Christmas Eve 2011
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
December 24, 1968. The world sat spellbound that Christmas Eve, as the astronauts of Apollo 8 sent back pictures to earth that had never been seen before – the bright blue planet from which the three men had come, hovering silently over the grey lifeless landscape of the moon beneath them. They were the first humans to orbit the moon, and that day being Christmas Eve, one astronaut was so moved by the sight of the earth from so far away that he read from the beginning of the book of Genesis.
The Apollo 8 astronauts chose those words from the first chapter of Genesis because they so clearly fit the scene they saw that Christmas Eve. Beneath them lay an utterly desolate, grey, lifeless moon. Yet over it rose the earth, a bright blue dot in a black sky, a place of life in the emptiness of space. The factual arguments of the story, creation versus evolution, faded away before them, as they grasped the truth of the story for them … the same truth of that old, old story for us, no matter whether you believe it factually or as a human way of explaining those things which can only be fully understood by the divine.
To those of us here on earth, those old words took on new meaning, they gave people hope, hope and optimism about our country at the end of a year when so much had gone wrong … in the midst of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Vietnam … we could still grasp the wonderful significance of what the astronauts were seeing and doing, so far away. Even those of us who were the little kids of 1968 could still realize that we were growing up in a time and place in which we were beginning to learn about the very beginnings of life … big, big stuff … stuff that previously had been so far beyond us, we hadn’t even dared to think about it.
It was as if a window into God’s eternity was thrown wide open, then and there, that Christmas Eve of 1968. I’ve been told – by those who were gathered there with them that night – that even the most unspiritual, just the facts and figures moon rocket scientists of that time were brought to a state of awe, and wonder, and prayer.
Now, I know that many of us here tonight don’t remember Christmas Eve 1968 … as one who was there said to me just days ago, “well, you’ll lose half your audience with that old story.”
Perhaps.
But we’ll all come back together and re-connect, with all of this.
Year after year, we still come here and see and experience Christmas Eve … we come to church tonight and see the candles burning and the decorations shining and sing the carols and hear the Scriptures read and … even us, practical, realistic, common-sense, double-tall-latted and I-padded Seattleites, we get all warm and fuzzy and even cry, if we have it in us.
And why is that?
Because we know, we trust, we feel with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, that the window into God’s eternity is wide open tonight. Our past and our present and our future are all laid out before us. These words and this music and these sights and smells remind us of Christmases past, times when we’ve been together with family and friends, times when we’ve felt safe and secure and loved. There’s a opening into the souls of even the most serious of us, where we can all be touched by the significance of what we come together to celebrate.
That’s the personal side of this night.
But we also have a collective story in which we share, one which touches us in an even better way.
It’s a story which starts far in the past … God speaking through the words of the Old Testament prophets, in the readings we’ve heard, speaking words of comfort and hope to a people who were suffering and thought that they were abandoned by God.
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light,” the prophet Isaiah said of his people … a people who were oppressed and suffering under social, economic and political injustice.
“A child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders;” these words spoke the hope of a people looking forward to a new, more powerful, earthly king in David’s line … and, beyond that … to a king who would rescue his people from sin and evil and death forever.
And the story continues … with God keeping his promises through that old but ever new sign of a child. First a baby born to the old Elizabeth and Zechariah – John the Baptist. Then an angel coming to Mary and promising her that she would bear God’s son - Jesus.
And then that special night when the window to eternity opened wide … a birth in a backwards town in a forgotten corner of the world, a baby born to an unlikely couple. An infant lying in straw … angels singing, shepherds hearing and seeing, God’s glory made visible to us in the birth of Christ our Lord.
And it is a story with a future … the child grown to be the man Jesus, who suffered and died on a cross but was raised again so that the window to God’s eternity might be open forever. “The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory …” Jesus’ gift to us is that we have a future and our future is together … in him. Together, with all those who have gone before us … some we never knew … and some whom we knew and loved very much and miss every day of our lives. Christ’s promise is that we will be together … one day … with him and in him … no more suffering, no more crying, no more pain … no more death … forever.
Tonight, that window to God’s eternity is wide open. The theologians may well call it the communion of saints, as we are surrounded by the angels and the past, present and future of the Church, on earth as it is in heaven. But we … we with our limited, finite understanding of the infinite … we might just call it “that Christmas spirit,” or feel it in a burst of gladness and tears that washes over us as we see a child’s face tonight … or sing our favorite Christmas carol … or look at the beautiful decorations … or remember a particular Christmas past, spent in happiness and warmth and safety. It’s our finite human way of experiencing God’s wide open window into eternity tonight.
For that is what Christmas Eve is all about.
And because of that gift of gifts, this night of nights, we can truly sing with those in heaven and those on earth, the saints and the angels, “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” Not just at that nativity 2000 years ago. But in this Nativity of 2011.
May you feel the window to God’s eternity wide open to you tonight. May you be blessed with that feeling … the essence of Christmas Eve. May your faith be strengthened through this worship … through the word and song … through being fed and strengthened by Jesus’ words of promise and hope in this meal we will soon share.
And, most important, as your heart and spirit are warmed by God’s Spirit … may that feeling of warmth and hope, joy and peace stay with you as you go from this place … to share with others this great news of the Birth of our Savior … until that day when he comes again and the window to God’s eternity is thrown wide open forever.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Sunday, December 18, 2011
18 December 2011
What is baptism? It’s an Advent Conspiracy.
“Love all”
4 Advent B
The Magnificat – Luke 1:46-55
18 December 2011
We’ve finally made it.
Yes, today we come to the end of our Advent journey … and granted, it’s been a bumpy one.
We began three weeks ago with the usual First Sunday in Advent words of apocalypse … Jesus’ warnings and encouraging about The End, his coming again.
Then we had our two weeks with John the Baptist … this year’s visit, some might say, mercifully short, no cursing the people, “You brood of vipers,” but still, there he was, hair shirted, ranting in the wilderness.
But remember … this year, we’ve laid two other themes on top of the Scriptures. Both are faithful to the texts … both are faithful to the sense of the season.
The first – our year-long focus – is on Baptism.
And the second – perhaps controversial to some – is the reform movement known as Advent Conspiracy. We’ve heard so far three of the four points of that reform of this season … Worship Fully, Spend Less, and Give More.
Maybe … with those texts, with those prominent themes; combined with life as it plays out for us, personally, corporately … maybe it hasn’t felt like, maybe it hasn’t been a happy Advent for you.
Not that the season of Advent – as Lutherans and other liturgical, church year cycle following Christians mark it – is ever really a “happy” time … as in gleeful and giddy. Apocalyptic Scripture isn’t usually part of the “feel good” hit parade of Bible readings. Neither does the hair shirted bug eater John the Baptist get everyone in a warm Yule mood.
