Merciful God,
who sent your messengers the prophets
to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation:
Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins,
that we may greet with joy the appearing of Jesus our Redeemer. Amen.
Do you remember what Hunt preached last week? Perhaps not a fair question.
It was a sermon addressing issues of grief and suffering
that frequently are in the back drop, if not the foreground
of our preparations for Christmas,
and the compassionate comfort of Advent hope and expectations.
Today we have another message of comfort
but with a different focus on the bleakness of the human condition.
It is the theme of repentance and forsaking our sins,
which, you have to admit, has been a perennial Advent theme.
Typically for us, however, we may repent and feel remorse,
but in all truth we rarely forsake our sins.
Sins, the common every day variety sins,
tend to become embedded into habit patterns
which are doomed to be repeated.
The kinds of sins I am thinking about here are not the text book sins,
like theft, murder and adultery,
but the more endemic, flying under the radar, kinds of sin,
so that without thinking we once again put our foot in it:
for instance, all the ways we subtly put down others,
diminishing them to make ourselves look better,
often without our even realizing what we just did;
or being indifferent to another’s needs,
or persisting in behavior that isolates us from others,
or showing our lack of faith in God
by trying to make ourselves good enough all on our own
so as not to need being saved, thank you very much.
Such is the spiritual condition of humanity,
and the scripture lessons for today address that.
Sin makes deserts out of our lives.
We have three readings from three prophets,
each with their message of repentance and preparing the way for salvation:
Isaiah,
Peter, writing in a prophetic manner in his second epistle, and John the Baptist.
In the collect for today we asked God to give us grace to heed their warnings,
so … let’s do that.
Isaiah, chapter 40: God is speaking comfort to a people decimated by defeat,
by the destruction of the center of their religion – the Temple,
and by exile.
“Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her
that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins.”
Now that is all over.
Now it is the time to prepare the way for salvation.
And a voice cries out in the wilderness,
in the desert, in the decimated place, the barren place:
Make a straight highway for our God.
Remove every obstacle, no depth, no height, no rocky uneven ground.
God comes.
And God’s glory shall be revealed. It will be all glory.
And all people shall see it together,
a vision of blinding glory and presence of God.
Who can bear to see all that!
A voice says, “Cry out.” And the prophet Isaiah responded, “What shall I cry?”
How does one respond and communicate such a vision of God coming in glory?
What is the glory of a human being in comparison with the glory of the Lord?
It is like the transitory glory of the short life of a flower.
In comparison all people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
when the breath of the Lord blows upon it.
God but breathes upon us, breath which gives us breath,
and in comparison with God’s timelessness,
that breath of life is but momentary.
Surely the people are grass – grass that withers, flowers that fade – terminal, everyone of us.
But the Word of our God will stand forever.
Such is the comfort that God speaks to the people,
the good tidings to be proclaimed.
God comes – with might, with an arm that rules, a strong arm,
the symbol of power.
And with that power of God is reward and recompense.
And that strong arm will gather the lambs and carry them in his bosom.
THIS is the comfort,
comfort with a twinge of fear:
knowing you are engulfed in a God of huge power.
Now Peter, his prophetic message:
“The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness,
but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish,
but all to come to repentance.”
Why?
Because there is this day coming, the Day of the Lord,
and it will be the end of life as we know it.
Now, before we all go off on various ideas about the Second Coming
or God’s judgment on all humankind,
and leap to theological conclusions, literal or symbolic,
consider this:
that what follows in Peter’s letter
is a description of what happens
for each individual
upon face to face encounter with the Living God.
Consider it personally:
“the day of the Lord will come like a thief” - suddenly and unpredictably.
Then the elements are dissolved with fire
and everything is disclosed.
The elements from which everything is composed, all that we know
goes up with a loud bang and a huge cloud of smoke,
and we are left naked before the Lord.
Prepare to meet your Maker.
If not a literal process,
this is certainly a spiritual process that will occur for each of us.
For some who are lucky, they will get knocked off their horse and blinded like Paul
and they will repent and be saved
and nothing will be the same for them;
all the elements of their previous lives melt away.
So to make it easier on yourself, prepare for the Day of the Lord, Peter says,
leading lives of holiness and
“strive to be found by him at peace.”
The promise is that when everything we know, our old way of seeing things,
goes up in flames, purged out of us,
then we will recognize “a new heaven and a new earth,
where righteousness is at home.”
We will wake up, be aware of our salvation
and no longer bound by patterns of behavior and attitudes
from that morass of subtle, and therefore insidious sins,
we will greet with joy the appearing of Jesus our Redeemer.
That is the message of comfort from Peter.
Now, the Gospel reading and John the Baptist:
What would Advent be without John the Baptist,
and his call from the desert to prepare the way of the Lord!
John the Baptist appears on the scene out of the wilderness,
out of the desert across the Jordan river,
a rocky, dry, barren, forbidding and harsh land.
He is a wild looking man with strange clothes and strange diet.
He tells us of a different kind
of preparation for Christmas and for Christ's coming
than trimming the tree and gift buying.
Sometimes it takes a wild man
to come in to our own figurative deserts,
the internal desert of the soul,
for us to become aware of that spiritual wilderness.
Sin makes deserts out of our lives.
So John the Baptist, echoing the cry of Isaiah,
calls us to repentance and confession of sin.
And here’s the Good News:
John baptizes with water,
but the One he is announcing, whose Advent we are preparing for,
Jesus
will baptize us with Holy Spirit – and with fire (Matthew and Luke add),
the fire that purges and cleanses
and enlightens us and energizes us,
that we may greet with joy the appearing of Jesus our Redeemer.
There is promise in all this talk about sin and repentance and Jesus coming.
Jack in his article on the Worship and Music Blog,
which you all should have received in the Emmanuel email
entitled Sunday Matters,
picks up on this other theme for today: promise.
Everyone be sure to read these articles that Jack writes. They’re good!
To quote Jack:
“Just like when we enter a river and the water rushes over us,
so when we are baptized are we entering the stream of God’s promises. Promises that go back thousands of years;
promises made to Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, the prophets, the apostles,
and to us.”
And the greatest promise is Jesus himself.
Come, Lord Jesus.
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