped down. How are we preparing to meet him? The small glimmers of hope in Christ’s work are the promise of the realities of the good things to come for the people of God who follow Jesus as their Lord and King.

Let us pray:

Almighty God, by whose providence your servant John the Baptist was wonderfully born, and sent to prepare the way of your Son our Savior by preaching repentance: Make us so to follow his teaching and holy life, that we may truly repent, boldly rebuke vice, patiently suffer for the sake of truth, and proclaim the coming of Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

[1]                Brevard Childs, Isaiah: A Commentary

[2]                Josephus, Antiquities 18.5.2, 116-119.

Advent 1: Preparing for the Dawn of Christ's Return

Matthew 24:29-44

cONTENT

Introduction

         Good morning friends. It is great to be with you as we begin our liturgical year together with the season of Advent. This season of waiting and longing is formative in making us who God called us to be as we prepare with hope to meet the Lord. I remember watching some of the shows about homesteading in Alaska and watching people prepare for entering the long and dark winter where there wasn’t light for a few months. Even in those seasons of darkness, there is preparation to be done, whether it is fir trapping, or gathering firewood; being proactive in seasons of darkness allow them to not only to flourish in the darkness, but then prepare them better for life in the season of light when the icy world begins to thaw. Preparing well in the seasons of darkness prepares us well to greet the dawn of the new day when Christ comes again.

         I realize that people usually make resolutions in January as they look at the the new year, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be more appropriate to use the season of Advent to take stock of our longings, desires, and lives in order to ask the Lord how we might resolve to prepare to become what he’s calling us to become? Today’s collect will be read each Sunday in Advent along with other ones as we are invited to cast off the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. It is a season where we feel the depths of the world’s anticipation of the Lord’s coming, because things did not turn out the way the world had hoped for and all creation longs to be made new. Advent, fittingly, leads us up to the nativity of our Lord, but actually it is predominantly an anticipation of the end of the reign of darkness in the world when Christ comes again to make all things new. We begin the year with a reminder of where all things are heading. Advent invites us to prepare for the coming of God’s kingdom in small ways so that we are ready when he ultimately returns. Our passages this morning frame it in terms of light and preparation.

         As we look at our texts, let me pray for us: “In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. Lord, my the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be always acceptable, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.”

1) Walk in the light (Isaiah 2:5 and collect)

         First let’s think about light. Our Old Testament reading today comes from Isaiah 2 where the prophet Isaiah is inviting people to choose to follow the Lord. There is a beautiful scene painted that also gets used in Micah, though we don’t know if one or the other is older, or if this passage preceded them both. The imagery is of pilgrimage, as all nations stream up the holy mountain to meet God in the temple, the place where heaven and earth are brought together. The nations want to go up to the house of the God of Jacob, which is Isaiah’s invitation to the people: be the people who show the nations the goodness of God. In that poetic passage, God reigns over all justly, instruction goes out from him, and people have no need for weapons any longer. All the swords will be beating into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. There will be true peace, a shalom which reconciles and restores, and doesn’t just provide for just a temporary cessation of hostilities.

         In verse 5 Isaiah says, “O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD!” What follows his call to them is a listing out of all the ways they have walked away from the LORD and disobeyed. The prophet named the crossroads the house of Jacob is at. They could either be the house of Jacob in name only — the result is the irony that by relying on their status and listening only to the voices that told the leaders what they wanted to hear, they would risk losing everything. Or they could live into this vision of the house of Jacob in Isaiah 2 which lives with integrity and puts God’s goodness, mercy, and justice on display in a compelling vision that draws in the nations around it.

         The call to walk in the light is the same for you and I. We should seek to live in integrity of heart, not depending on our status or a past experience to feel justified, but in a life of conversion and repentance, grace, and trust. Light comes when we become honest with ourselves. I remember someone decades ago I knew and the only things she could talk about were the frustrations she had with the people in her life. It was every conversation. Eventually, as new people would come into her life, it became somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The poor woman was unaware the damage she was causing herself because she was not aware of how she was showing up with other people. Following Jesus means we need to become aware of the places where we need God’s grace. We cannot rely on our past experiences, the faith of our households of origin, or even ecclesiastical status for our continual assurance that we are becoming who God has made us to be. Instead, we undergo the difficult and daily process of noticing our overreactions to things, our besetting sins, our places of inability to function, the false narratives we’ve held deeply, and we hold them before the light of Christ, fully expectant that his light will scatter the darkness. That healing is the integration we need to draw ourselves and others into the goodness of the light of God.

2) Be ready for him at all times (24:43-44)

         First there is light, second, there is preparation. Our gospel passage is from Matthew 24 is another apocalyptic passage of Jesus. Remember that apocalypse means something like uncovering or revealing, and Jesus is showing his disciples something of what is coming so that they’re prepared when calamity strikes. Jesus is speaking about the destruction of the temple and about when the Son of Man will come to bring an end to foreign rule and the beginning of the new age. The disciples are asking Jesus when this will happen and what will be the signs of Jesus’ reign. The destruction of the temple in Jesus’ prophetic ministry here is not arbitrary, but I think it has to do with the fact that the corruption in the temple was indicative of broader trends. Cleansing began with the most pronounced place of corruption.