But then, Advent was never supposed to be, as the song goes, the “most wonderful time of the year.” What Advent is all about … is joy … deep, abiding joy … trust and hope in the coming again of the Messiah to earth, the One who came once, who lived our life and suffered our suffering and died our death but rose again … to give us the promise, the hope, the deep joy of eternal life THEN … one day … which gives us the courage to fully engage in this life, to live, to risk, to share with others NOW.
Ah … but that was the past three weeks.
Today we are at the final stop in our Advent journey … the fourth Sunday in Advent … and, most certainly, happiness and cheerful holiday spirit are definitely among us.
Why, our Advent Conspiracy message for today is certainly one of warm holiday fuzziness for us … LOVE ALL. Certainly that’s a beloved, blessed outcome of our baptism, walking wet in God’s forgiveness, that we would LOVE ALL. It sounds like one of those Christmas carols we hear … “Why can’t it be Christmas the whole year long?” meaning that, ah, people just seem to be nicer and warmer and more loving and love-ly this time of year, and wouldn’t it be nice if that feeling lasted, at least into February.
And our text for today … it’s the lovely story of Mary; first her conversation with the angel Gabriel, the words of promise and hope coming to her, that she is the chosen one of God, chosen to bear God’s Messiah, God’s deliverer to the world … God for us, Emmanuel … and then, the song we’ve sung so many times, throughout Christian history and our own history here, Nativity, people of new birth, people who love these words … the Magnificat … “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”
How could we not be happy with this theme, these words before us?
How indeed.
So why don’t we take a deeper look at this text … there’s no harm in that, is there?
Yes … it’s true … we do know these words of Scripture quite well … but normally, they are inseparable from the music to which they are sung. There are many, many musical settings of Mary’s Magnificat … quite a number of hymns we have sung which include these words … but of course, it’s our dear favorite from Marty Haugen’s Holden Evening Prayer that likely rings in our ears loudest.
Today, though, different from past years, we’re deliberately not singing this Scripture-song … because I didn’t want the music to get in the way of our hearing what is, and isn’t, here for us.
So what is here?
There appear to be many deep contrasts in Mary’s words.
He has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant
Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed.
He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly
He has filled the hungry with good things
And sent the rich away empty
For Mary, these contrasts are directly related to the deep contrasts she saw in the world around her, and that she was experiencing personally.
First, in her own story … the visit from the angel, that great and terrible announcement to this poor little teenage girl … “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son … he will be called the Son of the Most High.”
Second, what she saw in the world of her time … the kings of the world, the wealthy and powerful rulers of Israel and the equally wealthy and powerful Roman occupiers, lording it over the poor and powerless of this backward corner of the world … especially this little rural backwater known as Nazareth.
We know Mary’s situation. It’s been painted and poured out in art and word and song for hundreds of years … God comes to poor lowly country girl, to announce that she will bear the Messiah.
The world is about to turn.
Those words … they are words of promise and hope, especially to those who are on the short end of things in the world … people like Mary, people who are poor, oppressed, suffering. Some would like this world-turning to happen on a speedier timeline … and on their own political terms. Mary’s words have of late been co-opted … watch out world; God’s deep reversal is going to be at work, cosmic Robin Hood-Jesus is coming to take from the rich and give to the poor and throw everything topsy-turvy … from the sound of some, you’d think Mary was the first century spokesperson for Occupy Nazareth.
Ah, but wait just a minute.
Is that what Mary’s really saying here?
We might think we live in a particularly unjust time in world history … but there have been plenty of other times when the inequality between rich and poor has been particularly striking.
Martin Luther’s, for example.
In 1522, right as he was being called before the Diet of Worms and the emperor Charles to defend his work in setting the church free from the tyranny of its powerful oppressors, Luther wrote a commentary on the Magnificat. From its early sentences, readers knew it would be a blockbuster.
[In these words] God breaks what is whole and makes whole what is broken.
With a start like that, people thought that here, Luther would write a work that would fan the fires of peasant revolt, turning servant and slave upon their master in revolution and world-turning.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he wrote of humility.
Those of low degree [of which Mary sings] are here not the humble, but all those who are contemptible and altogether nothing in the eyes of the world. It is the same expression that Mary applied to herself: “He has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” Nevertheless, those who are willing to be nothing and lowly of heart, and do not strive to be great, are truly humble. Now when God exalts them, it does not mean that God will put them in the seats of those God has cast out any more than that when God shows mercy to those who fear him, God puts them in the place of the learned, that is, the proud. Rather God lets them be exalted spiritually and in God, and be judges over seats and power and all might, here and hereafter; for they have more knowledge than all the learned and the mighty.
Humility, then, is the guiding light of these words of Mary. Not ‘revolution.’ Not a call for a violent moment when “the world is about to turn,” at least, in a political or economic sense. But instead, here is a Word to encourage those who are willing to be nothing for the sake of God, for the sake of their neighbor, for the sake of the world. Those who put place, power, prestige aside, and live, as Mary did, “Let it be.”
A quote from Mother Teresa here comes to mind:
A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, must empty ourselves. The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace.
Humility … and here we see a tie in, a link, with both our seasonal series as well. For what, indeed, is “Love All” but a call and a cry for humility … setting aside our own agendas for the sake of being a vessel for love, a servant in the journey of Jesus.
To put it in the vernacular … who is the person who you can’t stand the most? Your boss? That jerk who cut you off in traffic? Your teacher? A student? Newt Gingrich? Barack Obama?
Humility calls for an emptying of that hatred, a humbling of ourselves, a setting aside of even our most self-righteous anger … and loving … not just the ones we find loveable, not just the ones we view as “mild inconveniences” on our path … but the most annoying, obnoxious, downright opposite-to-our-nature-and-way-of-living people in our lives.
Ah, but you might say … look further. There’s more of the Magnificat.
Yes, there is.
So don’t these verses call forth some kind of “world about to turn-ned-ness?”
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
And lifted up the lowly
He has filled the hungry with good things
And sent the rich away empty.
Again, I’ll let the words of Luther speak:
Those who are lowly … are those who are willing to be in such a state … especially if they have been forced into it for the sake of God’s Word. On the other hand … what hindrance was their riches to the holy fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Or their high station or great riches to those who had them or who have them today, provided they do not set their hearts on them or seek their own advantage in them? “The Lord weighs the spirit,” that is, God judges not according to the outward appearance, whether one is rich or poor, high or low, but according to the spirit and how it behaves itself within.
Our wretched unbelief always hinders God from working [good works] in us, and ourselves from experiencing and knowing them. We desire to be filled and have plenty of everything before hunger and want arrive. We lay up provision against future hunger and need, so that we no longer have need of God and God’s works. What sort of faith is that which trusts in God, when all the while you feel and know that you have goods laid up to help yourself? This is to esteem temporal goods more than God and to put them in God’s place as an idol.
You see, Luther says, the beauty of the words of the Magnificat, are that they are all about God’s work, not ours. Here, in the words of Mary, God is not laying out some kind of world-turning revolution, taking from the rich and filling the poor … “everything for everyone” … no, to God, wealth and power have no standing whatsoever. In the coming Kingdom of God … the Kingdom which has its here and now start with the announcement of the birth of Jesus … wealth and power have no place at all.
