Preacher's Post: Advent 3

The Word

Zephaniah 3:14-20
Canticle 9
Philippians 4:4-7
Luke 3:7-18

John has a word about change

Headline Words

Hope in Copenhagen

An American Nobel Prizewinner

Hope for Health Care?

Quotable Words

Now in the small hours

Of belief/ the one eloquence

To master/ is that

Of the bowed head, the bent

Knee, waiting, as at the end

Of a hard winter/

For one flower to open

On the mind’s tree of thorns. ~~R.S. Thomas

Preachable Words

From a sermon preached in 2006 at Trinity, Santa Barbara

 

It’s good to be here in this pulpit again. I’m honored, and grateful to be here as your Preacher-in-Residence in this season of Advent.

But I’m not so sure I am grateful for these words from John the Baptist, that Preacher-in-Residence of the Jordan River. John is just so harsh, so radical, so, well, OK, political. Elizabeth and Zechariah must have forgotten to teach their son John that religion and politics don’t mix! (And they also skipped the lessons on how to dress properly, and no name-calling.)

Listen to John:

“You-Brood-of- vipers—fleeing-like-snakes-racing-ahead-of-a-wildfire-trying-to-escape-from-the-wrath-to-come—repent—bear fruits-worthy-of-repentance—show-that- you- mean-it-change your ways- Something-is- happening- a-new-day-is- dawning- get- ready- for- it.”

Why, why in the world, would the crowds gather  out there on the riverbank, clamoring to hear more of this, ready for a full-body dunking in the Jordan? What do they see in John?

Well, we have to begin at the beginning of Luke’s story about this wilderness preacher. In the portion of the story we heard last week, Luke, ever the historian, sets the scene for this action out at the Jordan. Luke tells us that it is the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius in Rome, Pontius Pilate is the local rep, Herod rules the Galilee, and in the temple we find the high priests, Annas and Caiaphas. Why this list of names? This is Luke’s way to show who’s in charge, who holds power. It’s Luke’s first clue that the locus of power is about to shift.

Luke tells us “the word of God came”— where?—to Tiberius? Pilate? The priests? No.

“The word of God came to John, son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” Ah, this sounds familiar: God is doing something new, and, God starts, as every Isrealite knows, where God has started before:  outside the temple walls and the city gates, out with Moses, Amos, David, out in the wilderness.

In the hair-shirt tradition of the ancient prophets, John tells the people it’s time for a change, time to straighten out what’s crooked, time to renew what is stale, time to bring down what is mighty and raise up what is low down; it is time for repair and renewal, time to make a new world.

But how? How to change the world? March on Rome? Offer a temple sacrifice? Stage an insurgency against the occupation? No.

Begin where you live, says John.

You with two coats, give one away. Share your coat and your food with the one who has nothing.

To the tax collectors, he says: Be honest, don’t cheat. Take only your due.

And to the soldiers: No more intimidation, no more threats; don’t line your pockets by extorting the people.

This crowd is hungry for something new. When they ask “What then should we do?” John calls them to renew their basic covenant with God: care for your neighbor.   In this dialogue about coats and taxes, Luke gives us particular members of the crowd, key classes of people, symbolic groups: those who have money, those who have influence, and those who have control. These people with means, the tax collectors, the soldiers, these are the ones who have the power to make change.

Put your repentance, your faith into action, John says. Treat one another as kin, all of you, even the emperor’s tax collectors, even the governor’s soldiers. Begin where you live and change the way you relate to one another. Practice neighbor-love. Give your repentance some legs. Build community.

And that of course, brings us into our own Advent. This is the season of change, repentance, renewal. Every Advent we hear John’s call to change. We hear the summons to the wilderness, the place of new beginnings.  Where, in our daily political landscapes, from the intimate politics of the kitchen table to the headline politics of the Pentagon, where are we called to change in this season of new beginnings?

I do not have a prescription. But I believe it begins with looking. Each one of us has to look within to see what needs straightening, raising up or putting down, each one of us has to look around and see what calls to us, what relationship needs repair, what commitment needs renewal, what step forward can I take, what ending is beginning. Each one of us can only begin where John begins, where we live,  to look and see what John is calling us to: renewal of not only ourselves, but of our world.

