3rd Sunday of Advent Sermon
Most of us, at some point in our lives, have spent a Christmas away from home.
I remember, one year, being out of the country. I’d been travelling alone for a long time, but that deep sense of aloneness didn’t settle in until everyone around me started preparing for Christmas. The bustle and shopping and decorating: it didn’t include me. I felt totally alone.
I remember one day going to the music room of the public library, just so I could sit and listen to music on the headphones – any excuse to fill the empty, lonesome hours.
It felt like that familiar Christmas song, “I’ll be home for Christmas” – that melancholy for home and all that “home” represents.
As the years go by I’m increasingly discovering how – even when we are home, surrounded by friends and family – that idealized Christmas experience is just that: an ideal, that’s often beyond our experience. We’ve created a vision of Christmas that doesn’t actually match the reality of our lives.
- Like “Jingle Bells.” How many of us have actually ever ridden on a one-horse open sleigh? It’s a romantic, appealing notion, but one that doesn’t exist anymore, except – perhaps – in some contrived, commercial way.
- Or what about “Winter Wonderland”: “and since we’ve no place to go, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.” Well, it hardly snows in Gig Harbor. And there’s not much snuggling in front of the fire. There’s a burn ban, or we live alone, or we’re watching Netflix.
- Even a song like “Silver Bells” conjures up a vision of Christmas so different from our own – the bustle of being smartly dressed while Christmas shopping somewhere glamorous like New York. Shoot. We just sit in our pajamas ordering presents from Amazon.
But we keep listening to those songs anyway, reinforcing this idealized Christmas. But you know? That’s okay. These fantasies of Christmas – of being home for Christmas – they might not reflect the reality of our lives, but they do very much reflect the reality of our hearts’ yearnings. This nostalgia may – in fact – be a deeper longing for a world remembered in the depths of our spirit, that eternal place in which we were formed in union with God.
- We want the beauty and aliveness of a sleigh ride.
- We want the comfort of fire within the peace of falling snow, and the intimacy of sharing it with someone else.
- We want the vibrancy of being a part of tradition and culture.
- And we want to be home for Christmas.
“Coming home” is one of the fundamental longings of the human spirit:
- Home, where we are known
- Home, where we are safe
- Home, where there are still grown-ups who will do the dishes and pay the bills, and carry us to bed when we fall asleep on the couch
Home, is for us all, a profound symbol of a world that is right, of a world where we belong and are safe. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at someone’s death bed and heard them say, “I want to go home.”
The prophet Zephaniah wrote to the Israelites who were exiled in Babylon in the 7th century BC. They had no hope of ever returning home. Their nation was conquered, their cities destroyed. Like countless displaced peoples before and since, the best these survivors could hope for would be to adapt to their new surroundings.
But listen to Zephaniah,
Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart….I will bring you home…says the Lord (Zeph. 3:14-20).
Against all odds, against all hope, Zephaniah tells the Israelites that their exile will end. The Lord will bring them home. Why? Because “the Lord has taken away the judgments against you” (Zeph. 3:15).
In a word: they are forgiven. Their faults, their sins, their inability to live as the people of God are called to live: all is forgiven. Not because of their righteousness, but because of God’s choosing. God chooses compassion and forgiveness. Their sin and brokenness drove them away from home. God’s mercy brings them back.
Our hearts, too, are yearning for home. And so the Lord says also to us, “I will bring you there.”
Today, we are in the “pink week” of Advent, the week (typically) when the scripture readings lighten up, when the dark gloom and the calls to repentance are giving way to celebration and rejoicing. “Sing aloud! Shout for joy!” because you’re going home.
Like the Israelites who were still in captivity, we’re told to rejoice now because our assurance of going home, of being with God in peace, has already been guaranteed. It’s no longer a fantasy; it is assured.
As I’ve been saying throughout Advent: our hope for what will come is rooted in our assuredness of what has already come. And that is Jesus.
- Jesus came at Christmas, already becoming one with us and all humanity.