So all the stuff we count as being of worth and value … all the things we end up spending our whole lives scratching and clawing after … place, power, prestige … status, honor, rank … the number of years one has served in a place as pastor, or been members of a church congregation … it doesn’t count for diddly squat, folks.
That’s the message of the Magnificat.
See, this is God’s justice at work … God’s justice, not ours … it’s not about the lowly clawing up and pulling down, or the wealthy and powerful hanging on to what they have rightfully earned … God cares for us, but God doesn’t care at all for our stuff-lust.
And you get that from Mary’s words here … if we have eyes to see and ears to hear … they most certainly are forward looking words.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
And lifted up the lowly
He has filled the hungry with good things
And sent the rich away empty.
Certainly, for anyone paying attention to the daily news of Mary’s time, this wasn’t the case. Certainly for anyone paying attention to the news of our own time, it’s not the case either.
That’s because these words are about life, life as seen through the lens of the Cross … yes, the Cross … here, even here at the height of the Advent season, we are called to view everything through the death of Jesus … the death of Jesus, into which our baptism has inextricably joined us …
in the words of the apostle Paul, “YOU, you who follow Jesus, you who are baptized into his baptism, YOU ARE DEAD, buried with him in baptism” … dead to all this, this worldly clawing and clutching, grasping and grabbing for place and honor … and stuff …
and “YOU ARE MADE ALIVE” … alive with Christ, for in your baptism, you have also risen with him, risen to a new life full of truth, forgiveness, giving and peace … in which you must LOVE ALL because nothing else matters anymore.
The beauty of the Magnificat is that Mary’s words make clear that God isn’t in the business of worldly revolution … but rather, the cosmic revolution of changing hearts forever. God’s politics are no more “Occupy Wall Street” than they are “Let them eat cake.”
Though … God hopes, God prays, God wills … in Christ … who calls us through our baptism into him to LOVE ALL … God calls us all to something new, a new way of living, here and now.
Again, Luther puts it so well:
How could one bring a more damning accusation against riches, or more grievously terrify the rich, than by saying that God sends them empty away? On the other hand, how could one be more strongly and comfortably moved to willing endurance of hunger and poverty than by these fine words of the Mother of God – that God will fill all the hungry with good things?
We have here such a promise of God and such strong comfort … for God’s own beloved people [us], for whose sake God also became man, to redeem [us] from the power of the devil, of sin, death, and hell, and to lead us to righteousness, eternal life, and salvation. That is the help of which Mary sings.
God’s promise … God’s help … God’s call, in Jesus, to a new way of living. For God is in the business of changing hearts … not changing politics … though, as hearts change, politics will surely, necessarily change too.
In other words … true love, God’s love, is a matter of faith. We don’t see it now fully, we don’t experience it now fully; and this life surely as we live it, will be more sad than happy, always, in all ways. This is the truth and reality of life in this world …
…Mary’s world, where the angel’s announcement to her, that she, an unmarried girl barely in her teens, would become pregnant with God’s son … this Word would bring her anything but happiness …
… and our world, where the words and actions of justice and peace, comfort and hope, are always, always in the minority.
But we have a deep abiding joy … a joy which will not be taken from us …
… for Mary, as Mary sings, as Mary says, we have a merciful God … or rather, that merciful God has us …
… and for us all, that same merciful God wants and works and wills that no one would be condemned to the hell of being sent away empty … neither the poor of this world nor the poor of the next … but instead, that God’s good and gracious will is that all … both the empty, and the full … the poor, and the rich … the powerful, and the meek … that all would be saved, to live, then in the future, and now as well, to live in the full-ness of God.
And so Mary’s song must be our song … Mary’s words, our words … heart changing words of Gospel truth … as we are called and gathered here to WORSHIP FULLY, fed on forgiveness and grace, sent forth to risk and to serve, to SPEND LESS but GIVE MORE, to tend relationships and not stuff, not just Conspiring together to overturn the Advent chaos and mess which we’ve made of this season … but to carry into the world a good Word, the best Word, of deep, lasting Hope and Peace, Joy and Love …
Blessed indeed are they who believe that there will be a fulfillment of what is spoken to us by the Lord.
Happiness is overrated but LOVING ALL is not … it is our call, our cry, our mission, not just in Advent, but all year through.
And so there’s nothing left to say this Advent … nothing more than … Merry Christmas …
… blessed Good Friday …
… Happy Easter …
… and may Jesus come again soon, to make IT, and US, ALL right. Amen.
“Love all”
4 Advent B
The Magnificat – Luke 1:46-55
18 December 2011
We’ve finally made it.
Yes, today we come to the end of our Advent journey … and granted, it’s been a bumpy one.
We began three weeks ago with the usual First Sunday in Advent words of apocalypse … Jesus’ warnings and encouraging about The End, his coming again.
Then we had our two weeks with John the Baptist … this year’s visit, some might say, mercifully short, no cursing the people, “You brood of vipers,” but still, there he was, hair shirted, ranting in the wilderness.
But remember … this year, we’ve laid two other themes on top of the Scriptures. Both are faithful to the texts … both are faithful to the sense of the season.
The first – our year-long focus – is on Baptism.
And the second – perhaps controversial to some – is the reform movement known as Advent Conspiracy. We’ve heard so far three of the four points of that reform of this season … Worship Fully, Spend Less, and Give More.
Maybe … with those texts, with those prominent themes; combined with life as it plays out for us, personally, corporately … maybe it hasn’t felt like, maybe it hasn’t been a happy Advent for you.
Not that the season of Advent – as Lutherans and other liturgical, church year cycle following Christians mark it – is ever really a “happy” time … as in gleeful and giddy. Apocalyptic Scripture isn’t usually part of the “feel good” hit parade of Bible readings. Neither does the hair shirted bug eater John the Baptist get everyone in a warm Yule mood.
But then, Advent was never supposed to be, as the song goes, the “most wonderful time of the year.” What Advent is all about … is joy … deep, abiding joy … trust and hope in the coming again of the Messiah to earth, the One who came once, who lived our life and suffered our suffering and died our death but rose again … to give us the promise, the hope, the deep joy of eternal life THEN … one day … which gives us the courage to fully engage in this life, to live, to risk, to share with others NOW.
Ah … but that was the past three weeks.
Today we are at the final stop in our Advent journey … the fourth Sunday in Advent … and, most certainly, happiness and cheerful holiday spirit are definitely among us.
Why, our Advent Conspiracy message for today is certainly one of warm holiday fuzziness for us … LOVE ALL. Certainly that’s a beloved, blessed outcome of our baptism, walking wet in God’s forgiveness, that we would LOVE ALL. It sounds like one of those Christmas carols we hear … “Why can’t it be Christmas the whole year long?” meaning that, ah, people just seem to be nicer and warmer and more loving and love-ly this time of year, and wouldn’t it be nice if that feeling lasted, at least into February.
