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Back to Sermon ArchivesDecember
7, 2008
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Isaiah 40:1-11, 2 Peter 3:8-15a, Mark 1:1-8
“Freely Dissolved, Fully Disclosed: Can’t See the
Gift for the Wrapping”
Here we are eight days into our “countdown to Christmas” – giving each day its full
due, inviting each day to last as long as it can, to reveal as much to us as it
can of the smallest, quietest, most hidden, perhaps forgotten gifts of everyday
life. I hope we are spending some time each day in reading the Advent devotion,
remembering how gifted we are, celebrating ourselves and others as co-creators with
God. The 8th Day Center for Justice in Chicago put it, “and on the 8th
day God invites us to be co-creators in building a more just and harmonious
world.”
I hope we are waiting for Christmas, the promised birth of new life in all our
lives, with the perspective of children to whom Peter speaks a literal truth,
that each day of waiting seems a thousand years long! Children feel it
takes hours for us to work through the layers of wrapping and get to the gift.
And that’s life! So many gifts are mistaken for their wrappings –as
persons mistaken for our appearances. Yet we are looking in this season of
new beginnings to the biggest, most cosmic picture from God’s point of view!
Only against that fathomless frame can we grasp the significance of the
re-birthing of God in Bethlehem. God to whom a thousand of our years are
but a day slips into the world a baby born on the run.
God has been working on this creation some 15 billion years – starting with the
same kind of star-shattering supernova giving life and light to a universe that
Peter here foresees as “the day of the Lord.” One way or another, one time
or another, all earthly elements will be freely dissolved by fire.
Everything ever done on the earth will be fully disclosed. If we were to
picture creation as a 24-hour clock, human beings come along in the final few
minutes of the last hour.
Clearly we are not the centers of the cosmos we pretend ourselves to be. And
yet, we alone among the species seem conscious and capable of expressing and celebrating
our each and every connection to lives of everyone, everything else.
God seems so slow to us, Peter claims. Yet God wants us all “saved” in the
way of knowing each one of us makes up our own indispensable part of the whole.
Imagine how God has waited upon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – through
all the history of so much self-inflicted human suffering. The Declaration
is 60 years old this week! Yet it sounds as remote from our everyday
life as the Sermon on the Mount. Take a look at this document of biblical
proportion and import –www.amnesty.org.
What a precious promise the United Nations remains!
(We read the Declaration in Adult Class this morning -- as a kind of “preamble”
to our study of what the Bible actually says about “human rights” of various kinds.)
It has been said, “This season is not primarily a birthday, but the beginning of
a decisive new phase in the tempestuous history of God’s hunger for human companions!”
God’s call to us is “the call of the wild” – of the wilderness project forecast
by Isaiah. We are called to prepare a new way of God for suffering peoples
-- by leveling the playing field, achieving as much a fresh and fair start for all
as we can – so that “the glory of the LORD shall be revealed and all people
shall see it together!” That is God’s yearning, for a “togetherness,”
a harmony, a holy and just communion that lies within and between and among all
persons and peoples – and still a togetherness of all peoples with God! Truly,
we celebrate (specially on Communion Sunday) all the gifts of God for all the children
of God!
John the baptizer, cousin of Jesus, is born just a little before Jesus. Mary
in her inconceivable pregnancy turns to her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with John,
to confirm their conspiracy to bring forth changed children to change all the world.
No prophet had been heard in Israel for hundreds of years before John – who takes
Isaiah’s exiled wilderness vision as his very own personal job description!
What is John’s bottom line? He appears in the wilderness “proclaiming a baptism
of repentance for the forgiveness of sins!” Leading us to wonder, which comes
first – the repentance, or the forgiveness? The promise, or the gift?
The change, or the power to change?The chicken, or the egg? New reality,
or new birth?
I suspect they all go together all the time. They all work wildly, “advently,”
hiddenly and mysteriously, even “underground,” subversively – as seeds do in the
dead of winter. If repentance is the change itself, then forgiveness is the
chance to change – sometimes the challenge to change – the scandal
of how it is costing us not to change! I see “for-giveness,” or “for-givenness,”
as given for us long before we become aware of it! It is part of the overall
gift of life to all God’s children – the “for-giftedness” of God in each of our
lives – God always going before us, always making a way out of no way for us.
