Second Sunday of Advent

This sermon is quite different from what I ended up preaching. I went another direction but I hope these words are helpful too.

         “Comfort, comfort my people.” We rejoice at words of hope. We look forward to an end of our troubles and worries. We don’t look too closely at the people to whom these words are addressed. We assume it’s us. We assume that we are God’s sheep and Jesus will take us up in his arms and carry us across his shoulders into the peace we have been promised. The prophet is speaking to people in a different time and place. They were lost and broken. They were people without status. They were people without a country. They had no resources at hand to use for their self-improvement.

         We assume we are in line at the river Jordan to hear the words of John the Baptist. I don’t think his crowd was well-heeled. The people who came to John seeking a radical change were people on the edges of society. They had no power or position. The respectful religious folks only came later, and then to study and judge.

         The Psalm offers the hopeful message, “Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” It is a beautiful sentiment. We might even hang it on our wall. I wonder if we have thought about it. How rare it is to have mercy and truth! How impossible it is for us to find righteousness and peace!

         When we seek to uncover the truth, there is no room for mercy. Just remember the reaction to grand jury decisions in Ferguson and New York. The truth wants no forgiveness. All over the world people are struggling to support the rightness of their cause. In Syria and Palestine, in Hong Kong and Nigeria – the desire for righteousness overpowers the desire for peace. We can only seem to set things right with the use of force which leads to no lasting peace.

         This is a stern reminder of how far we are from the hopeful promise of God. We talk generally about loving our neighbor – and it costs us nothing as we have retreated into safe spaces where we never see suffering or injustice. We live in a polarized and fragmented society. We zip along in our cars from school to work and home again. We never see the other side except from our car windows as we drive through the city. We have worked hard and done our best so we assume that this path is open to everyone who is willing to work as hard as us.

         We have moved away from the struggles and violence of our cities. In moving out we made ourselves comfortable but this is not a solution to racism or poverty. Much of the noise on the airwaves is about a “war on Christmas.” I think we are living in an age that is at war with advent. The proper way for us to get ready isn’t in judging someone else’s holiday greeting, but in how we are preparing ourselves to meet our Savior. It’s not in the over-commercialization of our age – in fact it may be in the opposite. We are not going to buy or produce our way to God. We can’t settle for simple answers to terrible divisions among the people of God.

         The prophet promises to make a way to God. The mountains will be brought low and the valleys will be filled. This is hard and dirty work. It won’t be done by looking and wishing. We have to be willing to enter the rough places and to get our hands dirty. We have to want to sit with the people God promises to save. We have to want the discomfort and the confusion of the place of injustice – and we have to give up our slogans and easy answers (that we tell ourselves to comfort ourselves.)

         God is with the city. We’ve built a comfortable existence for ourselves in the suburbs. We speak of our towns as beacons of family virtues and values. We talk ourselves into believing that we’ve left sin behind by changing our zipcode. God promises peace to Jerusalem (not the countryside,) because God is interested in saving people where they are. God is not put off by the noise and dirt of the city. God isn’t interested in the racial backgrounds or educational attainment of its citizens. God meets people where they are. Our willingness (especially in Connecticut) to abandon the city is not of God – it is a choice of convenience. “It’s not our problem,” we say – but God has a different opinion.

         God is with the alien. God sides with the people who have no country. He adopts the slave and the outsider and makes them God’s people. This should be easy for us to embrace. We are a nation of immigrants and outsiders who came to this land to re-create ourselves. Now in our fear we want to build walls and lock the gates and deny opportunity to people who are desperate for freedom and safety and a future for their children.

         God is with the poor. We are tired of our own difficult economic problems. In our jealousy, we complain about the waste of our welfare system. We are not nearly as generous as we think we are. Our largess is a small percentage of all our tax expenditures (we each only pay a few dollars a year in our taxes towards welfare of any kind.) Angry commentators pick a few statistics or find a few examples of waste as an excuse to wipe it all away. In reality, the main recipients of welfare are children, the elderly and people with disabilities. They can’t work and they are not thriving on what little they get.

         My father was laid off in the early seventies. Pratt and Whitney laid off five thousand workers in one day without warning. It took my father years to find any kind of decent employment. Food stamps put food on our table. There were no leftovers. Bills didn’t get paid. I don’t know how my parents kept their house. They stayed poor the rest of their lives – but we are grateful for the help. I was not one of the deserving poor. We were simply poor. With help, we moved on. That’s the least we can do for others.

         So we come to the Jordan to hear the cry of John the Baptist. We want to be better. Are we willing to pay the cost we need to pay so that we can change? With all the suffering and rage we hear around us, perhaps it’s time we stopped looking at our hearts and started looking at our hands. What are we really willing to do so that we will be different. Do we really want the different world that God promises? Do we want mercy and truth to meet together? Do we want to see righteousness and peace kiss each other? What self-righteousness are we willing to give up so that we can live into a new righteousness?

         We may get to the point where we realize we are unable and unworthy to live into such a vision. That’s where God can begin to work in us.