And our text for today … it’s the lovely story of Mary; first her conversation with the angel Gabriel, the words of promise and hope coming to her, that she is the chosen one of God, chosen to bear God’s Messiah, God’s deliverer to the world … God for us, Emmanuel … and then, the song we’ve sung so many times, throughout Christian history and our own history here, Nativity, people of new birth, people who love these words … the Magnificat … “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”
How could we not be happy with this theme, these words before us?
How indeed.
So why don’t we take a deeper look at this text … there’s no harm in that, is there?
Yes … it’s true … we do know these words of Scripture quite well … but normally, they are inseparable from the music to which they are sung. There are many, many musical settings of Mary’s Magnificat … quite a number of hymns we have sung which include these words … but of course, it’s our dear favorite from Marty Haugen’s Holden Evening Prayer that likely rings in our ears loudest.
Today, though, different from past years, we’re deliberately not singing this Scripture-song … because I didn’t want the music to get in the way of our hearing what is, and isn’t, here for us.
So what is here?
There appear to be many deep contrasts in Mary’s words.
He has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant
Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed.
He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly
He has filled the hungry with good things
And sent the rich away empty
For Mary, these contrasts are directly related to the deep contrasts she saw in the world around her, and that she was experiencing personally.
First, in her own story … the visit from the angel, that great and terrible announcement to this poor little teenage girl … “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son … he will be called the Son of the Most High.”
Second, what she saw in the world of her time … the kings of the world, the wealthy and powerful rulers of Israel and the equally wealthy and powerful Roman occupiers, lording it over the poor and powerless of this backward corner of the world … especially this little rural backwater known as Nazareth.
We know Mary’s situation. It’s been painted and poured out in art and word and song for hundreds of years … God comes to poor lowly country girl, to announce that she will bear the Messiah.
The world is about to turn.
Those words … they are words of promise and hope, especially to those who are on the short end of things in the world … people like Mary, people who are poor, oppressed, suffering. Some would like this world-turning to happen on a speedier timeline … and on their own political terms. Mary’s words have of late been co-opted … watch out world; God’s deep reversal is going to be at work, cosmic Robin Hood-Jesus is coming to take from the rich and give to the poor and throw everything topsy-turvy … from the sound of some, you’d think Mary was the first century spokesperson for Occupy Nazareth.
Ah, but wait just a minute.
Is that what Mary’s really saying here?
We might think we live in a particularly unjust time in world history … but there have been plenty of other times when the inequality between rich and poor has been particularly striking.
Martin Luther’s, for example.
In 1522, right as he was being called before the Diet of Worms and the emperor Charles to defend his work in setting the church free from the tyranny of its powerful oppressors, Luther wrote a commentary on the Magnificat. From its early sentences, readers knew it would be a blockbuster.
[In these words] God breaks what is whole and makes whole what is broken.
With a start like that, people thought that here, Luther would write a work that would fan the fires of peasant revolt, turning servant and slave upon their master in revolution and world-turning.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he wrote of humility.
Those of low degree [of which Mary sings] are here not the humble, but all those who are contemptible and altogether nothing in the eyes of the world. It is the same expression that Mary applied to herself: “He has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” Nevertheless, those who are willing to be nothing and lowly of heart, and do not strive to be great, are truly humble. Now when God exalts them, it does not mean that God will put them in the seats of those God has cast out any more than that when God shows mercy to those who fear him, God puts them in the place of the learned, that is, the proud. Rather God lets them be exalted spiritually and in God, and be judges over seats and power and all might, here and hereafter; for they have more knowledge than all the learned and the mighty.
Humility, then, is the guiding light of these words of Mary. Not ‘revolution.’ Not a call for a violent moment when “the world is about to turn,” at least, in a political or economic sense. But instead, here is a Word to encourage those who are willing to be nothing for the sake of God, for the sake of their neighbor, for the sake of the world. Those who put place, power, prestige aside, and live, as Mary did, “Let it be.”
A quote from Mother Teresa here comes to mind:
A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, must empty ourselves. The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace.
Humility … and here we see a tie in, a link, with both our seasonal series as well. For what, indeed, is “Love All” but a call and a cry for humility … setting aside our own agendas for the sake of being a vessel for love, a servant in the journey of Jesus.
To put it in the vernacular … who is the person who you can’t stand the most? Your boss? That jerk who cut you off in traffic? Your teacher? A student? Newt Gingrich? Barack Obama?
Humility calls for an emptying of that hatred, a humbling of ourselves, a setting aside of even our most self-righteous anger … and loving … not just the ones we find loveable, not just the ones we view as “mild inconveniences” on our path … but the most annoying, obnoxious, downright opposite-to-our-nature-and-way-of-living people in our lives.
Ah, but you might say … look further. There’s more of the Magnificat.
Yes, there is.
So don’t these verses call forth some kind of “world about to turn-ned-ness?”
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
And lifted up the lowly
He has filled the hungry with good things
And sent the rich away empty.
Again, I’ll let the words of Luther speak:
Those who are lowly … are those who are willing to be in such a state … especially if they have been forced into it for the sake of God’s Word. On the other hand … what hindrance was their riches to the holy fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Or their high station or great riches to those who had them or who have them today, provided they do not set their hearts on them or seek their own advantage in them? “The Lord weighs the spirit,” that is, God judges not according to the outward appearance, whether one is rich or poor, high or low, but according to the spirit and how it behaves itself within.
Our wretched unbelief always hinders God from working [good works] in us, and ourselves from experiencing and knowing them. We desire to be filled and have plenty of everything before hunger and want arrive. We lay up provision against future hunger and need, so that we no longer have need of God and God’s works. What sort of faith is that which trusts in God, when all the while you feel and know that you have goods laid up to help yourself? This is to esteem temporal goods more than God and to put them in God’s place as an idol.
You see, Luther says, the beauty of the words of the Magnificat, are that they are all about God’s work, not ours. Here, in the words of Mary, God is not laying out some kind of world-turning revolution, taking from the rich and filling the poor … “everything for everyone” … no, to God, wealth and power have no standing whatsoever. In the coming Kingdom of God … the Kingdom which has its here and now start with the announcement of the birth of Jesus … wealth and power have no place at all.
So all the stuff we count as being of worth and value … all the things we end up spending our whole lives scratching and clawing after … place, power, prestige … status, honor, rank … the number of years one has served in a place as pastor, or been members of a church congregation … it doesn’t count for diddly squat, folks.
That’s the message of the Magnificat.
See, this is God’s justice at work … God’s justice, not ours … it’s not about the lowly clawing up and pulling down, or the wealthy and powerful hanging on to what they have rightfully earned … God cares for us, but God doesn’t care at all for our stuff-lust.
