Old
Testament: Malachi 3:1-4
New Testament: Luke 3:1-6
Are you ready? Are you ready?
This is a question with which I became very familiar
over the summer and into the fall, as my wife got closer and closer to the due
date for our first child. In my full-time job, I work as a hospital chaplain,
covering pediatrics and women’s health – four floors and dozens of staff
members, all of whom were very curious to know: Are you ready? I’m sure I got
that question at least five times a day, every day. Once we’d had our baby
showers, my standard response was, “Well, the baby has things now…”
As the father of an almost-three-month-old, I now know
that we were absolutely NOT ready. In fact, our daughter Norah came three and a
half weeks early, so we were definitely not ready! We still might not be… I’ll
get back to you on that.
Advent is a season of preparation – of getting ready –
and so as I reflected on the scripture passages this week, I thought about the
many ways in which we prepare for certain events.
Are you ready … for company to come over? When it’s
time to have guests, as our opening hymn said, we clean the house – “trimming
the hearth and setting the table” – I don’t know about you, but the most
cleaning happens in my house during the fifteen to twenty minutes before visitors
show up! I want everything to look its best, even if I’ve cleared a bunch of
junk off the table, only to put it on our bed upstairs. I want to trick people
into thinking I’ve got it all together.
Are you ready … for the big test coming up at school?
You spend time reading and studying, doing flashcards or taking practice exams.
You want to know as much information as possible, so that nothing surprises you
when your teacher says “Okay, begin.”
Are you ready … for when disaster strikes? My wife is
the one who does this at our house. Every time there’s the hint of bad weather
– snow, in particular – she makes sure we have bottled water, bread, peanut
butter, candles, matches, batteries, the cars are gassed up – all the things I
fail to think about. Usually I tease her about this, except for the year that
derecho came through and knocked out our power for a couple days. She wants to
be sure we’ll be well-stocked if the power goes out or we lose heat or
who-knows-what happens.
Are you ready … for the big performance? You spend
extra time practicing your part – maybe singing in the shower, or humming in
your head as you ride to school. You want to get things just right. You want it
to be perfect.
Are you ready … for Christmas? You pull the
decorations out of storage, search for the perfect tree, make a list of things
you want and another list of things you have to buy for others, dig out your
Christmas card mailing list, write up the holiday letter – making sure to list
all your big accomplishments (it’s a lot of lists, come to think of it) – brave
the hectic malls or, if you’re like me, avoid them altogether and do your
shopping online. You want it to be the picture-perfect family holiday, with
everything just right.
What do all these things have in common? Whether we’re
preparing for company to come over or for the big performance, we’re always
trying to put our best faces forward. We’re trying not to let people see our
vulnerable side, the side of us that’s not quite perfect. And there’s not
necessarily anything wrong with that, per se – there’s nothing wrong with doing
well on a presentation, or having a really beautiful Christmas light display on
your lawn – and there’s certainly nothing wrong with acing a test! I should
really make that clear on a Sunday when we have so many students present!
But there’s another dimension to preparing for all
those things I’ve just mentioned, especially preparing for Christmas: we’re
trying to be in control. And that is not the kind of preparation we do at
Advent, when we stand back and recognize that we are not in control at all.
There’s a difference between preparing for Christmas and preparing for Christ.
When we’re preparing for Christmas, we want to make
everything look good.
When we prepare for Christ, we confess that things
don’t really look all that good.
“How could we possibly celebrate if we are paying
attention to this world?” writes blogger Sarah Bessey. “How do we make merry
when our hearts are broken by Paris, by Syria, by Kenya, by Beirut, [by
Colorado Springs, by San Bernadino]? [How do we celebrate] when, in response to
every crisis, our communities seem splintered and divided in how to respond,
and careless words are flung like rocks at our own glass houses? [How do we
celebrate] when, closer to home, perhaps we are lonely or bored or tired or
sick or broke? In these days,” she writes, “celebration can seem callous and
uncaring, if not downright impossible.”[1]
When we’re preparing for Christmas, we don’t want to
be surprised by anything.
