Rejoice Always!

Texts: Zephaniah 3:14-20; Isaiah 12:1-6; Philippians 4:4-17; Luke 3:7-18

December 17, 2006

I don’t think I’ll be giving up any deep trade secrets by telling you this, but lots of times we preachers give titles to sermons that we have not yet written. Bulletin and e-mail deadlines force the issue, and sometimes a title is as close to an idea as we have at the moment. That happened this week, and, for better or for worse, the sermon that actually emerged under the title “Rejoice Always!” might have more accurately been called “Hope Always!”

But as you listen now to the final text that the lectionary places before us on this third Sunday of Advent, you’ll hear just how it was that I began with rejoicing. I trust that in a few more minutes you will see how I turned to hope. Listen now to this morning’s fourth reading, and open yourselves to a word from God in Saint Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi:

4Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved. ²I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. ³Yes, and I ask you also, my loyal companion, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life. ⁴Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. ⁵Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. ⁶Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. ⁷And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. ⁸Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. ⁹Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.

Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen … keep on keeping on … and the God of peace will be with you.

What a remarkable word for a season of rushing ‘round like the proverbial one-armed paper hanger. Though the stress of the season press in upon you, though the check-out lines get long and testy, though traffic be snarled, though the illness of loved ones surround you in worry, though the tensions of work press in upon you, though the frustrations of family life entwine you, though the fear and terror of our time haunt your days with distrust and your sleep with nightmares, “do not worry about anything; rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice!”

Wow! Of course, it would be easy to reduce this to the level of Disney: hakuna matada – don’t worry, be happy. After all, Paul was a saint, for crying out loud. He could afford to rejoice – right?

Well, perhaps not so much. Consider the occasion of this letter. Paul is in prison, awaiting trial. The threat of execution hangs over his head. The young movement of “people of the way” is struggling with birth pangs that include missionaries whom Paul calls, in this same letter, “dogs,” “evil workers” and “enemies of the cross of Christ.” Both his life and his life’s work are hanging by a thread.

And yet, Paul says again and again in this letter, “rejoice! Rejoice!”

Paul got some things wrong in his letters – surely the patriarchal tone of his writing was bound by time and culture and is rightly set aside as a relic of first-century Middle Eastern thought. But the heart of the matter he got precisely – and the heart of the matter is a matter of great hopefulness.

Indeed, Paul used the word “hope” dozens of times in his letters, and gave us such memorably phrases as:

v Endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

v Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.

v There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling,

v And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

That last one, from the great hymn to love in the Corinthian correspondence, elevates love to the greatest good, and in so doing indicates precisely the kind of hope that Paul speaks of so often. It is an advent hope. It is the hope grounded in a deep trust of what has been given already and in a profound anticipation of what is yet to be revealed from the loving heart of God that beats at the center of all that is.

Indeed, witnessing to this hope is our highest calling as people of the way of Christ. While we are surely to be realistically discerning in our assessment of the present time, we are always to be a people of hope. This means that critical thought and inquiry are always appropriate, but that cynicism is not a faithful response to the world.

I know this is a sometimes difficult word for those of us enamored of Seinfeld, who get our news from The Daily Show and who believe that Stephen Colbert really is God’s gift to the earth – as one web site put it. I think it was Stephen Colbert’s web site.[1] It’s hip to be detached and ironic, and to wax cynical and amusing. I know – because I certainly pretend to be hip!

Be detached, ironic cynicism is an unfaithful response to a world that desperately needs not detachment but greater ties of human affection, that needs not irony but purpose and, that needs not hipness so much as hope. Well, there will always be a place for hipness! The world does still need hipness!

I probably cannot convince you that Paul is or was hip, but how about Zephaniah or Isaiah or John the Baptist in his fashionable camel’s hair cloak? Each of them proclaimed a message of hope, a promise that, in Zephaniah’s words, God “will save the lame and gather the outcast, and change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth.” Or, as Isaiah promised, “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.” Or, as John the Baptist proclaimed, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

These are words of hope, and, as John understood, such a promise compels a response. Such a promise invites us to live into hope. This hope is the promise of Advent.