         It isn’t that the disciples were wrong to want to know when or how, but Jesus isn’t concerned with giving them or us an eschatological road map. I had to look this up because I didn’t believe it existed, but it does. A guy truly wrote a book called “88 reasons Why the Rapture will be in 1988”. Like the disciples, there are strands of theology concerning themselves with the wrong things. Jesus isn’t calling us to speculative timelines and rapture charts. he is giving us enough to stay awake as the forces of wickedness draw people into their grip so that we are not swept away by the deeds of darkness as well. He isn’t giving the disciples or us enough information to preoccupy ourselves with dates and events.

         Jesus tells the disciples that no one knows when the son of Man is coming. No one knows this hour, not even the angels. He ends the section by saying “Therefore, you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

         This invites the disciples to ask whether they’re preparing for the Son of Man’s coming and how they are doing so? It is a similar invitation to Isaiah 2, but in light of the New Covenant. How do we prepare for the coming of Christ, his second Advent? Let me suggest that we all take this Advent to consider the monastic concept of a rule of life. Rather than viewing this as something like a set of dos and don’ts, it is more like the trellis you build in order to maximize the growth of the plant you’re growing. The other day I saw a fast motion video of a watermelon vine growing. Over the course of 3-4 months, it had spread like chaos all over the little room it was in. If someone had carefully constructed a trellis, the vine would climb, more green would be exposed to the sunlight for energy, and more melons would grow because more flowers are exposed. This is how a rule of life brings intentionality to rhythms of communal life.

         We have a built-in rule through the daily office of morning and evening prayer. The prayer itself helps us engage with scripture, do confession, praise and thanksgiving, intercession, and more. But then we need to do some other things and this will look different depending on our stories and seasons of life. If this is a season where you have small kids at home you may not be able to have time to exercise like you want to or have the kind of relationship with your spouse you used to before you were with kids. That’s okay. Be intentional about the moments you have, name them, and cultivate them. In this season, you may find yourself going through a major life transition: feeling yourself growing older, experiencing you’re parents aging into more dependence, learning how to be a single parent, feeling underemployed, or in a vocational change, or becoming more aware and grieving the loss of the ways things didn’t turn out as you hoped they would. Don’t let the vine grow into chaos all over the floor — give some thought and intentionality to your time and energy. You may not have the hours to spend reading and writing like you used to — or the other activities that brought you rest and joy. What does bring you rest and joy in this season and how can you cultivate that and create small things to look forward to? Are there 5-minute pockets you can use and redeem so that you are prepared to see Jesus when he shows up in the everyday moments? In our rule, can we also cultivate practices that notice the needs of others so that we don’t get stuck in spirals of self-pity? Do we make time for a little silence and solitude, gratitude, exercise, service to others, friendship or hospitality, prayer? How have we constructed our trellis? Building the trellis of seeing Jesus in the everyday ordinary stuff of life and relationships is the work of preparing to meet Jesus when he comes again in power and great glory.

Conclusion:

         I’m so grateful for Advent. I hope we make the most of this liturgical new year together. This is the time to walk in the light, becoming aware of where darkness has taken hold, and bringing it before the Lord so that we can discover his grace and bring others into a knowledge of Him. We need to prepare to meet him each day with intentionality so that we are ultimately prepared to meet him when he comes again. As we close, let me once again pray this collect for us from the first week of Advent.

“Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.”

Advent 4: Jesus in the Everyday Mess

Transcription

I'm Alexei Laushkin, a member here in on the vestry. Please pray with me. Gracious Father, as we approach you this fourth Sunday of Advent and our hearts are in preparation for this Christmastide, be with us and illuminate our hearts through your Spirit. In the name of Jesus, Amen. We're at the fourth Sunday of Advent and for many of us, mentally, we are in the Christmas season in our minds. Gifts wrapped, hopefully, family here or at least travel anticipated, hopefully, and all the pieces that go along with this season

Our scripture today talks about, in this fourth Sunday of Advent itself, our candle focuses on love, God's love for us in Jesus. In our scripture passages from Micah, the Psalms, Hebrews, and Luke, focuses on the meaning of Christ and many themes related to the fulfillment of God's promises to Israel and the foreshadowing thereof in this famous passage we have with Mary in the Magnificat. And one of the things that kind of animated my week and perhaps part of yours as well, is this idea of what does it mean perhaps to be Anglican.

So I was at a holiday party this week and we're talking to believers of different backgrounds and I was asked, well what does it mean? Corpus Christi, that sounds very interesting. And if you've been attending here for some time, were people set apart for uncommon prayer, right? Common prayer, uncommon transformation. What does it mean to be Anglican? And the question was, well does it mean that you have very stuffy services? That was the question that was asked to me.

I said, well no, it's not necessarily in the service type. But to be Anglican is to look back at the church's tradition and to think about what are the elements of the Christian life. Confession of sin, the partaking of the Eucharist, the disciplines and habits that cleanse our hearts and prepare us to live the Christian life.

