Sermons

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

I have an icon of St. John the Baptist which I keep in a spot in my office where I can always see it from my desk (though today I’ve set it on the stand in the back of the church, in case you’re interested in looking at it). It was an ordination gift from a dear friend who is a parishioner at the church in Brooklyn where I did my internship during seminary. It is in almost every way different from the painting on the cover of our bulletin this week by Mattia Preti, Il Cavalier Calabrese (the Calabrian Knight, which I think is a pretty cool nickname).

The icon shows a decidedly hirsute, disheveled Baptist, while the painting strikes one as depicting what must have been the 17^th Century equivalent of the contemporary men’s fashion trend of having intentionally slightly messy hair (sometimes very ill-advisedly- see, Johnny Depp or Boris Johnson). The icon shows John alone, while the painting shows the horrified crowd at the bottom and a cherub in the upper-right corner. (You can’t have a renaissance painting of a biblical figure without a superfluous angel or two, after all.) The icon sticks to the biblical description, dressing John in a simple camel’s-hair garment, while the painting drapes a red cloth or cape over him, which Preti often put on his subjects as an allusion to the red tabard of the Knights of Malta, of which the artist was a member, hence his cool nickname.

One thing which the two pieces have in common, though–and which most depictions of John the Baptist do–is that he is pointing away from himself. Capable artists have made a point (pun very much intended) over the centuries of drawing the viewer’s eye away from the Baptist and to the hand and the usually empty space to which it gestures. I think both the Greek icon and Preti’s painting succeed in this, and you might have noticed the same thing in Da Vinci’s famous painting or in Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece.

Anyway, the reason I keep that icon where I can see it is not because I like it, though I do. It’s because when I’m meeting with parishioners or writing sermons or making decisions that affect the life of the parish or whatever else I do in that office, I need the reminder that I need to point away from myself toward Jesus in all those tasks and interactions. I need John the Baptist to remind me that it’s not about me, just as he knew it wasn’t about him. It’s all about Jesus.

There’s an old often misquoted saying that the preacher’s job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The quote was actually about what newspapers ought to be doing, not clergypeople. One of our prayers in the section of additional prayers and thanksgiving towards the back of the prayerbook gets close to the sentiment–“strenghten the faithful, arouse the careless, restore the penitent”–though it is unmistakably God who is being asked to do those things, not some little vicar with a “John the Baptist” complex. Even so, we are all of us called to point away from ourselves, toward Jesus, and sometimes this will mean either speaking or living into hard truths which may not be popular.

I doubt many of us will be in a situation where we must call a crowd a “generation of vipers” or lecture tax collectors and soldiers about how to do their jobs or get thrown in prison for disturbing the peace, as indeed John does right after this morning’s gospel lesson closed. Nevertheless, pointing to Jesus and to what he stands for rather than exalting ourselves (or even just going along to get along) can be an uncomfortable proposition. Maybe it’s forgoing that brand new luxury item, the flat screen television or whatever, because the old one works fine, and giving the money one would have spent on that to the poor, knowing that those in poverty are in a very real spiritual sense, Christ to us. Maybe it’s as simple as checking our tongues, interrogating our motives before we speak, and asking “is what I’m about to say meant to impress people or is it meant to speak a word of grace and truth and love?” Maybe it’s pushing back when Uncle Jimmy makes a racist joke at Christmas dinner after he’s had one too many seven-and-sevens, remembering again that Christ is known to us in the abused and marginalized.

Today, despite the rather tough words from the Baptist in our Gospel, we are invited to take a small break from the penitence of the season and remember there is still joy in the midst of our lives of longing and expectation for Christ to come to us again. (That’s the point of the rose-colored vestments on the Third Sunday of Advent; it literally lightens things up a bit.) I truly believe that when we succeed in following John’s example, pointing away from ourselves toward Jesus, we find our best shot at achieving that joy in this life. When we practice that approach, often failing but sometimes succeeding despite ourselves, we find the words of Saint Paul to the Philippians has become a palpable reality in our lives, that “the peace of God which passeth all understanding [is] keeping [our] hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”

+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.

If you’re anything like me, last Christmas was the most difficult of my life. One of the most disappointing emails I think I’ve ever received (and I’ve got some nastigrams sent my way over the years, as one can imagine) was the bishop’s announcement less than a month before Christmas that we were being required to shut our doors again in light of the rising number of coronavirus infections. I think at the time I referred to it, rather indelicately, as an “interdict”, which some of you may know is what it’s called when the Pope bans the sacraments in entire countries, as he did to England and Wales for six years in the early 13^th Century during the reign of bad king John. I should note that this was because said king had refused to accept the pope’s appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, not because he got the Sheriff of Nottingham to hunt down Robin Hood, though that would have been a fun twist in the legend.

In any event, being forced to return to “virtual church” was a blow. Add to that the fact that, like many of you, we had to make the difficult decision not to gather with family, and it was terribly hard to get into the holiday spirit. As you’ll read in my newsletter article this month, none of these sorts of things can make Christmas any less meaningful objectively speaking, but one still laments that it cannot be celebrated in as fulsome a way as we’re accustomed to. This year, thanks to vaccines and loosening restrictions, many of us will be able to join with family once again, thanks be to God, though I know this is not the case for everybody, and it will certainly be a difficult Christmas for those who lost a loved-one to this dread disease, or for some other reason and were unable to be with them in their final days and hours.

