Mal.
3:1-4
Luke
3:1-6
How many of you have seen the movie
“French Kiss?” The movie begins with Meg
Ryan’s character, Kate, acting as a typical middle class person, saving money,
planning for the future, working hard to make the dreams of many a typical
middle class person come true. She is
engaged to a Doctor, and living in a home away from home, which for her is Canada , hoping
to become a Canadian citizen. She has
saved enough money to buy a wonderful house and she is dreaming and planning
for the family and kids she hopes to have.
She seems happy and excited about her life and the only clue we are
given that things are not all that they seem is that she is terrified of
flying. So when her fiancé invites her
to go with him to France ,
she declines, despite all his urgings. The
crisis in the movie comes just a few minutes later when her fiancé calls from
France to tell her that he has met a “Godesse” in France and that he will not
be returning to her. She feels the
secure walls of her life begin to crumble and she pushes herself to fly to France , despite
her terror, in a desperate attempt to “get him back!” When she arrives in France, she is met by a
number of people who block her attempts to connect with her fiancé and finally
everything she has is stolen from her. She
finds herself across the world from her home, without fiancé, without
possessions, without security, “without my vitamins!!” as she declares, and on
top of that because she left Canada to fly to France before her resident visa
was approved, neither Canada nor the United States will give her a new
visa. She has in the span of a day, gone
from being a complete “has” to being a total “has not.”
At first she is devastated. But as she later explains, “I thought, there
is no way that everything I was building for would be destroyed ... and so I
bought a plane ticket, got on the plane, somehow made it over the big blue
ocean,... and then the most extraordinary thing happened. Everything went wrong. I was wandering the streets of Paris , penniless, without
a hope in the world. And let me tell
you, you can do a lot of soul searching in a time like that and I realized that
I spent most of my adult life trying to protect myself from exactly this
situation. And you can’t do it. There is no home safe enough, there is no
country nice enough, there’s no relationship secure enough. You’re just setting yourself up for an even
bigger fall and having an incredibly boring time in the process.”
Throughout the movie Kate learns to
let go of her fear, to the point that towards the end of the movie she gives
away her life savings to
someone she expects to never see again - out of love - just because.
The lesson in the story is pretty
clear. Out of our fear of losing the
security, the wealth, the status that we have, we sometimes fail to appreciate
the most important thing of all: the gift of life that God has given us. We
fail to really live that life, but instead are controlled by our need for
security. Still, most of us are not put into the situation where we are forced
to reevaluate and reexamine our priorities, our fears, and our use of
resources....
Unless, of course, we are Christians
who take seriously that this is a part of God’s call for our lives. Especially during times like advent and lent,
times of preparing, we are called to reexamine our lives, and to make some
significant changes.
Today’s passage in Luke tells us
that we are to prepare for Christ’s coming.
More than that it tells us HOW we are to prepare. John, we are told, was proclaiming a baptism
of repentance. We are to prepare for
Christ’s coming by repenting. Repenting does
not mean being sorry for something you’ve done.
It does not mean wallowing in guilt or shame. It literally means turning the other way,
choosing a new direction. It means
committing to a radical change and then doing it, living out that change. This passage in Luke details what that path
is to look like. We are told to make
straight the paths for God’s coming. In
other words, we are called to repent, or rather, to really look at our ways,
look at our actions and our behaviors, and then change them, being focused and
direct in our behaviors, no longer taking roads to the right or left that are
distractions and are all over the map.
The rest of the passage from Luke also helps explain this. Luke continues, quoting Isaiah, by telling us
what God’s coming will be about. God
will raise the valleys and bring low the mountains. Raising up the valleys and bringing the
mountains low: what is that all about?
This passage is talking about
systemic change. It is talking about
even-ing out of the playing field. It’s
about confronting and not allowing suffering; lifting up the poor, the
marginalized, the oppressed, bringing them into physical, emotional, societal
... complete relief. We are all for that.
Of course we are. As people of
faith, we want the oppressed and those suffering to be okay. However, he doesn’t just talk about raising
up the valleys. He also talks about
bringing down the mountains. It is also
about bringing low the high and mighty: liberating the famous from their burden
of constant attention, the powerful from their total control, and liberating
the rich from their excess stuff. And
while we may not be powerful or famous, we are, in comparison to the rest of
the world, very, very rich. And while I
know it sounds funny to talk about liberating
the famous, powerful and rich, the reality is that God is about that, too. These things that we seek after imprison people. The famous really do loose their privacy, and
sometimes their sense of self, because the person everyone sees and adores (or
hates) is not the real person whom it takes time and intimacy to know. The powerful carry the burden of huge
responsibility and what it means to choose life for some, and often death or
poverty for others. And the rich, well
the more people have, the more they fear to lose. They end up becoming owned by their stuff,
controlled by their fear of losing that stuff.
Now they have to have an alarm system or systems to protect their
stuff. Now every stranger is a potential
danger. And we live in fear of not
having a high enough paying job, of something happening that will cost us more
than we “can afford” if we want to maintain the style of living to which we are
accustomed. We’ve talked before about
how the poorest people in Central America, for example, a family with six kids
who live in a one room house with dirt floors, will give you their only chicken
as a meal: will serve you truly the best they have, and they will feel honored,
happy, proud in the best sense to have been able to offer that kind of
hospitality. In contrast a person living
in a million dollar home here will begrudge a poor homeless person a dollar for
something to eat. We may feel we own our
stuff, but it is at least a mutual owning and often times I think our stuff has
ultimate control. So in this passage
from Luke we are told that God is about redeeming all people: the poor will
have more than one chicken to share, the oppressed will regain their dignity
and respect. The powerful will be
relieved of their burdens, and the rich will no longer have so much that they live
in the fear of losing it. ALL flesh, as
it says here, will see the salvation of God.
