Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

We encounter Mary’s betrothed, Joseph, in today’s reading, and he’s a figure we don’t hear much about in the Gospels. In Luke’s Gospel, Joseph shows up, but does little but follow Mary and Jesus around. In Matthew’s Gospel, by contrast, Joseph is shown taking the initiative in taking his family to Egypt on the eve of King Herod’s execution of the Holy Innocents and, of course, he is presented in today’s Gospel being faced with what is to all appearances a rather sticky situation.

We learn first of all that Joseph is betrothed to Mary when the events in today’s Gospel lesson take place. Some modern translations use the word “engaged” to describe the relationship, and the Authorized Version which we are using during this season uses the term “espoused,” but neither rendering is entirely clear. The Greek word Matthew uses is meinsteutheiseis, which suggests an intermediate stage between engagement and marriage, namely betrothal, a relationship status which we tend not to have in the modern West. At this stage the legal arrangements surrounding the marriage would have been organized by the couple and their families. Vows would have already been exchanged and contracts already signed.

This “ups the ante”, as it were, for Joseph; and lest we think his initial impulse to “put her away privily” (that is, to end the relationship without making a big deal of it) would have been a selfish act on Joseph’s part, the Gospel tells us that this plan was motivated by Joseph’s righteousness and his desire to protect his intended from public disgrace. What our translation renders as “put away privily,” and what more recent translations render as “dismiss quietly,” is literally, in the Greek, to “divorce secretly”- something quite different. Technically, should Mary have been found guilty of infidelity, the Jewish Law would have actually permitted execution–even if that were highly unlikely by the First Century A.D.–and it certainly would have led to the Blessed Virgin being subject to public scorn and both social and financial ruin both for her and her family.

Instead of turning Mary over to trial, though, Joseph intended to discreetly divorce her, which would have shielded her from public scorn but would likely have led to some significant financial burden for him, just like modern divorces can be expensive. So, Joseph acts here in a more selfless manner than the Law would have demanded and so we might even modify Matthew’s positive description of Joseph. Simply following the Law would have made Joseph a “just [or righteous] man” by the standards of his era; to decide on a course of action, above-and-beyond the demands of the law makes him a Saint.

It is after this act of selflessness that the Lord demands even more from Joseph. We all know how the story goes. An angel appears and explains to Joseph that the Virgin had not been unfaithful, but that she had conceived a Son by the Holy Ghost, a Son who would bear the sins of the world and save humanity. Joseph was ordered to take Mary as his wife and to be our Lord’s earthly father. Now Joseph knew that his wife had not been unfaithful; rather she had been reckoned as highly favored of God. This, however, diminishes neither the difficulty of God’s mandate to Joseph nor the great faithfulness Joseph displayed in following it. Joseph knew that his wife was a virgin, but the world would not have known. We do not know how Joseph was seen by his friends and neighbors and business associates. The Gospel is silent on this issue. Even so, we know that Joseph ran the risk of being seen as engaging in serious impropriety by going through with the marriage.

That brings me (at last!) to the point of this sermon, which is really quite simple, but it may be counterintuitive: sometimes God’s mission is offensive to societal norms of propriety and sometimes, as Christians, we are called to act in apparently scandalous ways in service to the Gospel. Now, let me confess that I am more guilty than most when it comes to making an idol out of norms of propriety, so I say this with some reticence. Also, I am not suggesting that society’s rules of propriety are “meant to be broken”. Rather, sometimes we can see where these rules hinder us from the work of the Gospel. For Joseph, God’s will was made quite clear and he knew he had to “break the rules,” so to speak. For the prophet Isaiah, as well, God was quite clear in demanding that he be very impolite indeed by walking around naked for three years. That, by the way, is one of those bible stories I would have loved to have heard as a child, but we never covered it in Sunday School for some reason.

Anyway, these are both rather grandiose examples of the point, but we can think of some which are more likely to come into our immediate spheres of influence. For example, I grew up being told that it was horribly impolite to talk about religion pretty much anywhere outside the walls of the church. But is this in keeping with the Gospel’s mandate to share our Good News with all people? Propriety demands that we not consort with dissolute, licentious people; but Jesus hung around with outcasts and sinners. Propriety demands that we try so hard to be nonjudgmental that we stay silent for fear of offending our brother or sister; but sometimes the Gospel demands that we speak the truth, in love, when we believe they have gone astray.

