don't eat alone

This week’s sermon is built around Matthew’s description of John the Baptist, but I wandered a bit through the Christmas story to get to him and ended up thinking about what it takes to exact significant change in our lives.

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When we read Matthew’s description of John the Baptist and the things he said to the people who came to be baptized in the Jordan River, where they were all gathered out in the middle of the wilderness, it’s a fair to ask, why are we focusing on him as we mark this Advent Sunday dedicated to hope?

For that matter, Advent is a season of anticipation for the birth of Jesus and our reading is the account of the one announcing the beginning of Jesus’ ministry as a thirty-year-old man. Why are we telling this story now?

For one thing, Matthew doesn’t spend that much time telling us about Jesus’ birth or infancy or childhood. He commits all of seven verses to what we know as the Christmas story, and most of those are about how Joseph reacted to the news that Mary was pregnant. Then Matthew spends a whole chapter talking about the Magi and the things their visit set in motion. (We will look at those stories at Epiphany.) Then he moves directly to John and the things Jesus said and did as an adult.

With that in mind, before we talk about John let’s back up to Matthew’s account of the birth because we can make an important connection there. (Matthew’s primary focus is Joseph; we will hear from Mary next week.)

This is Matthew 1:18-23.

This is how the birth of Jesus Christ took place. When Mary his mother had been betrothed to Joseph, but before they were married, she was found to have a child in her womb through the Holy Spirit. Joseph, her husband-to-be, being a decent man and not wanting to publicly humiliate her, planned to call off their betrothal quietly. But when he thought carefully about these things, an messenger from God appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because the child she carries is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you will call him Jesus, because he will rescue the people from their offences.” Now all of this took place to fulfill what God had spoken through the prophet: Look! A young girl will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will call him by the name Emmanuel, the translation of which means, “God is with us.”

God is with us. As we engage this story in our time and in our culture, it helps to remember that the basic understanding of history in the Hebrew Bible is that the people strayed from God and then God rescued or redeemed them. The name Jesus, in fact, is from the root of the word for rescue or salvation. Whatever happened, they trusted that God was with them.

Joseph (and perhaps Mary) needed to be reminded of that by the messenger because all he could see was dead-end circumstance. The woman he wanted to marry was pregnant. The life they had anticipated—whatever that was—was not going to happen. The angel didn’t tell him any differently, other than to say for him to not break the betrothal. Stay for the birth and name the boy “God is with us,” then stay for the marriage and trust that the name will hold up.

That sense of God’s presence matters when we take a larger view of Hebrew history. It helps to keep in mind is that the Hebrew people lived through a number of exiles and oppressions over many centuries, facing circumstances where the life they had anticipated didn’t happen. A good deal of their story as it is told in the Hebrew Bible centers around those experiences. Often, the way the people understood their difficulties was that they had done something wrong to cause their exile. That’s not necessarily what God said to them, but it was often what they heard. In most every case, the main message that God continued to send was one of redemption, offering the people a chance to repent and start over.

Which brings us to John the Baptist.

The historical moment into which he stepped when he started calling people to repentance and baptism was another moment of oppression and struggle. The Romans were brutal rulers, as we will see when come back to the story of the Magi. John’s invitation for them to make changes sounded like the prophets they had heard about in Bible stories who gave people hope beyond feeling like life was difficult because they had sinned. They could make changes that mattered if they were willing to trust God was with them and see what would happen next.

He was calling them to hope, to trust that the choices they made mattered, even if they couldn’t see how that would all work out. He called them to change their purpose, to change their hearts and lives, to start anew with what they thought God could do through them.

In the centuries since John walked in the wilderness, that sense of that kind of hope hasn’t changed. None of us knows for sure what is going to happen, or how things will work out. What we can do to affect whatever is coming is to make thoughtful, dare I say prayerful choices about what we say, do, and feel; about how we treat other people; about how we spend our time and our money; about how we live out our trust that God is with us.

How, then, can we change our purpose, change our hearts, so that Christ can be born anew in our time?

That’s a big question that doesn’t necessarily require a global answer. I’m not asking how we change the world as much as how we change ourselves because that is how the world actually gets changed. Hope requires specificity, so here are three specific things to consider.

First, I invite you to daydream about who God wants you to be and what God wants you to do within your spheres of influences. Are you doing the work you feel that is most true to yourself? How can you affect the primary relationships in your life? Who do you feel call to become?

As you hold that question, I ask you to think of one specific element of your life that you would like to change, that you would like to repent. Let me offer an example. Most every fall is difficult for me because the shrinking daylight is like rocket fuel for my depression. I spend most of November and December feeling crushed by the weight of it all and doing what I can to hold on till the Solstice and the promise of longer days.

Thanks to some suggestion I read or heard somewhere, I decided to commit to getting up morning at around five so that I was awake for the sunrise. I make the coffee and I sit at my desk, which is in front of a window, and I watch the dawn break as I do the crossword and then read. Somehow that change has given me new life. I have had a burst of creative energy rather than feeling like I was falling into a hole.

Let me be clear: depression is not a sin. It has been something in my life that has kept me from being my full self, from being able to see that I am wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. The change I have made—my repentance, if you will—has not been because I did something wrong as much as I changed a behavior to make me more available to the world and to God.

Repentance can have a number of faces, so let me ask the question again. What one specific element of your life would you like to change?

The last question requires us to think about our lives together. What change do you think needs to happen in one element of your communal life—here in this church, in your neighborhood, in Hamden, at work—that you can contribute to with a change in what you say and do, or how you spend your time and resources?

