The Glory of God in a Life Transformed by Jesus

Transcription

It's good to see you this morning. I'm Father Morgan Reed, the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church and on Monday we celebrated Epiphany. So we had our twelfth night party last week. The 6th of January is Epiphany, or if you're familiar with the Eastern Orthodox tradition, they call it Theophany. In the Western tradition we begin the season thinking about the celebration of the Magi, the wise men who come to visit Jesus, the child in Bethlehem, who is king of the Jews and the hope for the nations. And then in the eastern part of the church, rather than focusing on the Magi, they tend to focus on the celebration of the baptism of Jesus as the foundation for this season.

But the point, whether it's east or west, is that the glory of Jesus Christ is going forth to the nations and that's what this season is all about. And so you know as far back as you go in church history they were celebrating the baptism of Jesus in this season. And so we do that in the West on the first Sunday of Epiphany, also called within the octave, the eight days of Epiphany. We celebrate Jesus's baptism today. We have a day set apart for that. And as we look together at our gospel text this morning, 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 Redeemer. Amen.”

The Baptism of Jesus affirms Jesus’S anointing as the Servant

Well, Isaiah 42 was our Old Testament reading this morning. It's a famous passage in the Old Testament. It's one of what's called the servant songs of Isaiah. There are these passages scattered all throughout the book of Isaiah that talk about a servant who will come, who would deliver the people from exile, who would deliver the people from their sins, who will heal the people, who will restore them and make all things new. And in the book of Isaiah, there's actually quite a bit of ambiguity about who that servant is.

Is it a Gentile pagan king like King Cyrus? Is it a future messianic ruler? Is it the prophet himself? Is it the remnant, the people of God? Or is it all of the above? There's quite a lot of ambiguity in the book of Isaiah about who this servant is. But we read this passage today in Isaiah 42, and it said, Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights. I have put my spirit upon him.

He will bring forth justice to the nations. When we get later on in the season of Epiphany, I'll talk about how the call on Jesus as the servant gets democratized to the people of God as the remnant. So there is this, I think Steven Myles talked about this when he preached prophetic, what was the word you used? Foreshadowing? Sort of like mountaintops where it's, you see this much of it, but there's something behind it, there's something behind it, right? So there is a sense in which it's the prophet, it's Jesus, it's the people themselves who follow Jesus.

And in Luke chapter 3, the connection is made between this prophet, the servant song in Isaiah, and the person of Jesus. We start with the ministry of John the Baptist. And John had been proclaiming the kingdom of God, and the people wondered, which makes sense, is John the Messiah? He's going around proclaiming the kingdom of God, he seems to have a messianic style ministry, he's calling the people to repentance, and John assures them, no, I am NOT the Messiah, there is somebody coming after me who is going to come and bring justice to the nations. It's not me. And then John gets put in prison at the hand of Herod for his testimony against Herod's unrighteousness, his illicit marriage, etc. And interestingly, when you read the Gospel of Luke, the other Gospels, when they talk about it, John's present at the baptism.

In this account, the summary of John's ministry happens when Herod puts him to death, and then it talks about the baptism of Jesus without mentioning that John was actually there. So it sounds like Jesus is just there being baptized, but we know John was there. There is a literary reason why I think St. Luke is doing that, and that's because he's trying to show that at the baptism of Jesus, this is God's work alone.

This is God's work alone to declare Jesus the Messiah, to justify his ministry in front of people, to anoint him as the servant. This is God's work alone. And the text says that all the people had been baptized, and then Jesus was baptized, and while Jesus was praying, the heavens were opened up, and then the Holy Spirit came down on him in bodily form, in something like a dove, and a voice came down from heaven, saying, “this is my beloved Son. With you…” or sorry, it says, “you are my beloved Son. With you I am well pleased.” And so the Spirit that had overshadowed Mary in the conception, the miraculous conception of Jesus, is the same Spirit that's now anointing this adult man to carry out the ministry of the servant that had been prophesied about in the Old Testament, that it had pointed to. 

And the Father's declaration about Jesus's ministry is coronation language. Psalm 2:7, which talks about, “kiss the Son lest he be angry and you perish in the way.” Psalm 2:7 is all about God's coming King; sort of opens the Psalter in a unique way, thinking about kingship, and that passage, Psalm 2:7, is brought together with Isaiah 42 in God's quotation. So you have the language of coronation, the language of the anointing of the servant being brought together in the baptism of Jesus. And so heaven endorses Jesus as the Messianic King.

It's not that Jesus is becoming the Messiah at his baptism, that was an early heresy, so I'm not saying that. What I am saying is that Jesus's ministry as the Messiah is being legitimated here by heaven's testimony. And so in reflecting on this moment in the book of Acts, which is also written by St. Luke, and we read it, Ivory read it for us today, in the book of Acts, Peter the Apostle reflects on this moment, and he says, how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. “How he went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.” So Jesus has this ministry of healing, and doing good, and freeing people from the power of sin and darkness, and the kingdom of evil, and that good rule and reign of the kingship of Jesus is inaugurated here at his baptism. And that's the thing that we celebrate in the baptism of Jesus, and it's the thing that continues on in and through the church, which is Jesus's body.

So the kingdom ministry inaugurated at Jesus's baptism is furthered, continued, solidified in his death, and in his resurrection, and his ascension, and the giving of the Holy Spirit to the church. And so the glory of Jesus in the work of the kingdom is now carried on by you and by me, who have been given the Holy Spirit, who have joined him in his death and in his resurrection through our own baptism. And so the glory of God, which is a shorthand for the dominion of love, the rule and the reign of God's kingdom, and his self-revelation to his people, his presence, that glory continues to be made visible in the lives of you and I, who are being transformed by the grace of God.

