The Third Sunday of Advent

Yesterday there was a yet another tragic mass shooting at Brown University. I learned after this sermon that there was also another mass killing in Australia. The Bishop of Rhode Island sent an email to clergy which is where we began our worship – his email was also before we learned of what happened in Australia. Here is what he sent and I read as we lit the third candle on our Advent wreaths.

As we gather today, following a mass shooting event in Providence late yesterday afternoon, I ask that we pray for all the victims of this violence, all those whose lives have been impacted and the first responders and medical personnel. I offer this prayer, written by Bishop Rob Hirschfeld:

Give us courage for the facing of this hour. Guide us by the bright vision of your Heavenly Realm where no weapon is drawn but the sword of righteousness, no strength known but the strength of love. O Christ, show us your mercy as we put our trust in you.

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The connection between these two texts, one from the Old Covenant and the other from the New Covenant seems pretty unmistakable, doesn’t it? It seems so nice and tidy! We hear a word from the prophet and then while his words are still ringing in our ears we hear it happening in the ministry of Jesus: the eyes of the blind are opened and the deaf hear. Who could miss it, right?

From the prophet, Isaiah the 35^th chapter:

Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble (tottering) knees! Say to those who are of a fearful heart, "Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance with terrible recompense. He will come and save you." Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.

And then these words from the eleventh chapter of Matthew’s Gospel:

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?" Jesus answered them, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me."

Anybody who reads the Old Testament knows that when Messiah comes there is supposed to be peace on earth and goodwill to all people and the lion is supposed to lie down with the lamb and swords will be beaten into plowshares. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. All that good stuff we’ve been hearing about now for three weeks in Advent from Isaiah. So what went wrong?

Jesus is born and is baptized by John in the Jordan River and teaches people about the Kingdom of God. He heals the sick and he’s a great preacher. All good stuff. But then things start to unravel. First John, the one who baptized Jesus, is arrested and put into prison. You all remember how that ends, right? Certainly not with a stay of execution! And one can already see the writing on the wall for Jesus: he, too, will come into conflict with the religious and political authorities and be arrested and tried and executed.

Good Friday is less than four months away.

So John’s question is legitimate. There isn’t yet peace in Jerusalem, let alone on earth. Not when he asked the question and not today. We can’t even get good will in Washington, DC!  Most nations continue to spend way more on swords than plowshares in their national budgets, and lions still eat lambs for lunch. So if Messiah is supposed to do all those things, then who, John asks, are you? And what are you up to, Jesus? Why are kids getting killed at Brown?

It is a fair question, and it takes us on this third Sunday of Advent to the very heart of our faith. We are still waiting expectantly And that is what Advent is all about—not only waiting for the first coming of baby Jesus, but for the second coming of Christ the King. For new heavens and a new earth. For the New Jerusalem, and the new Providence and the new Bristol. For the new St. Michaels’ to shine as a light for all of the East Bay.

Waiting is hard. And it’s tempting in the meantime to ease our anxiety by spiritualizing the good news of Jesus Christ. This is not some temptation that comes from a so-called secular society; we do it to ourselves. We turn this holiday season into fuzzy sentimentality. Or we postpone all our hope until the day when Christ comes again.

But here is the thing: the prophets imagine God’s reign on earth as it is in heaven. And when Jesus sends word to John the Baptist in today’s gospel reading, notice that he isn’t talking in the future tense like Isaiah was. He now speaks of what is happening: the blind are receiving their sight, the lame are walking, the lepers are being cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

So Jesus is a great teacher, a healer, the kind of guy everybody wants to eat supper with because wherever he is, it’s a party and everyone keeps hoping he’ll do that thing again with the water and the wine. But how do we really know he is the One? That is John’s question today and it lingers in the air. John has been out there proclaiming that the One who comes after him is going to usher in that reign of God—justice and peace and all the rest. I imagine as he sits in that prison cell that John was as confused as anyone and maybe even a bit angry, because the One whose sandals he knew he wasn’t fit to carry is out there doing good work to be sure—important ministry. But in a macro-cosmic sense the world looks pretty much the same as it always has. When are the prisoners really going to go free? That’s an existential question for John who is sitting in a prison cell and hoping it happens soon and definitely before his head ends up on a platter.

