Third Sunday of Advent Year B 2008

3 Advent B 08

December 14, 2008

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 (NRSV)
1 The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the LORD has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;
2 to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
3 to provide for those who mourn in Zion--
to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the LORD, to display his glory.
4 They shall build up the ancient ruins,
they shall raise up the former devastations;
they shall repair the ruined cities,
the devastations of many generations.
8 For I the LORD love justice,
I hate robbery and wrongdoing;
I will faithfully give them their recompense,
and I will make an everlasting covenant with them.
9 Their descendants shall be known among the nations,
and their offspring among the peoples;
all who see them shall acknowledge
that they are a people whom the LORD has blessed.
10 I will greatly rejoice in the LORD,
my whole being shall exult in my God;
for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation,
he has covered me with the robe of righteousness,
as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland,
and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.
11 For as the earth brings forth its shoots,
and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up,
so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise
to spring up before all the nations.
Psalms 126:1-6 (NRSV)
1 When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.
2 Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then it was said among the nations,
"The LORD has done great things for them."
3 The LORD has done great things for us,
and we rejoiced.
4 Restore our fortunes, O LORD,
like the watercourses in the Negeb.
5 May those who sow in tears
reap with shouts of joy.
6 Those who go out weeping,
bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
carrying their sheaves.

1 Thess 5:16-24 (NRSV)
16 Rejoice always, 17 pray without ceasing, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. 19 Do not quench the Spirit. 20 Do not despise the words of prophets, 21 but test everything; hold fast to what is good; 22 abstain from every form of evil.

23 May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.

John 1:6-9, 19-28 (NRSV)
6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
19 This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, "Who are you?" 20 He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, "I am not the Messiah." 21 And they asked him, "What then? Are you Elijah?" He said, "I am not." "Are you the prophet?" He answered, "No." 22 Then they said to him, "Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?" 23 He said,
"I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness,
'Make straight the way of the Lord,'"
as the prophet Isaiah said.
24 Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. 25 They asked him, "Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?" 26 John answered them, "I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, 27 the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal." 28 This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing.



You Are Who Sent You

I anointed my head with oil this morning, and it felt pretty darn good.

I’ve shaved my head bald in solidarity with a cancer sufferer in our community and when I shave it, it sometimes gets dry. My wife who has salon training suggested I use a little olive oil to moisturize my scalp. Hence I have had the experience of having my head anointed with oil.

Anointing the head with oil was a Jewish ritual of blessing or honoring. But it was primarily Israel’s way of crowning a king. The word “Christ” means “anointed one.” In the rituals of ancient Israel, kings were crowned by recognized prophets, who poured oil over the head of the one they claimed God had chosen. Oil was rare and hard to produce and very expensive. It was a sign of excessive, over-the-top recognition.

God sent the prophet, therefore God sent the king.

The gospel of John the Evangelist tells us that John the Baptist was “man sent by God.”

1 The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the LORD has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed…

Jesus read this passage from Isaiah in the first sermon he preached.

This is the question of vocation. The root word is from Middle English, vocasioun, which means “a divine calling to a religious life,” although it has come to mean many other things.

We have a Rescue Squad in Deltaville that is exceptionally good. They have a very specific mission, a very specific job to do. Not everyone can do it. There’s significant training involved. The whole organization is set up to recruit, train, equip and organize people to carry out this particular mission.

We hear calls on the scanner and get a little taste of the kind of organization involved. It seems, although I’m not expert, that you need a driver for every mission and an EMT for every mission. The driver has a set of particular duties for which he or she is trained, and the EMT has another set, requiring a different skill set. Together with the appropriate equipment, they become the Rescue Squad when someone is choking or having a heart attack or is injured in some accident.

The community as a whole has called the Rescue Squad into existence, and that community continues to support and direct them. In a sense, when the Rescue Squad arrives to help you, it is the whole community who has sent them. They have a vocation, a call to a particular duty. The reality exists that people will get sick or get injured and that they will need a special crew of people not to do the major medical work of healing or repairing them, but to stabilize them and transport them quickly to the people who can do the medical work.

The people of God, the church, is the Rescue Squad of God. Our job is not to heal or forgive or transform anyone, but to get them to the one who can heal, forgive and transform them. Our job is not to change the world, but to open the door for God to change it.