The Baptism of Jesus begins the kingdom that will be manifest in our lives

If you ask, how is the glory of God continuing to show itself more and more in the world, it's through the testimony of the lives that are being changed by the grace of Jesus. And so the baptism of Jesus frames our baptism as well. And I love this quotation, there's a church father named St. Maximus of Turin, I'm sure you've all heard of him, and he's in the fifth century, one of the things, he was a student of Ambrose of Milan, one of the things that he says in thinking about the baptism of Jesus is this, “when someone wishes to be baptized in the name of the Lord, it is not so much the water of this world that covers him, but the water of Christ that purifies him. Yet the Savior willed to be baptized for this reason, not that he might cleanse himself, but that he might cleanse the waters for our sake.” What do you do when the maker of the universe is holier than the font by which he's being baptized, right? He is sanctifying creation in this moment. So at the baptism of Jesus, creation experiences the inauguration of the kingdom of God, it experiences new creation, so that every time someone is baptized, the Spirit that anointed Jesus now anoints you and I as followers of Jesus to carry on the revelation and the glory of Jesus into the world.

And that is the power of our baptism. And so when somebody is born into a family, you can think of it this way, when someone's born into a human family, there's a sense in which they carry on roles, responsibilities, and the reputation of that family more and more through time. When the child's a baby, there's not a lot of expectation that they're going to reflect the reputation of that family, but as that child grows, there is.

So as a child grows, none of you have experienced this, but hypothetically if, you know, that child smacks another child on the playground, then the parent has this internal sense of, that is not a value in our household, and I need to instill this value that the the household code must be seen, understood, and named for that child. You know, no kid of mine is going to do that. There's this internal sense of the reputation of the household is at stake, you know, for right or wrong.

We have our own internal work we need to do, but the point is, as the child gets older, the reputation of the household kind of sits on the shoulders a little bit of that child, and the parent then disciplines or sets boundaries for that child to help them internalize the household code, the household values. And as the child gets older, they carry on that reputation of their household with them when they meet teachers or friends. You know something of the household when you meet that child, whether good or ill, right? And the stories that form them become part of their story as they start their own households.

And, you know, whatever they make of their own households, someday something of their stories of their family of origin affects how they think about things, how they speak, and how they react to things. This is why it's good news that baptism is a new birth. Baptism brings us into the family, the household of God, as adopted children. Romans 6:4, St. Paul says this, “Therefore we've been buried with him, with Christ, by baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” We share in the death and the resurrection of Jesus in our baptism. And that's good news.

So in our baptism, we are made not only adopted children, we are made citizens of the kingdom of God. We experience new creation, and it's a reality that we live into. And we carry on then, when we're baptized, we carry on the ministry of making the glory of Jesus known to the world around us, as we experience the grace of God more and more for ourselves.

And we make that grace of God, the glory of Christ, known to our friends, our relatives, our acquaintances, our neighbors, and our co-workers. All those people experience something of the glory of God in our lives that are being transformed. So carrying on the glory of Jesus requires us to listen to the Spirit, and to see the Spirit's work in us, and to grow in an awareness in the ways that we're broken, which is really hard work.

There are undercurrents of our family history, and there are stories of our lives that influence our speech, our thoughts, our reactions to things in ways that we may or may not be aware of, and as we become aware of them, we will come to see that some of those things may reflect the glory of the image of God in us, and some of those really don't.

Maybe you've experienced this as well, but making known the glory of Jesus means that we are growing in living out the entire counsel of Scripture, from its commands to love, to its demands for justice, to its commands to serve and care for the poor and the marginalized, to its demands for humility and having the mind of Christ, to its requirements for having the right use of speech and the right use of creation, all of these things. To know the mind of Christ, and to know the whole counsel of Scripture, takes a long time. I mean, you might even say it takes a lifetime. In fact, you should say it takes a lifetime. To know the entire counsel of Scripture takes a lifetime. And to know the brokenness and the ways that the image of God in us has been stained and marred by the effects of sin takes a long time. In fact, it takes a lifetime. And so you have these parallel tracks of things that take a lifetime of work.

Knowing the full counsel of God and the grace of Christ, knowing how deeply broken we are, and wanting and desiring the redemption of Jesus in those places. Those are parallel tracks that run together. And I thought it would be helpful, as I was thinking about accepting the grace of Christ, to share something of my own story.

Something that I'm constantly working on. Okay, and this may not actually be surprising to those of you who know me pretty closely, but I can look back on a series of events in my life. And I'm not going to name all of them, but just thinking about a few of them. I was thinking of my son who is about in kindergarten. I was thinking back to being able to read in kindergarten. I was thinking back to playing sports in middle and high school. Thinking back to playing guitar, leading music in my youth group, then in my church. Starting a PhD, building a Syriac website, even planting a church. I mean, if I think back to all those events in my life, to be honest, there is a besetting sin of pride.

They're all good things to do, right? If I look back, I can say, gosh, you know, I really did want the welfare of others. I did want people to experience Jesus. I did do something because I genuinely enjoyed it and I experienced the goodness of God in those things. And then there's also this little voice that says, you have to do it better than other people. So I'm just being vulnerable with you. This is my besetting sin.

You have other ones. But there's a good desire in that to do something well. And there's also this mixed motivation to be the absolute best. So if I'm honest, you know, part of my own brokenness is that I internally feel like I have to be the absolute best at something or else it's not worth doing. Somebody had said this at the men's breakfast. You if something's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly. That is true. And I cannot internally get myself there. I want to so bad. And I can't point to a particular story that I look back to and go, oh, yeah, from that moment on, I had this internal sense about myself.