And you get that from Mary’s words here … if we have eyes to see and ears to hear … they most certainly are forward looking words.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
And lifted up the lowly
He has filled the hungry with good things
And sent the rich away empty.
Certainly, for anyone paying attention to the daily news of Mary’s time, this wasn’t the case. Certainly for anyone paying attention to the news of our own time, it’s not the case either.
That’s because these words are about life, life as seen through the lens of the Cross … yes, the Cross … here, even here at the height of the Advent season, we are called to view everything through the death of Jesus … the death of Jesus, into which our baptism has inextricably joined us …
in the words of the apostle Paul, “YOU, you who follow Jesus, you who are baptized into his baptism, YOU ARE DEAD, buried with him in baptism” … dead to all this, this worldly clawing and clutching, grasping and grabbing for place and honor … and stuff …
and “YOU ARE MADE ALIVE” … alive with Christ, for in your baptism, you have also risen with him, risen to a new life full of truth, forgiveness, giving and peace … in which you must LOVE ALL because nothing else matters anymore.
The beauty of the Magnificat is that Mary’s words make clear that God isn’t in the business of worldly revolution … but rather, the cosmic revolution of changing hearts forever. God’s politics are no more “Occupy Wall Street” than they are “Let them eat cake.”
Though … God hopes, God prays, God wills … in Christ … who calls us through our baptism into him to LOVE ALL … God calls us all to something new, a new way of living, here and now.
Again, Luther puts it so well:
How could one bring a more damning accusation against riches, or more grievously terrify the rich, than by saying that God sends them empty away? On the other hand, how could one be more strongly and comfortably moved to willing endurance of hunger and poverty than by these fine words of the Mother of God – that God will fill all the hungry with good things?
We have here such a promise of God and such strong comfort … for God’s own beloved people [us], for whose sake God also became man, to redeem [us] from the power of the devil, of sin, death, and hell, and to lead us to righteousness, eternal life, and salvation. That is the help of which Mary sings.
God’s promise … God’s help … God’s call, in Jesus, to a new way of living. For God is in the business of changing hearts … not changing politics … though, as hearts change, politics will surely, necessarily change too.
In other words … true love, God’s love, is a matter of faith. We don’t see it now fully, we don’t experience it now fully; and this life surely as we live it, will be more sad than happy, always, in all ways. This is the truth and reality of life in this world …
…Mary’s world, where the angel’s announcement to her, that she, an unmarried girl barely in her teens, would become pregnant with God’s son … this Word would bring her anything but happiness …
… and our world, where the words and actions of justice and peace, comfort and hope, are always, always in the minority.
But we have a deep abiding joy … a joy which will not be taken from us …
… for Mary, as Mary sings, as Mary says, we have a merciful God … or rather, that merciful God has us …
… and for us all, that same merciful God wants and works and wills that no one would be condemned to the hell of being sent away empty … neither the poor of this world nor the poor of the next … but instead, that God’s good and gracious will is that all … both the empty, and the full … the poor, and the rich … the powerful, and the meek … that all would be saved, to live, then in the future, and now as well, to live in the full-ness of God.
And so Mary’s song must be our song … Mary’s words, our words … heart changing words of Gospel truth … as we are called and gathered here to WORSHIP FULLY, fed on forgiveness and grace, sent forth to risk and to serve, to SPEND LESS but GIVE MORE, to tend relationships and not stuff, not just Conspiring together to overturn the Advent chaos and mess which we’ve made of this season … but to carry into the world a good Word, the best Word, of deep, lasting Hope and Peace, Joy and Love …
Blessed indeed are they who believe that there will be a fulfillment of what is spoken to us by the Lord.
Happiness is overrated but LOVING ALL is not … it is our call, our cry, our mission, not just in Advent, but all year through.
And so there’s nothing left to say this Advent … nothing more than … Merry Christmas …
… blessed Good Friday …
… Happy Easter …
… and may Jesus come again soon, to make IT, and US, ALL right. Amen.
Sunday, December 04, 2011
4 December 2011
What is baptism? It’s an Advent Conspiracy.
“Spend less”
2 Advent B
4 December 2011
Last week we began the season of Advent, and our “Advent Conspiracy” series, with a remembrance of a television series – in that case, Seinfeld, and how it launched a whole new holiday, Festivus, created especially for people who have grown disgusted with what Christmas has become in our culture. Overblown, drawn out forever, and dollar-driven … many, many people have said “there’s got to be another way.”
That way for the creators of the Advent Conspiracy was our initial focus … Worship Fully … meaning that, the holiday begins, and ends, in Jesus … and by worshipping fully, by following our baptismal calling to live fully into the preparation and anticipation of the season of Advent … preparing for, anticipating Jesus’ return to earth once again, rejoicing in the Good News that the kingdom of God is coming “on earth as it is in heaven,” … and we ourselves, dying and rising with Jesus, joined with him in our own baptism … we are given freedom to reject the death-bound ways of worldly living (like overbloated Christmas) and instead, embrace real, authentic, faith-filled life, so we can truly receive and celebrate Christmas as God intends it … GOD, FOR US.
But that was last week.
This week, this Second Sunday in Advent, we move ahead … move ahead, with the word of … another television show.
It’s one of those “train wreck” kind of reality programs … presenting situations so horrible and awful, you feel like you have to turn away … but we don’t … we’ve got to watch because we just can’t believe it’s true. Perhaps it’s one of your “guilty pleasures.”
I’m talking about “Hoarders,” the series on A&E which focuses on people who are literally surrounded by their stuff.
Many of us save things … some of us more than others. We collect t-shirts and baseball hats, ticket stubs and commemorative plates. My dad was a “saver” … not a hoarder, but he kept an inordinate amount of stuff in his basement shop … some of it, things he’d fished out of the trash that my mom, my brother and I had thrown out. So the three of us – all “throwers” … we learned the neat trick of setting things in the outside trash can right before the garbage got picked up.
“Throwers” don’t save much … we give it away or recycle it or sell it or just plain get rid of it because we like things neat and tidy with lots of room to move around.
But I digress … we were talking, not about savers and throwers, but “Hoarders.” These are the extreme people who have massive problems with massive amounts of STUFF.
One recent episode of “Hoarders” showed a man who had somewhere between 50 and 60 cars in his yard, all in various states of disrepair and decomposition. Another woman’s house had every room filled with bins and bins of videotapes she’d recorded on her 10 or 15 VCRs. And many of the hoarders simply have houses crammed full of … STUFF … you name it, they have it, piled so high they can’t get through the doorways of their houses, and when they do manage to crawl in they can’t get in bed, can’t use the dining table, can’t even hardly move because of the sheer amount of STUFF. So each episode follows the trials and tribulations of these hoarders … most of them, in some kind of life crisis (usually a demand from a family member or the local authorities) to clean up their place, to reduce their piles of stuff, to throw things out, recycle, just plain GET RID OF IT. And the “train wreck” comes in the watching, the seeing, how they (usually) just can’t do it … can’t bring themselves to part with any of it.
