The Christmas story we need

Matthew 2:13-23; Hebrews 2:10-18

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I promise to keep this short, because today we’ve come primarily
to sing the story of Christmas.
But I had to get a little sermon in for two reasons.
A minor reason is that next Sunday we won’t have a sermon,
because we’ll be celebrating communion,
and singing again, lots of songs of Christmas and Epiphany.
The main reason is that on this first Sunday after Christmas,
in Year A of the 3-year lectionary cycle,
we have one of the most absolutely horrible, and distasteful
stories from the Gospels,
and I never get to preach on it,
since this is always a music Sunday.
Yes, I should be glad I don’t have to deal with scripture like this,
and in a way I am.
But as I’ve said other times,
the texts that repel me, that I want to push back from,
usually have a hidden treasure,
that’s worth the struggle to find.

And I think that’s the case with this terrible story
known as “the slaughter of the innocents.”

The quartet did a lovely rendition of the old beautiful Coventry Carol,
didn’t they?... “Bye, bye, lully, lullay.”
That was a familiar carol to you, wasn’t it?
Raise your hand if you’ve heard it before.
Almost everyone.
Now, raise your hand again, if you can say in all honesty,
that before today,
you could have told me the Coventry Carol was all about
Herod killing the children of Bethlehem.
I didn’t remember that.
Until we started searching far and wide to find some music
based on this gruesome gospel story.
Check out your collection of Christmas records and CDs.
The Coventry Carol shows up mostly
on classical or renaissance collections,
or on instrumental albums.
It’s really hard to find on pop Christmas albums,
and even harder on contemporary Christian albums.
I found it on one, in my collection.
But they changed the words completely... sanitized it.

We don’t really want to hear this story in Matthew 2—spoken or sung.
But to quote the Methodist bishop Will Willimon,
“Even though it’s not the Christmas story we want,
it may be the Christmas story we need.”

His point was that in the time of Herod,
Bethlehem, and all of Judea, was an awful place to be.
And Willimon says, and I quote again,
“Any God who is unwilling to come to Bethlehem,
won’t do us much good.
If any God is going to save us,
God will have to come to where we are,
because we can’t get to God.”

We just don’t get the picture of how awful things were in Bethlehem.
The idyllic manger scenes we have in our homes,
and on Christmas cards and tree ornaments,
are all so serene, peaceful, charming.
Those are imaginary scenes.
That was not the reality. It simply was not.

Jesus was born into a world that was incredibly hostile
and dangerous and violent.
King Herod was a brutal king.
He did some good things for the people.
Politically, he had to.
He built gardens and parks and great buildings.
He even helped restore the temple.
But Herod ruled with a terrible iron fist.
He was fearful. He was paranoid.
He didn’t hesitate killing anyone
who seemed to be a threat to his throne.
He had three of his own sons executed,
as well as one of his wives.
In fact, he was so insecure—and so deranged—
that on his death bed,
he had the most prominent Jews brought to his palace,
and locked up,
and gave orders that the moment he died,
these prominent citizens would be executed,
so there would be national mourning when he died,
instead of national rejoicing.

So you can imagine when wise men from the east arrived,
and asked about the newborn “King of the Jews,”
this pushed all Herod’s buttons.
He hatched a plot to kill Jesus, by tricking the wise men,
but it didn’t work,
so he slaughtered every male child in Bethlehem under age 2.
It was horrifying and repulsive,
but for Herod, it was par for the course.
It wasn’t his first bloodbath, and it wasn’t his last.

This was the kind of Bethlehem into which Jesus was born.
So where is the good news in this horrible Gospel story?
Why do we need a story like this
on a day of joyful Christmas singing?
What a downer!
But no! In the midst of this terrible, terrible story, there is good news.
And it’s simply this:
That God wanted to come and be with us,
in a world exactly like Herod’s Bethlehem.
That God would take on our flesh and become one of us,
when we were at our worst.
That the incarnate God would show up
not in lofty Jerusalem or Rome or Washington,
but head straight into the bloody darkness that was Bethlehem.
That God was pleased to be born as the child of young Mary,
to be taken on as the son of Joseph,
to be delivered in shadows of a livestock shed.
and to become, soon after his birth,
a child in an Egyptian refugee camp,
because his parents managed to escape Herod’s violence.

That world was not a whole lot different than the world we live in now.
War. Terrorism. Genocide.
14 million refugees, all over the world,
huddled in tents or tiny houses of tin or cardboard.
Popular leaders being assassinated
under the watch of insecure governments.
This is the world into which God is pleased to come.
And be with us.

In Jesus, God entered our human condition, the worst of it.
In Jesus, God walked with us in the darkest of times.
In Jesus, God experienced our suffering.
And in Jesus, through his birth, his life, his ministry,
his suffering and death, his resurrection,
God took it all and redeemed it.
In Jesus, God comes to save us.

Our reading from Hebrews 2 says the same thing basically.
The writer said Jesus came not to help angels,
but the human descendants of Abraham.
Therefore (and I quote from Hebrews),
“he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect,
so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest
in the service of God,
to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people.”
This awful gospel story that we don’t want to hear
is the Christmas story we need.
The bloody reality that was Bethlehem, into which Jesus was born,
is evidence that we have a God who knows our suffering,
is able to be with us in our suffering,
is able to be a “merciful and faithful high priest.”