But I can tell you that internally, this is a pattern that I can look back on. And so part of accepting God's grace in my own life has been the discipline of accepting failure and love at the same time. I can accept failure and I can accept love, but those two things don't go together for me naturally.  And because what I often internally think is, I am only as loved as my last success, my last sermon, my last whatever it is. So this is the internal voice that just sort of sits under the surface for me — in the Tradition, we would call this a besetting sin. Whether it's parenting and the way I discipline or provide good boundaries or whether this is my vocation or something that I'm called to do or accomplish, I am constantly reminding myself that even if I fail at this thing, I'm still loved. Right? This is a really, some of you are going, man, why is this so hard? It is hard for me. And so, you know, and it may not even be failure, but I may not even, I may not do something as well as somebody else. And I have to sit with going, okay, somebody else did that better and I'm still loved and I'm okay.

And that's God's grace. And so, you know, failure then becomes, if I were to accept the grace of God in those spaces, it would become a place where I could repair a relationship with somebody where I've broken it or where God may be calling me to pivot and do something different with full confidence that he'll provide. But God's grace is there in those places, if I'm curious enough to find it.

But what often happens with our besetting sins is we sit and we stew in self-contempt or we isolate ourselves in the loneliness of shame and say, I am, I am not going to be curious. I don't have the energy for that. I am a failure. I will isolate myself or I will hate myself because it's easier to do that than to sit with curiosity about where God's grace might be in those places of our insecurity. But maybe I'm alone in that. So my baptism and my anointing, you know, they call me, they beckon me, they compel me to search for God's grace in failure.

And so I don't know if I'm, I don't think I'm ever going to be done working on that. I think this will be a lifetime track for me, but it's a reality that accepting grace and love in perceived failure, this is important. That's going to be the place where transformation happens and where the glory of Jesus is going to be made known to other people. And so now that I've shared that with you, I want to ask you as you consider this, what is that place for you?

What is that place where if you were to accept the grace of God with curiosity, where transformation would happen and where the glory of Jesus would be made known in your life? Living out the glory of Jesus is a lifelong work of exploration, of repentance, and of dependence on the grace of God. But to live that out day in and day out will make the glory of Jesus made known to your friends and to your relatives, to your acquaintances, to your neighbors, and to your co-workers, which is all the nations. So in this season of Epiphany, consider how the picture of the glory of Christ is being depicted in your story.

Conclusion

How is that being depicted in your life for others? How is your unique story presenting the grace of Jesus? And the season of Epiphany focuses our attention on God's revealing of his good and his loving and his just rule and reign to the ends of the earth in the person of Jesus. We often don't know what the word glory means, but when you hear glory, think as a shorthand the good, loving, rule, and reign of the King Jesus and his revelation of that. That is the glory of Jesus. 

Remember your baptism. This is a season to remember that. This is a day to remember your baptism. For those of you who haven't yet been baptized, consider your own story. Continue to think about it, because when you are baptized, what you can look forward to is that the Spirit will anoint you for this work of carrying on the glory of Christ with you wherever you go. And so may we all continue to do that hard work of repentance together in community and individually as we are learning God's Word to us and the ways that our brokenness needs to be redeemed, those parallel tracks.

And as we live into the grace of Christ, our transformation becomes the means by which the glory of Jesus is going to be made known to others. Let me pray for us. Eternal Father, at the baptism of Jesus, you revealed him to be your Son, and your Holy Spirit descended upon him like a dove.

Grant that we who are born again by water in the Spirit may be faithful as your adopted children, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the author.

12th Day of Christmas: Rewarding Rachel's Work of Lamentation

Transcription

 It is good to be with you today. I'm so excited that the snow decided to wait until 11 o'clock tonight so that we didn't have to change our plans this morning. It is good to be with you on this 12th day of Christmas, and as I mentioned before, this is the final day of Christmas. If you're not used to the Anglican tradition or Catholic, we have 12 days. It's a whole season. And so today's gospel passage is about Jesus being brought into the temple, presented in the temple, and actually we're gonna have a whole feast day for that on February 2nd, which this year occurs on a Sunday. It's called Candlemas, and I'll introduce you to that as it gets closer. We'll have a procession with candles. It's going to be a delight.

So I'm not going to preach out of our gospel passage today, because I'm going to do it in a few weeks. So I wanted to spend some time this morning in our Jeremiah passage. This is a passage that might be unfamiliar to you, and as we look at Jeremiah chapter 31, 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.”

It was back a decade ago, it's hard to believe, in 2015. I was a pastoral intern. Before I was ordained, I was working at a church, and the priest I was working under gave me a really challenging assignment. There was a family in the church that sadly experienced a stillbirth, and the priest that I was working for had asked me to find a liturgy that she could pray through with this family. The loss of pregnancy and infertility are not things we often talk about from the front. They're very painful, and they're also very common, and they're very grief-worthy. And this, as an intern, was my introduction to how common these things are in the church. And I was looking through all kinds of liturgical resources to try and find something to help this priest pray with this family in a way that wasn't going to bypass their suffering, that would enter the depths of grief with them, but also that would point them to the real hope that was in Jesus, our Christ who has suffered with us, who suffered for us.

And as I looked through different liturgies, it was interesting what passage came up over and over again surrounding birth issues, and that is Jeremiah chapter 31. It was a verse that we didn't read this morning. It was one verse afterward, verse 15, and it says, “Thus says the Lord, a voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children because they are no more.” And I have come to love that passage over the last ten years.

There are two images of God in our passage today in Jeremiah that are meant to be a hope for the grieving, which ties in really well to the gospel in Christmas. The hope for Israel in this passage comes from two images that are mentioned explicitly, one that we can infer by extension. And again, this fits with the gospel, the good news of Christmas, which, you know, Christ entered into the darkness, the light of the world to bring new creation. 