This season of hope does not simply wash over us and reassure us that, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, all will be well. Rather, this season of hope – these prophetic promises filled with hope and expectation – call forth in us a hope-filled way of living day to day in spite of the evidence.

This is Advent hope and faith: that we trust in spite of the evidence and, through our very living full of hope and faith we witness the evidence change. To paraphrase my friend Jim Wallis, down at Sojourners, “Faith is believing in spite of the evidence and witnessing the evidence change.”

That’s what these Advent stories are all about: a profound and active hope that trusts God’s providence in the world and acts in response to it to witness the changing evidence. Mary and Joseph and their families lived under an oppressive imperial rule, and yet found the faith to trust the angelic promise in spite of the evidence, and then they witnessed the evidence change in their very midst. Old Zechariah was stunned into silence as he watched the evidence change. His unexpected son, John, lived out beyond the margins, in the wilderness, getting by on locusts and honey, and yet found the faith to trust prophetic words, and then witnessed the evidence change in his very midst.

Paul, bound and in jail, found the faith to trust the message he had been given and witnessed the evidence change.

Witness, in every one of these cases, amounts to much more than passive watching. This is not couch potato faith by remote control. Witness means to speak out, to move and act and live into the deepest hope of our faith. We are doing this together here at Clarendon.

And, sisters and brothers, the evidence is changing in our very midst this season; so much so that I find myself this morning able to echo Paul’s words – meaning, of course, that in spite of himself, old Paul must have been hip!

“Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love … my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved. Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen, and the God of peace will be with you.” Amen.

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[1] Actually, those exact words were found at http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=55303429.

Refiner's Fire

Texts: Malachi 3:1-5; Luke 3:1-6

December 10, 2006

When session meets a bit later this morning, our first item of business will be a conversation with incoming elders. Over the past several weeks, I’ve been having conversations with the elders-elect about their upcoming service, and in the midst of that I thought back to my own preparation for ordination and a, shall we say, negative object lesson in pastoral care that I picked up along the way.

In preparing for that service of ordination, I went to the interim senior pastor of the church that would host the service and asked him for a bit of guidance in several matters concerning the service. Without any response to the concerns I’d raised, he launched into a ten-minute story about his own ordination.

I suppose all of us do that to some extent from time to time. This man had raised it to an art form, such that he regularly worked out his own issues from the pulpit – right up to and including digestive issues. I kid you not.

That came to mind this week as I was reading Malachi’s words and then Isaiah’s words out of the mouth of John the Baptist. You see, we Christians have been in the habit for 2,000 years of interpreting the words of the ancient Hebrew prophets as being directly about Jesus, and, thus indirectly, about us.

Fact of the matter is, we’ve got is exactly backwards. The words are directly about us and only indirectly about Jesus.

Let me sort that out a bit. We read this passage during Advent in order to hear, in the Christ event, the events in history promised by the prophet Malachi. Indeed, the framers of our Christian Bible placed Malachi as the final book of the first testament just ahead of Matthew, the first of the gospel stories. This arrangement certainly means to suggest that Malachi’s prophetic vision is directly connected to the story of Jesus.

However, a bit of common sense tells us the Malachi wasn’t talking about Jesus. It’s not that prophesying a birth 450 years in advance strains credulity so much as it is that the promise of an event 450 years in the future is going to have no impact on the prophet’s intended audience. After all, no one suffering today will find comfort in the promise of a savior coming 450 years from now. No one acting unjustly today will find approbation in the promise of a judge coming 450 years from now. No one longing for God today, wants to wait 450 years for God-with-us.

No. Malachi was not speaking about Jesus. The words of Isaiah, used so often in our Advent stories and placed in the mouth of John the Baptist in our passage from Luke’s gospel, were written even earlier than Malachi’s – about 550 years before Jesus.

No. Isaiah was not speaking about Jesus either.

Nevertheless, the gospel writers – and quite likely Jesus, himself – used the words of the prophets to situate the story of Jesus within the broader story of Israel and Israel’s God.

And it is within that understanding that these prophetic words, written some 2,500 years ago for a premodern Middle Eastern Jewish community, can be seen as directly about us – Christians living in North America in the year 2006 of the Common Era.

