Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 5, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s Advent, that time in the church calendar that a lot of church people find really annoying. We want it to be Christmas already. Out in the world it already pretty much is, what with Wal-Mart and all the others using our sacred music to move merchandise, to get those cash registers ringing. So a lot of people want to come to church and sing Christmas carols; but the church says not so fast! We can’t just jump straight into Christmas. We’ve got to get ready first. So we’ve got these four Sundays of Advent to get through before we get to sing Christmas carols. So no Christmas carols! Not yet! We just aren’t ready.

So you may well be asking: Why do we have to get ready? There’s no season of getting ready for most of the other special days in the church year. Oh sure, there’s Lent leading up to Easter, but then we know what a big deal Easter is. So we sort of get that one. Besides, there are no Easter carols that we want to sing during Lent, so we don’t mind Lent so much. So why do we need a whole season to get ready for Christmas? It think that the reason the church in its ancient wisdom says we have to get ready is the same reason that it says we need Lent to get ready for Easter. It’s because the meaning of Christmas is so profound, so central to the Christian faith. Especially with Christmas, which has become our secular society’s mid-winter festival quite apart from what it means in the church, there is such a great risk that we’ll miss its profound, central meaning if we don’t take the time to prepare for it. Advent is the time of getting ready for Christmas so that when Christmas finally comes, and we get to sing those Christmas carols at last, we won’t miss it’s meaning.

So how do we get ready in a way that helps us not miss the meaning of Christmas when Christmas finally comes? Well, one particularly important way to get ready for Christmas, it seems to me, is to ask questions about it. Specifically, to ask questions about its meaning. To spend some time thinking and praying about what Christmas really means. And let me suggest one way of asking the question about the meaning of Christmas. We can ask: Why was Christmas necessary? We say that at Christmas God came to us as one of us in the person of Jesus, but why did God find it necessary to come to us as one of us in the person of Jesus? Many Christians say that it was because Jesus had to die as a sinless sacrifice to pay the price of human sin; but, as those of you who know me know, I reject that understanding of what Jesus is all about. So we, or at least I, need another answer to our question. A much better answer, I think, to the question of why God found it necessary to come to us as one of us in the person of Jesus is suggested by our Scripture readings this morning. That answer is: God found it necessary to come to us as one of us because, despite all the Torah law and despite all the preaching of the prophets, we humans just weren’t getting it. Jesus had to come to help us get it.

Clearly John the Baptist thought people just weren’t getting it. In our lesson from Matthew, John’s message is first of all “Repent!” Repent is actually a word that is often misunderstood. We take it to mean feel bad about something we’ve done. In Biblical usage it has some of that sense, but it is much more about changing our ways, changing our behavior. John didn’t so much want people to feel bad as he wanted them to behave differently because they felt bad about how they had been behaving. We see that aspect of John’s message in his sharp words to the Pharisees and Sadducees who came to him for baptism. They were the elite of the time, and John calls them a “brood of vipers.” Then he tells them to “Bear fruit worthy of repentance” and condemns people who do not bear good fruit. By bear good fruit he means of course lead lives characterized by good works. These people weren’t getting it that that was what God wanted from them, so John told them what God wanted from them in no uncertain terms.

So OK, people weren’t getting it, and John called them to repentance, to transformed lives. But transformed how? The Christian answer to that question is transformed on the model of Jesus Christ, but here in Advent there’s a problem with that answer. Jesus hasn’t been born yet. So it’s pretty hard to use him as a model of the transformed life. Maybe that’s why the lectionary gives us our passage from Isaiah this morning.

That passage is about an ideal ruler who, the prophet says, is to come one day. Isaiah says this very strange thing about that promised ruler: “He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.” Not decide by what his eyes see and his ears hear? How else are we supposed to decide anything other than on the basis of information that we take in through our senses, that is, on the basis of what we perceive and experience? That’s how we make our way in the world, how we learn anything. We have no other way than through our perception and our experience.

I think that maybe that’s the point here. Perhaps we can understand Isaiah as saying that the future ruler will not judge the way the world judges. He won’t decide the way people of the world decide. Rather, he shall rule by righteousness, that is, by being in right relationship with God, and by the fear of the Lord, that is, respecting God’s ways rather than the world’s ways. That I think is what people weren’t getting in Jesus’ time—and what we still aren’t getting in our time. We don’t get it that God’s ways are not the world’s ways. So God came to us as one of us in Jesus to show us God’s way and to call us to follow it. Isaiah calls that way justice for the poor and the meek. Jesus said the same thing. God’s way is more than that of course. It is also the way of compassion and peace, but the point is made. God wanted to show us God’s way in the most immediate and understandable way possible. So God came to us as one of us in Jesus.

That’s what we’re preparing to receive. That’s who we are preparing to welcome into the world. That’s the message that we are preparing ourselves to accept and understand. Accepting and understanding Jesus and God’s way the he shows us isn’t easy. That way is so radically different from the world’s way. That way stands everything the world tells us on its head. It calls us to a radically transformed way of being in the world, and we resist having the way we are turned upside down. But if we really understand Jesus that’s what happens. We give up our attachment to worldly things, to money, power, prestige, and status and give priority to spiritual things. We give up our attachment to violence and practice the ways of nonviolence. We come to realize that we are the beneficiaries of a profoundly unjust distribution of resources in the world and try to change things in the direction of justice. We give up our self-centeredness and move out from the center of our own selves into the world on behalf of others. And you don’t just jump into all of that on Christmas day. We have to get ready. That’s why we have Advent. That’s why we don’t sing Christmas carols just yet. We aren’t ready. It’s Advent. Emanuel is coming. Let’s get ready. Amen.