And so one of the reasons that our tradition can have a C.S. Lewis, who many of you probably know, but the school my children attend is Charlotte Mason, also an Anglican. And our catechesis is a Good Shepherd, a Montessori type focus. It focuses on the person.

I said one of the reasons you can have a Charlotte Mason or a C.S. Lewis come from the Anglican tradition is they're really focused on the things that are uncommon for the Christian life and a remembrance of those things. So what are some of those things? What can we be thinking about as it relates to the season of life that we're in? When we look at our Micah passage, we see this focus on the restoration of the kingdom of God. Micah 5.3, therefore he shall give to them until that time when she who's in labor has brought forth, then the rest of his kindred shall return to the people of Israel.

And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord and the majesty of the name of the Lord his God, and they shall live secure. For now he shall be great to the ends of the earth, and he shall be the one of peace. And so in this sense of God relating to his people, there is this anticipation in this hope that God will return and restore the temple.

And what does it mean for the temple? Have any of you here been to Jerusalem? Just a little bit of, a few of you have been to Jerusalem. The temple system in Jerusalem was focused on a place, it's not like our sense of when we hear the word temple. When we hear the word temple, we might think, well it's just a really nice church, a really big church.

This may be one way we think about temples. Maybe it was a beautiful church, maybe like the National Cathedral, or perhaps the National Basilica in town. But that's not necessarily the role of the temple, which is this glorified place of just a nicer way to worship God.

No, in the temple system, you had a whole system of worship and sacrifice really for the remission of sin. And so you would come, there'd be various feast days, you would come to a place which was the Holy of Holies where God would dwell, in the sense that God being present and close to his people wasn't something that was easily thought about or thought on. And the people, you know, in this temple system, and if you think about the temple system itself, if you're a student of the Old Testament, this was foreshadowed in the tabernacle, foreshadowed further in the commandments given by God, in the sense that there are certain things that are required to bridge the relationship between God and man.

The temple system was meant to be a place where the restoration of true worship would happen between God and God's people. If you look at the sense of what Israel was asked to do, be a people set apart for the nations, be a people who exemplified the truth and the love of God to the least of these, right worship, what you quickly find is, in the Old Testament, something that you may find today, which is that God's people were not living up to the promise, right? And so you may come here today in the season of Advent, and you may look at religious people and religious institutions, and you may feel very similarly that God's people don't quite live up to that promise. So there's hypocrisy within the people of God.

There's hypocrisy, by the way, that they treat the least of these. They say one thing and maybe do another. There may be hypocrisy as it relates to, are they really that loving as a people? What does God do with this problem of religious people not living up to the way he has asked them to live? Well, throughout the Old Testament, because in Micah in particular, a disregard for the poor, disregard for the least of these, a profiting out of wealth, certainly in the prophet Jeremiah, the sense of the rich and the righteous doing many things with the temple, but their lives not reflecting a holiness of life, you were faced with this real reality of exile, meaning the temple is destroyed and the people of God are then put into exile.

And so a good chunk of the Old Testament writings about restoration, restoration of Messiah, is the sense that when will God restore his relationship, the temple, but also restore his love for his people in the sense of what the temple might mean for the nation. So when we're in the season of Advent and we're thinking about what is this meaning of Jesus's love that we have, what we have is a restoration of the temple in Jesus himself. What does that mean, a restoration of the temple in Jesus himself? Well, it means that when you discover the right relationship between God and his people, that the real focal point of that right relationship being made available to you is in Jesus himself and not necessarily in a temple system.

In other words, that gap between how we desire to live and God's ability to meet us in that desire is now placed in Christ. And this is a great miracle. This is a great cataclysmic change in our ability to approach God.

On a personal level, it's exemplified in profession of faith. So I grew up in a Christian household, meaning Christmas this time of year was probably one of the most magical times for me growing up. So I would tell, I'm an only child, I would tell my parents in Los Angeles, you know what we need to do? We need to go to midnight service.

Maybe you have kids like this. We go to midnight service and I want to hear all the songs because the songs of Christmas are joyful songs. This season is filled with the sense of joy.

And you can see even the world around us kind of reflects that joy in a way that's a bit unusual, in a way that's a bit magical. You'll see stores, I mean just right next to the church, we have a whole gas station, right, that plays Christmas songs. And you can turn on the radio and the lights go with the songs and there's a sense of joy and peace that's reflected in our culture that really isn't quite there in other parts of the year.

You'll have people who aren't necessarily people of faith or particularly religious who celebrate Christmas. You may have relatives for whom this is true. Christmas is this joyous time.

And for me, prior to confession of faith, Christmas was one of my favorite times of years. The songs were wonderful. There are songs that we would start playing.

I mean you even see it in the reflection of the culture of when do we start playing Christmas songs, right? But as in the Anglican tradition, we have this hopeful tension point, so we're not quite at Christmas, but it's because of the gift of what Jesus is as it relates to faith itself. So for me, by the time I'm 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, I would say that I had some experiences of God, a deep love of Christmas, but no real sense of the anchoring that faith can provide. The anchoring that it can provide.