I was reminded of all this while thinking about this morning’s epistle. Paul is in lockdown in Rome, not because there is a plague, but because he’s been put in prison. It wasn’t the first time; Paul should really be the patron saint of recidivists. In fact, the first time Paul was arrested, sometime around A.D. 57, it was in Philippi, the city whose church he is writing to in today’s lesson. But this would have been the last time he had been arrested, sometime around A.D. 66. It was during the first significant persecution of Christians by the empire, after Nero blamed Christians for setting the great fire of July A.D. 64 (quite possibly actually set at Nero’s request, so he could clear space for his new palace, hence his “fiddling while Rome burned”). Paul was writing from a jail cell in Rome which he would only leave to face his own execution.

Like most of Paul’s letters, Philippians was written on the occasion of a difficulty in the community to which he was writing, and the Philippian problem was one which he had written about extensively before to other churches–namely the controversy surrounding circumcision and whether or not one had to become a Jew before becoming a Christian. But it is significant, I think, that he doesn’t bring this up until the third chapter, halfway through the letter, and then pretty quickly returns to the tone of the first two chapters of the epistle. One gets the sense that though the occasion for writing is this old controversy, Paul’s real point is to be found elsewhere.

And the point, I think, is this: He misses them. These are people he loves and longs to see, he knows he will be killed before seeing them again, and he wants them to know how important they are to him. Note the heart-wrenching language in this morning’s lesson: “I thank my God upon every remembrance of you … I have you in my heart … How greatly I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ.” He will go on to remind them to be joyful, to be humble as our Lord who came to us as a servant, to avoid those who put their trust in the flesh and the works of the law (here, the putative occasion for the letter). But at the end of the epistle he returns again to how much he loves and misses the Philippians and how grateful he is for them.

So, I wonder, if our experience over the last two years might encourage the same fruit to be borne in us, the fruit of love and longing and gratitude for those whom we could not see and touch and share the physical manifestations of companionship – a shared meal, sitting round the Christmas tree, a hug. A sure and certain hope that those who did not make it will be held in the Father’s Almighty hands until we see and touch them once again on that other shore and in that greater light. This latter hope must have animated St. Paul who, as his own death drew near, encouraged the Philippians to rejoice.

I know we’re not entirely out of the woods. I sometimes suspect that in the era of vaccination, those of us who have seen our way to availing ourselves of that great gift (if I may be slightly controversial, for those who have not fallen prey to the satanic lie of antivaxxer propaganda), are being encouraged by omicron variant click-bait to live once again as those without hope. Even so, there are no guarantees, and I realize that those with suppressed immune systems and other conditions must remain vigilant. For many of us, this year’s Christmas will carry with it a difficult calculus of risk and reward, perhaps more difficult than last year when many of us had to come to terms with gathering being a more uncomplicatedly bad idea, as sad as that reality was.

Whatever one’s celebrations look like this year, though, I hope we’ll all take St. Paul’s words to the Philippians as our example and encouragement. To love and long for our brothers and sisters we cannot see is a good and godly thing. To feel and express gratitude when we do see each other again is the Christian response to the great gift of fellowship our Lord has established in making us all members of the same body. Let us never again take that for granted, and let us be ever swift to rejoice.

+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.

And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.

These are not particularly cheerful words during a season in which the culture-at-large tells us that it’s time to start celebrating Christmas. I’d guess that most of you here have been more-or-less successfully catechized to know that there is a difference between Advent and Christmas, a distinction which the church continues to maintain despite the fact that it seems that Christmas in the secular culture seems to keep expanding to envelope about the last quarter of every year in a phenomenon called “Christmas creep.” As jaundiced as one can be about this sort of thing, I continue to be surprised every year when I see Christmas displays in big-box stores well before Hallowe’en.

All this is well-trod ground for us, but I think that sometimes we say there is a difference between Advent and Christmas, but we don’t quite acknowledge what precisely the distinction is, or, more to the point, what Advent is really all about. We sometimes say that it is to prepare us spiritually for Christmas, a sort of fast before the feast in the same way that Lent prepares us for Easter. This is true, but there is a whole other theme in Advent which we sometimes shy away from: namely the second coming of Christ.

It should be no surprise that we tend to forget this part of the story, but it’s unfortunate nonetheless. We in the Christian mainstream have basically ceded this topic to fundamentalists, and that’s too bad, because there is a great deal of hope to be found in scripture’s account of the second advent of Christ. It’s not just weird, scary stuff.

Remember that scary passage from the Gospel reading with which I opened the sermon: the nations are in perplexity, people are fainting with fear, the seas roar, and the heavens shake? Here’s what comes next.

And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.

We get caught up in the nasty bits and we forget that the Gospel is Good News. We forget that it’s not about God inflicting havoc on the world, but about God coming to us in the midst of turmoil and, through Jesus Christ, setting all things right.

What our Lord is on about in this morning’s Gospel is that when things seem to be absolutely as horrible as they can possibly be, God is there ready to step in and establish justice and peace, to bring about the Kingdom of God.

We do pray for this every week for heaven’s sake: thy kingdom come. We pray for it because it’s a good thing. I’ve said before that, despite the obsessions of some streams of American, fundamentalist Protestantism, there are some things not worth worrying about. Don’t worry about some people getting raptured up and others left behind. Some very poor biblical scholars basically invented that idea in the nineteenth century. Don’t worry about the wrath of God coming down to give you your just deserts for saying a cross word to your kid or accidentally swallowing your toothpaste before church. This religion we’re a part of is about grace, not judgment. Don’t worry too much about the whole world going to hell in a handbasket (unless you’re specifically worrying about premature Christmas decorations, I guess). God won’t permit it to go that far. Just as nations and peoples start freaking out in today’s Gospel readings, God comes and sets things right before it gets too bad.

So, that’s really the upshot, here. Don’t freak out. “Keep calm and carry on” as that old English poster from the Second World War put it (there’s one in my study and it inspires me frequently). God is on our side. God will keep us safe. God will establish a kingdom without end. Watch for it and pray for it.

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