Remember my quote from Willimon?
“Any God who is unwilling to come to Bethlehem,
won’t do us much good.
If any God is going to save us,
God will have to come to where we are.”
The wonderful, and joyful news is that God came.
Then, and now.

A poet and song writer Scott Soper wrote these words,

Helpless and hungry, lowly, afraid,
wrapped in the chill of midwinter;
comes now among us, born into poverty’s embrace,
new life for the world.

Who is this who lives with the lowly,
sharing their sorrows, knowing their hunger?
This is Christ, revealed to the world
in the eyes of a child, a child of the poor.

Who is the stranger here in our midst,
looking for shelter among us?
Who is the outcast? Who do we see amidst the poor,
the children of God?

Bring all the thirsty, all who seek peace;
bring those with nothing to offer.
Strengthen the feeble, say to the frightened heart:
“Fear not: here is your God!”

Because of Matthew 2, we can be confident
that in the worst of our human reality,
“Here is your God!”

—Phil Kniss, December 30, 2007

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(Advent 3) So what did you expect?

Luke 1:46-55; Matthew 11:2-11; Isaiah 35:1-10

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The third Sunday of Advent is always “Joy Sunday.”
On this day the scriptures declare God’s saving work,
and then both people and creation
practically burst with joy because God saves!
It’s great fun to read texts like these.
A lot easier to read these,
than to read about John the Baptist pointing at people,
and screaming “You brood of vipers!”
Lot easier than reading about two women grinding grain,
and one of them getting snatched away,
and the other left behind.

But today’s readings—who wouldn’t be enthralled by these images?
The desert, Isaiah says, is going to burst forth with flowers,
it’s blooms will be as abundant as the crocus.
The wilderness and dry land
will turn into refreshing springs of water.
Isaiah 35, verses 5 and 6:
The “eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
the lame shall leap like a deer,
and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.”
Who wouldn’t want to say out loud, “Yes, Lord! Bring it on!”

And how heartwarming to hear the song of Mary,
the Magnificat of Luke 1,
as this young woman is overcome with joy, and sings,
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
The Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.”

We could spend all morning reading and re-reading these texts.
The song of Mary alone has inspired countless hymns and anthems.
The choir sang one of them this morning.
The congregation is going to sing one of them soon.
Between the three hymnals in our pews,
there are too many songs based on the Magnificat,
to sing all of them in one service.

This is all just a little bit strange, if you ask me.
Here we sit (on a cold, wintry morning)
in a large and comfortable church building,
in a prosperous town, in a more prosperous commonwealth,
in one of the most affluent countries in the world,
and we are happily reading and singing, multiple times,
one of the most revolutionary scriptures in the Bible.
And this morning, around the world,
in all the urban centers of wealth and power—
New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Moscow, Rome—
this same text is being read and sung in massive cathedrals,
and countless other houses of worship.

I suspect that on this very day, Advent 3,
dozens of presidents, prime ministers, members of royalty,
CEO’s of global corporations,
are sitting in a church somewhere, with a smile on their face,
while someone is reading or singing these words, and I quote:
“God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”

This is the song of a young and frightened girl from a back-woods town
in an out-of-the-way region of a puny little country
occupied by one of the most powerful Empires in human history,
and she is singing about all of that being turned upside-down.
The powerful being brought down.
And the powerless—her people—being elevated.
The hungry being filled,
and the rich going hungry.
She is speaking not only for herself,
having just been given the news
that she would give birth to the Messiah,
but she is speaking for all the little, insignificant people.
She is saying, our time has come.
God has looked on us with favor.
God has intervened and is turning things upside down.
God has brought about a surprising reversal of fortune.

It’s amazing to me—it’s great, but amazing—
how this text holds such a great appeal for all people,
rich and poor alike.
And I don’t think it’s just because the rich and powerful,
did not happen to notice how revolutionary these words are.
They’d have to be woefully unobservant to miss it.
And they didn’t get where they are by being unobservant.
I imagine there is something in the essence of this text
that speaks to a deep and universal human longing.
Human beings, rich and poor alike, want justice to be done.
We haven’t always sorted out what the implications of that might be.
When we seek justice,
we may not be ready for everything that means,
especially if it involves personal sacrifice.
But there is a God-breathed desire in all of us, I believe,
for the right thing to be done.

I think it must be an essential part of being made in God’s image.
God is merciful. And God is holy.
God is loving. And God is just and righteous.
And those divine seeds are planted in us.
But we forget that, and we fail to nourish those seeds,
the more we get enmeshed in the commitments and values
of this world and its fallen systems.
The more entangled we become with the powers—
whether those be the powers of wealth, of social privilege,
of political influence, of military might,
or the powers of spiritual oppression—
the more attached we are to those powers,
the less likely we will be in touch with God’s heart,
God’s desire to bring justice and healing to all.