All of this is to say that sometimes obedience to God’s Will will be unpopular or impolite. Sometimes it may even be scandalous. We may take heart, however, that it was thanks to one man’s obedience, in spite of societal expectations, that our Lord and his blessed mother were given a home, and that the scripture might be fulfilled: Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel.”

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

“Art thou he who should come, or do we look for another?” It’s an odd question for John the Baptist to ask, considering that he got his answer eight chapters earlier. At the Jordan River the heavens had opened and the very voice of God confirmed Jesus’ identity: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” John knew that he was unworthy to Baptize the Lord to whom he had been pointing, and had consented only because of the authority of the one who demanded it. So, John the Baptist had seemed to figure out that it was Jesus himself for whom he was the forerunner, so why this question about Jesus’ role in the story so much later? If in the third chapter of Matthew, John seems convinced that Jesus is none other than the Messiah, why would he begin to question this by the eleventh chapter?

It seems to me that the question on John’s lips might not be as strange as it first seems, and this is because of the shape which his expectations must have taken. John’s understanding of the Messiah’s mission would likely have been the same as his contemporaries’- namely, that the Messiah would come and free God’s people, the Jews, from captivity to an oppressive foreign regime. And now John finds himself quite literally a captive, a prisoner, after the one whom he believed to be the Messiah had already come. Things were supposed to get much better with the advent of the Messiah, but for John and for the others who followed him, things seemed to have gotten much, much worse. We can imagine the tone with which John’s question was asked. He must have been more than a little frustrated. “Are you the Messiah or not?!”

Now two-thousand years later, we know how this ended. The Kingdom which Christ had ushered in was not of the sort expected. It was not a free Israel with a reëstablished monarchy, a renewed corporate worship life centered at the temple, and a Roman Army on the run. For as long as the Jews had their own leaders these leaders would remain Roman puppets, the temple would be utterly destroyed a few decades later, and the Roman Army wouldn’t go anywhere for a very long time. We know that the Kingdom Christ would establish was different from the Kingdom his contemporary compatriots expected- that it would be a Kingdom not of this world, a Kingdom whose citizens were determined not by lineage but by Baptism, whose King could not be seen in some royal court in Jerusalem, but in his marvelous, miraculous appearing wherever Christians are gathered together around his throne, which is the altar. We know that now, but would we have expected it if we were John the Baptist or some other first century Jew who’d been thrown in prison for disturbing the peace? Not likely.

So, John’s apparent lack of faith is understandable. If somebody told us he were here to free us from oppression and we ended up in prison instead, we’d naturally wonder if the one who made that promise really intended to be our Savior after all. We, like John, might become exasperated and ask, “Well, are you the Messiah, or aren’t you?”

That we would probably be in the same boat as John means that the message we get from his qualms is not that we’re a whole lot smarter or more faithful than those first century Jews whose expectations were misdirected. If anything, I think it should simultaneously convict us of our own misdirected expectations and serve as a consolation for the same. If a great hero of the faith like John the Baptist could get snippy when things didn’t seem to go according to his plan, then maybe we’re not so bad after all. On the other hand, we should be even more reticent to expect God to conform to our expectations, knowing how easy it is to fall into that trap.

What an appropriate lesson to learn this time of year! Our Lord’s arrival both in Bethlehem and on the last day both convict and comfort. Our shepherd wields both rod and staff; he demands repentance and graciously offers the joy of redemption. We live in an either/or kind of world, but often the truth of our faith is a both/and kind of reality. We are called to things unseen, which can be frightening, but we are encouraged by Christ’s promise to be with us always. We are called to repentance, but even in penitence there is joy. Even in what seems the longest darkness, you can see the light begin to dawn.

Ultimately, Advent is about deferred expectations- the hope of something we don’t fully understand at a time which we do not choose. It is about this both/and reality or penitence and joyful expectation. Just like John might have expected political salvation in his own lifetime rather than spiritual salvation delayed, so have the hopes of the Church and its children often been misplaced, expecting God to conform to our designs rather than the other way round.