We will go from this service to share a meal and talk about our budget for the coming year, which is actually a discussion about who we are as a congregation and who we think God is calling us to be. Do we have ways in which we need to change our purpose or change our hearts?

The hope that underlies repentance is that when we change ourselves we change the world. May we live boldly into that kind of hope. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

As I begin another year of writing each day during Advent, beginning with the sermon I preached this morning seems right. It is where the season is starting for me: in the shared space of life in my congregation. I am not following the lectionary this week and took Isaiah 35:1-10 as the jumping off spot for my words, looking at the way stories get lived and retold as we seek to continue to learn from them. Happy Advent.

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When I say the word prophet, what images come to mind?

The word itself comes from roots that mean “before-teller,” “harbinger,” or “proclaimer,” all of them carrying the idea of one who speaks for God. Down the years, the word has also come to carry the idea of one who predicts what’s going to happen in the future, but that misses the mark because, though they are talking about what might happen, or maybe even what will happen, most of what prophets say carries a note warning or perhaps admonition, to call people to action.

As one of my seminary professors said, the biblical prophets were “forth-tellers” not “foretellers.” They weren’t reading crystal balls; they were interpreting the consequences of the present. Sometimes they offered words of correction, or even judgment. At other times, as in our reading today, they offered words of hope and encouragement.

Isaiah was a forth-teller who spoke to the Judean people during a time of exile when they were far away from their homeland and had been for many years. When he spoke about the dry lands being joyful and the wilderness blooming, he was doing more than giving them an image-filled pep talk. He was not an optimist telling the people the sun will come out tomorrow. He knew change wasn’t going to come quick, necessarily, and he wanted the people to remember—to trust—that God had not abandoned them; and then to live like God had not abandoned them, to be open to the future and the possibility that God could bring about significant change in and through them.

“Through them” is key to the whole idea because the way God brings about change is with and through people who trust that it is possible. Judea would bloom again when people went back to the burned out and abandoned land and recultivated it, when they got out and dug in the dirt and planted things. The love of God requires human incarnation in order to change the world.

Perhaps that is why those who followed Jesus leaned back into Isaiah and some of the other prophets as they began to collect and tell the stories that became the foundation of our faith, re-membering Isaiah’s words in a new way that saw Jesus’ birth as validation of the truths the prophet had spoken. Isaiah didn’t know about Jesus, but when Jesus’ followers remembered what the prophet had said, they made new connections to their own lives of faith in Christ.

Let me tell you a story to explain what I mean by that kind of re-membering.

When my father pastored in Houston, one of the children’s Sunday School teachers told him what had happened that day. She taught a class of four- or five-year-olds, and she was describing what Jesus was like—he was kind, he was friendly, he listened to people. After almost every characteristic she named, one of the little boys would raise his hand and blurt out, “I know him. He lives on my street.”

She tried to explain that Jesus lived long ago, but the little boy was unflappable: “I know him. He lives on my street.” They got through the lesson and when the little boy’s mother came to get him, the teacher told her what had happened. The mother smiled and said, “There’s an old man who lives on our street who is the kindest, gentlest, and most loving person we have ever met. Many of our neighbors have said he is more like Jesus than anyone we have ever met. So, yes, he does live on our street.”

The followers of Jesus read Isaiah and, like the little boy, said, “I know him. He lived on our streets.” They re-membered Isaiah through the lens of their present tense, of their moment of struggle and oppression and difficulty, much as we do when we come, once again, to Advent and to remember the story in our time. Our sense of exile, our feelings of despair, our grief, even our hope, are not tied to the same circumstances as the Judeans of Isaiah’s time or those of Jesus’ followers, and yet the promise that God has not deserted us still matters, and so we read ourselves into the old stories, even as we remind ourselves that there is a difference between living a story and remembering or retelling it.

One of the prophetic words I come back to most every Advent—words I quote to you every year—comes from twelfth century mystic Meister Eckhart, who said, “What good is it to us that Mary gave birth to the son of God two thousand years ago, and we do not also give birth to the Son of God in our time and in our culture? We are all meant to be mothers of God. God is always needing to be born.”

To walk through these days of Advent is about more than going through the ritual that has been handed down or lighting the candles and singing the songs because it is tradition. Most of our ways of remembering—the things we say and sing and repeat—were not a part of the actual birth of Jesus. They are memories and rituals handed down to help us re-member the story in our time.

Though we mostly talk about it as a season of waiting and anticipation, the word advent means “arrival” or “approach.” It carries its own momentum: something—someone—is coming.

These Advent Sundays as we will observe them lead us to several arrivals: next week, John the Baptist, then Mary, then Jesus, each of them calling us to ponder how we will live out our response to their arrivals, how we will incarnate the love of God in a new way in our time and in our culture, which is another way of saying how we will live out our trust that God is capable of making streams in the desert and giving sight to those who cannot see.

But how do we look at our world and honestly trust that kind of change is truly possible? Perhaps the better question is how can we afford not to trust it?

How will the world change at all if we are not willing to trust God enough to dig riverbeds and do what we can to help those around us see that they are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved?

We retell these stories to remind ourselves that in order of Christ to be born anew in us means we must open our hearts with expectancy for the almost unimaginable good that the love of God can accomplish in and through us in even the most unexpected places, as well as in the most common places in our lives, we must choose to let the story be re-membered in what we say and do, such that when our neighbors hear our story they, too, will say, “I know Jesus. They live on my street.” Amen.

Peace,
Milton