So maybe that explains why kings and princes and billionaires,
and the likes of us average prosperous Americans,
can still sing the song of Mary.
There is still alive within us, a spark of the divine longing for justice,
even if we’re not quite ready
for all the social implications of this text.
For instance, I’ve heard many Christians make a strong argument
against any kind of economic strategy
based on redistribution of wealth.
But to this day, I’ve never heard a Christian try to make a claim
that the Magnificat is not inspired, holy scripture,
when it talks of wealth being transferred from rich to poor.
So there is a tension there, that I think we have to keep living with.
_____________________

The gospel of Jesus Christ, when it comes down to practical matters,
almost always leads us to a point of tension.
Tension between the now and the not yet.
Between the vision and the reality.
Between our loyalties to the kingdom of heaven,
and to the kingdom of this world.

That was certainly true during Jesus’ own life and ministry.
Even Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist,
struggled with this tension.
The second gospel reading of the morning, is most fascinating.
Last week’s gospel showed John the Baptist
as a confident and courageous prophet,
convinced about Jesus’ identity as Messiah.
He pointed to Jesus without reservation.
And said, “This is the one.”

In this week’s reading, it’s altogether different.
Things didn’t pan out the way John was expecting.
John himself was in prison with a death sentence.
And cousin Jesus had taken no initiative—none whatsoever—
to deliver his people from Roman oppression.
And with opposition to Jesus growing in the Jewish ranks,
and Rome watching with an eagle eye,
it looked unlikely that Jesus would ever do it.
Maybe John was thinking he got his prophetic wires crossed.
He had stuck out his neck for Jesus,
and now it looked like it was about to get chopped off.
So he sent a delegation of his disciples to Jesus.
To ask him straight up.
“Are you, or aren’t you?”
Tell me, yes or no, if you’re the Messiah.

Jesus gave a simple reply.
“The blind receive their sight.
The lame walk.
The lepers are cleansed.
The deaf hear.
The dead are raised.
The poor have good news brought to them.
So...blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

Take offense, at healing the blind and deaf, the lame and lepers?
Actually, yes. All kinds of people were taking offense.
And there’s where the tension lies.
Everyone—from the scribes and Pharisees, to priests and prophets,
to the common men and women on the street—
everyone had their attention on Rome, and it’s easy to see why.
It was because of Rome, that they were suffering so much.
If only someone would come along to fix the Roman problem,
we would be healed as a people.
Most of the “people in the know” rejected Jesus
as a serious candidate for Messiah,
because he was not taking on Rome.
Or if he was, it sure wasn’t obvious.

But you see, the mission of Jesus was first and foremost,
to announce the in-breaking of God’s kingdom.
The message of Jesus was justice and healing for all God’s people.
And ever since then, from the days of the Pharisees,
to the present day,
people have tried to narrow down Jesus’ mission
to the part they’re most interested in.
People in Jesus’ day saw their main problem
as the lack of political freedom.
So they saw Jesus as someone to bring salvation
from their national enemy.
Some of us today see the problem primarily
as a need for individual spiritual renewal.
So we focus almost exclusively on Jesus
as my personal and individual Savior.
Some of us see the main problem as the social ills of the world.
So we narrow Jesus’ message to that of social justice,
and transformation of society.
Some of us are focused mainly on personal brokenness,
and then narrow Jesus’ ministry to one of personal healing.

But the message of Jesus was bigger than any of that.
It encompassed all of life.
God’s people had lost their way.
The message of salvation that Jesus brought,
was comprehensive and wholistic.
Jesus went about acting as though
healing people and working for justice,
were one and the same thing.
He didn’t heal people in isolation.
He healed lepers of their skin disease,
and then instructed them to return to the community
that had sent them away.
He cast out demons,
and then encouraged them to find a place of belonging again.
He healed the physically lame,
and then forgave their sins.
Even the moral and spiritual ills that Jesus encountered,
he saw in a larger context.
A woman was caught in adultery and sent to Jesus for his judgement.
The socially accepted punishment was stoning to death.
Jesus identified and acknowledged her moral failing, her sin.
But then he put it in the larger social context,
and her accusers slinked away.
Her life was spared, she was restored to her community,
and she was urged to walk a new path of righteousness.

Wherever Jesus encountered brokenness,
he addressed it.
Whether it was primarily an individual who was affected,
or a segment of the community,
or the whole community.
He was equally moved to compassion,
whether it was a man blind from birth,
or a woman overtaken with a fever,
or a person possessed by an evil spirit,
or children being pushed away by grownups,
or tax collectors who overcharged their own people,
or temple money changers making worship into a business,
or the scribes and Pharisees tending to religious trivia
while neglecting the poor.

In all these situations that Jesus encountered,
it was the same divine impulse that moved him to action.
So when John the Baptist questioned him about his Messiahship,
because he didn’t see any evidence that he was taking on Rome,
Jesus answered, in effect, “So what did you expect?”
People who are broken are being healed.
People who are poor and powerless are hearing good news.
God saves. And I am God’s servant.
What did you expect?

If we believe in a God who saves,
and believe that Jesus came as God in the flesh,
and that by virtue of his life, death, and resurrection,
we still participate the saving mission of Jesus,
then we should expect things in this broken world
to be turned on their head sometimes.
We should come to expect surprising, and impossible,
reversals of fortune.
Blind people who see.
Lame people who leap like a deer.
Spiritually oppressed people who are released.
Despairing people who find joy.
Abused persons who finally discover the full personhood.
Sexual addicts who find love in a community with good boundaries,
where they can begin to heal.
People obsessed and anxious about their wealth
who find surprising freedom in letting go of it.
A nation divided by ethnic hatred,
being healed as they face the truth and seek reconciliation.
A wilderness that blooms like a garden.
A desert that pours forth springs of water.