The show points out, that there are more and more hoarders, more and more people in crisis over having too much stuff, all the time.
Really, it’s the nightmare scenario of the American way, isn’t it? This end result of the consumerist merry-go-round we all are on … hoarding, throwing, saving, losing, it really doesn’t matter, because it’s still all about our STUFF, isn’t it?
To have STUFF to give or throw away, we have to have bought the STUFF in the first place.
We buy a lot of STUFF at all times of the year; the economists and politicians are all very happy when we decide, to heck with our budgets, LET’S GO SHOPPING.
But at Christmas, even in the worst of times, we pull off the brakes and go all out.
The good folks at Advent Conspiracy know this … and here’s what they have to say about it:
We like gifts. Our kids really like gifts. But consider this: America spends an average of $450 billion a year every Christmas. How often have you spent money on Christmas presents for no other reason than obligation? How many times have you received a gift out of that same obligation? Thanks, but no thanks, right?
And so in this second week of our participation in the Conspiracy, they present us with this challenge:
We’re asking people to SPEND LESS … to consider buying ONE LESS GIFT this Christmas. Just one. Sounds insignificant, yet many who have taken this small sacrifice have experienced something nothing less than a miracle: They have been more available to celebrate Christ during the Advent season.
Spend Less this Christmas? Why, it sounds positively un-American!
I mean, haven’t we been told by our leaders, exhorted by our authorities, that the way we’ll get out of our economic mess is TO GO SHOPPING????!
I can just hear the economists and politicians now: “Why, in our economy which is almost totally built on consumption, if everyone Spent Less, we’d be plunged into recession. Maybe even, depression. Hundreds of thousands, millions, would suffer because of that ONE GIFT NOT PURCHASED.
Well, probably not.
But, maybe?
AND SO WHAT IF IT DID put a little dent into our economy?
Might that actually point out that what’s really messed up isn’t the suggestion that we buy one less gift this Christmas, but OUR mindset and OUR behavior instead … credit-carded, buy it now, pay for it later, endless consumption of more and more AND MORE STUFF.
So why do we do it, anyway?
It almost seems like, like, we’re looking for meaning in our STUFF.
Certainly that’s true for those television show-“Hoarders.” Each program always features a psychologist brought in to help provide the hoarder much-needed therapy. And the first thing we hear from the psychologist each week, is that the Hoarder is initially unable to give up even one little thing because to them, it means giving up part of who they are.
But I’m probably being too hard on the Hoarders. For we all try to find identity, meaning, in our stuff. Part of why we buy STUFF is because of what we believe the STUFF says about us. The kind of car we drive, the house we live in, the labels on the clothes we wear, the ZIP code in which we choose to live, that’s the way we believe we show our identity to the world.
What a contrast to the texts we have before us today. Yes, they are also about identity, who people are, who WE are, but they’re sure not focused on STUFF.
Isaiah’s word comes as to us as pure grace. It’s not the harsh prophetic word of judgment for God’s people that we hear in the first chapters of this book. No, here the people Israel have already lost the war and been hauled off into exile in Babylon. They’ve had the land of God’s promise taken from them because of their greed and idolatry.
Everything bad that they feared has come to pass. What their living has gotten them into is a wilderness, for sure, a place where all that they’d been certain and sure of in their lives, their very identity, has been snatched away from them.
So Isaiah’s word comes to them, helpless, hurting people, to remind them of WHOSE they are, so they can once again know WHO they are:
In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand fast forever.
Despite your search for identity away from me, Israel … God says to them … despite your wandering away into a wilderness where you have felt abandoned and become hopeless … despite all this, God says to them, my promises to you remain true and FOR YOU. I will once again rescue you from the ‘fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into’ because I am your God and you are my people, and I will be your shepherd, your caregiver, your help and your hope, and I will never leave you.
Then there’s our Gospel text. It starts out The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and at first, it certainly sounds like good news, quoting word for word what Isaiah said to his people centuries earlier.
Ah, but the one we encounter in these words isn’t a comforting Isaiah, but a hair-shirted John the Baptist, calling people to repent, to turn from their sins, to turn around and follow God’s call to holy living.
But once again, we hear a word about identity … knowing whose we are, so we can know WHO we are.
John is calling people to baptism, to be sure … but his is a baptism of repentance, for forgiveness. It was an ancient Jewish practice still done today, called Mikveh , a ritual bath of immersion for purification. This kind of baptism which John offers would have to be repeated time and time again, as many times as people sin and become impure, they would need to be immersed.
Yet John points beyond himself … to the one whose way he is preparing … the one whose Good News is being proclaimed in these opening verses of Mark’s gospel:
He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.
The good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is that his baptism will inseparably link his people with him, forever … his people, US, WE will be baptized with the same Holy Spirit with which he, Jesus, is baptized. And so we recall the words we heard last week about that baptism:
• On the one hand, Baptism = death. Being joined to Jesus in his baptism means dying to the old ways of sin and death. Dying to the death-bound ways of the world. Dying to how far short we fall from where God calls us to live and be, to and for others.
• On the other hand, Baptism = life. Being raised with Christ, we are raised FOR something. And that something is life … full, rich, and abundant … free from the fears that we’re going to lose out on something … whether it’s place or stuff or whatever other gods, other idols we’ve placed in our path along the way. In Baptism, we have DIED to the death-bound ways of the world, and been RAISED to life together, in Christ, forever.
The Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, which we received from last week’s text is that we no longer fear “the End” because our End is in Jesus Christ, the Lord of life and forgiveness and salvation, … and he is in God and with God, forever.
The Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, which is for us this week is that our identity, our True Identity, is … baptized child of God, brother or sister of the one who brings Good News in his very self, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
In other words … our STUFF is not us, whether that’s a fancy car, piles of video cassettes or clothes or papers hoarded away … or pride in a clean, tidy house, an organized desk, or a showroom-condition car. We are not saved from our sins by our hoarding or our throwing, our saving or our recycling.
OUR STUFF IS NOT US.
No, we are given our indelible identity in our baptism … though the water evaporates, it leaves its mark on us permanently, because, as Luther tells us in his Catechism,
Baptism is not just water.
The Good News for us here this week is that Baptism is Identity for us … we are part of God’s Kingdom, on earth as it is in heaven, what will be perfect then, is not yet perfect now, but still in the works nonetheless. We are walking wet works in progress … dead in Baptism, alive in Baptism, sinner-saints, sent forth to bring wet footprints of God’s love into the world.
And Advent is the perfect time for us to focus on “walking wet,” all our Baptism means for us.
In the old, old church days … Advent was seen as a ‘little Lent,’ a time of repentance, preparation before the festival of the Incarnation of Jesus … Christmas. Though we use blue as our liturgical color for Advent now, we still have a vestige of that Lenten link in the purple and pink candles of Advent … purple being the liturgical color for Lent.