So how do you know? If you are a good Jew waiting for Messiah to come or a good Christian waiting for Messiah to come again—if you live in the first century or the twenty-first—if you are sitting in a prison cell or in a church pew—how do you know when it is God at work and that Messiah has come?

“Go tell John what you see and what you hear,” Jesus says. It is such classic, vintage Jesus. Notice that he doesn’t directly answer the question. He never does! He just encourages people to open their eyes and ears. But the problem with that is always the same: when you see, can you see what I see? When you listen, do you hear what I hear? When you listen to the evening news: is the world being made new or is it coming unglued? Is the light shining in the darkness, or is it just getting darker.

It’s not just about whether we are constitutionally more optimists or pessimists as far as I can tell—although perhaps that’s a part of it.  It’s more than just “is that glass half-full or half-empty?”  We can look at the same thing—each of us, from one day to the next and see it differently. Is it an opportunity or a crisis? Is it something that will help us grow or will it be our undoing? Is God in the midst of it all or absent? One could ask all of these questions in a congregation that is going through a time of transition and people will see things differently, and do

So much has to do with where we are and that can change from day-to-day. If we are overtired or depressed or angry or confused—sometimes we just plain cannot see. I mean literally, we sometimes just cannot see what is right before our eyes. The optic nerves are working fine and delivering messages to the brain but we are blind. And sometimes it’s like those images where if you blink you see it one way and if you blink again you see something else: is that an old lady or a young girl?

Go tell John what you see and hear.  Sometimes people whose lives seem (at least from where I stand) to be so incredibly blessed still struggle with doubt and uncertainty about whether God loves them or even exists. And sometimes people whose lives seem (at least from where I stand) to be so incredibly sad are able to find faith and love and joy and hope in the smallest of life’s gifts. The externals don’t always dictate how we will view even our own lives, let alone the world around us. We can have it all and feel empty and sometimes that is exactly where we are in December. And we can have very little and feel like our cup overflows. And sometimes that happens to us in December as well.

What you see depends on how you look and also where you look. What you hear depends a great deal on who you’re listening to.

So two people stand on the beach and watch the sun rise and one of them is overcome with awe and wonder and filled with an awareness of the goodness of life and the benevolence of God. The other sees a ball of fire sending harmful rays that need SPF 30 to avoid cancer. And oh yeah, that ball of fire is burning itself out and every day we’re one day closer to a universe where the lights will go out.

So what are you seeing this December? Do you see weak hands and tottering knees being strengthened? Because where you see those things happening, I think Jesus is saying, there you see God at work. There you see signs of Messiah’s presence. And if once you were blind but now you see in amazingly different ways—isn’t that good news?  

We have to be intentional about looking for signs of God’s presence in the world. If we can find ways to put ourselves in places where we can get glimpses at least, of new life and new possibilities, then it becomes food for the journey. And as we learn where to look and how to look with eyes that see and ears that hear, then our faith is truly strengthened because we see signs of God’s presence where we never before even thought to look. And if we are really brave we begin to join in, to participate in that holy work, to spread the good news.

Who knows where that may lead? We might even find God in a stable, of all places…

 

An Advent Evensong: Farewell Sermon

We have three things to cover here before we reconvene across the street for a little party tonight. 

• First, Advent. 
• Second, the Feast of St. Nicholas of Myra.
• Third, the end of a pastoral relationship.
  

Ready?