God is active and at work in the world.
And God’s work is to save.
So what did you expect?

No, this surprising reversal doesn’t happen everywhere and every time.
In fact, it seems it does not happen, more often than it does.
The kingdom of which Isaiah spoke,
and of which Jesus gave witness,
is here now, but not yet completely.
But we can be sure it will continue to come.
Some of it we will see in our lifetime.
Some of it, probably not.
In the meantime, our calling is to live expectantly,
expecting God to save...broken individuals, lost souls,
estranged families, a polluted earth,
a violent society, an unjust nation.
Here and there and everywhere,
God saves.
We can expect it.
Mary was right.

So let us, even from our safe and comfortable position,
sing again the song of Mary.

And we’re going to learn yet another version of it,
one you probably haven’t sung before.
#124 in the new Sing the Story book.

The refrain goes,
My heart shall sing of the day you bring.
Let the fires of your justice burn.
Wipe away all the tears,
For the dawn draws near,
And the world is about to turn.

—Phil Kniss, December 16, 2007



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(Advent 2) Turn around and look

Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12

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It’s not hard to figure out why we Christians love Advent.
It’s such a hopeful season.
It anticipates such wonderful things.
It makes the claim that we are on the verge,
right on the verge of God breaking into the world
with salvation, and healing, and restoration.
It’s no wonder that Christians mark time with Advent.
Advent always begins a new year in the worship calendar.
In fact, in the 3-year cycle of scripture readings,
called the lectionary,
we’re at the very beginning now.
Last Sunday we started Year A, Advent 1.

Advent carries a message welcomed by a world
longing for the fulfillment of God’s salvation.
Advent is a promise that we’ve not been forgotten by God,
that God is with us.
Immanuel!

Our challenge is how to hold this Advent message of hope,
and at the same time, face life in this world, the way it is now.
That’s not an easy task.
And it’s seems to me it’s getting harder every year.
I thought it wouldn’t get any harder than it was six years ago, in 2001,
when we began the same scripture cycle, Year A, Advent 1,
less than 3 months after the Sept. 11 catastrophe.

Then, as now, we were given these texts from Isaiah,
full of hope and confidence that God is about to intervene,
and put everything right.
Last Sunday, our text from Isaiah talked about
the nations of the world beating their swords into plowshares,
and no longer studying war.
Next Sunday,
Isaiah will wax poetic about the desert pouring forth water,
and the drab wilderness bursting into bloom with flowers.
And today, we probably have the most amazing word picture of all,
a true utopia,
the peaceable kingdom Ross talked about to the children
Where the wolf will lie down with the lamb.
Where the calf and lion will be led by a child.

Sounds pretty inviting, doesn’t it?
Especially in a week of more saber-rattling
between the leaders of the U.S. and Iran,
another mass murder and suicide by a troubled young man,
this time in a shopping mall packed with Christmas shoppers.
a massive oil spill in South Korea,
and in Iraq, another 4 U.S. service personnel killed last week,
along with 117 Iraqi civilians.

It’s age old question of human existence,
“How do we live in a world overflowing with suffering?”
When there is more than enough suffering to go around;
when there is pain and poverty,
loneliness and hatred,
violence and disaster everywhere we turn,
what does it mean to “live well” and how do we do it?

That question is a lot more complicated these days.
Used to be, in my grandparents’ day,
you weren’t all that aware of suffering in the world,
unless the suffering was your own, or your neighbors,
or someone told you about it personally.
In their small towns and rural communities,
it was normal to not know.
Pictures of the latest war, or typhoon, or famine,
could only be seen at the downtown movie theater
on grainy black & white news reels once a week or so.

Today, all the horrific and bloody and gut-wrenching
sights and sounds of suffering are in our face
instantly, and constantly—
in our living rooms, and bedrooms,
and on our office computer screens.
A plane crashes in a fiery inferno somewhere in Japan.
Within minutes, on cable TV or the internet,
we can see the flames and hear the sirens,
and listen to the anguished crying of relatives.
A hurricane bears down on the Gulf Coast,
and we can watch it happen live,
can see houses, cars, and bodies float away, in real time.
Interesting experience a couple weeks ago.
Irene and I and daughter Sharon were on a big ferry,
crossing the Irish Sea toward Dublin.
Out in the middle of the sea, TVs in the passenger lounge
were showing BBC news, live.
And there was a rescue operation in progress
in waters north of where we were.
A ferry was sinking, and hundreds of passengers in life boats
were being rescued by a cruise ship.
We, and the other passengers on our ferry,
were sipping our tea, and watching this happen.

I imagine most everyone here can remember where they were
on the morning of September 11, 2001.
Some of you here probably watched, and saw,
the towers crumbling to the ground,
taking thousands of lives with them.
You actually saw it happen, in real time,
and so did millions of other people, all over the world.

I have to wonder about the social, and spiritual, impact
of all this instant and constant availability
of the sights and sounds of human suffering.
I think we scarcely realize what this does to us, as a society.

