March 2024 Sunday services are at our Haddam Campus
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People Get Ready

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.

A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

A voice says, “Cry out!” And I said, “What shall I cry?” All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever. – Isaiah 40:1-8 NRSV

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’” — Luke 3:1-6

The Advent season in the Christian liturgical year has two centers of gravity. On the one hand, Advent prepares the way and paves the way for our annual journey to Bethlehem, where Jesus the Messiah was born, in whom are met “the hopes and fears of all the years.” During Advent, we are moving toward Bethlehem.

At the same time, during Advent, God in Christ—the “word become flesh”—is moving toward us. So on the other hand, this season is a time of patient yet expectant waiting. Advent has less to do with putting up our Christmas decorations and doing our Christmas shopping than with preparing ourselves for the very real possibility of the arrival of something new and different in our lives. As Simone Weil has written, “Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.” So there’s a sense in which Advent is the foundation of the Christian spiritual life.

Here is how one of my favorite authors, Frederick Buechner, visualizes this feeling of waiting patiently in expectation:
“We are in the dark, and the dark, God knows, is also in us. We watch and wait for a holiness to heal and hallow us, to liberate us from the dark. Advent is like the hush in a theater just before the curtain rises.” II don’t often go to the theater, but when I do, I love that hush after the house lights go down, just before the curtain rises. This is a beautiful image of expectant waiting, which to me means the hopeful anticipatory awareness that something really good is about to happen.

So where does John the Baptist, the messenger and forerunner of the Messiah, fit within this Advent theme of expectant waiting? In the words of my friend and colleague Susie Hayward:
“John the Baptist, that seminal one built up in a crescendo by the ancient Israelite prophets, the one granted the glorious task of readying the world for the Messiah’s arrival on earth… [John the Baptist] was not the sort of resplendent angel like we usually see around this time of year. He was a bug-eating wildman dressed in animal skins.”

She continues, “How awesome is that? I love it! It is such a testament to how fiercely God upturns our expectations in order to shake us awake and call us to a new way of living—a way of living in which we see the divine everywhere and in every bizarre character.” Susie concludes:
“But if the image of John does not get you looking at our sacred world through new eyes, his message should. Our Gospel reading today reminds us that before Jesus began his ministry, before he even arrived into the cold stink of barn, the world needed to prepare itself. And so John came to tell us that before we could be laid bare by the light of our Emmanuel, we needed to ‘Prepare his way by clearing a straight path for him.’”

John prepares the way for Jesus in several ways. He prepares the way for Jesus by evoking that spirit of expectant waiting in the crowds who come down to the Jordan River to hear this prophet preach. As charismatic and powerful as John is, he is not the Messiah—his vocation in history is to prepare the way for the Messiah, who is arriving to save the people, and soon. People, get ready, says John, it’s time to get prepared to witness what God is about to do, it’s time to get on board with what God is about to do.

John also prepares the way for Jesus by his baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Once people are willing to submit themselves to John’s baptism of repentance, they will be prepared to submit themselves to Jesus’ preaching of repentance and forgiveness. They will be prepared to submit themselves to Jesus’ healing with power and Jesus’ teaching with authority.

Here’s some wisdom on repentance from Barbara Brown Taylor:
“The way most of us were taught it, repentance means owning up to how rotten you are. It means saying out loud, if only in the auditorium of your own soul, that you are a selfish, sinful, deeply defective human being who grieves the heart of God and that you are very, very sorry about it. It means dumping all your pride on the ground and stamping on it, since pride—as in ego, arrogance, vainglory—is the root of so much evil.”

“Only what if it isn’t?,” asks Barbara Brown Taylor. “What if pride isn’t the problem at all, but its very opposite? What if the main thing most of us need to repent of is not our arrogance but our utter despair [and cynicism]—that things will never change for us, that we will never change, that no matter what we say or do we are stuck forever in the mess we have made of our lives, or the mess someone else has made of them, but in any case that there is no hope for us, no beginning again, no chance of new life—?”

This past week has been a good one for cynicism and despair. On Monday I was in the waiting room at a car dealership, trying to write this sermon while my car was being worked on. The TV in the waiting room was tuned to CNN, which was repeating bad news over and over again: the shootings at the Planned Parenthood center in Colorado Springs; further threats from the so-called Islamic State; a gun violence threat at the University of Chicago campus. On Wednesday the news was all about the mass shooting in San Bernardino – fourteen innocent people killed, twenty-one injured, including one police officer, the two shooters killed in a fierce gun battle with the police. Last week’s murder-suicide in Killingworth.

There is, simply put, an epidemic of gun violence in our nation. The causes of this epidemic are complex. Unlike other public health epidemics our nation has faced, there’s no political will on the part of Congress to take the necessary first steps toward understanding and overcoming this epidemic. For me, these two realities of gun violence and the lack of political will to address this epidemic are cause for cynicism and even despair.

I have found myself throughout this week often in the place described so well by Barbara Brown Taylor: caught in the conviction that “things will never change for us, that we will never change, that no matter what we say or do we are stuck forever in the mess we have made of our lives, or the mess someone else has made of them.”

We as a nation need to repent of all the ways in which we have contributed to this epidemic of gun violence. And I as an individual need to repent of my own fear “that there is no hope for us, no beginning again, no chance of new life.”

Again quoting Barbara Brown Taylor: “Those of us who have committed ourselves to a life of repentance and return will not give up on ourselves, no matter how many times we have to repeat the process. We will keep telling the truth and turning around, every day if need be. We will never say never (I’ll never recover, I’ll never get it, I’ll never learn). Why? Because we believe in God’s goodness more than we believe in our [human] badness.”

Yes, I believe in God’s goodness. I am also not naive about our human potential for badness. And I am sometimes less than confident about our human potential for goodness. What I need to remember, in times like these, is that every day in our “great world house,” we human beings engage in countless interactions of goodness and mercy with each other. In light of this reality, I hear John the Baptist—and Jesus—exhorting me to repent of my attitudes of powerlessness and hopelessness.

So here’s what’s on my Advent list this year, for me and for you.
 That we will not succumb to cynicism and despair.
 That we will believe in God’s goodness more than we believe in our own badness.
 That when the curtain rises after that hush in the theater, the drama that will unfold on the stage will be about God’s power to make new.
 That this unfolding drama will “shake us awake and call us to a new way of living”—a way of living in which we see the divine in countless human interactions of goodness and mercy.

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