Advent. It’s probably my very favorite season. Although I admit that I'm a bit like Erma Bombeck who famously told each of her children they were her favorite. I sometimes feel a little bit that way about the liturgical seasons. But we are in Advent now and I love it best. I love the flickering candles in the darkness of December days and nights. They remind me and all of us that no matter how dark it may feel in the world, a little bit of light is enough to go on. I love Advent because those candles remind us of God’s dream for this world, and the promise of peace, and hope, and joy, and love. We do not need to be afraid of the dark and we should never curse the darkness. We are little lights and we can let them shine in the darkness.

I love Advent because it’s all about the preparation, about getting ready. I love Advent because of John the Baptist, fearlessly preparing the way in the wilderness. John points to the one who is coming after him and I can relate, since we have known from the time I arrived here fifteen months ago that this day would come and that our work was in preparation of the next chapter.

I love Advent because of Mary, fearlessly saying yes to God and telling out with her soul the greatness of the Lord. I grew up a United Methodist, and in that little church in Hawley Pennsylvania we didn’t talk about Mary very much. She seemed too “Catholic” for our tastes. But over the course of my ordained life I have come to appreciate holy Mary, the mother of our Lord and let’s face it, without her “yes” there is no Jesus and we aren’t even here tonight.

Oh, and one more thing: I love the hymns in Advent. I’m told that some clergy get pushed by their parishioners to sing Christmas Carols before it’s Christmas. I have never understood that and frankly I’ve never been pushed. I’ve been fortunate enough to serve in parishes that “get” Advent. I have nothing against Christmas carols. But the Advent hymns, including the ones we selected for this night, speak to a deep place in my soul. They are so beautiful.

So it all comes together - the waiting, the preparation, the flickering candles, John and Mary, the music – to create a mood of hopeful expectation. And Lord knows we can use some hopeful expectation these days.

Second, St. Nicholas. Let me just confess that today is actually the feast of Ambrose of Milan. We were originally going to do this last night, on December 6, which is actually St. Nicholas’ Feast Day. Then we realized that the closing of Hope Street for the illumination of the Christmas tree required us to adapt our schedule. But I was already committed to St. Nicholas in my mind (nothing against Ambrose!) so let’s just go with that.

Before he was brought to this country by Dutch settlers and became jolly old St. Nicholas, he was a fourth-century bishop who likely took part in the Council of Nicaea. He is the patron saint of sailors and children. Well, I know some of you are sailors, and even if this parish doesn’t have many children in this chapter of its long life, we are all children at Christmas, right? So he’s our guy: he encourages generosity and gift giving and helps us all feel young at heart, even if we happen to be of retirement age.

This leads me to number three. As most of you know, before arriving here, I spent nearly twelve years serving on the staff of Bishop Doug Fisher as his Canon the Ordinary in the Diocese of Western Massachusetts. Prior to that, I’d been the Rector of St. Francis Church in Holden, Massachusetts, a suburb of Worcester, for fifteen years. We raised our kids in Holden and when they went off to college, the newly elected bishop asked me to join his staff and I said yes. That was in 2013.

It was a good run and I was a decent-enough Canon to the Ordinary. But I missed some parts of parish ministry a great deal. That never went away. In fact during the pandemic I did a lot of walking on the Wachusett Rail Trail and I thought a lot about how I might return to parish ministry before retiring.

Don’t misunderstand; being a Canon to the Ordinary is a great gig in many ways. Some say it’s the best job in the Church. But my analogy was always this: if you love being a classroom teacher and then get made assistant principal, there is an adjustment and some loss. Or if you prefer a sports analogy, if you love playing the game and then become the offensive coordinator, it’s different. Early on I read a book called “Leading from the Second Chair.” The book itself was “just ok.” But the title described what I was up to for nearly a dozen years, zig-zagging across central and western Massachusetts to support the ministry of the guy in the first chair.

I have no regrets. But I became a priest to preach and teach. To baptize. To be at the bedside to anoint people as they lay dying and then offer them a Christian burial. To officiate at weddings. And you, St. Michael’s, have given me the chance to finish my active ministry by doing all of these things again. Thank you for opening your lives to me, for welcoming me to Bristol. It’s been a great run!