I’ve been thinking lately about something I preached about four years ago in Advent, something I’d learned back in my 20s, back when I worked with an interfaith group opposed to the nuclear arms buildup. My Jewish colleagues talked of their work as tikkun olam, the Hebrew expression for ‘repairing the world’. It is holy work, they told me, this work of repairing the world. It is inner work and outer work: the work of quiet prayer and communal worship, the work of small private tasks and bold public actions.  Tikkun olam means setting right that which has gone wrong. It means comforting the grieving, challenging the complacent, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, changing despair into hope. It means speaking up and acting up, whether the issue is the nuclear arms race of the 1980s or the war in Iraq.

Four years ago, when the war was just beginning, I said we needed to take up the work of tikkun olam,  the building of shalom, salaam, the peace that is more than the absence of war, the peace of wholeness and well-being for all. I’d said then that “We begin to work for Shalom, Salaam, among the nations when we learn to curb our appetite for oil, and learn to use renewable sources of energy. We begin to build shalom when we urge our own government to join with the United Nations to combat the real roots of terrorism around the globe, rather than attack Iraq. We build shalom when we use our great resources to feed the hungry and house the homeless and build sustainable communities and educate our children and care for our elders. We build shalom when we free ourselves and one another from the fear that locks us into passivity or reactivity.  This is tikkun olam, holy work, repairing the world.”

It is four years later. The war has gone long, and we have seen Katrina and tsunamis and earthquakes and Darfur. We have lived through tragedies global and familiar. Global warming, we are assured, is real. The world is ever more in the need of repair.

And we still wrestle with change, with transition; we wrestle with our resistance to change, our accommodation to the way things are. But that urgent voice of the Jordan, that tireless preacher, still calls us, rousing us to look to the One who is coming, to make ready, make room, for Someone new, Something new in the world.

It is in the looking that we prepare. John’s Advent call to change is not just about giving away that extra coat, or writing a bigger check, or joining an extra church committee.  Those necessary actions do give legs to our repentance, but the filling up of those valleys of fear, the leveling off of those mountains of indifference, the repair of the world, begins with our own repentant looking--looking  within-- and seeing who we are and to Whom we belong.  Repentance begins with seeing that God is always coming toward us, loving us, forgiving us; repentance begins not with our failing, but with God’s generosity.

Wendy Wright, in her fine book of Advent meditations called The Vigil, describes this repentance business:

“Repentance is not necessarily the gloomy and self-loathing practice it is sometimes made out to be. To repent is not to be confirmed in what the little voice within keeps whispering: that you are no good, that everything bad that happens to you is your own fault, that if only others knew…No. True repentance begins with the felt knowledge that we are loved by God. We are children of God. If we cannot find ourselves there, then perhaps our preparation might consist of the prayer that we might know ourselves as beloved, that the divine lover might reach down into our self-hatred…and touch us…Repentance consists not so much flagellating ourselves over our failures as in courageously...reorienting our priorities…turning our faces, like the sunflower, toward the dawning of the light of God.” (pp41-42)

 

That is when we begin to repair the world. The voice in the wilderness calls us to begin where we live, very local, very small, very intimate, the places where change is hardest of all. It is change that begins, says the poet R.S. Thomas, with bowed head, and bent knee, waiting for the One who is coming. He writes:

Now in the small hours

Of belief/ the one eloquence

To master/ is that

Of the bowed head, the bent

Knee, waiting, as at the end

Of a hard winter/

For one flower to open

On the mind’s tree of thorns.*

 

In this last short week of Advent, let’s find a moment to bow our head, bend our knee. It’s an old posture, one we mostly forego in this reformed time of standing prayer. But when we are bowed low, bent to the earth, we get close to what’s real, close to solid ground-- that posture that can move us out of our ‘mind’s tree of thorns’ so that we can look and see that one flower, that fresh, new promise of Christmas waiting to be born in each one of us-- and in this tired world.

AMEN.                                                          *“Waiting for It” R. S. Thomas