Second Sunday of Advent (A)
December 8, 2019

O God of hope of the prophets, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Last week at Emmanuel Church, the musical through line of our worship service was Wachet Auf (or wake up). In our musical through line today we are calling on the Savior of the nations (or a little more rudely, Savior of the heathens) to come now! Do any of you worry about calling on the Divine so boldly? Do any of you think of Annie Dillard’s famous warning about how we should be wearing crash helmets when we blithely invoke the power of God,. She adds that church “ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense; or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” It can and does happen.

For our Second Sunday of Advent this year, our scripture lessons begin with the second half of a beautiful oracle or poem in Isaiah. Maybe the first half is omitted from our lesson because it is not as charming as the second half. The first half describes how the mighty have fallen like tall trees in a forest that has been clear cut. It’s a wasteland. There are only stumps left where there had been a forest. The context is the collapse of the Assyrian (or perhaps Babylonian) occupying military, which was, itself in control as the result of the total failure of the dynasty of King David, that had utterly miscarried its obligations to care for those who were most vulnerable and weak: aliens, widows, orphans, and other impoverished people. The government was responsible for doing no wrong, doing no violence to the neediest people, and it neglected its duties. And as is so often the case, the government and the religious leadership were one and the same.
In the place where our reading from Isaiah picks up, there is the promise of a tiny shoot of new growth that will come out of what looked dead. A sprig of new life will come out of the stump of the family tree of Jesse, King David’s father. This shoot will grow into a branch, a metaphor for a ruler, who will be filled with the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and fear of the Holy One (fear, here, means awe and reverence, not anxiety or dread). The new growth, the new ruler, will ensure that those who are most vulnerable will be cared for and protected. As one of my colleagues says, “Isaiah urges the people to remember who they are as the people of God, reminding them that their power, their life, comes from goodness, not from greed.”[1] It’s still true. We still need to be reminded that our power, our life, comes from goodness and not from greed. Our lessons testify that God will be faithful in reminding us.
Sometimes our lectionary shoe-horns readings together from the First and Second Testaments in a way that I think inappropriately “props up the Gospel.” But in today’s appointed lessons, Paul’s letter to the Romans and Matthew’s Gospel are referring directly to Isaiah. The Book of Isaiah was the good news – the “gospel” of the Jesus followers before the books we know as Gospels were written. We know this because the prophet Isaiah is quoted or alluded to in the Second Testament hundreds of times. Isaiah’s writings shaped the lives of first century Jesus followers, as well as many other Jews living under the oppressive Roman Empire, and helped them make meaning of their experiences. Isaiah’s words and ideas are infused into Paul’s letters, our Gospels, as well as Acts and Revelation, far more than any other book of the Bible except maybe the hymnbook of Psalms.[2] To be clear, it’s not because in 800-600 BCE Isaiah was predicting Jesus. It was that it wasn’t such a big leap of imagination for first century Jews (whether or not they experienced Jesus or his followers), to be inspired by Isaiah’s calls for governmental and religious reform, repentance, and hope for God’s mysterious engagement with the world in new and surprising ways.
Walter Brueggemann describes the book of Isaiah as “a mighty oratorio whereby Israel sings its story of faith. Like any oratorio, [he says] this one includes interaction among many voices, some of which are in dissent. Like any oratorio, this work requires a rendering…no one rendering may claim to be the ‘correct one,’ [but what is clear in Isaiah is] “the predominant and constant character of [the inscrutable reality of the Holy One] who looms over the telling…[with] the faithful gentleness of a comforting nursemaid.”[3] Jews, Christians, and Muslims, have had the courage to imagine that the Holy One who acted in “disruptive and embracing ways still continues to disrupt and embrace even now.”[4]
While it’s painful to hear God’s call for justice and acknowledge my own complicit share in unjust systems and economies that make and keep people poor or sick or set apart, Advent is not at all a time for personal salvation or private sacramental moments. Again, the nouns and verbs are plural. Advent is a season that trains our eyes on the vision of economic justice and systematic reparations, to participate in building a society in which those who are most vulnerable are not victims of rapacity, domination, and violence. Advent calls for organizational and structural repentance, which means change for the sake of the well-being – the shalom of all of the citizens of the world: all the nations, even all of the heathens!
I have to tell you, I think we are some of the heathens – you know, not as individuals, but as a Church. And the first step of repenting is acknowledging that we have been wrong.[5] The Episcopal Church has been wrong. Emmanuel Church has been wrong. As a Church we have benefited from white supremacy, from wealth that came from the slave trade, from ongoing racial bias that is baked into our systems of governance and access to power. We have been wrong as a Church when it comes to protecting misogyny and homophobia (which I think is just another form of misogyny), and patriarchal language, tolerating predatory behaviors and other misconduct. We have been wrong as a Church when it comes to tolerating anti-Jewish rhetoric in our scriptures and hymns – often we don’t even notice it. We have been wrong as a Church when it comes to measuring our well-being by numbers of people or amounts of money. We have been wrong as a Church when it comes to using more than our share of natural resources, our complacency when it comes to the damage our “first world lifestyle” does to creation.
John the Baptist is crying out about religious hypocrisy and we should take heed. We must change our ways, starting again with acknowledging the ways that the Church perpetuates systems of oppression, starting anew with acknowledging the sins that we have committed, and the sins committed on our behalf. In his reflection on repenting in The Passionate Life, Sam Keen wrote: “the practice of [beginning again] …requires the rarest type of courage. Magical thinking always tempts us to believe that we can purchase enlightenment without coming to know our darkness, that we can be saved by some vicarious savior, that we can be reborn without having to die.”[6] We are called to begin again and respond as a group – as a parish, as a community of faith, as a Church. It seems to me that Advent, the beginning of a new church year, is the perfect time to realize or remember this. The more we love our own Church, the more we must confront its arrogance and its indifference.[7] We might have difficulty knowing how the need to change applies to us. Or perhaps we have difficulty seeing in the darkness of this season. But I think it’s actually easier for us to see than it is to change. We are in a wilderness of sorts – feeling vulnerable, unsure of what the change will demand from us, unsure of whether we will have what it will take. Writing about the culture of fear in which we are living these days, Washington Post op-ed columnist Michael Gerson said that Advent is the season when we are assured that conflict and even evil are “real but not ultimate. Grace and deliverance are unrealized but certain…no matter how desperate the moment…time is on the side of hope.” Advent teaches us that “hope is not a cruel joke, because nothing is impossible with God.”[8] The sprout is coming up out of a stump in the midst of a clear cut forest. Where are tiny signs of growth? Of new life?
Here’s some Good News. In the most desolate and spare wilderness, there is a river of life and a voice of hope that cries out that we are not alone. That’s what the voice crying in the wilderness tells us. We are not alone. Our sacred narrative tells us that God wants us to know this so much that God With Us, Emmanuel, will be born – God will take on human form as a radical show of solidarity. Apparently, God will stop at nothing to get our attention! The voice crying in the wilderness tells us that Jesus, Emmanuel, will help us sort through what in us is true and what is false, what are the nutritious kernels and what are the indigestible husks. Jesus will do this with inspiration and passion – which is another way of saying with the Holy Spirit and with fire. So let’s encourage one another to grow as a Church from the inside-out in this new year. Let’s bear fruit worthy of the welcome home that God is preparing for us, because the realm of heaven has truly come near.

← Back to sermons page