So what does faithful, Christian living look like, in such a world?
Is there a way to live fully and joyfully and meaningfully,
in the face of such suffering?

Seems to me that we’ve sort of decided
we cannot look head-on into the suffering of this world,
and still live fully and joyfully, so we’ve found ways to avoid it.
_____________________

Ironically, one of the ways of escaping it, I think,
is by watching it all the time on CNN and the internet.
After hundreds of hours of watching bombs fall, and buildings burn,
and planes crash, and children starve, and parents cry,
it soon starts to seem like just the way life is.
It’s normal.
We stop being shocked by it.
We have no intense reaction at all—no outrage, no anguish, no grief,
no determination to fight against the suffering.
Obviously, we can’t go through life
in a constant state of outrage and anguish.
We would die from emotional exhaustion.
But most of us could probably handle more than a raised eyebrow.
That’s about all the response some people can muster,
after watching it night after night on TV,
with a full plate of food in front of them.

When our God-given senses have become dulled,
when we no longer are moved by suffering,
we fail to be fully human.
God is a passionate God. God feels...deeply.
God is moved, to joy, to sadness, to anger, to love.
And we are created in the image of God.
If we fail to be moved,
we are shutting out part of the image of God within us.
_____________________

There are also plenty of ways we’ve learned
to escape the suffering that’s right in our own back yard.
Some of these ways are not only encouraged by our culture,
they are put into law.
City and county planners regulate property use in such a way,
that if I am living a comfortable, stable,
and safe middle-class lifestyle,
I need not ever worry
about having to rub shoulders with the poor.
Residential neighborhoods are developed,
that don’t allow houses less than a certain square-footage,
and don’t put in sidewalks,
and don’t allow businesses to locate there.
So when I move there,
I’m guaranteed never to have, as a close neighbor,
someone who can’t afford a house like mine,
or can’t afford a car.
Poor people won’t even have a reason to
visit my neighborhood to conduct business.

We make sure all the poor people
live together in the same general part of town.
We plan our streets and major roads so that we don’t even
have to drive through a blighted neighborhood
to get to our favorite restaurants and shopping centers.
We create an illusion that the kind of life I live,
is the way everyone lives.
I don’t blame the planners.
We elect them.
And they do what we want them to do.
We want them to protect us
from having to face the suffering of others.
If they did anything else, they’d get thrown out of office.
_____________________

But we can also err the other direction
when it comes to living in a world of suffering.
We can become so immersed in the suffering of others,
and of ourselves,
that we succumb to outright despair and hopelessness.
We can focus our energy so intently on the darkness of this world,
that we drown ourselves in it.
There are those who see all the oppression and violence
in our world,
in our cities,
in the middle east,
in the war on terror,
in the violent clash of religious dogma...
and they drown.
They literally drown emotionally.
They lose the ability to breathe in life and joy and hope.
And they sink into a state of despair and hopelessness.
_____________________

Both those responses to a world of suffering are sorely lacking.
They need the good news which the scripture proclaims
on this second Sunday of Advent.

In Isaiah 11,
the prophet looks, and sees, a vision of a peaceable kingdom,
with wolves resting beside lambs,
and leopards and goats and lions and calves,
all grazing peacefully, with children playing nearby.
It was not a picture of the real and present life for him or his people.
Not by a long shot.
The Israelites were basically slaves of King Sennacherib
and the Assyrian army.
Isaiah’s people were suffering, deeply.
So I wonder what they thought of Isaiah’s vision?
Were they truly encouraged by it?
Or did they laugh it off? “Yeah, Isaiah, in your dreams!”

But Isaiah persisted.
He kept proclaiming peace.
He kept painting these word pictures
of swords into plowshares,
of rivers in the desert,
of lions that ate straw like an ox.
In spite of the reality all around him.
In spite of the ridicule he probably got from his neighbors.
He held up this picture of hope, and said,
“Look here! See what God is doing!”
_____________________

Over 200 years ago a preacher from Berks County, Pennsylvania,
did something very similar.
Inspired by this very chapter in Isaiah,
Edward Hicks picked up a paintbrush,
and put Isaiah’s vision on canvas.
And then he did it again. And again.
Over 100 different versions of Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom,
were painted by preacher Hicks,
including the one that Ross showed the children,
and which is on the back of the bulletin.

Like Isaiah, the pictures that Edward Hicks painted
did not represent present reality.
Hicks was a Quaker.
And at the time he made those paintings,
the Quaker church was suffering a painful division.
There were two opposing camps of Quakers –
the Orthodox Quakers – headquartered in Philadelphia –
and the Hicksite Quakers –
named after Edward’s older cousin, Elias Hicks.
Even though Edward supported his cousin Elias,
this division pained him deeply.
So he used his paintings to preach to his church –
a message not only of acceptance of those who are different,
but of true affection for, appreciation of, and genuine love
toward those who would otherwise oppose us.
We have some of his actual sermons in print,
where he explained the meaning of his paintings,
and applied it directly to that conflict among Quakers.

But why do this, Mr. Hicks?
Why do this, Isaiah?
Why persist in painting unrealistic pictures of peace,
when brokenness and suffering and pain is all around?