What do I mean by anchoring? Because I realize part of when you talk about faith, it can be hard to potentially relate to if it's outside of your experiences. So I want to take a little bit of time about this in this extended meditation on Jesus and his significance in illuminating some of the scriptures as it relates to the temple. Well, one of the things that I think is easier to relate to if you have not had an experience of God is that, and even if you have, how to deepen that experience of God is a sense that when we love something, we tend to put a lot of focus and attention on it, right? So whether that is a spouse, whether that's a dating relationship, whether it's something that interests us, could even be a hobby, we put a lot of attention to it, right? It could be, for some, I know that it can even be gaming.

It takes a lot of different forms where we put our attention and where we put our time. And why do we do that, right? We even have the phrase in the culture, mindless scrolling, or we're going to have the Netflix binge. Well, what is that about? We're looking for something to either engage our interests or to help fulfill a need.

And part of what it means to have Jesus as the center of those things is that we're putting time and attention in with Jesus within our life circumstances. Well, that sounds really lovely, Alexei, but what does that mean? What does that look like? Well, I can narrate the last day and a half for me. So my household, I'm a father of five children, and we're now in the break season, so most of the gifts are ready.

But with our household, when we're on break, a lot of stuff can just kind of happen, right? Well, what do I mean by that? Well, you wake up early and one spouse didn't get any sleep. Why didn't they get any sleep? Doesn't sleep come naturally to a father of five? Well, no, not if your kid wakes up and has a nightmare or needs Tylenol or any number of things. So in this particular instance, it's Casey who didn't get the sleep, so I'm up early.

So what am I doing? Well, breakfast making. Okay, and then I'm thinking about the sermon, and then I'm thinking about preparation for that. And then what happens? Are kids just magically happy because it's break and it's time off? No, they're not.

 They want to know what's going to happen today. And who's responsible for what's going to happen today? Well, in my household, it's the parent that has the energy, right? So that's me, right? So what am I going to do? Well, then you set aside plans. You're going to go outside, and hopefully it's going to be a nice little outing outside.

 Was it a nice outing outside yesterday? No, it was really cold. The kids could only last about 10-15 minutes. So what is dad supposed to do? He's got a sermon tomorrow.

 And then God's supposed to enter in. How's that all supposed to look, Alexi? These are nice words, but what does it look like? Well, for me, with my disciplines and love of Jesus, it was just a very short, Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Please help. We did some hot chocolate. We did dinner.

 We played a board game of candy canes, which was a lot of fun. A lot of discipline, though, to get through that board game. And then it's the bedtime routine, right? And what's the bedtime routine? Is it just joyful and easy and peaceful? And where's Jesus? And where are all these disciplines in the bedtime routine when the kids are screaming? Well, it's another small prayer, Lord, have mercy.

 Why is that prayer meaningful to me? Is it just to make me feel good? No, because in my teenage years, I had an experience with the living God, right? The living God. And maybe you've had these experiences in your life where the Lord comes to meet you and it's awe-inspiring. It's as wonderful as opening presents on Christmas morning, even more wonderful than that.

 It's something you want to devote your whole life to, your whole interviews to. But if you're like people, going back to hypocrisy, our desire to do good, to orient towards God, to experience the grace of God, does not match the reality. Does not match the reality.

 So we have to double, triple focus, be in a community where repentance and the communion, the Eucharist, which is not just a simple meal. It's the strengthening of our faith in encountering Jesus himself. It is a strengthening, if you're from this kind of background, it's a strengthening of the gift of the spirit in your heart so that you might be empowered.

 But then you need reminders. So this morning I wake up going back to, what does this look like, Alexi, really? I wake up and I think, I'm gonna have lots of time to think about exactly what I want to say. Does that happen? No.

 It's seven o'clock. After seven o'clock, people are sick. We're trying to figure out who's going to stay home.

 Breakfast has to be made. What does this look like, Alexei? What does this faith look like? Well, worship. So I put on worship music so my heart can connect.

 But honestly, you know, you end up feeling a lot of anxiety. You're running out of time. It's a car ride.

 What do you do with the car ride? We're going listen to N.T. Wright, right? You listen to a little bit about these questions about the temple, what the temple means. And, oh, okay, but what does this faith look like, Alexi? Well, just before the sermon starts, I turn to Father Morgan. I say, well, what about water out of the Old Testament? Because that's where my headspace was.

 And he encourages me to look it up. But there's no time, right? And so this sense of not having time is not a hindrance to the worship of God. It's not a hindrance to our orientation of what Jesus means in this love that we're asked for.

 As our lives grow deeper in faith and as our lives become more complex, perhaps you're dealing with, your story is different than mine. Perhaps you're dealing with an illness at home. Perhaps you're dealing with severe loss.

 Perhaps you're dealing with depression. Perhaps you're dealing with unmet expectations, financial concerns. All of these things can be difficult and weighty in a season that's supposed to be joyous.

However, seek ye first the kingdom of God is still the same. That God can come and meet us in our mess. That God can come and meet us in our dissatisfaction.

 And when we encounter the Holy Spirit and we encounter this faith, our hearts are captivated by it. Our hearts are captivated by it. And our hearts are worshipful towards it.