Listen, again, to the words of the prophets:

John the Baptist calling out, “prepare the way,” the echo of Isaiah’s promise that “every valley shall be filled, every mountain made low, the crooked made straight, the rough way smoothed, and a vision for all people,” and the prophetic vision of the refiner’s fire from Malachi: these words are for us and about us. The promise that the mountains shall be made low and way made straight are for us and about us. The promise of a refining fire is for us, as well.

Isaiah’s words – “every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low” – are not, as some misunderstand them, about making everything easy. Isaiah spoke to an exile community who knew better than to believe their way would be easy. No. Isaiah is not promising the exiles that they will return home on Easy Street. But he is promising them that the way to God is not blocked even by the difficulty of the present time.

That promise is for us – even now as we live in the shadow of the most violent, war-torn century in human history, as we live in the memory of Holocaust and the reality of Darfur. Even now, the way to God is not blocked for us. Even now, when the Holy Day of Christmas has become an excuse for conspicuous consumption, the way to God is not blocked for us. Even now, as some of us suffer illness and the disease of loved ones, as others of us suffer broken relationships or vocational distress. Even now, as we live our all too human lives, the way to God is not blocked for us.

Indeed, God speaks still and beckons us to deeper communion with the divine and deeper community with those who bear the imprint of the divine – that is to say, us, we who live these all too human lives.

Where Isaiah speaks words of comfort to us, Malachi’s words speak a particular challenge to us. With his images of judgment and refiner’s fire, these prophetic words remind us that though the way to God may be made level and straight in and through Jesus, the way of God, as revealed in the life of Jesus, is anything but easy. For despite the pastoral images of shepherds, mangers and new life, we know that the story of Jesus goes forth from Bethlehem toward the cross.

In using the words of the Hebrew prophets to shape our understanding of the Christ event, we draw upon a particular memory, a particular story told through particular texts. In the end, these texts are about us – but only insofar as they transform us.

Reading these stories these days may be the most radically counterculture gesture any of us can make.

For in the face of a culture that believes so clearly in redemptive violence, these texts guide our feet in the way of peace. In the face of a culture that believes so clearly that we are what we can buy, these texts promise their richest blessing to the poor. In the face of a culture that believes so clearly in power and domination, these texts tell us that the powerful have been brought down and the lowly lifted up. In the face of a culture of self-absorption – where magazines such as Us and Self call to us at the grocery store check-out lines – these texts call us to refocus our deepest concern on the other. And, most urgently, in the face of a culture of death, these texts – even though they take us by way of the cross – promise everywhere the gift of new life.

As Walter Brueggemann put it, “the recovery of the biblical text is urgent, the most urgent ‘social action’ that can be undertaken. For it is only when the past is brimming with miracle and the future is inundated with fidelity that the present can be recharacterized as a place of neighborliness in which

Ø Scarcity can be displaced by generosity;

Ø Anxiety can be displaced by confidence;

Ø Greed can be displaced by sharing;

Ø Brutality can be displaced by compassion and forgiveness.”[1]

The Advent story calls us to prepare for precisely such a place, such a site in our lives, in the lives of our families, our workplaces, our communities where conditions of scarcity, anxiety, greed and brutality are transformed into their opposites. Prepare, in other words, for a world turned inside out and upside down.

Further, they tell us to prepare as if by going through the refiner’s fire which leaves in its wake generosity, fidelity, sharing, compassion, forgiveness.

This is the way of Christ. It is the way for which we prepare in these days of Advent. May our hearts and our lives be open to its coming. Amen.

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[1] Walter Brueggemann, The Word That Redescribes the World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006 ) 16-7.

David E. Ensign

What Are We Waiting For?

Text: Luke 21: 25-36

December 3, 2006

The first Sunday of Advent. The candle glows. The tree stands ready to be decorated. We’ve sung the first carol of the season, and opened the first flap of the Advent calendar. There’s even a hint of colder weather outside. The days are growing shorter in our part of the world, as if all creation itself were preparing for the traditional Christmas of hearth and home and comfort and joy.