And that’s not a bad thing. We hear the Baptist’s call for repentance today, and we heed it … heed it by repenting from our overspending, overconsuming ways that have marked Christmas for us in the past. We can turn from that poor way of marking the Advent, the coming of our God in Jesus Christ … turn from it, if even a little, hearing and following the Advent Conspiracy call to a simpler celebration this year.
And in the Baptist’s words we’re also given freedom … freedom from our fears and courage to take risks … little risks (like not giving in to the needless ‘well, she bought me something, so I need to buy her something’ cycle), but meaningful ones nonetheless … giving us more freedom, more time to spend in our true calling as disciples of Jesus, to continue to go and grow in faith …
So here’s a suggestion … with the time you’ll gain from doing less shopping … why not take up a devotional life?
Here’s a Word for you which doesn’t have to cost you a cent. The Daily Texts are a great way to engage with the Scriptures every day, brief readings and prayers which millions of people have used worldwide since the 1700s to begin their day with a Word of faith and life.
Yes, they are produced by the Moravian Church, one of our ecumenical church partners … but millions of Lutherans use them, too. They were Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s constant companion throughout his life, including his time in Nazi prisons. And they can be yours, too, just by visiting the Moravian Church’s website (I’ve run off copies of the web page and they’re on the round table – with the url listed) and signing up for email delivery of the Daily Texts, each day.
If you’re more a book person, you can also order your own personal copy of the Daily Texts for a little more than $10, by using the order form which is attached.
I ask you, Nativity, God calls you, Nativity, to go deeper in faith … not just “going to church,” but BEING CHURCH.
For Jesus has given us an indelible identity, our true identity, in our baptism.
And we are called to set aside that masks that identity … hiding behind our STUFF, our
busy-ness, in fear of going deeper prayerfully, spiritually, in faith … we are called to set that all aside, to unmask, to cease hiding … and walk wet … fearlessly, in faith, in love, in service … walk wet into God’s future … where all that matters is that we are IN HIM, brothers and sisters of our Lord, given his same Spirit, beloved, baptized children of God.
Amen.
“Spend less”
2 Advent B
4 December 2011
Last week we began the season of Advent, and our “Advent Conspiracy” series, with a remembrance of a television series – in that case, Seinfeld, and how it launched a whole new holiday, Festivus, created especially for people who have grown disgusted with what Christmas has become in our culture. Overblown, drawn out forever, and dollar-driven … many, many people have said “there’s got to be another way.”
That way for the creators of the Advent Conspiracy was our initial focus … Worship Fully … meaning that, the holiday begins, and ends, in Jesus … and by worshipping fully, by following our baptismal calling to live fully into the preparation and anticipation of the season of Advent … preparing for, anticipating Jesus’ return to earth once again, rejoicing in the Good News that the kingdom of God is coming “on earth as it is in heaven,” … and we ourselves, dying and rising with Jesus, joined with him in our own baptism … we are given freedom to reject the death-bound ways of worldly living (like overbloated Christmas) and instead, embrace real, authentic, faith-filled life, so we can truly receive and celebrate Christmas as God intends it … GOD, FOR US.
But that was last week.
This week, this Second Sunday in Advent, we move ahead … move ahead, with the word of … another television show.
It’s one of those “train wreck” kind of reality programs … presenting situations so horrible and awful, you feel like you have to turn away … but we don’t … we’ve got to watch because we just can’t believe it’s true. Perhaps it’s one of your “guilty pleasures.”
I’m talking about “Hoarders,” the series on A&E which focuses on people who are literally surrounded by their stuff.
Many of us save things … some of us more than others. We collect t-shirts and baseball hats, ticket stubs and commemorative plates. My dad was a “saver” … not a hoarder, but he kept an inordinate amount of stuff in his basement shop … some of it, things he’d fished out of the trash that my mom, my brother and I had thrown out. So the three of us – all “throwers” … we learned the neat trick of setting things in the outside trash can right before the garbage got picked up.
“Throwers” don’t save much … we give it away or recycle it or sell it or just plain get rid of it because we like things neat and tidy with lots of room to move around.
But I digress … we were talking, not about savers and throwers, but “Hoarders.” These are the extreme people who have massive problems with massive amounts of STUFF.
One recent episode of “Hoarders” showed a man who had somewhere between 50 and 60 cars in his yard, all in various states of disrepair and decomposition. Another woman’s house had every room filled with bins and bins of videotapes she’d recorded on her 10 or 15 VCRs. And many of the hoarders simply have houses crammed full of … STUFF … you name it, they have it, piled so high they can’t get through the doorways of their houses, and when they do manage to crawl in they can’t get in bed, can’t use the dining table, can’t even hardly move because of the sheer amount of STUFF. So each episode follows the trials and tribulations of these hoarders … most of them, in some kind of life crisis (usually a demand from a family member or the local authorities) to clean up their place, to reduce their piles of stuff, to throw things out, recycle, just plain GET RID OF IT. And the “train wreck” comes in the watching, the seeing, how they (usually) just can’t do it … can’t bring themselves to part with any of it.
The show points out, that there are more and more hoarders, more and more people in crisis over having too much stuff, all the time.
Really, it’s the nightmare scenario of the American way, isn’t it? This end result of the consumerist merry-go-round we all are on … hoarding, throwing, saving, losing, it really doesn’t matter, because it’s still all about our STUFF, isn’t it?
To have STUFF to give or throw away, we have to have bought the STUFF in the first place.
We buy a lot of STUFF at all times of the year; the economists and politicians are all very happy when we decide, to heck with our budgets, LET’S GO SHOPPING.
But at Christmas, even in the worst of times, we pull off the brakes and go all out.
The good folks at Advent Conspiracy know this … and here’s what they have to say about it:
We like gifts. Our kids really like gifts. But consider this: America spends an average of $450 billion a year every Christmas. How often have you spent money on Christmas presents for no other reason than obligation? How many times have you received a gift out of that same obligation? Thanks, but no thanks, right?
And so in this second week of our participation in the Conspiracy, they present us with this challenge:
We’re asking people to SPEND LESS … to consider buying ONE LESS GIFT this Christmas. Just one. Sounds insignificant, yet many who have taken this small sacrifice have experienced something nothing less than a miracle: They have been more available to celebrate Christ during the Advent season.
Spend Less this Christmas? Why, it sounds positively un-American!
I mean, haven’t we been told by our leaders, exhorted by our authorities, that the way we’ll get out of our economic mess is TO GO SHOPPING????!
I can just hear the economists and politicians now: “Why, in our economy which is almost totally built on consumption, if everyone Spent Less, we’d be plunged into recession. Maybe even, depression. Hundreds of thousands, millions, would suffer because of that ONE GIFT NOT PURCHASED.
Well, probably not.
But, maybe?
AND SO WHAT IF IT DID put a little dent into our economy?
Might that actually point out that what’s really messed up isn’t the suggestion that we buy one less gift this Christmas, but OUR mindset and OUR behavior instead … credit-carded, buy it now, pay for it later, endless consumption of more and more AND MORE STUFF.