And so God in Jeremiah 31, he's pictured first as a shepherd, and then he's also pictured as a bereft mother, and I'll explain that later. And by extension, this is mentioned implicitly, he's pictured as a gatherer. So these three images form the good news in Jeremiah chapter 31. And so if you have ever felt excluded, like if people really knew you, they wouldn't like you, if you don't really feel like you belong, this passage is an encouragement for you. If you've ever experienced deep loss and deep grief, this passage is hope that your grief is meaningful, that it is a productive kind of grief. And so this passage is an encouragement to all of us in one way or another, and it shows that our God is the God who pursues the broken, and he pursues the scattered to bring them home.

God as Shepherd

First, God is a shepherd. In the history of Israel, you may not be familiar with how these things shook out. Israel had split into two kingdoms, the North and the South, and in the South, some of the older kids, if you know the answer to this, do you know what two tribes comprised the South? Hmm. Yeah, exactly, Judah and Benjamin, which had two different mothers, historically, in the book of Genesis. And the northern ten tribes were all the others. And the northern tribes came to be referred to by the most famous tribe among them, which is Ephraim.

And interestingly, Ephraim's grandmother is actually Benjamin's mother. I should have put a chart up there for that. Anyhow, so Ephraim is a shorthand way of referring to the northern kingdom of Israel, and I don't know if you heard this during the reading today, there was a lot of mention of Ephraim in the text, which is weird, because Jeremiah is prophesying in the South. And Jeremiah is prophesying at a time where the northern kingdom had already been exiled a hundred years before he was actually prophesying. Or sorry, I should say it this way, they were exiled, and a hundred years later, the South would be exiled. And in between those two exiles, Jeremiah is prophesying God's Word to the southern kingdom in Jerusalem, to the religious institution, the seat of power.

And his ministry would be a very polarizing one. It would often be a ministry of rejection, wherein his call was really to solidify the hardness of people's hearts. And interestingly, there's these alternations between oracles of judgment and oracles of salvation. Today is a happy one, it is an oracle of salvation. And so what's interesting in this passage is, rather than being a condemnation for all the injustices the South is doing, it's this joyful exhortation to the remnant in the South who is going to follow the Lord faithfully. It's this oracle of salvation reminding them to trust the Lord no matter what, because the God who has scattered is going to be the one who will gather them in.

And so we read verses 7 through 14 today, we didn't quite get to verse 15, and this exhortation to the South is to rejoice and sing. And surprisingly, it's not rejoice and sing because the South is going to be okay, but it's because God is going to rescue the northern kingdom, which is surprising. And again, that's indicated in verse 9, where it says, for I have become a father to Israel, not Judah, Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn.

So God is referring to the North. God didn't take delight in the destruction and the exile of those northern ten tribes, and God is reminding them that he hasn't forgotten them. The rescue of the North is good news for the South, even if in reality the way this plays out is the salvation of the Samaritans in the book of Acts, but that's for epiphany.

So, well, let me connect the dots there. The northern kingdom becomes what is later the Samaritans when you read the New Testament, and God's salvation extends to those who were forgotten by those who are calling themselves Jews in the South. Verse 10 says that the one who has scattered Israel is going to gather them in as a shepherd does the flock.

And Jesus, in his incarnation, has come to deliver all people, which means those who are easily forgotten by others. Again, in Jesus's day, you could read the Samaritans there, but again, by extension, all of those that we so we so easily forget. And this encourages me to delight in God's work in other people. As you hear about the testimonies of God's faithfulness in other people, remind yourself that if God is at work in this or that person, he's at work in me also, and in us. So if you've ever felt like you just don't belong, like, you know, if people really got to know you, then they wouldn't like you. If you don't know exactly where you fit, this passage is an encouragement for you, and my suspicion is that probably everybody in the room at some point, right? Because imposter syndrome just kind of sits under the surface for everybody, and especially in northern Virginia, maybe even more than most other places.

And the good news is that God longs to save those who feel forgotten, that he brings in those who are scattered into his flock to bring them home. He longs to bring his people safe and secure into his flock in Christ. And so we've seen God is a shepherd, and then now I want to look at a surprising image that God is like a bereft mother in this passage.

God as Bereft Mother

Our passage, again, stopped at verse 14, but if we were to go on to verse 15, we would hear that famous verse that I quoted before. “Thus says the Lord, a voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children because they are no more.” Now, Rachel was Jacob's favorite wife. If you go back to the book of Genesis, he had two wives and two servants of those two wives. And so the tribes of Israel were populated by four different women, and part of the reason for this is the favorite wife could not have children while the other ones were populating these tribes. It's sort of like an arms race of procreation, it's very bizarre to read. And so Rachel is Jacob's favorite wife in the book of Genesis, and she had been childless, and eventually though, God blesses her with the birth of Joseph, who the rest of the book of Genesis will talk about at length.

And then she gives birth to Benjamin. So remember when I talked about Benjamin was the other tribe in the south? So she has one child who will comprise the north, one child who will be part of the south. And Joseph, importantly, was the father to two half-tribes. Extra points for anybody who knows the half-tribes of the north. Any guesses? One of them is like a city in Virginia. Yeah, Manasseh, good.

 Manasseh, if you didn't put that together. Yeah, and Ephraim. Ephraim and Manasseh, these two half-tribes. Ephraim, the more famous of the two, becomes the sort of moniker, the symbol of the northern kingdom. And again, Rachel is Jacob's favorite wife. She's the mother now of the preeminent northern tribes. And it's thought that when she died, she was buried in a tomb at Ramah, which is north of Jerusalem, southern part of the northern kingdom. And this city would have had a good vantage point when the people are taken off from Ramah. You could see them being carted off.

And so what this passage is picturing is Rachel weeping from her grave as she sees her children being taken from her. And so you can see why, when you read this passage, it is such a poignant and helpful text. When thinking about, in the past, how the church has used this historically, both for the death of children, there's lots of homilies on that topic, and for the loss of pregnancy. And you can see why this text is so helpful for this. In fact, you may not be aware of this, but our fourth day of Christmas is actually honors the holy innocents, those infants who were killed in Bethlehem by King Herod. This is sort of the dark underside of the Christmas story, right? And so, but these these children are dying for the sake of Christ without consent to it, and without having actually seen the Messiah.

