Tonight at 5 pm we’ll celebrate an Advent
Evensong, followed by a little party across the street. I hope that many of you
are able to come back for that, when we will begin to say our goodbyes as
priest and congregation and get ready for what comes next here at St. Michael’s
and in my own retirement from full-time ministry.
But this morning there is work to be done
on this Second Sunday of Advent. I suspect that across this diocese and even
nation, most sermons today in Episcopal congregations and beyond will focus on
John the Baptist. I like John a lot and I’ve preached many of those sermons
over the years. But I feel like we know John, and he’ll be back again next
Sunday when he’ll send a word to Jesus from prison. So this year I’m going to
let John the Baptist be.
For those who don’t focus on John the
Baptist today, Isaiah seems like the logical place to land. Someone said in our
Revelation Bible Study a week or so ago that they felt a gap in their
theological formation when it comes to the prophets. It’s not because that
person wasn’t paying attention! It’s because we Christians have historically
not done a great job with teaching the prophets, even though you can’t really
get what Jesus is up to without understanding what Isaiah and Amos and Micah
and Jeremiah were up to. Keep in mind the prophets were not fortune-tellers.
They were not looking into a crystal ball and predicting the future. Rather,
they were more like social critics. They looked at the world around them and
invited a closer look, from the bottom up. They judged the politics and
economic policies of their day based on how they impacted on the lives of those
struggling, not those who were thriving. They take us by the hand and ask us to
see and hear things we would prefer to ignore.
Like all the prophets, Isaiah uses his
imagination – can you imagine a peaceable kingdom where the lion and the lamb
lie down together? It can sound like a children’s story but Isaiah is quite
serious: that peace on earth can never be limited to our hearts, even if it
begins there. Rather, the peace of God that passes all understanding changes
the neighborhood and ultimately the world. So I commend Isaiah to your prayers
this week and beyond, as you find your way through these December weeks.
I want, instead, to do something you’ve probably
realized by now after we’ve spent fourteen and a half months together that I
don’t do often, and that is to preach on the epistle. The reason I’m going to
the epistle today is that it feels like it’s the most relevant to our situation
right now. I’ve been reflecting on this for a while now and hope you’ll hang in
there with me. So that we don’t lose our way, let me repeat that last sentence
we heard today once more: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and
peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy
Spirit. (Romans 15:13)
Romans was probably written from Corinth,
but it’s addressed to people that Paul has not yet met, although he does tell
them he would like to get there someday and that he thinks about doing so
often. Clearly, Paul knew something about the Church in Rome and they knew
something about him. Even so, Romans is a kind of letter of introduction. Some
scholars have even described chapters 1-8 as Paul’s “theological last will and
testament.” Paul is telling them how the gospel has changed his life and
changed the way he sees the world; and he is suggesting some ways that it might
change them also.
Enough, for now,
about Paul. Let’s talk a bit about the people at the receiving end of this
letter, living in first-century Rome: the imperial, administrative, and
economic capital of the world. Think Washington, DC and New York City wrapped
up into one. The people who came to be followers of Jesus there, setting up
small house churches that included both Jewish and Gentile Christians, still
lived and worked and were educated in this Roman context. They were shaped by
Rome—not Tarsus, not Bristol.
The Jewish
Christians and Gentile Christians there coexisted in a rather uneasy
relationship that often involved misunderstanding and stereotyping of the other
group. First-century Jews had been taught to divide the world into basically
two groups: Israel, i.e. God’s chosen people, and everybody
else—the nations, the goyim. Usually the “everybody else” tended to
be bigger and stronger nations like Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and most recently,
Rome. When you tend to divide the world into “us” and “them” and when you are
weak and they are strong, that brings with it a whole worldview that is hard to
let go of.
Gentiles also tended
to divide the world into “us” and “them” but the lines were drawn very
differently. For Gentiles, the world was divided into civilized
people, who were cultured and educated, and barbarians (which
literally means ‘bearded’) who were not. These civilized folks tended to be
more privileged with all that comes with that. The “them” included, but was not
limited to, Jews.