So why do we do it, anyway?
It almost seems like, like, we’re looking for meaning in our STUFF.
Certainly that’s true for those television show-“Hoarders.” Each program always features a psychologist brought in to help provide the hoarder much-needed therapy. And the first thing we hear from the psychologist each week, is that the Hoarder is initially unable to give up even one little thing because to them, it means giving up part of who they are.
But I’m probably being too hard on the Hoarders. For we all try to find identity, meaning, in our stuff. Part of why we buy STUFF is because of what we believe the STUFF says about us. The kind of car we drive, the house we live in, the labels on the clothes we wear, the ZIP code in which we choose to live, that’s the way we believe we show our identity to the world.
What a contrast to the texts we have before us today. Yes, they are also about identity, who people are, who WE are, but they’re sure not focused on STUFF.
Isaiah’s word comes as to us as pure grace. It’s not the harsh prophetic word of judgment for God’s people that we hear in the first chapters of this book. No, here the people Israel have already lost the war and been hauled off into exile in Babylon. They’ve had the land of God’s promise taken from them because of their greed and idolatry.
Everything bad that they feared has come to pass. What their living has gotten them into is a wilderness, for sure, a place where all that they’d been certain and sure of in their lives, their very identity, has been snatched away from them.
So Isaiah’s word comes to them, helpless, hurting people, to remind them of WHOSE they are, so they can once again know WHO they are:
In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand fast forever.
Despite your search for identity away from me, Israel … God says to them … despite your wandering away into a wilderness where you have felt abandoned and become hopeless … despite all this, God says to them, my promises to you remain true and FOR YOU. I will once again rescue you from the ‘fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into’ because I am your God and you are my people, and I will be your shepherd, your caregiver, your help and your hope, and I will never leave you.
Then there’s our Gospel text. It starts out The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and at first, it certainly sounds like good news, quoting word for word what Isaiah said to his people centuries earlier.
Ah, but the one we encounter in these words isn’t a comforting Isaiah, but a hair-shirted John the Baptist, calling people to repent, to turn from their sins, to turn around and follow God’s call to holy living.
But once again, we hear a word about identity … knowing whose we are, so we can know WHO we are.
John is calling people to baptism, to be sure … but his is a baptism of repentance, for forgiveness. It was an ancient Jewish practice still done today, called Mikveh , a ritual bath of immersion for purification. This kind of baptism which John offers would have to be repeated time and time again, as many times as people sin and become impure, they would need to be immersed.
Yet John points beyond himself … to the one whose way he is preparing … the one whose Good News is being proclaimed in these opening verses of Mark’s gospel:
He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.
The good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is that his baptism will inseparably link his people with him, forever … his people, US, WE will be baptized with the same Holy Spirit with which he, Jesus, is baptized. And so we recall the words we heard last week about that baptism:
• On the one hand, Baptism = death. Being joined to Jesus in his baptism means dying to the old ways of sin and death. Dying to the death-bound ways of the world. Dying to how far short we fall from where God calls us to live and be, to and for others.
• On the other hand, Baptism = life. Being raised with Christ, we are raised FOR something. And that something is life … full, rich, and abundant … free from the fears that we’re going to lose out on something … whether it’s place or stuff or whatever other gods, other idols we’ve placed in our path along the way. In Baptism, we have DIED to the death-bound ways of the world, and been RAISED to life together, in Christ, forever.
The Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, which we received from last week’s text is that we no longer fear “the End” because our End is in Jesus Christ, the Lord of life and forgiveness and salvation, … and he is in God and with God, forever.
The Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, which is for us this week is that our identity, our True Identity, is … baptized child of God, brother or sister of the one who brings Good News in his very self, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
In other words … our STUFF is not us, whether that’s a fancy car, piles of video cassettes or clothes or papers hoarded away … or pride in a clean, tidy house, an organized desk, or a showroom-condition car. We are not saved from our sins by our hoarding or our throwing, our saving or our recycling.
OUR STUFF IS NOT US.
No, we are given our indelible identity in our baptism … though the water evaporates, it leaves its mark on us permanently, because, as Luther tells us in his Catechism,
Baptism is not just water.
The Good News for us here this week is that Baptism is Identity for us … we are part of God’s Kingdom, on earth as it is in heaven, what will be perfect then, is not yet perfect now, but still in the works nonetheless. We are walking wet works in progress … dead in Baptism, alive in Baptism, sinner-saints, sent forth to bring wet footprints of God’s love into the world.
And Advent is the perfect time for us to focus on “walking wet,” all our Baptism means for us.
In the old, old church days … Advent was seen as a ‘little Lent,’ a time of repentance, preparation before the festival of the Incarnation of Jesus … Christmas. Though we use blue as our liturgical color for Advent now, we still have a vestige of that Lenten link in the purple and pink candles of Advent … purple being the liturgical color for Lent.
And that’s not a bad thing. We hear the Baptist’s call for repentance today, and we heed it … heed it by repenting from our overspending, overconsuming ways that have marked Christmas for us in the past. We can turn from that poor way of marking the Advent, the coming of our God in Jesus Christ … turn from it, if even a little, hearing and following the Advent Conspiracy call to a simpler celebration this year.
And in the Baptist’s words we’re also given freedom … freedom from our fears and courage to take risks … little risks (like not giving in to the needless ‘well, she bought me something, so I need to buy her something’ cycle), but meaningful ones nonetheless … giving us more freedom, more time to spend in our true calling as disciples of Jesus, to continue to go and grow in faith …
So here’s a suggestion … with the time you’ll gain from doing less shopping … why not take up a devotional life?
Here’s a Word for you which doesn’t have to cost you a cent. The Daily Texts are a great way to engage with the Scriptures every day, brief readings and prayers which millions of people have used worldwide since the 1700s to begin their day with a Word of faith and life.
Yes, they are produced by the Moravian Church, one of our ecumenical church partners … but millions of Lutherans use them, too. They were Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s constant companion throughout his life, including his time in Nazi prisons. And they can be yours, too, just by visiting the Moravian Church’s website (I’ve run off copies of the web page and they’re on the round table – with the url listed) and signing up for email delivery of the Daily Texts, each day.
If you’re more a book person, you can also order your own personal copy of the Daily Texts for a little more than $10, by using the order form which is attached.
I ask you, Nativity, God calls you, Nativity, to go deeper in faith … not just “going to church,” but BEING CHURCH.
For Jesus has given us an indelible identity, our true identity, in our baptism.
And we are called to set aside that masks that identity … hiding behind our STUFF, our
busy-ness, in fear of going deeper prayerfully, spiritually, in faith … we are called to set that all aside, to unmask, to cease hiding … and walk wet … fearlessly, in faith, in love, in service … walk wet into God’s future … where all that matters is that we are IN HIM, brothers and sisters of our Lord, given his same Spirit, beloved, baptized children of God.
Amen.
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