 And so what does this mean as it relates to the kingdom? Well, there's two songs that are lifted up before us. The one out of Luke for the Song of Mary and then another one that comes to mind is Exodus 15, the Song of Moses. What is the Song of Moses? Well, the Song of Moses is the song that happens when Israel escapes Egypt.

 And he bursts out into worship, into thanksgiving. And it's a spontaneous praise of the Lord. And it makes sense.

 I think if we were there and we had left Egypt and we had just escaped an army that was pursuing us, our hearts too would be prone to give thanks. And there are times in our lives where big things happen. Big, big things happen, even either collectively or money comes through when we didn't expect it or we were saved from something that seems just really difficult, an illness or I'm glad I wasn't there type moment for which our hearts give thanks.

 But the Song of Mary is a different song. The Song of Mary is a different song. It's a very ordinary song.

 It feels very much like it could come out of an Advent type season or a Christmas type season. What's happening? Mary is going to the hill country of Judea. And she is greeted by Elizabeth.

 It's a family setting. And Elizabeth gives her this encouraging news. You know, she speaks in a loud voice, which if you're in a family gathering would definitely get your attention, would it not? If someone spoke to you in a loud voice.

 And Elizabeth says, blessed are you among women and blessed is the child you will bear. But why am I so favored that the mother of my Lord should come to me? And I think we have a tendency sometimes to read the scriptures in religious words and almost think that we're like watching a play, maybe a great play out of Hamlet or Shakespeare. And we say to ourselves, of course that's what Elizabeth should say to Mary.

 That just makes sense. It fits the beauty of the season. But that's not what's going on here, right? Elizabeth is saying something deeply personal to Mary.

 With Elizabeth's words, Mary is experiencing a God moment, the kind we've been talking about, the kind Moses sings about, the kind I've been talking about just in the daily habits. And Mary breaks out into song over a very ordinary family encounter. It's ordinary and extraordinary.

 It's ordinary in context. It's extraordinary in conviction. She is having a big God moment.

 And Mary says, my soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has been mindful of the humble estate of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the mighty one has done great things for me. Holy is his name.

 His mercy extends to those who fear him from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds of his arms. He has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.

 He has brought down rulers from their thrones, but he has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry of good things, but he has sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and descendants forever, just as he promised our ancestors.

 What an extraordinary response. It's related to the family context and it's beyond the family context. It's words for all time.

 It is a profession of faith. Her faith that God had done great things for her, who was doing great things to the fulfillment, this fulfillment of longing. So what is happening in these verses? What does this have to do with temples and Advent and Christmas? Well, in these verses Mary is becoming a bridge from the Old Testament to the New Testament.

 She is becoming a bridge as the mother of God, exemplifying what we will do in this age until the time of our passing, which is the true worship of God in our hearts. And these themes, I want you to notice, are not just themes about how wonderful it is that we have a connection with the living God. For me, one of the reasons I confess faith was the love of God was more real than the love I was experiencing on earth.

 And so it was very compelling to me. It's extraordinarily compelling. And it captured my heart.

 It made me want to read scripture right away. And if that's you today, meaning some version of that, go ahead and read the scripture. Talk to Father Morgan.

 Approach people who can help walk with you in this journey and we'll be praying for you. But within that context, it's not just about good news for her personal soul, though that's there. Notice the good news for creation, the good news for creation, the good news for restoration.

 He has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things. He has sent the rich away empty.

 This is a news of restoration that the right things would be, the wrong things would be made right. That those who are in destitute would experience freedom. That the worship of the Lord would be matched by the way the Lord's people lived.

 That they would be righteous and kind. What does that look like practically? Well, one of the things the scripture teaches us and one of our challenges is to give to all those who ask of us, right? Give to those who ask. That's hard, isn't it? Give to those who ask.

 Ooh, going to that grocery store, I've got a meal to prep. I don't know this person's background. Words of Jesus, judge not, least you be judged.

 I'm saying exercise prudence, of course, but prudence should not get in the way of kindness and love. This is love, Advent Sunday. The restoration, right worship, planned giving and spontaneous ability to love people who are in need right before you, right? We are not asked to be so busy as a society and a culture that we don't live the Christian life back to the beginning.

 The Anglican way of life and service walk us through all aspects of the life of the church so that we might remember we are in need of repentance. We are in need of community. We are in need of generosity.

 All flowing from the living head, Jesus himself, that transform our hearts. Not that we would be some righteous people removed from the world, living lives that cannot be emulated, but instead that Jesus would come and enter into our mess, our absolute mess. Mess made because the world is not well ordered.

 Our lives are not well ordered. But the love of God dispels fear and brings wholeness of life. That's what we celebrate on Christmas.

 We celebrate in this Advent season that we don't have to triple and quadruple our efforts to get close to God, but instead that God has come to us in our mess and has met us. And we pray that that love would be so available in us and to those who are in need of connection and hope from the living God, that they too would have a Christmas miracle. What is the biggest miracle? Faith.

Faith that animates and dispels all the difficulty. And it's not because religious people are good or righteous or do the right thing. They often don't.

But they follow the one who can and does meet us in the mess. Let's pray. Gracious Father, we thank you for this Advent season.

