Second Sunday of Advent Year B 2008

2 Advent B 08

December 7, 2008

Isaiah 40:1-11 (NRSV)
1 Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God.
2 Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her
that she has served her term,
that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the LORD's hand
double for all her sins.
3 A voice cries out:
"In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
4 Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
5 Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken."
6 A voice says, "Cry out!"
And I said, "What shall I cry?"
All people are grass,
their constancy is like the flower of the field.
7 The grass withers, the flower fades,
when the breath of the LORD blows upon it;
surely the people are grass.
8 The grass withers, the flower fades;
but the word of our God will stand forever.
9 Get you up to a high mountain,
O Zion, herald of good tidings;
lift up your voice with strength,
O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,
lift it up, do not fear;
say to the cities of Judah,
"Here is your God!"
10 See, the Lord God comes with might,
and his arm rules for him;
his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.
11 He will feed his flock like a shepherd;
he will gather the lambs in his arms,
and carry them in his bosom,
and gently lead the mother sheep.
Psalms 85:1-2, 8-13 (NRSV)
1 LORD, you were favorable to your land;
you restored the fortunes of Jacob.
2 You forgave the iniquity of your people;
you pardoned all their sin. Selah
8 Let me hear what God the LORD will speak,
for he will speak peace to his people,
to his faithful, to those who turn to him in their hearts.
9 Surely his salvation is at hand for those who fear him,
that his glory may dwell in our land.
10 Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
11 Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky.
12 The LORD will give what is good,
and our land will yield its increase.
13 Righteousness will go before him,
and will make a path for his steps.

2 Peter 3:8-15 (NRSV)
8 But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. 9 The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance. 10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed.

11 Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, 12 waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? 13 But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.
14 Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; 15 and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.

Mark 1:1-8 (NRSV)
1 The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

2 As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,
"See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way;
3 the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
'Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight,'"
4 John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 6 Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7 He proclaimed, "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. 8 I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."


Feeling the Distance

Oscar Wilde once said, “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”

Repentance is the theme of today’s lessons. I think a lot of us have experience with the kind of preaching that tries to scare you to death, that tries to hold a gun to your head to get you to go in a different direction, variations on the great sermon of the first Great Awakening in American church history by Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

But I want to introduce you to a different way of thinking about repentance.

Right now, there’s a lot of news about the suffering brought about the financial crisis. People are talking about betrayals of trust. The tragedies are with the people who did everything right, who paid their bills on time, showed up for work, kept their promises, paid their debts. They trusted in the promises of the American dream and did all the things people are supposed to do to achieve it. But they were betrayed. There are differences of opinion about who betrayed them. Some want to blame irresponsible and lazy homeowners who didn’t pay their mortgages. Others want to blame financial institutions for making up securities out of thin air. Either way you look at it, we’re talking about broken trust.

Isaiah says to us today:

All people are grass,
their constancy is like the flower of the field.
7 The grass withers, the flower fades,
when the breath of the LORD blows upon it;
surely the people are grass.

Could the problem be that we have misplaced our trust? Is it really a good idea to put our ultimate trust in human institutions like governments, corporations and banks? Is it not likely that when we do such things, we are overestimating the constancy of human beings and their works? Can we finally depend on people to be faithful to their promises?

Such misplaced trust is a basic facet of the biblical story of God’s people. The fall of Israel and Judah in the Old Testament story was the direct result of misplaced trust. God offered to rule his people, but the people felt they could do a good job of ruling themselves, based on their observations of other nations, empires and gods. Therefore God turned away, and allowed his people to suffer the consequences of their own choice.

But the biblical story is also about God’s faithfulness. Isaiah says:

8 The grass withers, the flower fades;
but the word of our God will stand forever.

When God makes a promise, he keeps it, even when his people don’t. God will not break trust.

Those of you who have had children know about the instinctive drive, usually by pregnant mothers, to prepare their homes for the coming of a child. We call it “nesting.” It’s become something of a fetish in our anxiety-ridden culture.