In the final prayer we’ll offer after this sermon, we’ll list the names of those I have had the privilege to baptize, and marry, and bury over the fifteen months we have shared together. All of those things and the life of a congregation that unfolds in between big events is about relationships. Thank you for giving me this opportunity. Thank you for sharing your lives with me. I wanted to “go out” doing the parts of this calling that I love the most and you invited me to do just that over the course of the past fifteen months. Tonight my heart is full of gratitude.

You enthusiastically welcomed me and we worked together to get things back on track. You’ve done amazing work in the search process and you’ve called a wise and capable priest to walk with you in the next chapter of your life together. Well done. I know I’ve helped, and I’m proud of that. But I did not and could not do that alone. I’m so grateful for the staff – Alexander and Loretta and Steve and Betty. I’m so grateful for the officers of the vestry: Allison and Maryanne and Deb and Geoff, and for the others who serve on vestry, and outreach, and stewardship, and in worship. Even driving up and down 146 between here and Worcester has not dampened my spirit of joy at getting to be with you for this season in your long history.

The end of a pastoral relationship sounds very ominous. But it’s important to call things by their right name. It’s important to say goodbye and not just slip out the back door. Being a priest is an incredible gift. But always, and throughout this journey I’ve had, being a husband and a dad and a grandpa has taken precedence over my work in the Church. If you get to talk with Hathy and Graham and James, with Cara and Lindsay and Julian, tonight, you will understand very quickly why this is. I am the luckiest man on earth.

Until I ran into Bishop Kniseley at General Convention in Louisville in June 2024 I didn’t know anything at all about St. Michael’s or Bristol. I did not know about the oldest continuous Fourth of July parade in the country. Now I will never forget that. And I won’t forget you all.

When we turn the calendar to 2026, I will no longer be your pastor. You will have a new priest heading this way, driving up from North Carolina with her wife. I pray that you will welcome Ginny and Barbie as you have welcomed me and Hathy. I pray that you will open your hearts to them as you have to us.

In my previous job it drove me crazy when clergy would retire or leave and throw the diocese under the bus by saying, “I can’t talk to you any more because of the diocese.” So I’d walk into the parish a week later and get asked, “why do you have these stupid rules?”

The best practice is that we are here tonight to say goodbye so that you are fully engaged in saying hello to your next rector. We have a couple of weeks left, but we make it clear tonight that my time is very short. Saying goodbye and ending a pastoral relationship is not because of Bishop Knisley or Canon Dena. It is because endings lead to new beginnings, and because you will have a new priest and your energy and focus needs to be on cultivating that relationship. Please allow space for her to become your pastor. 

This does not mean I will forget you, and I hope you don’t soon forget me. But it does mean that things are about to change, and we don’t need to be afraid of change. Through it all, God is with us.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel – be with us all.

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent

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)

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. 

The Second Sunday of Advent

Please note that I've done something relatively rare for me. This sermon was written and "queued up" here on Thursday morning. It is ok, I think, even if a little academic in the beginning. But it didn't sit right and it didn't feel like the "right sermon" for this December Sunday. The nice thing about blogging is that I can still share it here and maybe there is a word of good news for readers of this blog. But early this Saturday morning I started over and the sermon I'll preach tomorrow at St. Michael's is totally different, and focused on Romans. I'll try to get the time early next week to upload that one here - but there's lots going on today and tomorrow at St. Michael's so I won't get to it on Sunday afternoon. You can ponder this one in the meantime. 

I hope that many of you are able to come back tonight when I can reflect a bit on what my time among you has meant. Like George Washington sings in Hamilton at the end of his second term, we’ll teach them how to say goodbye!

But for this liturgy on this morning of the Second Sunday of Advent I want to stay focused on the work of the day as we light that second candle on our wreath.