When we prepare for Christ, we will be surprised by
everything.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Christ came – not
as a conquering king or a supernatural lightning strike from heaven – but as a
humble baby, in a seemingly unimportant corner of the world.
Listen to how Luke’s gospel sets up this shock: he
lists off the great and powerful rulers of the world at the time – Emperor
Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Philip, Lysanius – and then he lists off the
powerful rulers of the church – Annas and Caiaphus – and then he says, in
essence, “The word of God didn’t come to any
of those people. Instead, it came to an apparent lunatic who spent his time
wandering around in the wilderness, eating locusts and honey, quoting
centuries-old passages that had, so far, failed to come true.”
When we prepare for Christmas, we want everything to
be perfect.
When we prepare for Christ, we recognize that we are
far from perfect.
We hear this in John the Baptist’s call for people to
“repent and be baptized” in the text today. In fact, this recognition of the
need for repentance is embedded in our worship practice every week in the form
of our prayer of confession, which is not actually designed so that we may silently
list off the ways we’ve messed up during the week. Instead, we lay before the
Lord not only those sins which … belong to us individually and personally, but
also the sin and brokenness of the world itself. “We do not confess primarily
specific acts … but rather [acknowledge] the tragic brokenness of our human
condition, in which, even without intending to, we are constantly running away
from God and our neighbors.”[2]
In our Advent preparations, we repent – we turn from
our brokenness – not so that God will
come into the world, but in response to the glorious good news that God is already coming into the world! As we
heard in our promise of forgiveness: “While we were still sinners, Christ died
for us.”
We want to be in control, we want everything to look
good, we don’t want to be surprised, we want to be perfect. God’s coming into
our lives thwarts all those expectations. And so, as I reflect on Advent this
year, it strikes me that it really is a lot like preparing for a baby.
Before my daughter was born, I was told again and
again: You have no idea how your life is going to change! And I took that
seriously; I believed people when they said it. “It will be hard,” I thought. “It will be hard to fit this baby into
our lives.” And then Norah was born – and she was early, and she needed to be
fed, and she needed to be changed, and she needed to be held. And I suddenly
realized, “Oh, no – it’s not about fitting her
into our lives; it’s about fitting our lives around hers.”
I think – I hope – something similar happens when we decide
to put our lives into God’s hands. Dietrich Bonhoeffer explains it this way:
“The coming of God is not only a message of joy, but also fearful news for
anyone who has a conscience.”[3]
He meant that God’s coming into the world opens our eyes
to the suffering around us and calls us to truly embrace Christ’s call:
“Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life
for me will find it.”
What does this mean? It means recognizing that all
people are children of God. And if we do that, then we can’t join others who
mock the weird kid at school; we are actually called to befriend him. We can’t walk by the homeless woman on the corner; we
are called to clothe and shelter her. We can’t demean those whose political or
religious views are different from our own; we are called to listen to them, to
find common ground. We can’t ignore the hungry among us; we are called to feed
them, just as we are about to be fed by God at the communion table before us.
And so, maybe the most radical thing you can do this
week is to eat this bread and drink this cup, to lose your life by casting in
your lot with a God who defies all expectations, who comes unbidden, who
surprises us; who takes us to places we’d rather avoid and pairs us with people
we’d rather ignore; who accepts us completely, just as we are, and who loves us
too fiercely to allow us to remain just as we are; who calls us to join in the
healing of this broken world – a task that is daunting and dangerous, difficult
and probably never done.
So what do you say?
Are you ready?
Preached December 6, 2015, by Rev. Joshua T. Andrzejewski
[2]
Peter C. Bower, ed. The Companion to the
Book of Common Worship, p. 23.
[3]
Edwin Robertson, ed. Dietrich
Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, p. 25.
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