And in reflecting on that terrible scene, Matthew, the gospel writer, quotes Jeremiah 31, verse 15, about Rachel's voice being heard in Ramah, and her wailing and lamentation and weeping for her children. And so you hear the echoes of this over and over again, and there is good news in Jeremiah 31 as well. On the flip side of this passage, God is moved by the lamentation of Rachel. God is moved by the repentance of Ephraim, and who confesses, Ephraim confesses his sins in the text. And God comforts Rachel, and he tells her that she doesn't need to keep on weeping, she doesn't need to keep crying, because, and this is a really important phrase, there will be a reward for her work of grief. There will be a reward for her work of grief. That's verse 16. Ephraim will be brought back from the land of the enemy. And the text, really interestingly, connects the sorrow of Rachel with the sorrow of God's heart in verse 20.

God says it this way, “Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he the child that I delight in?” The implied answer is yes. “As often as I speak against him, I still remember him. Therefore, I am deeply moved for him. I will surely have mercy upon him.” And so God mirrors the emotional state of the bereft mother and is moved to action, and that's often not a symbol or an image that we associate with the heart of God, but I do think it is so helpful because it is so real and so human. And so when our loss and grief feels like it's too much, we can trust in a God who knows the deep loss of a bereft mother, and we trust that, like this passage, he honors the work of grief.

And he honors the work of grief, eventually restoring what was lost, maybe not in the way that we would have anticipated, but does, in fact, honor the work of grief. And so God is pictured as a shepherd. God is pictured here as a bereft mother longing for the child that she loves.

And the good news, and why I love that this passage occurs in the last day of Christmas, is that when you go back to the prophets, it's the word of the Lord in Isaiah 40 that is speaking to the exiles that says, comfort, comfort my people, says the Lord your God. And the voice of the Lord, the word of the Lord is who is bringing the exiles back. And when we read John 1, which we read last week, we find that the word is incarnate.

The word takes on human flesh to bring God's people home. And so the shepherd the bereft mother longs to bring back her wayward children. And that is why also God, both implicitly and explicitly in this text, is called a gatherer. Here, like a shepherd, but more than that. So God is the one who has scattered them. God is the one who will bring them in and gather them back.

 God as Gatherer

And so that goes beyond just the Northern Kingdom, who potentially is forgotten, to include all Gentiles, which is good news for us. We were the ones who potentially would have been forgotten, except that God is the one who gathers us into his flock. Even to the most forgotten of Gentiles, or those who are sort of in between Jew and Gentile, like the Samaritans had been in Jesus's day.

And so whoever becomes excluded, whoever becomes made other, the good news is for them. That God is gathering them in, and that their joy is our joy, as we see God's work in their hearts. And that reminds me of a very early Eucharistic liturgy. There's this really beautiful document called the Didache. It was written in the second century, the teaching of the Twelve Apostles, and it probably has roots of tradition that go back to the time of the Apostles themselves. And it gives us one of the earliest Eucharistic prayers in the church.

And the prayer that the celebrant prays over the bread is this, we thank you, our Father, for the life and the knowledge which you made known to us, through Jesus your servant, to you be glory forever. Even as this broken bread was scattered over the hills, and was gathered together, and became one, so let your church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom. And so here the Eucharist itself, the celebration of the Eucharist together in the church, recalls God's gathering together of a people into one body in Christ.

So our gospel passage was about Jesus's presentation into the temple. And we hear Zechariah's song, which is also in the daily office, daily prayer. So some of you pray that every day, and it probably threw you off when I read it from the ESV, because you've probably heard it from the the BCP.

And you know, that passage, Zechariah's song, and Anna's song, help us connect God's saving work that he's doing in Jeremiah 31 with the person of Jesus. Zechariah says, my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel. And so Jesus is the means by which God is bringing the least, the lost, and the forgotten into one body in Christ, to the praise of his glory, which is what we read about in the book of Ephesians today.

Conclusion

And we're going to talk a lot about the glory of God in the weeks that are coming up, because that really is what the season of Epiphany is all about, as the glory of God moves to the Gentiles, to the ends of the earth. But here, as we end the Christmas season together, we have this beautiful good news, that God longs for his people to turn to him like a shepherd who is gathering his wayward sheep, to turn to them like a mother who is desirous of her lost child. And from the Didache, that God is like a harvester who is gathering grain in from the mountains to bring it together into one bread.

 And so your loss is not too deep for God to know your grief. That's one of the encouragements. And that he will honor the work of grief. If you have ever felt like you don't belong, like if people really knew you that they wouldn't like you, that you're sort of on the fringes all the time, that you're unworthy of God's love unless you can really prove yourself, this passage from Jeremiah is an encouragement for you this morning. And so may we be a church where these things are true, where we reflect God's love for all people, where people find a home. May we be a church where people experience God's care for the grieving, where the work of grief is honored and given back with honor.

And that this would be a church where people are desiring to bring the scattered into one community in Christ, in the church. Let me pray for us. “Oh God, who wonderfully created and yet more wonderfully restored the dignity of human nature, grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.”

 Transcribed byTurboScribe.ai. Edited by the author.

First Sunday of Christmas: The Word Took Flesh to Bring us to Life

Transcription

Good morning. It is good to see you. Merry Christmas again to you.

As we look at our passage from the Gospel of St. John this morning, let me go ahead and begin with a word of prayer 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. Oh Lord, my rock and Redeemer. Amen.”