Maybe these paintings, and these prophetic oracles,
are simply wishful dreaming,
an exercise in the power of positive thinking.
But no. That would be a gross misstatement of what’s going on.
Isaiah was not trying to conjure up some new reality,
trying to wish something into existence.
His utopian prophecy was not his imagination gone wild,
trying to get the people’s minds off of their troubles.
It wasn’t some motivational speech like some we hear today,
“if you can dream it, you can accomplish it.”

No, this was the picture of what Isaiah really saw,
when he was given a glimpse of what, in fact,
was in the heart and intentions of Yahweh, the God of Israel.
The people of Israel were being given an inside look
at God’s dream for them, and for all creation.
They were given a glimpse of the future
that God was preparing for them.
Obviously it had not yet been fully realized,
but it was a picture of what was already breaking forth.
God’s work, you realize, is all about making all things new.
The good news for Isaiah’s people, several millennia ago,
was that God was working on his dream,
right then, in the time of their suffering.
The good news for Edward Hicks’ Quakers, 200 years ago,
was the same.
The good news today is that God is still at work,
bringing forth the peaceable kingdom,
in the midst of this suffering and broken world.
In your own suffering and brokenness.

The perfect and peaceable kingdom of God is taking root now.
Look and you’ll see the signs.
Whenever and wherever God’s people
open themselves to God’s saving and healing and redeeming work.
God’s peaceable kingdom comes a little closer.

It comes when we turn around and look.
The turning around is crucial, of course.
Turning around is the attentiveness I was talking about last Sunday.
It’s turning around, from our chronic distraction,
turning around, from the sin that binds us,
turning around, from those things that keep us from seeing,
and turning toward God’s dream of a peaceable kingdom.

That’s what the Gospel reading was about today.
That’s why the story of John the Baptist is read,
on the same Sunday we read about the peaceable kingdom.
See, in Matthew 3,
John the Baptist was helping the people prepare for the kingdom,
by calling them to turn around, to repent.
That’s the definition of repentance.
Turning around, to move toward God’s dream, God’s future.
I think that’s exactly what John meant,
when he preached by the Jordan River,
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.
Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

This picture of the kingdom,
painted with words by Isaiah,
and on canvas by Edward Hicks,
is what defines our lives as disciples of Jesus,
not the suffering in the world around us.
We by no means, avoid or deny the suffering.
And we by no means, drown ourselves in despair.

Rather, we acknowledge it, we see it, we allow it to move us.
And then we turn toward God’s dream,
we turn around and look at another equally truthful reality,
the reality that is in the heart and intentions of God,
the reality that shows what God is up to, even now,
and we orient our lives around that reality.

This orientation is captured well, I think,
in a song we sang this past summer
at General Assembly in San Jose.
You’ll find it in your insert.
Music by Jim Croegart, words adapted from the poet David Adam.
Let me read the words, before we sing it.

Our hearts are empty without you
Barren and cold, but for the bold
Hope that you yourself planted within
In the mighty name of God
In the saving name of Jesus
In the strong name of the Spirit
We come. We cry. We watch. We wait. We look.
We long for you.

Sometimes we look for the morning,
For a refrain from etchings in pain,
But our loneliness draws us to you.
In the mighty name of God
In the saving name of Jesus
In the strong name of the Spirit
We come. We cry. We watch. We wait. We look.
We long for you.

--Phil Kniss, Dec. 9, 2007

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(Advent 1) Expecting the Unexpected

Matthew 24:36-44

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After the first candle was lit this morning on the Advent wreath,
the leader’s line was,
“Keep awake!...be ready for the unexpected.
the congregation’s response was,
“We watch. We listen. We wait.”

Those words say a lot about Advent.
The set the agenda for this season.
And they’re easy for us to say.
We’ve gotten comfortable with this idea of Advent
as a season of waiting.
If you grew up Mennonite, and you’re over the age of 40,
my guess is you didn’t celebrate Advent as a child.
The church I grew up in never mentioned the word.
In fact, it wasn’t until I became a pastor in the early 80’s,
that I had much of a concept of what Advent was.
We’re just growing to understand and appreciate the season.

But in another way, I think we hardly understand it at all.
Sure, we get the idea that it’s a 4-week waiting period for Christmas.
It’s a way to hold off celebrating Christmas until it gets here.
Which makes these couple hours on Sunday morning,
stand out in sharp contrast.
Many of us are in Christmas mode all December.
We spend mountains of time and energy and money
shopping, decorating, putting up lights,
shopping, baking, tree-cutting, shopping,
making travel plans,
going to Christmas concerts,
singing Christmas carols,
and (did I mention?) shopping.
It’s only in Sunday worship that we put all that on hold,
and say, wait!
Literally... wait!
And if that’s all Advent was about, I’d say it’s still a good thing.
It’s good to wait.
It’s good to remember that worthwhile things
don’t all happen instantly, at the moment we want them to,
or expect them to.
Some things are a long time coming. And that’s alright.

But I think the part of Advent that we haven’t yet understood,
at least not very well,
is that this attentiveness is not just a four-week discipline of waiting
which we happily put aside on December 25.
The unwrapping of presents on Christmas,
doesn’t mean the end of mystery.
It doesn’t mean we’re done waiting.
Not by a long shot.