To shift ground a little bit, I want to propose a hypothetical situation. What if the Rescue Squad gave up training its recruits? What if they gave up recruiting? What if they didn’t fix their equipment when it broke? What if they gave up all their fundraising efforts? What if the Rescue Squad decided it only needed to respond to other members of the Rescue Squad? What if the Rescue Squad decided that all it had to do was to have a friendly attitude toward those in crisis? What if it told itself that the warm feelings members had for each other and the community was enough?

It would probably lose most of the community’s support, wouldn’t it? The community might have to turn to the county and demand a raise in taxes to pay a professional crew to come in. The Volunteer Rescue Squad would be in shambles. All the members who really cared about the vocation of the Rescue Squad would be embarrassed and ashamed.

What if the problem wasn’t just that people got sick or injured, but that the rescue squad wasn’t ready to help them?

This was the situation when Isaiah was writing to the decimated populace of ancient Israel, and this was the situation when John the Baptist started preaching at the Jordan. And I think this is the situation the mainline churches find themselves in today. We are the rescue squad of God, given the commission to reveal God’s love to a hurting world. The world continues to hurt, but the rescue squad has broken down. They have forgotten their vocation. They have rationalized their laziness. They have turned away from the world and turned inward on themselves. They only answer some calls, and only from fellow members. They don’t bother to recruit. They don’t bother to train or prepare their members. They don’t fix their equipment when it breaks. And they get incensed if anyone points out their faults.

Who do you think you are? That’s the question the religious leaders have for John the Baptist. Who do you think you are calling us to repentance? How dare you demand we be baptized, as if we were not God’s people already? Who are you to tell us the Messiah is here? That’s our job! Herod the Great is doing a splendid job funding the temple project! Who’s to say he’s not the Messiah? And what about Caesar? He’s done a great job of keeping the peace and he leaves us alone, except for those pesky taxes. Why can’t he be the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, like all the propaganda says? Remember Cyrus? He was a Persian emperor and God made him Messiah, right?
John’s answer is Jesus’ answer is our answer. Who am I? Who are we? We are the ones God sent.

The celebration of Christmas, just like the celebration of the birth of any great person, is the celebration not merely that a baby was born, although birth is always a joyous thing. The reason we remember certain birthdays is because of what the person went on to do, what their coming meant for the world. We remember Jesus because of his vocation, his divine calling to a religious life.

Israel has a divine calling to a religious life. The church has a divine calling to a religious life. The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the United States and Canada has a divine calling to a religious life. Philippi Christian Church has a divine calling to a religious life. Every member of Philippi has a divine calling to a religious life.

This doesn’t mean that everyone has to leave their jobs or their retirement and run off to seminary. That’s a particular piece of the whole religious life to which we are called, but not everyone is supposed to do that. But some of us do.

I did. One of the things that makes being a pastor different from having a job is that I understand my presence among you not as a job to which I was hired by an employer, but as a calling and a sending by God. If I have an employer, God is that employer, and I discern God’s rule in my life through the scriptures, prayer, self-examination, meditation and the sense of the community of believers. God speaks to me through his Word and through his people, not only here at Philippi, but throughout the whole church and throughout the church of history. I joke about being out in left field, but sometimes God puts me there; he puts me at odds with you. It is often at those moments when both you and I grow the most, however uncomfortable those times might be. This is very different than an employee who simply carries out the orders of a human boss.

But, like John, I am not Jesus, I am not Elijah, I am not Moses. Each of these people had a particular calling. All of them found their calling in the word of God. And every one of you has a special calling peculiar to you that comes from the word of God. The anointing of God, the gift of the Holy Spirit, is the means by which God enables you to fulfill your vocation.

This congregation is your seminary. It is the training and education center, the school of the Holy Spirit. At the same time, the places and people and things into which God has placed you in your everyday life are also speaking to you, speaking about your vocation, your divine calling to a religious life.

Today is the third Sunday of Advent, called Gaudete Sunday, meaning Joy Sunday. The joy of Christmas is not simply that we have been blessed with lots of goodies, or even that we share them with people less blessed than ourselves. The joy of Christmas is that God’s Rescue Squad has a new leader, that the members have been given all they need to do the great work they have been called to do.

Friends, the world is full of suffering primarily because it does not know or doesn’t want to know that a loving God is present and wants to heal and renew it. The world is full of spiritually injured people. We have been blessed with everything we need to rescue them. We are blessed with God’s word, we are blessed by God’s Spirit, we are blessed with God’s calling to us.

Who are you? You are who sent you.

Amen.