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The Second Sunday in Advent The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: I have a confession to make. As much as I want to be filled with “holiday spirit,” I have a hard time with this time of year. I start to get cranky around Hallowe’en when the first Christmas decorations appear in the stores. My crankiness increases exponentially around Thanksgiving when cheesy pseudo-Christmas carols start to fill the air, and it is compounded by the constant news reports about how the shopping season is going and what the “must-haves” are this year. As much as I want to get caught up in the excitement of Christmas, I struggle with what the celebration of Christmas has become in our culture. And that is why Advent is so important to me. Like the children in our Godly Play classes, I grew up learning about the church calendar, and about Advent. For Episcopalians, Advent has long had a significant place in our liturgical calendar as the beginning of our church year, and perhaps more importantly, as a time to prepare for Christmas. That has not always been true in the “non-liturgical” denominations. However, Advent has been “catching on” even in these churches in recent years, so now if you were to wander into a Methodist or UCC congregation or even in some places a Baptist church this time of year you might find an Advent wreath and blue hangings and Advent hymns instead of the more familiar Christmas carols. As a cradle Episcopalian who grew up with Advent I might mark this up to other denominations finally “getting it,” but in truth I think the spread of Advent is at least in part due to a growing recognition on the part of people of faith that ever-expanding secular Christmas celebration, however much we might enjoy it, has resulted in a real loss of meaning in a key time in our church year. For me, and I think for many others, the importance of Advent is multiplied by a real discomfort with what celebrating Christmas has come to mean in our culture. Advent is in many ways the antithesis of what popular culture promotes in the weeks before Christmas. Popular culture pushes us to hurry up, to buy more, to spend more, to do more. Advent, on the other hand, encourages us to slow down, to pause and to prepare—not by engaging in a shopping and decorating frenzy, but rather to prepare for the coming of the Christ Child in prayer and reflection on what this coming means for us—to prepare for the Kingdom of God. Of course this need to prepare is nothing new. Prophets in the OT especially in times of trouble called the people of Israel to repent and to prepare for God’s coming just as we are called to prepare. And in our gospel reading today we find John the Baptist, perhaps the first NT prophet, whom we last met when he leapt in his mother’s womb upon her encounter with the newly pregnant Mary, we find this same John preaching in the wilderness in Judea, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Luke uses words from the prophet Isaiah to mark the import of this call:
Get ready. God is coming. Prepare the way because God is coming and all humanity will see the salvation that is God. In Luke’s context John is, of course, preparing his hearers for Jesus who is to usher in a new kingdom of God. In using the words of Isaiah Luke is reminding his readers of a God who perseveres with God’s people no matter how far they stray, no matter how disobedient and recalcitrant they become. And in our context John is calling US to prepare. Get ready. God is coming. Prepare the way because God is coming and all humanity will see the salvation that is God. John called the people of Israel to a baptism of repentance, a ritual cleansing, a washing clean of sins as they opened their hearts to God incarnate in Jesus. That made eminent sense in a society where purity and ritual cleanliness were emphasized. We are not situated in such a culture but surely we too are called to repent of our sins, to open our hearts to God incarnate in Jesus. What might it mean for us to do this, to “prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,” now in Advent and throughout the year? It might be helpful to think about what it means to “repent.” Every week when we say the confession we are “repenting” of our sins; we commonly see that as taking stock and then saying, “I’m sorry God, I’ll try not to do it again, and that is a good start. It’s just a start, however. The Greek word we translate as “repent”—metanoia—actually connotes something a bit strong: “turning away” from our sin, turning away and doing a new thing, Doing a new thing—what might that mean in our lives, turning away doing a new thing? Do we have the courage to imagine what this might be really like to do a truly new thing? Jesus gives us a picture of what doing this new thing might look like: A world where we love our neighbors as our selves, a world where we give up the status quo, in which no one is hungry, in which no one is hungry, where there is justice for all and peace such that the lion lies down with the lamb; in other words, a world in which the Kingdom of God is fully in force, Do we have the courage not only imagine such a world, but also to take steps to bring it close to reality? Can we avoid the paralysis that the enormity of such a vision often brings on, the paralysis that tells us that nothing we do really matters anyway? I’ll admit that I’m as subject to this paralysis as anyone. After all, we’ve been at this a long time; we’ve heard this call before. When we look around at the state of the world it is far too easy to feel impotent, to feel powerless to effect any changes at all. But here is where the Good News of Advent comes in: God is not calling us to do this all on our own. Even as God calls us to do this new thing, God also empowers us by sending Jesus, God’s only son to be our strength and our salvation. We can hear this call to do a new thing with fresh ears each year if only we dare, and we can begin again to bring such a world into being. And with the strength that is Jesus there should be no limit on what we can do if only we dare to try. If we dare to turn away from the status quo, if we dare to have the vision, if we look around us, empowered by Jesus’ strength and redeeming love, we will see places where that new kingdom, that new way of being is already breaking in. And we will see opportunities for jumping in, for doing something large or small to do that “new thing.” I’m sure that you can think of your own examples, but I will mention a few ways that I think we can do this:
I could go on, but I know that these are things probably aren’t entirely new to many of you. And these are thing that we can do all year long, not just at Christmas. What is crucial, I think, is recognizing that we can hear this call anew and truly believing that by embracing these actions and others like them we CAN do a “new thing”. And in a season and a culture that emphasize consumption, materialism, and self-gratification, holding on to that vision is more important than ever. As for me, I’ll get over my crankiness around Christmas Eve—because celebrating anew the coming of the Christ Child is a joyful and precious thing. But in the meantime, as we move through the weeks of Advent, my prayer for all of us is that we can hear the voice of the prophet calling in the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord and that we can have the courage to do that new thing, to live into what answering that call can mean. AMEN
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