There is a common Christian misperception that has been repeated so many times that people sometimes assume it must be true. In fact, when a second-century theologian named Marcion began saying it, the Church rightly declared him to be a heretic (which is simply to say, wrong. You don’t need to burn heretics at the stake to simply say they got it wrong!)

Marcion believed that the God of the Old Testament was a god of judgment and the God of the New Testament was a god of mercy. If he had had his way, we would not claim the Old Testament to be “the Word of God.” Yet the core testimony of ancient Israel, in what we call the Old Testament, is that YHWH is the maker of heaven and earth and that creation is good. We are created of the earth and God says we are very good. That very same God is a God of steadfast love and mercy, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. These claims are repeated over and over again in the prophets and in the psalms, because over and over again it is Israel’s experience that that when they fall short of the mark and fail to hold up their end of the bargain, God responds with amazing grace.

I’m not saying that there isn’t violence and judgment in the Old Testament or that God isn’t sometimes portrayed anthropomorphically as getting impatient, hurt, and even angry. I think we do drive God to vertigo sometimes. I simply want to say that these things are in the New Testament as well, and the reason for that is that both Testaments are not about a fantasy world, but real life.

The core testimony of both Old and New Testaments is of one God who is steadfast and merciful: the one whom Israel called Creator of heaven and earth and that Jesus called Abba. The Nicene Creed gets this right, of course, and sets the contours of orthodoxy over and against our Marcionite tendencies: We believe in one God…We believe that the Abba, the Father Almighty, is the maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen; which is to simply to say that we believe the Creator we meet in Genesis 1 is the very same God who is “with the Word” in the first chapter of John’s Gospel.  

Are you with me so far?

Some of us here, especially those of us raised in more Protestant traditions, were taught to contrast the “law” of the Old Testament with the “grace” in the New Testament. We have some un-learning to do when we approach the Scriptures, because only in un-learning that false dichotomy can we begin to truly embrace the Old Testament in all of its richness. After all, what we call the Old Testament was the only Bible that Mary and Joseph and Jesus and the disciples and Paul ever knew. Jesus learned to call God “Abba” from the Law and the Prophets, the Psalms and the Writings, and it does us some good every now and again to be reminded that he did not carry around a leather-bound King James Bible that had all of his lines written out in red.

All of Holy Scripture was written for our learning, and both Testaments are meant to point us to the living Word—to Jesus the Christ.  The Bible is one drama, told in two acts. I don’t need to belabor this point, but Advent is as good a time to remember this as any because in Advent we seem to get readings intended to subvert our Marcionite tendencies. Two weeks in a row now, we have heard extraordinarily “good news” from the prophet Isaiah, which some Christian Biblical scholars have nicknamed “the fifth gospel.” And, as it happens, both weeks the gospel readings seem to have a sharper edge to them: winnowing forks and axes and judgment and wrath to come…

The vision given to the prophets, including Isaiah, is of God’s shalom: of a peace that passes all understanding. It’s not just an inward spiritual peace, but a yearning for the restoration of all creation and the healing of the nations. Last week we heard about how swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, and I tried to suggest that this language inspires hope that unleashes energy that allows us to roll up our sleeves and to do the work God has given us to do. This week we hear once again from Isaiah, now speaking of the peaceable kingdom, of predators and prey living together in shalom.

If you want to look for differences between the two Testaments, that difference is not about the nature of God. God is one. But there is an important difference worth noting and it has everything to do with the readings before us today: it’s about verb tenses. It has to do with how we tell time. Isaiah lived in very difficult times: a time of war and rumors of war. In the eleventh chapter, he is looking toward the dawn of a new day. But he sees that future on a distant horizon. He looks to a day when the wolf will lie down with the lamb and the leopard with the kid. But all of his verbs, notice, are future tense and given the realities of his day that is understandable: it doesn’t seem like it will be anytime soon:

• A shoot shall come from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow;
• …by righteousness he shall judge the poor;
•   …the wolf shall live with the lamb;
• …the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
•  …a little child shall lead them;  
•  …they shall not hurt or destroy on all God’s holy mountain…

Someday. But not yet. It was the same with last weekend’s reading from Isaiah: “in days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established…” In those days, people will study war no more. (Isaiah 2:1-5) Someday. But not yet. In the meantime, we live in the “real” world that seems bent on destroying itself, sometimes even in the name of God.