Well, since we have lots of kiddos in the service this morning, I want to start with a question for the kiddos to test your Bible knowledge. I'm gonna say a phrase, and you can tell me where it's from. In the beginning. Anybody know? Any kids know? Yeah? Yep. What were you gonna say, Gregory? What? He made the earth. That's right. Cole? The light of God? Absolutely. That's great. Yeah, so in the beginning makes us think of creation.

And you know what? I'll be honest, it was sort of a trick question. Because in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth as Genesis, but in the beginning was the Word as the beginning to the Gospel of John. And so when the early readers of this Gospel would have heard the beginning of this Gospel read, their minds would have gone back to the book of Genesis, which they would have also read in Greek at the time.

And it's interesting to have this passage in the Western tradition fall in the first Sunday in the Christmas season, because we're so used to thinking of the Christmas story as shepherds and, you know, possibly the Magi and Mary and Joseph going to Bethlehem, we don't often stop to think about the fact that the beginning of the Christmas story is actually back in creation itself. And that's what this text points us to this morning. We don't just have somebody who can deliver God's people from their sins, we have somebody who can make all things new, to make a new beginning.

Because this Word who makes all things new is in the beginning creating the world at the very beginning of creation. The Word who was God, who is God, has taken on flesh completely, so that humanity can fully participate in God's divine life. And so that's one of the pieces of good news of Christmas, is that God is not just delivering people from sin and death, he is delivering them into new creation life.

And there's this important point made about the good news from John 1. It's that by adding humanity, human nature, to God's divine nature, he raises up our humanity to his divine life. And I'll spell that out over the next few minutes. The prologue to John chapter 1, these first 18 verses, introduce us to the divine Word, this Word of God, this speech of God that doesn't diminish from God when it, you know, leaves the mouth of God.

But this Word has created the heavens and the earth, and he came to do a new work of creation in those who would believe in his name, according to verse 14. There was never a time when this Word was not. He was in the beginning with God, he was God, and we affirm that in the Nicene Creed when we say, he was eternally begotten of the Father. So yes, the Father begets the Son, but there's never any time where we can point to and say, that's when the divine Christ was born in his divinity. There was not a beginning, because there was no point at which the Word was not. That's why one of those, one of those things you just, you affirm, you don't try to explain.

Got people into trouble a lot over the last 2,000 years. So the addition, the math of the Incarnation, the addition here is that God took on human flesh, human nature, and that was something foreign to his essence. About 1,400 years ago, Pope Gregory the Great said it this way, “But we say that the Word was made flesh not by losing what he was, but by taking what he was not. For in the mystery of his Incarnation, the only begotten of the Father increased what was ours, but diminished not what was his.” And so in taking on human flesh, he never took the flesh off again. That's the mystery of the Incarnation.

He took on flesh, and he suffered unjustly in the flesh. He died in the flesh, he was crucified in the flesh, he was resurrected in the flesh, glorified in the flesh, and ascended on high in the flesh where he reigns as king. And so Jesus fully assumed humanity. He took it on himself. It's interesting that he didn't destroy flesh as something evil, which that seems to be an error that crops up cyclically over the last several millennia. Flesh is not evil.

Your body is not evil. He didn't come to destroy it. He raised it up to his divine life, the life of the Creator, which is the end for which all of us are made, the end of which all of us look, which is why in the Creed we talk about being raised in the body. And I think, as we think about this in a Christmas sense, it reframes salvation for us in a really helpful way. Sin is real, right? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at the world and know how broken it is. We can all acknowledge that sin is real, but let's begin with this other reality, that each person on the earth, every single person on this earth, bears in himself or herself the image of God, the image of their Creator.

You don't come under into the world under the hateful gaze of a vengeful God. No one comes into the world that way. The narrative is not that you're as bad as you could possibly be, or even that you were made bad. That is not the narrative that Scripture tells. When you were born into the world, regardless of who brought you into it, you were born under the loving gaze of a good Creator who loves you because you bore something of his image. And so people are fundamentally made good because they reflect their God.

They're made with good bodies that reflect the goodness of God's handiwork and his image. But what does sin do? Sin distorts what is good. Sin comes in and introduces something foreign and perverts that which is good, the goodness of creation. It distorts the good desires that good image bearers have. And so when somebody is bound up in sin, this brings us to a place of compassion. Whether someone is under generational sin, whether they're under systems of injustice or patterns of thinking or behavior, what they're doing is not just being as bad as they could possibly be.

Sin is distorting the good desires they have, the goodness of who they are, and moving them away from their identity as an icon of their God. And so salvation, then, it reframes salvation as not just forgiveness of sins, but God's realigning of our loves and our affections with his loves, and God's restoring of our nature and not our destruction. So salvation is actually becoming fully alive in Christ, becoming fully into the image that God has made us to be.

You become fully yourself when Jesus raises up your everyday stuff into the life of the kingdom of God, which he inaugurated at his baptism, and it is here and now, and we long for it to be in its fullness. And that involves entrusting ourselves to this Creator, and that's what John 114 is about. He came to bring life to those who would believe in his name and having faith in his name.

And so one way that people have thought about this in the past, the fathers of the church, like St. Basil the Great, they talk about a sword and fire, and it's not a perfect analogy, but I find it helpful. So the idea is that the fire burns bright hot, and you take a sword and you plunge it into the fire, and that sword begins to take on the properties of the fire, that the fire can communicate to the sword. And when the sword is taken out, the sword is no less a sword, and it's still a sword, but it's taken on the property of the fire, and it doesn't diminish the fire or the sword when that happens.

And so that's likened to what it's like to be in the life of the divine, to be in God's very life. What Christ is bringing us into, as we draw closer to Jesus, we are being forged in the fire of God's grace and his truth. And God is imparting to us something of his life, not destroying our nature, but making us fully human again in Jesus.