We ask that you would meet us in extraordinary love. We thank you that you're so gracious, so kind, that in following this Christian life, it's not about effort, but about our response to spontaneous love, just as it was with Mary, exuberant love, overflowing. May that be part of our lives during this Christmas season. Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the Vicar.

Advent 3 (Gaudete Sunday): The Hard Work of Joy in Waiting

Transcription

Good morning again. It is good to see you. If you're new or visiting this morning, I'm Father Morgan Reed, the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church. And as I mentioned earlier, this is called Gaudete Sunday, which means in Latin, rejoice.

And our passages all have something of joy in them, except perhaps the gospel. It's a fascinating one to have on a rejoice Sunday, you know, starting out with the good news of “you brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” It's very jarring, but this is indeed a day of rejoicing. 

And in the passage that was read last week from John the Baptist preaching, he quoted from the book of Isaiah, where Isaiah is preaching comfort to the exiles. And so even in the midst of the impending coming of the kingdom, there is both judgment for those things that are wrong, but comfort for those who are following the Lord. And so this joy and this comfort come together in Gaudete Sunday.

There is comfort. And so as we look at this passage this morning from the gospel, let me pray for us. In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my Redeemer. Amen.

Today's gospel passage highlights for us, and this Sunday in particular highlights for us in a special way, the ministry of John the Baptist. John continues the ministry of the Old Testament prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah and those who have come before him. And he really is calling people in a real way to come out to the wilderness to hear about the good news of the kingdom of God. 

And so this is where we find him. He is preaching that people need to be baptized, and in the baptism that he is offering, that they need to repent from their sins, to turn away from them, and receive forgiveness and prepare themselves to meet the Lord in the coming of the kingdom of God. So John is their advent guide. Advent in the first coming of the Messiah. That's what the word advent means. If you're not familiar, it means “coming”.

So John is their advent guide, preparing them to meet their King. And John is going to encourage them as they come out to the wilderness and they're baptized, to bear fruits that are worthy of repentance. And then he's going to encourage them today also to do their vocations with justice.

John's call to them is to join the work of Isaiah and to join his work as well in proclaiming the kingdom of God as they prepare themselves to meet the Lord. We often think of prophets as people who are just foretelling the future. That is one sense of what a prophet does.

But even more than that, prophets are truth-tellers. They're people who are calling people back to covenant life with God. They're calling the people of God back to the covenant life of God. They're calling people to live in integrity with the grace and the love of God that's been revealed. And so our call as well is to join the line of prophets like Isaiah and John the Baptist as truth-tellers who live with this knowledge that the Lord's coming is going to happen soon. And with the coming of the Lord comes both comfort and judgment.

And the people who have come to John are wondering, how do we be the kind of kingdom people where when the kingdom's revealed, it is a day of comfort for us? This is what Isaiah 40 says. Comfort, comfort my people, says the Lord. Prepare the way in the wilderness. Make the rough places smooth. You know; and so it's talking about preparing to meet the coming King. And they're asking, “how do we become those kinds of people? Because we think it's happening right now, and that you are this prophet like Isaiah helping us prepare.”

And there are two things that John is going to tell them to do in preparation: 1) Bear fruits worthy of repentance, 2) Live out their vocations justly.

Bear Fruits worthy of Repentance

And first, let's look at this, what does it mean to bear fruits worthy of repentance? There was a group that was coming out to meet John. The group of Jews. It was made up of lots of people. It was made up of soldiers. It was made up of tax collectors. And it was made up of people that their vocations aren't really named in this passage.

But there's lots of people who are coming out to the wilderness to see glimpses of the kingdom. And this was a people who were longing to see the mighty hand of God at work, like God had done in the past. They were longing to see God's hand bring justice and bring the kingdom.

And so they were coming out to see how they can prepare for the coming of the Messiah. One thing that John tells them is not to rely on their heritage. In that day, the average Jew knows that there is the coming of the judgment of the nations around them.

And they know that because they're of the seed of Abraham, or they think perhaps because they are of the seed of Abraham, that they're exempt from any of that judgment. And John's message to them was, your heritage is not good enough. That's not what God's after.

John's message to them is that they needed to avoid falling into the trap of wanting to see God's judgment on others without first exploring what God might want to do in transforming their own hearts. It's easy to rely on external signs around us to make sure that we're okay. You know, we sort of make check boxes, rather than doing what is admittedly harder work, which is to press into and admitting things that we've done wrong, or face the embarrassment of admitting that there's something that we don't know how to do.

But to do so is to search for the grace of God. Do we want to see God's hand, is the question, without hearing his voice? This is sort of, if I could summarize the question to the people, do you want to see God's hand without hearing his voice? And so joy, and this is the Sunday of joy, joy is really important in our walk with the Lord. It's one of those things that reminds, that the rose candle reminds us of. And one of the things that the rose candle reminds me of, which happens, there's two times we wear a rose in this, in the calendar. Anybody remember the other time? All right, so we're gonna have confirmation class in February and March. The other time we wear it is the fourth Sunday of Lent.