The message of Advent, if you want to the know the truth,
is about the way to live the Christian life all year—
all day, every day.
The message of Advent is 24/7/365.

That’s one of the reasons, I think,
that the people who chose the scripture readings for Advent,
decided we should always begin the first Sunday,
with scripture about Christ’s second coming.
The second Advent.
Scripture that contains a stern warning,
a warning that seems rather out-of-place for the season.
You don’t sing about it when you go caroling.
It’s not very holly-jolly-Christmas-y at all.
The warning is this:
Stay awake. Pay close attention. Be alert and ready.
Don’t be caught unawares,
when the end comes, like a thief in the night.

And Matthew’s version of this warning is the worst of them all.
Thank goodness it only comes around once every three years,
in the lectionary cycle.
I don’t have to face this text and deal with it every year.

You heard it. Matthew 24:36-44.
Maybe you want to turn in your Bibles to it,
to convince yourself it’s really there.
The reader wasn’t just making it up.

I used to instinctively avoid this text in my Advent sermons.
The day of the coming of the Son of Man
will be just like the days of Noah,
when people were eating and drinking
and going about their merry life,
and one day Noah and his family walked into the ark,
and a flood suddenly came
and swept everyone else away to their death.
The day of Christ’s second coming will be just like that, it says.
Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left.
Two women will be grinding meal together;
one will be taken and one will be left.
Keep awake therefore,
for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.

Well... Merry Christmas!
It’s not too hard to figure out why they don’t play Christmas carols
about that on the radio, and over the loudspeakers at Wal-Mart.
It’s because nobody wrote them.
If they did write them, nobody would sing them.
If people would sing them, nobody would listen.
I wouldn’t want to listen to those kind of carols,
while I shop for candles and cranberries.

It’s probably not too hard for you to figure out
why I avoided this text for my sermons.
I was always glad there was an Old Testament text to fall back on.
And this Sunday always had a great one: Isaiah 2—
about nations streaming to the mountain of the Lord,
and about people beating their swords into plowshares,
and studying war no more,
and walking in the light of the Lord.
It’s a beautiful text. The youth did a great job reading it earlier.
So why am I not preaching from Isaiah, you might ask.

Because I have come to learn that if a certain text gives me the willies,
if it repels me more than attracts me,
then it is probably worth the effort of wrestling with it,
and discovering the treasure that seems hidden to me.

I have a knee-jerk negative reaction to this text
for probably some of the same reasons you do.
I was an adolescent in the late sixties and early seventies,
when certain books and movies were making their rounds,
like Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth,
and the movie Thief in the Night.
And while it wasn’t a Christmas carol,
there was a popular Christian song at the time by Larry Norman,
based on this Matthew 24 text.
The lyrics are imprinted in my head, as is the tune.
“A man and wife asleep in bed,
she hears a noise and turns her head—he’s gone,
I wish we’d all been ready.
There’s no time to change your mind
the Son has come and you’ve been left behind.
I wish we’d all been ready.”

It was fear-based evangelism the church engaged in.
And it worked.
I know I, for one, was scared stiff of being “left behind.”
I remember, when I was 11 or 12-years old,
waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweat,
afraid I had done something to offend God,
that might be cause for him to leave me behind.
In recent years, the book and movie series, “Left Behind,”
picks up on this same overemphasis on the event of the rapture,
and the fear of being suddenly abandoned
by God and by your loved ones.

But when you hear these words in Matthew 24,
it’s kind of easy to see where these books and movies come from.
It seems to be what Jesus is saying, too.

So would I say the notion of a rapture is a bunch of hogwash?
No, I can’t dismiss these words of Jesus that easily.
But I don’t accept that Jesus’ main agenda here,
was to make us afraid of the rapture,
to frighten us into faith.
He wasn’t even aiming to give us specifics about the end,
and how exactly it would take place.
He said he didn’t even know the day or hour,
only the Father knows.
What Jesus is calling for here, I believe,
is a lifestyle of attentiveness.
He’s calling for a consistent and continual way of life
for citizens of God’s kingdom.

Anytime we get hung up on one single
and final and irreversible moment in time,
and build our theology of salvation around that,
we are badly missing the point.
Jesus himself wasn’t privy to those details, he said.

No, I think this text is pointing us to a different, and better,
and more free and joyful way of living on this earth.
It’s pointing to a life of attentiveness,
of readiness to receive the kingdom of God when it shows up,
whenever and however it shows up.

You see, the greatest temptation for us humans,
is distraction.
Chronic distraction.
A state of existence whereby
our attentiveness to the work of God all around us
has been dulled.
We get distracted so often and so completely,
by the lure of the culture we live in,
and its material pleasures,
and its worship of the self,
that we fail to notice the kingdom.

So the kingdom of God might be taking root
and sprouting up right at our doorstep,
and we just don’t see it.
We stomp on the tender plant as we go rushing out the door...
to hop in our air-conditioned car to go Christmas shopping,
or wherever we’re going.

We’re not awake. We’re not alert.
We’re not ready for the kingdom, it would seem.