Advent is at least in part about this process of setting aside our own expectations of how God ought to operate and subjugating those expectations to the promise of Christ’s reign as it is now and as it will be in the age to come. It is about waiting for those four last things I mentioned the last two weeks—death, judgment, heaven and hell—knowing that for those who are faithful, God’s plan in God’s time will be more glorious than anything we could possibly expect.

So, when we ask, along with John the Baptist, “Art thou he who should come, or do we look for another?” we may be sure that the answer is “yes” even if our doubt militates against our reasons to believe. Our doubt is natural, but it will be answered to our satisfaction and, indeed, be more satisfying than we, in our impatience, can foresee.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

As I said last week, Advent is not just about preparing for Christmas, as important as it is to focus on that. It has also historically been about what we call the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. We tend to shy away from at least three of these things – namely death, judgment, and hell – because so many of our more radical coreligionists might seem to place too much emphasis on them. Or, rather, they seem to want to be the one’s meting those things out, rather than leaving it to God. Too many take for themselves the role of judge, daring to speak on matters where Christ, not we mortals, has the final say.

That being said, I think we mainstream Christians are a little too quick to shy away from these last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. We are a little too quick to dismiss the apocalyptic themes of scripture, because those who focus on them the most are a little bit “judgy” and creepy.

The problem is that when we simply react against an admittedly odd sort of theology, we can swing too far to the other side, and forget that scripture is full of these apocalyptic themes and if we choose simply to reject them, we’re missing out on a lot of what scripture can say to us. We are throwing out the baby of biblical truth with the bathwater of fundamentalist interpretation.

Take this morning’s Gospel. We hear a rather disconcerting sermon from John the Baptist who cries “Repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” and who gives us an image of the final judgment:

[His] fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

There is more to scripture than gentle reminders to be nice to each other. The prophetic tradition in which John the Baptist finds himself is concerned with the eternal consequences of righteousness and wickedness and it is concerned with finality, the end, and we are unwise to ignore that message.

Now, before this gets too creepy, it’s important to remember that the Kingdom which is to come is a fundamentally positive thing. It is a promised gift to which we may look forward eagerly. This, I think, is where we can draw the most important distinction between the apocalyptic throughline of the Bible and the apocalypticism of some modern people. You see, the latter, at least as I’ve heard it preached, is primarily about fear. God’s coming, they seem to suggest, to blow the wicked away. The world is going to hell in a handbasket, so you’d better jump on a theological life raft. Even secular folk thrive on this sort of fear mongering. How will it end? Nuclear war, a super bug, a climate catastrophe. Well, maybe, but why are we so fascinated by the question “how is it all going to come crashing down?” Such speculation may be well intended—particularly if it leads us to live more responsibly in the days and with the world God has given us—but when Christians focus so much on the world coming to some nasty end the speculation can become profoundly theologically suspect, as I suggested in last week’s sermon, and when we assume such destruction is God’s will, we cede our obligations to make peace and to fight against the greed and corruption which create poverty and pollution and war.

The biblical view of the end is radically different from the modern apocalypticism. Instead of fear the biblical message engenders hope, because it is a story about triumph rather than destruction. There is, of course, an element of judgment in the biblical view—John calls for repentance that we might stand up under that judgment—but the overwhelming theme is that of a new peace and prosperity for God’s people. Hear again those beautiful words from the Prophet Isaiah:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.

Every time we come together we pray as our Lord has taught us: thy kingdom come. And when we say “thy kingdom come” we pray not for the wrath of God on our enemies but for the peace that lasts to eternity. We pray not for death and destruction, but for the time when “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

Thank God that sooner or later our Lord will return in triumph to judge the world, not because he comes to destroy the wicked, but rather that he comes to redeem us. Because it means that we who have been given grace to repent of our pride, we who are faithful if even in a little, will be brought at last to that heavenly city of peace and unity to dwell with God forever. We watch, then, not in fear but in eager expectation, knowing that our Lord will come and save his people, captive once to sin, but now made free by the power of his mighty Resurrection.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.