And so here is how that begins to change what transformation can look like when we think about discipleship. If you look at our website, one of the things I did in the last couple weeks, I changed our About Us page from being sort of a narrative about how we got started, to being more based on our vision and our values. Who are we? What do we care about here? And so it's got the vision statement, and then it's the core values that are under. 

So when we talk about common people, common prayer for uncommon transformation, what I mean by that uncommon transformation is that we're not taking a one-size-fits-all approach to discipleship. It's not like ten steps to become more like Jesus. It's not that simple, because each of our stories are unique, and so two of our values are redeeming brokenness and then discovering God's story. 

Those are on the website. And what this means is that we move at the pace of discovery when it comes to people plumbing the depths of their own stories and discovering God's story in theirs. We move at the pace of their stories. Discipleship is unique to each person, and so I'll give a hypothetical example, a hypothetical you. This isn't any of you, right? But your firstborn comes into the world, and they bring you so much joy, but you notice that every time that baby makes a mess, your anger just gets hot. Your voice raises whether you want it to or not.

You scold that little baby, you know, and you are breathing out little words of shame that you aren't even really aware that you're doing, and you really regret it afterwards. And you hope that the child's just gonna forget and move on, but man, it just happens every day, and you don't know why it's not getting better, and you can't recognize it before it happens. But you also think that apologizing makes you look weak as a parent, and you don't want your kid to think you're weak, so you're not gonna apologize either.

And so you're in this conundrum. Now kids, I'm gonna ask you an important question. This is a theological question. How does God view us when we make mistakes? Hmm. What do you think? How does God view us when we make mistakes? Anybody have an answer? Have you ever thought about that question before? I can see you guys commiserating over there. Somebody throw something out.

There aren't any. Yeah, you can have a collective answer. That's fine.

Yeah. A. God's really angry. B. God still loves you.

What do you guys think? Misha? Yeah, mistakes help us learn, don't they? Yeah, you can't learn without making mistakes. So that's right. Yeah, God loves us, has compassion on us, and mistakes are mistakes.

That's great. So the kids know this, and sometimes we forget it as adults, right? No, I mean the hypothetical person, not you or me. So we forget this, and we think that, you know, God gets angry and he wants to punish us when we make a mistake.

He's just waiting. It's tragic, really, and it's often because there's somebody in our lives that didn't teach us the right way to think about God and how he views us and how he views mistakes and learning, and that can affect the ways that we parent. It can affect the ways that we view relationships with one another, and man, if that hypothetical person had just begun to ask the question, I am noticing this in me, what is this? And then start to talk about it with other people in community to acknowledge that.

That would be the beginning to understanding this disordered anger and why they viewed apologizing as weak, which isn't objectively true, but why did they view it that way? And then seek help from others and from Christ, and so when that happens, that begins the hard work of discipleship, and that's what I mean of the uniqueness of somebody's story. You can't put a timeline on the healing of that, but that process has to happen with each person here in their own unique stories, and so that begins the hard work of discipleship transformation, and that's why it's not common to say it through our values. That is where we begin to redeem the brokenness, because we name the brokenness, and that's where we begin to discover God's story, because we find grace in the redemption, and so their good desire, their good desire for orderliness, this hypothetical person, needed to come secondary to their child's desire to discover things, right? They needed to rightly order their good desires, and so in that process of discovery, they find something of the divine joy in the story that God is telling in their life, and so they're being forged in the fire of divine love and divine life, and that's where God's grace is, and they themselves are not being destroyed at that point. 

God is not destroying them. He is making them new, and they're becoming fully alive as a divine image bearer in Christ, and so Jesus assumed all of what we are so that we can be forged in the fire of his divine nature and God's divine life, and we can bask in the glow of the grace and the truth of God without losing who we are, but actually instead by becoming who we were meant to be, and that is the good news of Christmas from John chapter 1. It's by adding humanity to the divine nature that Jesus raises up our humanity to divine life. It's a theological concept that we don't often give attention to, but we ought to, because it infuses all of our daily stuff with the kingdom imagination, and we long for the day where the kingdom will be fully realized, where we fully enter into that divine life, but because our Savior came in the flesh, now the everyday stuff that you and I are going to go through has kingdom potential.

If we do Jesus' commandment to seek first the kingdom of God in all things, and so let's seek to know the grace and truth of God to become people fully alive in Jesus Christ. Let me pray for us. Oh God, you made us in your image, and you have redeemed us through your Son Jesus Christ.

Look with compassion on the whole human family. Take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts. Break down the walls that separate us.

Unite us in bonds of love, and work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth, that in your good time all nations and races may serve you in harmony around your heavenly throne, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

 Transcribed byTurboScribe.ai. Edited by the author.

Christmas Eve: Joining in Wonder at the Redeemer of our Ruins

Transcription

Well, good evening again, everybody. It is good to be with you. I'm Father Morgan Reed. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church. 

If you're new or visiting, we are delighted to have you here. Hopefully you can stay afterwards and join us for the cookie exchange as well. We heard from our passage tonight in Isaiah chapter 9 verse 2, the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. 

Those who lived in a land of darkness, on them the light has shined. It's a very famous Christmas passage. And this beautiful poem was written, surprisingly, against the backdrop of the Assyrian invasion.

Isaiah is prophesying to the southern kingdom about 700 years before the time of Jesus. And the Assyrians, who are under the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III, have swept through the Middle East. They have gone through what is today Iraq. They have gone through what is today Syria and Lebanon. And they have conquered the northern kingdom. And they're at the southern kingdom's border.

And so this, Judah's border, is under immense pressure. The people are terrified. And so this passage that Isaiah prophesies functions like a confession of hope for the generations to come. Not just the ones who are sitting underneath the darkness of Assyria, but for those who will come to sit in the darkness of Babylon when they go into exile. Those who will sit in the darkness of Greece. Those who will sit under the darkness of Roman occupation.