And so we, in the midst of our seasons of penitence and preparation, there is a Sunday to remind us that there is joy in the midst of penitence and preparation, and it reminds us that joy is hard-earned, that joy doesn't just come easily. It's hard work to name the things that we've done wrong, to recognize where we've had unhelpful thinking, to turn away from those things, because of the potential embarrassment involved, because of the potential humiliation involved. And sometimes it's really risky to make repair where we need to.

But to face that potential humiliation is to open ourselves up to the grace of God, and to realize his love more fully. And that opens us up to experience the joy of God more fully. And so the rose candle reminds me, you know, twice a year, that joy comes at the high cost of naming the truth, and then being willing to receive God's grace.

In her book, the Reverend Tish Warren, she has a book called Advent, and in that book she says, “In a culture where lying is rampant, where we instrumentalize relationships to our own ends, where we teem in self-justification and spin, where we minimize the faults of our own political and ideological tribe while exaggerating those of our opponents, where we share false information and gossip online, and embrace conspiracy theories, the church must recover a radical commitment to knowing and proclaiming truth.” That's her reflection on the particular collect from today. We're really good at creating false narratives to keep us feeling safe and okay, to keep us in false senses of security, and to keep us from looking at what is within our own hearts.

And sometimes, as I see the culture around us, I wonder if the spirit of anger at whatever those people are doing, name those people in your own heart, don't name them out loud, please, you know, the anger and the vehemence at whoever those people are is a form of dehumanizing that is a way of blame-shifting, that is a way of keeping us from seeing what God might do in our own hearts. We want God's wrath to come and to judge those unjust people, whoever they are, without any thought to, how are my own hearts aligned to injustice? Or how has my own heart been misaligned with God's goodness and love? And sometimes, keeping our focus on people out there keeps us from looking at what God wants to do in here. So joining the prophet Isaiah, joining the prophet John the Baptist, begins with the hard work of repentance in our hearts, which involves humanizing other people again and creating a culture of truth-telling.

These are part of the fruits of repentance. I was really encouraged a few weeks ago, the youth, we were selling Christmas trees and we were doing so to benefit the Ecumenical Community Housing Organization. It serves locally and they serve people who are experiencing housing insecurity, but they serve people who are experiencing insecurity in other ways as well.

And while we were out there, we had a great fire pit going, and two gentlemen came over from the Springfield Plaza and joined our fire pit, who probably were experiencing some level of housing insecurity. And so my, you know, child safety alarm bells are going off, and I'm just like making sure I'm keeping an eye on them. I was grateful to the adult leaders who did the same thing, and they kept a conversation going with these two.

It was very friendly and cordial, and what really impressed me was one of the youth came up to me and said, I wonder what we could do for them? And I was struck by that, and one of the things I said was, we don't have much to offer them now, but we could offer them pizza and hot chocolate. And so we did, so they had hot chocolate and stood around the fire and talked about all kinds of things with the adults. You know, it would have been really easy in that moment to content ourselves with the fact that we were selling Christmas trees to benefit an organization that would benefit them, to otherize those people and say, well, we don't have to deal with that, that's not our problem, that's that organization's problem, so we'll just help make money for the organization.

It was a reminder to me how often I need to repent of the ways that I'll use programs or systems to keep me at arm's distance from other people and dehumanizing them and making them “other”. And so I was really grateful for that youth. It was a very sweet and profound moment the other week.

We have to do the hard work of repentance to experience Jesus's coming as a comfort, and the day of the Lord will be a comfort for those who both want to see the hand of God and to hear the voice of God. Both things are true. So we've looked at what the fruit of repentance looks like, now let's consider our vocation.

Doing our Vocations with Justice

So this passage kind of covers two different things, and in our passage today we don't totally know who constitutes this nameless, faceless crowd, but we do know that there are tax collectors and there are soldiers, and these are the two groups mentioned. Both groups are the object of ire. They are hated in first century Judaism for different reasons.

The taxes were really complex in Roman Judea. There were different kinds of taxes that were collected, and different people in different ranks of tax collectors who would collect them. City rulers would lease the right for people to collect the taxes for them, and there was a bid for this that would either be done amongst a group or a rich individual, and that person had to pay the amount in advance.

So the result of that was that the tax collectors that went around collecting taxes had to not only collect the tax that Rome required, but then they also had to collect a surcharge in order to cover the cost of collecting those taxes. Now those tax collectors had freedom to make the surcharge, a lot of freedom to make whatever the surcharge they wanted it to be, and so both Jews and Gentiles hated tax collectors. And amongst the Jews they were cast out as robbers. 

They were sort of exiled from society as thieves. And yet it's interesting that these are the ones who are coming to John the Baptist. You know, there's a feeling of isolation, probably a deep sense of shame about what they've done, or how they feel about themselves, and they're coming going, is the Messiah going to come and make this right? Like what do I need to do to enter into the goodness of that kingdom that I've been hoping for? The soldiers were likely Jewish people who were escorting the tax collectors to help them ensure that they were getting the taxes and safety.

We don't know much else about them. But I think it's interesting that John's response to them is not, well get out of your vocation, come with me into the desert, live this ascetic life, and let's proclaim the kingdom together. It's not what he does.