- He died at Good Friday, already absorbing this world’s sin and violence.
- He rose at Easter, already becoming one with our resurrected selves.
- He returned to heaven, already becoming one with our eternal selves.
- And he will come again.
This is the message of Advent. Because of what Jesus has already done, we celebrate today the assurance of what is yet to come.
We can think of it like this:
When I was sitting desolate in that foreign library, hiding from the Christmas that was starting without me, what would it have been like if someone had given me a plane ticket home – already paid for, with my name on it? Christmas would have begun at that moment, because that ticket-in-hand would have assured me of the inevitability of being home.
Or think of the flood of Syrian refugees already celebrating, knowing their reunion with their family, in their home, has already started.
Or think of the Advent Giving Tree in our narthex. Our community of St. John’s has already purchased hundreds of dollars’ worth of gift cards. These cards are ready and waiting to be shared with whomever will need them in the months to come:
groceries are already paid for;
gas is already paid for.
Christ is our Giving Tree. He entered this world and took every card off the tree, read our needs, and said, “Oh, I’ll take care of that…I’ll buy that.”
- Lonesomeness? I will never leave you nor forsake you. I will live in you and you will live in me.
- Fear? Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.
- Death? I am the resurrection and the life.
Every longing of the human heart has been met in Christ. So we can now lean into our hope for God’s thorough redeeming. We do live in a world of real wickedness and horror. But, as the people of God, we must resist becoming accustomed to it, as if were the final reality. We and all creation are made for holiness.
Yes, be horrified by evil. Be horrified and weep when it’s time to weep.
Then turn your face towards God with a fierce expectation that Christ –
who was born into this world,
and was murdered in this world,
and arose from the dead in this world –
will come again to complete God’s redeeming of this world.
Just as the prophet Zephaniah preached a preposterous hope to the exiled Israelites so long ago, so we now hope in the same assurance with Christ: In him we have our resting place. In him we are home. And in him we shall be home.
But as we hope in Zephaniah’s promise of what shall be, we also heed the call of that other prophet we heard this morning: John the Baptist. His message was not merely the anticipation of some future redemption, but the exhortation to prepare for God’s coming by living out the heart of God today.
”If you have two coats,” he tells us, “keep one and give the other away. If you have food, keep enough for yourself and give the rest away.”
This is what godliness looks like, because this is what God looks like. There is no place for hoarding and stock-piling and selfishness in the Kingdom of Heaven. For there is nothing stagnant with God: God is always living, active, blessing, loving. When God chose a name for Godself, that name was I Am. Who is God? but a present tense verb! God, the I Am with you, the I Am for you, the I Am saving you, the I Am right now and always alive and present to the reality of this world.
And so we, who are joined with this I Am God, are called to participate in this same ministry of being: “fully present to” and “fully present with” whatever we are given. So long as our coat hangs as a “spare” in the closet, it keeps no one warm. So long as our wealth is just a number on our monthly statement, it is just a configuration of ink. But when the coat is given to FISH (as many of you recently did), it will then insulate the living body of someone otherwise living in the cold. When the money is turned into Advent gift cards it becomes actual food that will nourish a living body. We become agents with the I Am love of God. Life is passing through us and becoming life for others.
We are most truly alive, we are most truly like God, when we perceive our lives – and everything that makes up our lives – as conduits of God’s love. This is true of our tangible possessions and everything else in our lives, too. It’s true of our affections, our time, the content and spirit of our conversations. I watch how a retired friend of mine is choosing to structure the rhythm of her life: she spearheads a little group that keeps the creek clean in their town and steelhead have begun spawning in it again; she visits her father three days a week, in his last stages of Alzheimer’s. She is deliberate in choosing an “I am” way of living with God in blessing her little corner of the world.
John’s message, then and now, was simply this: you prepare for the coming of God by living now for the world as God is always living. And even though this feels costly, it is nothing but good news.
It is good news because God has not given up on us.
It is good news because a better world is still possible.
It is good news because this is the reality that will endure, and it is ours to step into today.