We then prepare for God’s coming in
two ways. First, we are called as part
of our repentance to understand our part both in the current situation of haves
and have-nots, but also in the new creation that we are told God will
bring. Even those of us who are “poor”
in this room are richer than most of the world.
We are called to repent our having at the cost of others who have
not. And we are called to look at the
promise God makes to bring the hills low and raise the valleys, recognizing
that even-ing out for most of us will mean we have less. We will be liberated from our nice cars, from
our fancy computers and phones, from all of our electronic toys. The good news
for us is there really will be freedom in that, no matter what our current
fears. Not easy to see from where we
sit. But remember God wants us to be as
whole as we can be and this will be part of that wholeness.
Second, this passage says we are
called to prepare for Christ’s coming by making the way straight. Making the way straight, preparing for God’s
coming looks like choosing to be part of that world where all have enough,
because we are not so rich anymore. It is a call to us for just action on our
part. We make the way straight by no
longer bending the road to the distractions of that luxury over there, or this
status over here or that entertainment over there. In other words, we make the way straight by
being part of bringing that justice to the world. We are called to prepare for Christ’s coming
by caring for one another, at the deepest level.
This is more than charity. Because
sometimes charity keeps the needy needing.
Charity keeps some as givers and some as receivers. It doesn’t ultimately raise the valleys and
bring low the mountains. I’m not saying
that charity isn’t important. It is a
good start. Teaching a person to fish is
pointless if their stomach is so empty they can’t see the fishing pole. But this passage calls us to something much
more than charity. It calls for systemic
change in the way we treat one another, in the way we see one another, in the
way we interact with one another. That
person who is poor is your BROTHER. That
woman who is crazy and angry and even violent is your SISTER. And we are called to LOVE HER with respect
and care.
Part of what keeps our preparations
for Christ’s coming less in the realm of total change and more in the area of
shopping and baking cookies, is that when we prepare for Christ’s coming at
Christmas, we tend to be imagining Christ as the Christmas stories show us: as
a baby.
That is important and good. There is a great gift in seeing God enter the
world helpless, in innocence, in vulnerability, in humility. There is incredible joy and peace in seeing
Christ as a baby, someone we cannot help but love and adore, someone who
depends on our care for survival and who is therefore everything good that a
baby can be.
But the passage we read today from
Malachi calls us to something different.
This passage from Malachi says that God’s coming will be as unlike a
baby as we might imagine. Malachi
describes God’s coming how? Like a
refiner’s fire: a fire used to purify metals like gold and silver: very hot,
very true, very intense. Malachi also
says that it will be like fuller’s soap, which is a very harsh soap: it cleans
deeply and purely, but not without pain or cost.
God comes to us then in different
ways. Yes, as a baby. But also as one who calls us, commands us
even, to act with justice and love towards our enemies. And God comes as the one who will clean us
into the righteous behavior, into that love, sometimes in uncomfortable
ways. There are many ways God comes to
us. Preparing for God is always, then, preparing for the unexpected.
One evening about eight years ago,
my family and I were sitting around the dinner table talking about our
experiences of the day. We were feeling
down and were talking about some of the terrible things we had heard in the
news that day. Natural disasters,
violence, war. Closer to home, another parishioner
was seriously ill, there was a conflict in the church with a neighbor, road
rage was getting all of us down. It was
a lot to hear and experience in one day.
I found myself sitting there feeling helpless, wondering what we were
supposed to do, how we were supposed to be God’s voice in the world in the
midst of the pain and chaos, when Jasmyn, then only three years old, suddenly
piped up, “I heard God talk to me today.”
I’ve shared with you before about Jasmyn’s conversations with God, and
this was one of them. As I’ve said
before, when it comes to children hearing God’s voice I do not doubt this
reality. Call me superstitious if you
will, but I deeply believe that children have a connection to the Divine that
many of us have lost. So when Jasmyn
told me she heard God’s voice, there was no doubt in my mind that she actually
had. And I wondered what God’s message to her, and perhaps to all of us present
might be. So I turned and said, “Yes,
Jasmyn? And what did God say to you?”
Her eyes opened really wide and she leaned forward and said in an intense
whisper, “This is my World.” “This is my
world.” This is God’s World.
God appears to us sometimes as one
convicting us of failing to love one another fully. Other times God appears to us as a baby,
newly born, dependent on our love and care, trusting us, reaching out to
us. And sometimes God just shows up in
the unexpected moments of our grumpiness, in our helplessness, in our fear or
pain or joy or confusion. We need to
keep our eyes open. For God is there,
calling us to care completely with all that is ours. For this is God’s world, and we are called by
that to act with justice, to act with humility, and to look for God’s coming in
unexpected and amazing places, to make the paths straight.
I invite you this Advent to prepare
by looking at the ways in which we support the system of haves and have-nots. I invite you to look at your life and
scrutinize the ways in which we fail to bring the mountains low and raise the
valleys up. I invite you to see in what
ways that failure is holding you back from becoming the whole person God calls
you to be. And then I encourage you to
change, to repent, not out of guilt, but out of a recognition that we are
called to be part of making the paths straight for God’s coming.
God does come, God will come, in
wonderful, glorious, awesome ways. God’s
coming will, no doubt, be surprising.
God’s coming will, no doubt, happen, again and again. So prepare for it, through repentance,
through justice, through peace, through love.
In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.
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