There’s “baby-proofing” for example. Baby-proofing in my mother’s house mainly consisted of allowing me to pull the television off the table on to my head. “That’ll teach him,” mom would say. But now we have gates and little plastic plugs for wall sockets and playpens and even leashes. We have the pink and blue decorations and cribs and toys babies can’t choke on and rocking chairs for breast-feeding and special little tubs for bathing. We have lotions and powders and special shampoos and new storage space for the endless supply of diapers.

Or when we know someone we love is coming, we will prepare in similar ways. In my home, our dining room table is a catch-all for unprocessed mail, ongoing paperwork, spare purses and keys. Any complaint about the crowded dining room table is met with a “There’s no place else to put that stuff.” But when my mother-in-law announced that she was coming to visit, the table was miraculously cleared.

Repentance is not about looking into the past, it’s about looking into the future. It’s about what we expect, not about what we have done. If we are at home already, then we have nowhere to go. But if we are not yet home, we have a journey to make. If we expect nothing but what the world already is, then we will do nothing. If we expect the world to change, we will get ourselves ready.

Repentance is about feeling the distance from home.

Our actions in the present are based mostly on our expectations of the future. And our expectations of the future are based on our experience of the past. If our experience is based only on what the world offers, then our expectations will be based on the world’s promises. But if we claim the experience of God’s people and make it our own, the experience of God’s eternal faithfulness, then our expectations will be based on the coming of heaven.

Repentance is not about feeling bad about who we are. Quite the contrary: it’s about feeling hopeful about who we will be.

Repentance is about feeling the distance from home, and it’s like the distance a pregnant mother feels between a household with two spouses and a household with two parents and a child, the distance a couple feels between just us two and us two plus mom, the distance the people of God feel between the world as it is and the world as it should be, and most of all, the distance I feel between who I am and who God intends me to be.

I have a friend who calls himself an atheist. I think he’s probably really a Buddhist. He owns a home and two cars and has a pretty big savings account. He has a great, high-paying career. His take on the economic crisis is that he is not particularly attached to his home or his cars or his savings or his job. He has lived without such things before and he is comfortable with not living with them in the future. He does not assume he will retire, though he is currently sixty-two. He doesn’t mind working, and he is willing to work at anything that will put food in his mouth. He is open to whatever future is coming.

Isaiah says that the way for his people will be opened up and made easy. There won’t be any valleys to get trapped in and there won’t be any mountains to climb. The barren wilderness his people must cross on their way home will be made fruitful so that no one will go hungry, and the desert will sprout springs of water so no one will get thirsty. And when they get there they will be greeted by a tender God who will care for them and cradle them and feed them with everything they need.

In what do we hope? To what do we look forward? Economic crisis, loss, aging, war, plagues, terrorism, death? These things will come, certainly. The bible gives us ample examples of the forgetfulness and pride and arrogance of the human race. Indeed, it is this very reality which grieves our God so deeply that he has called us, Israel and the church, out of all nations to be his people in the midst of such suffering.

But the promise of God, and perhaps the very content of faith, is that such things are simply part of the slow dissolution of all things we have foolishly trusted in, and that the end will be God’s victory.

What will that victory look like? And what is the distance between where we are now and the home we are destined for? This is the proper meditation of repentance. What is the distance between who I am now and who I am meant to be? What is the distance between what is now and what will be?

You may have noticed a subtle shift between Isaiah and the Gospel of Mark. Isaiah says:

3 A voice cries out:

"In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

But Mark subtly changes the quote:

3 the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
'Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight,'"

Isaiah is speaking of a journey Israel will make out of exile and back to the promised land. But Mark is describing the journey of God into the world. We are not going home. Home is coming to us.

Peter invites us to prepare ourselves for God’s coming. The first step in this preparation is to feel the distance between the person I am and the person I want God to find, between the world I live in and the world I want God to find. Because we have no idea when he will suddenly come, this preparation is urgent, perhaps more urgent than any other crisis or problem we think we may be facing.

Repentance is feeling the distance from home.

Amen.