It is a warm and pleasant image that we gather around this time of year, and into that greeting card image comes this seemingly discordant word, from Luke’s gospel:

²⁵“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. ²⁶People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. ²⁷Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. ²⁸Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

²⁹Then he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; ³⁰as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. ³¹So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. ³²Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. ³³Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. ³⁴“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, ³⁵like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. ³⁶Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”

“There will be signs … distress among the nations … be on guard … be alert at all time.”

No sunny, warm, pastoral images in that Advent reading. I think I’d prefer something from Hallmark, instead.

But the coming of Christ is not a domesticated event easily reducible to muzac in the mall or Christmas specials on TV. God will not be mocked, and this reading from Luke’s gospel demands our attention.

Jesus asks, “can you not read the signs of your own times? What are you waiting for?”

So, then, for us – the church at Clarendon: a progressive, inclusive, diverse community of faith and doubt – what are the signs of our times? Where is Christ being born again in us? What are we waiting for?

When we sing, “O come, O come Emmanuel – Come, God-with-us,” what longing deep within ourselves do we name and give voice to?

It’s funny, as we enter this season of Advent, I feel as if I have lived in Advent time for a very long time now. Perhaps all of my life. A friend in Lexington told me, about 10 years ago, that I wait too long, that I suffer the paralysis of analysis, and that I need to “sin boldly” a bit more often. Given some of the changes we’ve lived through together here over the past three and a half years you may disagree with that assessment.

In any case, I do know that I have come to understand these years here as an Advent – a coming together of many unique, disparate but passionate voices of faith longing to live together into deeper community, longing to work together for a more just commonwealth, longing to sing together a more profound hallelujah.

Some of those voices are present in the room this morning. Some are in other pews in other houses of worship this morning. Some are sitting in coffee shops reading the Sunday papers, and still others are home in bed.

And all of that is blessed. All of that is blessed!

You see, the signs of the times do not indicate that what is being born in us is simply a new way of being an old institution; the signs point us to a new way of being. Period. The signs of the times do not point to mere congregational transformation; the signs point to a more fundamental transformation of our very lives and our society.

This way of being – this fundamental transformation – is the way heralded in the Christ event. It cannot be confined to a sanctuary at 10:00 on Sunday mornings. It is a way already being born in coffee-shop conversations with church folks and with people who want nothing to do with church as it is. It is a way being born in book groups of spiritual progressives who may never set foot in this sanctuary or join this congregation. It is a way being incarnated – made flesh – in the lives of emerging young leaders in movements for justice and equality in this community. And it is a way, I am utterly convinced, that thousands more want to follow but they have not yet perceived the signs, they have not yet heard that there is such a way.

The Advent story, as we will read together in the weeks ahead, begins with a voice crying out in the wilderness, “prepare the way!”

We are the ones to whom that voice cries!

We are the ones called to prepare the way!

We are the ones called to show the way to the multitudes who long to discover it!

The signs of our times are clear: we are the ones who we’ve been waiting for.

Now, as is always the case when discerning signs, the way may be clear but there is no road map. Therefore, in the days ahead, I want to engage you – in every way I know how (coffee talk, e-mail, phone calls, cookie bakes, newsletters, sermons, whatever) in every way we can conceive I want to engage you in a deepening conversation about an incredibly exciting idea and opportunity being born in our midst that will stretch us far beyond the confines of tradition and definition and institution. Please, consider this invitation.

This calling – which we have collectively discerned during our season of Advent preparation, to be a center of discernment and center of reformation – is deeply rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news of love and justice that we proclaim and share with the world. We are called to risk all – even the church – for the sake of the gospel.

I know full well that this sermon is no more clear than the apocalyptic words of Luke’s gospel, or than Jesus’ words therein: “Look at a fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is near.”

This may be a metaphor out of season, but new life is blooming in our midst. We do not need to look to the sun, the moor, or the stars nor even the ample and evident distress of the nations to see the signs of our times. They are right before us.

The only question is whether or not we, as a community of faith, will stand up and raise our heads, for the time is at hand and the kingdom of God, the commonwealth of the beloved, is drawing near.

As Jeremiah promised, “The days are surely coming … for justice and righteousness throughout the land.”

Let us celebrate its Advent – its coming – by gathering at this table, where we break bread together and share a common cup in a foretaste of that beloved community. Amen.

David Ensign