Sermons

+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.

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

I’ve never been much of a doomsday “prepper” or a millenerian, but I might have to go onto the streets with a bullhorn and a floppy bible and a sign reading “the end is nigh” after seeing a headline this week. The Church of England suggested parishes consider moving traditional Advent carol services from the evening of the Fourth Sunday of Advent to the night before, so as not to compete with the final game of the World Cup. Lord Jesus, quickly come!

All joking aside, and in light of what I said last week about the Christian’s primary citizenship being in heaven, perhaps the church should be a bit counter-cultural here by keeping services as scheduled and including some prayers about human rights and the Qatari government and our complicity by sending our national teams to such a repressive country instead of boycotting like we did in 1980 when the Olympics were held in Moscow.

Today we enter the season of Advent, in which we are invited to consider Christ’s return and that which precedes and follows it. Several years ago, before I started my current practice of spending a little time on Monday mornings finding some piece of art to put on the front of the bulletin, I discovered that for some years we had been using some images (presumably from some church publishing software) which highlighted what were reckoned by somebody to be the themes of the four Sundays of Advent: hope, peace, love, and joy. Poor Deborah was taken aback when I told her we needed to find something different because these were not the traditional themes of Advent. This schema was popularized by church supply companies who wanted to sell more Advent wreaths and who, probably rightly, figured that focusing on the traditional themes of Advent–death, judgment, heaven, and hell–would not shift as much product.

I’ve wondered what it would be like to go on Shark Tank–the reality television show where people bring their inventions to try to get investors–seeking somebody to underwrite my idea of a theologically correct Advent calendar: open the little door each day to find a miniature calavera (one of those Mexican skulls for the Day of the Dead) or a chunk of brimstone or something like this.

Now, I am not as uptight as I used to be. I confess that I have come to love what we might call “secular Christmas” even when it takes up much of the season when we in church are observing a season of penitential expectation. I kind of love seeing the much too early Christmas lights and displays and finding the radio stations that change format entirely to Christmas music for a full month and digging out my VHS copy of the best Christmas program of all time–which is A Charlie Brown Christmas, there is no debate–and watching it before it’s even December. Don’t take my word for it. I encourage you to find the video released on November 1^st by Queen of Christmas and faithful Episcopalian, Mariah Carey, in which she transforms from a witch into Mrs. Santa Claus and sings “it’s here” backed by the jingle bells and synthesizers of her perennial chart-topper “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” I think all that is great.

That said, we are on a different time-frame here in the church, and this morning’s lessons should have made it clear, that while we are called to prepare not only for the coming of Christ in a manger on December 25^th, but also his return at the end of time. I won’t belabor this point, since I know I’ve said it before from the pulpit, but the scriptural view of eschatology, of these last things, as it’s been understood and interpreted by the church over the last two thousand years is not what we see in The Late Great Planet Earth or the Left Behind books and films. The idea of a “rapture” followed by a period of “tribulation” from which the faithful will be spared was a nineteenth creation of poor biblical scholarship, and it’s a bit shocking how much currency the view has received.

The lesson today from Matthew is not about Christians getting whisked into heaven to avoid difficulties. It is rather the opposite: the promise of persecution for the faithful in the face of the powers and principalities which wish, vainly, to silence the word of God, to snuff out the light of the Gospel. Indeed, the Christians of the pre-Constantinian Roman Empire would experience this, as have countless in the millennia since. Even today–though the situation is complicated by tribal histories and the natural antipathy between herdsmen and farmers–the participation of Boko Haram suggests that the thousands of Christians killed every year in Nigeria are victims of a fundamentally religiously motivated persecution.

I may get myself in trouble here for perpetrating what might be seen as committing a contemporary heresy, and I say the following not to denigrate the good work of Dr. King or of the 19^th Century abolitionist minister, Theodore Parker, from whom he adapted his most famous quote, but here goes. I do believe the arc of the moral universe is long, but I am not convinced that it bends toward justice.

My own philosophy of history is best summarized by a fictional character, written by that eminent and eminently Christian writer and philologist J.R.R. Tolkien, when the Lady Galadriel of Lothlorien told the hobbit Frodo that she and her husband, Celeborn, the wisest of elves, had “dwelt in the West since the days of dawn… years uncounted… and together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.”

So, I tend to believe the glorious battle which we are bound to fight against the works of darkness by donning the armor light is one which we will seem to lose as history comes to an end. We mustn’t lose heart, though, we mustn’t cease striving as those without hope, we mustn’t despair, because beyond history is victory. “For in such an hour as ye think not, the Son of Man cometh.” Lord Jesus, quickly come.

This is a teaser for my final church history class during coffee hour today–the great error of nineteenth century theology was to believe that we were all getting progressively better, the moral arc of the universe was reaching its positive conclusion, and that Christ returning to make things right and inaugurate the Kingdom of God on earth was merely a metaphor for how the human race was about to solve all its problems through science and technology and the perfection of human moral reason. Then the twentieth century–the most violent century in human history–happened and reminded us that we were wicked and that in the end only Jesus could fix it all. This is not to say that nobody believes in this myth of human progress anymore. If you do, I bet Elon Musk has a seat on his first colony ship to Mars to sell you.

Even so, we are promised today that at the other side of that long defeat, the victory which Christ has won and will win at the last, is a promise whose glory is hard to imagine now in the time of this mortal life.

And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it … and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

And so I say once more, “Lord Jesus, quickly come.”

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