And out of darkness, light will shine forth. There is going to arise a divine ruler who is going to overthrow and undo all the unfaithful reigning kings, like Ahaz in the days of Isaiah, like Nebuchadnezzar over Babylon, like Alexander the Macedonian, or even Caesar Augustus, who is mentioned in our gospel text today. But it's not enough just to overthrow the unjust empires of the earth.

Because you and I are born into this broken family of humanity that binds itself over and over again to the kingdom of darkness, to the kingdom of sin and death. And we find ourselves longing for that same hope over and over again that the Jews in Isaiah's day were longing for as well. And the good news for them is the good news for us.

Unto us a child is born. Unto us a son is given. It's the good news of Christmas.

And I have two points for us this evening as we think about this passage. First, Jesus's good news to a people walking in darkness. And second, in him heaven and earth rejoice. So let me pray for us as we look at those two points. “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.”

Well, Jesus is good news for those who are walking in darkness.  It was in the days of Caesar Augustus that everybody had to come to their places to be registered, and that brings Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem. And Mary comes to her time to give birth while they're staying at somebody else's house. And they're in part of the house where the animals stay.

So it's not an inn like we would think of a traditional hotel. They're at somebody's house, then the animals, there's a room for the animals to stay within the house too. They're in that room, because there wasn't room in the part where they would normally have guests.

And when the child is born, they swaddle him and they lay him in the place where the animals eat because it's soft. And it points to the humble means by which our Savior entered the world. He wasn't born to aristocrats in a to royalty in a palace.

 I mean in one sense it was royalty, but not in a palace. He was born to this peasant girl, somebody who's seemingly unimportant, in somebody else's house and laid in a place where the animals feed. And so it speaks to the humility by which our Lord entered the world.

And this Prince of Peace was born into a world that wasn't just subject to Rome, but the world was subject to the kingdom of evil and darkness that binds all the nations to it. It's this kingdom of darkness that enslaves human hearts to shame, to sin, to autonomy, to rebellion against their Creator, and to the right good and beautiful use of creation. And to know the right good and beautiful things the way that things were made.

And so the surprise to everybody in in this gospel is that the Messiah didn't lead an armed rebellion to overthrow the Roman Authority. He wasn't leading a resistance in a way that they would have expected. Instead his weapon was the wood of the cross. And his death disarmed death and made a mockery of the kingdom of darkness. The hope for Isaiah's audience is our hope that a child is born to us and a son is given. We can't talk about the birth in the manger without also holding in tension the wood of the cross. Both things bookend Jesus' life and the resurrection. All of it is part of the incarnation to save a people. And so we've looked first at the good news for the people walking in darkness.

And second, heaven and earth rejoice in Christ. So the light came into the darkness. Angels burst forth out of the darkness, and the glory of God was shown to shepherds. And the angels speak comfort to them because whenever angels show up in the Bible people are terrified. And they're not these little cherubic little baby looking things. They have lots of wings and eyes and they're terrifying. So they see these visions of the angels and they're terrified. And the angels say, do not be afraid. For see I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.

To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior who is Messiah the Lord. So into the darkness heaven speaks out these thunderous cries of good news. Royalty of the line of David has been born. The anointed King who's going to reign over all things to put all things right to make all things new. This is the one who's ultimately going to defeat all the powers that are opposed to the kingdom of God so that we enter the life of new creation. And so Christmas invites us to join the wonder of the shepherds and running to discover Jesus.

It invites us to join the wonder of the shepherds and running to discover Jesus. There are so many things that we want to run to. We want to run to possessions that content us. We run to politicians that we think can make things better. We run to podcasts that can give us answers. We run to things that minimize our griefs. We run to screens or other things that distract us from being present to wonder at Christ in our everyday moments. But Christmas should actually invite us to discover where the light of Christ is being born in the darkest ruins of our lives to restore and redeem those places. We look for Jesus in that humble place and we see the beginning of the glory of the resurrection there. 

I was thinking back to 2017 partly because I've been following what's happening with Syria and I was reading back to what happened in 2017 when the Islamic State was defeated. When Christians in Iraq, however many were left after the defeat of the Islamic State, were flocking to their churches for Christmas. It was a beautiful sight. I mean these had been beautiful edifices of worship that had been there for centuries and now they stood as these hollow testaments to what was once bombed-out shells. And there's a real resistance involved in Christians making the decision to be together to worship the Lord in his incarnation and to worship him as Lord filling all of those hollow edifices with the voices of saints and angels once again. And it reminds me that Jesus comes into the most broken places as Emmanuel.

He comes as God with us. The places that have come to feel the most broken, the most destitute, those can become the places where the light of Christ overcomes the darkness to shine the light of his glory most brightly. And so we come back to this phrase again that we opened our service with, a child is born to us, a son is given.

And we are reminded from Isaiah that the government will rest on his shoulders and he'll be named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. And as we celebrate the next 12 days of Christmas, let's press into what places feel dark or hollowed out or shells of what once was to run with wonder like the shepherds in discovering the light of Christ who was born for us to die for us, the light that is being born in those places. And in the places that we grieve, let's grieve with hope because those places that are war-torn and hollowed out and ravaged by the fall will eventually be where the light shines into the darkness, where broken ruins will ring out with songs of angels rejoicing to see God's glorious work of redemption.

Let me pray for us. “O God, by whom the meek are guided in judgment and light rises up in darkness for the godly. Grant in all our doubts and uncertainties the grace to ask what you would have us do. That the spirit of wisdom may save us from all false choices. That in your light we may see light. And in your straight path we may not stumble. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the author.

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 1: Glimpses of Redemption in Darkness

Fall Retreat: Making a Mudpie in the House of God

All Saints' Sunday: A Heritage of Hope

Life Through the Frame of God's Kingdom

Michaelmas: the Fellowship of Saints and Protection of the Angels