What he does is he says, live out the vocations that you're in, and do so in a way that is compassionate, loving, and fair to fellow humans. Don't take advantage of other people. Don't leave others destitute for your own gain.

You need to be content with what you have to look to meet others needs, rather than aggravate other people. So knowing that God's kingdom is coming changes the way that we live out our vocations. And it leaves us with a question, what do people learn about the kingdom of God by the way that we live out our vocational calling? It's a really interesting question to ponder.

As you think about how you live out your vocational calling, what does somebody learn about the justice, the compassion of God, about the kingdom of God from the way that you live out your vocation? And this passage encourages us not just to think about our vocations that God has called us into, but how we live them out. I was at the dentist a few weeks ago, and as often happens, I wear my collar when I do things like haircuts or go to the dentist, and it always makes for interesting conversation. So I met the dentist, and before they could like, you know, hold my mouth open, we had a conversation. 

And so as we were talking, the dentist told me, hey, you know, obviously you're a pastor. Yep. If there's, you know, anybody in your congregation, people who are immigrants, or people who are just struggling with job insecurity, you know, just let me know.

“Let me know.” The idea is that what his implication was that there would be, you know, either heavily subsidized or free work done for somebody who definitely could not afford it. And I was struck by that spirit of generosity, by the way, this family practice was living out their professional vocation.

I don't know if they're Christians or not, but the generosity struck me, and their desire for the well-being of other people as people. So often when we look at our careers, we look at what we don't have yet. Where can we climb the ladder? How much more is there to climb? Am I upwardly immobile? All these sorts of things.

And, you know, part of living out our vocations with justice is developing a deep sense of contentment with where God has us in our vocation. And having that ability to have contentment, and to have a mentality of abundance, then to create the opportunities within our vocation for other people to flourish. So where do we need to learn contentment in our vocations right now? I know it's a, it might be tough for some of you in the moment to think about your own vocation and where God's called you. 

And, by the way, vocation doesn't need to be monetized. Some of you have vocations that are not volunteer, voluntary, and is what you spend most of your time doing, that God has given you to do. And so where do we need to learn contentment in those vocations? Consider what God has called you to put your hand to do.

Consider the people who God has placed you in a relationship with. And those are often good indications of your vocational calling that you are in right now. And so these things, whether they make money or not, are part of your vocation.

If we had security and if we had contentment in the vocation that God called us into, it would solve so many problems. There wouldn't be these, you know, abuses of power or authority. There wouldn't be a need to dehumanize anybody else.

But we would recognize what God has given us, and we would use it to see the image of God in other people, to long for their flourishing as image bearers of our Creator. And then, when we look at our vocations, we wouldn't just be content in a job well done, but when we look on whether or not we've had success, we will look back and see the faces and hear the names of people whose lives have been touched by the thing that God has called us to do. So joining this ministry of John the Baptist and Isaiah, joining in this prophetic line, calls us to see our vocations as places where God's kingdom justice is experienced, where people see the kingdom done, in will and in deed and in word.

Conclusion

And so this third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday, it's a Sunday that recalls joy in the midst of all of our waiting, but it also reminds us that comfort and judgment go side-by-side when we talk about the imminent return of Christ, that that's supposed to be at the forefront of our thinking. And so our call is to enter into joy through the fruits of repentance, through the justice done in our vocations, through truth-telling. And so when we come to grips with where brokenness lies, we open ourselves up to the grace where we receive comfort in a new way forward in the kingdom of God.

And in all that God's called us to do, and with those whom God's put us in relationship, God is calling us to the work of restoring all the things that have been broken in the past, and he's calling us to do justice where there was only injustice and destruction before. So the joy that is in Gaudete Sunday is not a cheap joy. It is a hard-fought joy.

And it's a joy that we need, because life is hard, and we are in the waiting. We need Advent guides for what we are waiting for, which is Christ's coming. And so Jesus is going to come again, and it's in that preparation of truth-telling and doing justice that we find this coming of Christ to be comfort for our wearied and war-torn souls as we live out this life in God's faith and fear.

And we stand in the long line of prophets like Isaiah and John the Baptist who were looking for that great day of the Lord. And Jesus has come, and he's going to come again. And so we need to become this community of prophetic truth-tellers who are longing for the fruits of righteousness and justice in our lives.

So my prayer for us is that God would make us a community that longs to see both God's hand at work and to hear his voice, and that we would be a community who longs to see God's kingdom come in the vocations that God's called us to. As we close, I want to pray again that the collect that we prayed earlier for this third Sunday of Advent. O Lord Jesus Christ, you sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and to prepare the way for our salvation.

“Grant that the ministers and stewards of your mysteries may likewise make ready your way by turning the hearts of the disobedient toward the wisdom of the just. That at your second coming to judge the world we may be found a people acceptable in your sight. For with the Father and the Holy Spirit you live and reign one God now and forever. Amen.””

 **Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. and edited by the author.

Advent 2: When Good Desires Go Unfulfilled

Advent 1: Glimpses of Redemption in Darkness

Advent 4: Broken and Longing for Immanuel

Advent 2: Advent Longings