We may experience God’s going before as absent and hidden from us. God is forever
circling back to find us and to catch us up in God’s new doing. God’s for-goingness
and for-givingness invite us all to be born and start over again. It is the
deepest, truest, abiding gift of this gifted and gifting, given and giving,
season of Advent/Christmas/Epiphany.
This is not only the time of God’s advent but also our own. This is the time
of our coming at last into our own deepest, fullest, truest, richest, most abiding
selves – though still most wrapped and closeted, hidden, forgotten from view.
“Come, thou long-expected peoples of faith!” Born to set our togetherness
– relatedness and connectedness – free! Henri Nouwen sees and says that, “Much
violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not
a gift to be shared.” Yet a poet friend of ours adds, Even “sharing is not
enough! / What is needed is radical loss -- / Nothing held back!” That is
the word as a sword through this season – freely dissolved, fully disclosed -- loss
and gain, death and birth, sin and forgiveness, ending and new beginning.
All parts of the tough mix we are living through now. Parts of the very mixed
blessing each one of us is – each of our lives and our whole species is – very mixed
blessings indeed!
This is a time with John in the wilderness – wrapped in camel’s hair and leather
– subsisting on locusts and wild honey -- for counting our radical losses.
Someone has said that wilderness “has no apparent human purpose” – do we have to
look far around us to see that? But wilderness “brings us to the
edge of our weakness and impotency and compels us to look for strength in God
alone.” In this particular winter’s wilderness – this winter of
national/global discontent -- radical reductions may be required of each of our
lives. For a given number of us, at any holiday time – time of reflecting,
time of remembering – our losses may be very great, our grief may be very
unshakable. For a given number of us, holidays take lots of courage just
to get here – courage to stay here, courage to go on from here – and we thank
all for whom that is true for the courage and trust you show just by being here.
Nor do we take lightly the harm that religions have done through the
generations.
And still, says John, forgiveness grows wild! Everywhere! Beyond our
control! Even now, forgiveness – release for movement onward – goes for
us and be-fore us – making a way, even a “way of the Lord,” out of no
way we see at all. Even a Route 50? Loneliest highway in the world?
No way! Or new way. Forgiveness may offer us challenge and chance
to change – even while we yet struggle with change itself. God is always the
courage to change what can be changed, the grace to accept what cannot be changed,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
I pray for us in this season, and beyond, that we do not sell our selves short!
“Celebration” spelled “c-e-l” is so different from “sell-ebration” spelled “s-e-l-l.”
Let us be reduced to the most essential of giving and gifts. That’s why we
practice discerning and naming our unexpected, uncounted gifts together this season.
(And if by reducing we find ourselves lacking in places to give – please talk with
me! Please take a line of apportionment giving – such as, Conference
Program! Conference Administration! World Service! Black College
Fund! There’s something for everyone – in almost every dollar amount
– just ask me! Not to mention our District Askings! Or a pastor from
new nation of West Timor now studying at PSR while raising a son. George Bennett
commends her to us.)
I pray we do not sell, or cop, ourselves out! Even as we learn to live more
wildly, more advently, more trusting in God’s uncontrollable grace – let us also
prepare to settle in – with no less eagerness, no less urgency – for the long haul,
the protracted protest, the sacrificial struggle that may lie ahead. Mark
steals this word “gospel” from the Empire to announce the peace at the end of all
war. He calls this offer of pervasive peace “good news of Jesus Christ, the
Son of God.” He cuts to the chase of Jesus fulfilling God’s purpose in the
first line of his book.
But he sees his gospel, his “good news,” as a point of attack! Creative attack,
loving attack, nonviolent attack, to be sure – but no less a point of attack on
the whole Roman Empire! Or whatever the empire of any particular time of world
history. A “sneak attack,” we might say -- launched deep in the middle of
a long, cold night -- in the hidden, forgotten place of Bethlehem -- by a people
long defeated, long exiled, long invaded, long occupied – through a young, unmarried
couple of working-class folks – commanded to be counted! Such is the “countdown
to Christmas” – the call to count gifts that we are every day! Amen
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