But the thing about the kingdom...
is it always seems to sprout up around the edges.
It emerges so often on the margins of life,
and if we’re distracted we’ll miss it.
At least it showed up on the margins when Jesus was here among us.
It sprouted up in a despised tax collector’s house,
when Zaccheus repented of his greed,
and pledged to help the poor.
It sprouted up at the dinner table of Simon the Pharisee,
when a sinful, shameful woman came in to anoint Jesus’ feet,
and express her love and devotion.
It sprouted when Jesus welcomed the children,
when he healed a lame man on the Sabbath,
asked a Samaritan woman for a drink,
touched lepers,
cast out demons,
preached deliverance to the poor.
Meanwhile, all the religious people were too distracted
to see the kingdom sprouting up all around them.
The Pharisees, and all the teachers of the law,
stomped on this tender new life
in their rush out the door to condemn Jesus for all this nonsense.

The Pharisees sincerely meant to look for the kingdom,
but they missed it completely,
because they were so distracted by the religious framework
they had so carefully and conscientiously constructed.

That’s the one thing about the kingdom of God
that we get wrong...again and again.
We Christians,
especially those of us who have invested ourselves
in religious institutions,
are tempted to think the kingdom is something we need to build.
That we need to keep our own hands on it at all times.
Ever notice how controlling the language is
when the church talks about the kingdom of God?
We talk about building the kingdom, establishing the kingdom,
advancing the kingdom.
In the Gospels, we find different language.
Jesus invites us to recognize it. To receive it. To enter it.
The kingdom is near you, he said.
Watch out or you’ll step on it.
The kingdom is God’s doing,
and we are invited to join it.

It’s all about God’s mission
to restore what is broken,
to reconcile what is estranged,
to redeem what is lost.
And in Jesus Christ, God put this mission into full gear.
You want to learn to recognize the kingdom of God,
as it emerges in our lives and in our world today?
Then get familiar with the story of Jesus.
The kingdom of God exists
where the lost are being found,
the dead are being raised,
the sick are being healed,
the broken are discovering new wholeness,
where people are being made new
by their encounter with Jesus the Christ.
We don’t make people new. We don’t build the kingdom.
But it’s the church’s job to be there when it happens,
to enter into and participate with that mission of God.

So the message of Advent is to get ready!
Get ready for the reign of God.
It is now here.
It is now emerging.
It is now being given birth.
The kingdom of God is not ours
to manufacture, manage, or manipulate.
Those three words all begin with “man,” and it’s not a coincidence.
“Manus” is the Latin word for “hand.”
Hands that control, that exert upon, that interfere with.
Kingdom hands are hands that receive, accept,
with palms upturned in gratitude.

That’s not to say that living attentively is living passively.
No, seeking the kingdom often means we need to
exert enormous effort,
make tremendous sacrifice,
be intentional in how we shape our lives,
and to be tenacious in our striving to overcome
the chronic distraction that has come to define our lives.

To use a timely example,
those Saturday newspapers
that are three times their normal weight
due to all the glossy fliers for Christmas sales.
That’s a distraction.
Those ads are designed for one purpose,
to create desire.
As a follower of Jesus,
I don’t think I really need the help of a national retail chain,
to tell me how to enhance my relationship with my spouse,
or children, or boss, or co-worker,
by buying the gift that says it all.
In our house, all the fliers, every one of them,
get pulled out of the paper
and immediately put on the recycling pile.
If I want to communicate my love and regard for Irene,
or our daughters, or other friends and family,
through gift-giving,
then wouldn’t it be far better to sit somewhere quietly and think?
To reflect carefully about the kind of gift
that would communicate what I most want to communicate?
And to consider some of the many options
that aren’t found in the chain stores,
like things I might create with my own hands,
or purchase from a local craftsperson,
or an alternative gift that helps someone in need,
like those available in the foyer today.
And if buying some clothing, or jewelry, or gadget
is what I need to do,
I know where the stores are.

That’s just one small example.
Every day we are surrounded by distractions.
It takes a lot of intentionality to brush those distractions aside,
so we can notice where God is moving in our neighborhood.
Being attentive is our Christian calling.
It is a lifestyle to which God in Christ invites us.
Life in the kingdom of God.
And that kingdom is a kingdom of deep joy
and peace and happiness and wholeness.
It is the kingdom described in the Isaiah 2 reading today,
to which nations stream, enthusiastically saying,
“Come, come, let’s go up to the Lord’s mountain.”
It’s a kingdom where people laugh
as they beat their swords into plowshares,
and put away their war manuals.
It’s a kingdom where people walk in the light of the Lord.
With a lightness in their step.

That’s the kind of life Matthew 24 is calling us to.
I think Jesus must be deeply saddened when scripture gets twisted
to the point where God’s deep love and mercy get squeezed out of it.
When an 11-year-old boy wakes up in the night
shaking in fear that he’ll be left behind.

This is a serious call to a deeper life,
from a God who embodies both love and judgement, to be sure.
But it’s not the rapture we need to get ready for.
It’s life in the surprising kingdom of God
that we need to get ready for.
This is first and foremost an invitation
to a life of freedom and joy and attentiveness in Christ,
where the kingdom of God shows up at unexpected times
and in unexpected places.
It is a call to expect the unexpected.

God help us remove the distractions.
I wish we’d all get ready.

—Phil Kniss, December 2, 2007


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