So imagine for just
a moment what it would be like to be a member of one of those first-century
house churches in Rome: a congregation consisting of people shaped by each of
these competing worldviews. Imagine Darius, a “civilized” Gentile- Christian
who has been raised to look down his Roman nose at those uncultured barbarians,
sitting at a brown-bag lunch and eating his totally un-kosher prosciutto on
ciabbata bread sandwich. Next to him sits Moshe, whose grandmother would be
turning over in her grave if she knew he was sitting next to a goyim.
Imagine them and their family members trying to plan the menu for the annual
parish picnic, make decisions together on vestry, or choose music for worship,
and you are quickly relieved of any naïve sense that the early Church was free
of conflict where everyone sat around holding hands and singing “kumbaya!
Diversity (in the
first and twenty-first centuries) holds within it the seeds of radical
transformation, to be sure. But working through old prejudices is difficult and
challenging work and we should never underestimate the very real challenges
that these Christians in Rome faced. When Paul tells the Church in Rome that
there is no longer Jew or Greek, he means it; but he’s talking to people who
know just how hard it is to live into that reality. Paul’s theology is not the
abstract systematic theology of a tenured religion professor—not that there is
anything wrong with that! Paul’s theology is always contextual: scripture,
reason and tradition intersect with a particular context, in this case those
house churches in first-century Rome. He is a pastoral theologian; his theology
is rooted in the everyday challenges of congregational life, of trying to live
into the call to be “in Christ.”
“Romans
was written to be heard by an actual congregation made up of particular people
with specific problems.” If you
sit down and read Romans from beginning to end you’ll get a sense of what I’m
talking about. The gist of it is that Paul reminds them of the love of God and
that nothing in all of creation can separate us from that love. He challenged
them to confess that “Jesus is Lord” and then to live that way.
On my commute from Worcester to Bristol, Route 146 becomes more tolerable when I listen to music or podcasts. Lately I’ve been doing more podcasts and one of my favorites is Freakonomics. Last week I listened to a podcast entitled: “how can we break our addiction to contempt?” (You can listen to that episode here.)
The scholar being interviewed distinguished between anger, a hot
emotion, and contempt, a cold emotion. He said we can deal with anger, but
contempt is much more challenging because we dismiss the other, we roll our
eyes, we treat them with disdain. He says that social media and cable news move
us all toward contempt even more than anger. They encourage us to divide the
world into “us” and “them” and the problems we see are all because of “them.” I
got thinking about Moshe and Darius in first-century Rome and how hard it was
for them to break through contempt to love. And, I got to thinking about the
persons here who get their news from Fox and those who get their news from
MSNBC and how contempt “sells” but also keeps us from living the second
commandment to love our neighbors.
The scholar in that
podcast was compelling. His name is Arthur Brooks and he teaches at Harvard,
both the Kennedy School and the Business
School. You may surmise from that that he’s a liberal but in fact he was the
eleventh president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think
tank in Washington. So he’s complicated. An economist by training, but before
that a professional French horn player. (Did I tell you how much I love
Freakonomics?)
Brooks says we don’t
change people’s minds or hearts with logical rational arguments that try to
convince them how misguided they are. He says that we change ourselves and
others and the neighborhood with love. He says we need to make space for authentic
relationships. If I could have invited him to be here today to preach this
sermon I would have done so. I want to simply hold him next to St. Paul today
and encourage you to check out the podcast. Hold the first-century Church in
Rome side by side with the twenty-first century Church here in Bristol, and take
in these two little candles we’ve lit in the midst of a world that teaches
contempt, and then pray that God will change all of our hearts, and through
that transformation the neighborhood and the world.
This isn’t wishful thinking or denial. It
takes us to our core values as followers of Jesus: abounding in hope by the
power of the Holy Spirit gives us the will and the courage to love God and love
our neighbor as if the world depends on that. Because it does.
May the God of hope fill you
with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the
power of the Holy Spirit.
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