Notice, however, what happens when John the Baptist arrives on the scene in the New Testament: he proclaims that a new day is about to dawn. John declares that “the kingdom of heaven has come near.” He insists that “the time is at hand.” No longer is it a distant future. There is a sense of urgency in John’s message, because the time is Now. And then notice what happens when Jesus comes on the scene. All the verbs become present tense: 

• Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, for theirs IS the kingdom of heaven; (Matthew 5:1-12)
• When Jesus walks into the synagogue one Sabbath day to read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, about good news being brought to the poor and release to the captives, about recovery of sight to the blind and the oppressed going free his commentary is simple: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:18-21)
• St. Paul picks up this same theme in his letter to the Church in Corinth: he too quotes from Isaiah and then says, “NOW is the acceptable time; NOW is the day of salvation.” (II Corinthians 6:2)

What has happened? One might be tempted to think that the world somehow changed overnight when Jesus stepped on the world stage, that in first-century Rome all of a sudden there was a regime change and no more chariots were built; instead there was a lasting peace dividend and swords were beaten into plowshares. But of course we know better than that. The world was probably not much better or worse in the time of Jesus than it was in the time of Isaiah, and probably not much better or worse today than it was in either of those two times.

It’s tempting to make it all spiritual: since we can’t ever have peace on earth, we can have it in our hearts. Since we can’t have true community on earth, at least someday we’ll all die and go to heaven. But this, too, is in the spirit of Marcion. This is heresy. This too, discounts the entire witness of the Old Testament; not to mention the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray: thy Kingdom come on earth, as it is in heaven. God’s shalom is cosmic and material; not merely spiritual.

Jesus teaches us to live today as if the Kingdom of God is already here. To live today into our calling as Baptized people by becoming salt and light and yeast that not only bear witness to the world but that begin to transform the world by making it saltier, lighter, and yeastier. We are called to become the change we yearn to see, to become the change that God yearns to see. As we light that candle for peace, the very next words on our lips, St. Francis taught us, need to be for today: “Lord, make us instruments of your peace…”  When we pray for peace on earth, we pray, “let it begin with me.” Let it begin now.

To be the Church means to be part of a community that dares to live against the grain of the dominant culture, right now in this moment. Not someday. It means that we live as if the time is Now; because we believe it is. It’s precisely because we live in the midst of warring madness, that we not only ask God to cure that warring madness, but that we also pray for the strength and courage to embrace our calling to make peace wherever we are. Not someday, but right Now.  

If we mean to follow Christ, we will do it Now. We can help move ourselves and others away from fear by building trust. We can begin to live more peacefully now as we faithfully use and claim our power, not as lions who eat lambs but as people ready to live and act as servant-ministers. We cannot afford to delay until someday; because it is this day that the Lord has made and it is on this day that God means for us to follow Jesus, and it is on this day that we are called to love God and neighbor.

In Greek there are two different words to capture these two different notions of time. Chronos, from which we get our word chronology, is about linear time. Something happened yesterday or it happens today or it will happen tomorrow. History is chronological, even when it repeats itself. Kairos captures a different aspect of time: sometimes we speak of the fullness of time, or of the moment arriving: it’s the right moment, the moment of fruition, the time when something significant happens. We live, of course, with both aspects of time, even when we only have one word for it in English. Advent unfolds chronologically, over the four weeks that lead up to Christmas. But at its core, Advent is about kairos time. Advent is about present-tense verbs: it’s not about hope and peace and joy and love “someday”—but about embracing these signs of the kingdom in our midst right now, proleptically, even if only as tiny mustard seeds or as four little lights shining in the darkness.