2 Advent

December 5, 2010

Romans 15.4-13; Matthew 3:1-12

+ This past Wednesday—December 1—was World AIDS Day. At our 6:00 Mass that evening, I preached a short homily about how AIDS has affected the Episcopal Church. I shared stories from what I described as three of my “favorite” Episcopal Churches in the US—Advent of Christ the King in San Francisco, St. Thomas the Apostle in Hollywood and St. Luke’s-in-the-Field in Greenwich Village—were changed by the crisis and how they each responded. Now, of my “favorite” Episcopal Churches in the US, I didn’t even mention the others—such as St. Paul’s K Street in Washington DC, St. Clements in Philadelphia, Grace Church in Newark, New Jersey, to name just a few more.

Afterward, at supper, at my “favorite” restaurant—Wasabi—our own, dear Joanne Droppers said to me, “I don’t believe you anymore when you talk about things being your ‘favorite’ anything.”

“Excuse me,” I said to Joanne’s somewhat curmudgeonly exegesis of my homily.

“Well,” Joanne responded. “Everything’s your favorite!”

Fair enough. But, today, Joanne, you will hear me talk about a saint who I will be honest is not one of my favorites. And that is St. John the Baptist. For some reason, I just don’t like him. I don’t think I would’ve liked him if I was alive at that time. And I can definitely tell you I probably wouldn’t like him if he was alive right now.

In this morning’s Gospel, we are faced with this formidable figure of John the Baptist. There is no getting around him. There he is—loud and, excuse me for saying, but he sounds a bit crazy to me and I’m sure to a few of the people who heard him. The impression we get from Matthew is of someone we probably wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. He comes across to us through the ages as a kind of gnarled mountain man. He is dirty. He is not very well mannered. He is shouting strange words and prophecies. He is frightening. I would probably guess his hygiene wasn’t that great. And, no doubt, he may have smelled.

Certainly it would be difficult for any of us to take the words of a man like this seriously. Especially when he’s saying things like, “prepare, for the Kingdom of heaven draws near” “the axe is being laid to the root of the trees” and “the chaff will be burned in an unquenchable fire. “

Somehow, in the way John the Baptist proclaims it, this is not so much hopeful as frightening. It is a message that startles us and jolts us at our very core. But this is the true message of Advent.

Like John the Baptist and those who eagerly awaited the Messiah, this time of waiting—this time of hope—can be almost painful. When we look at it from that perspective, we see that maybe John isn’t being quite as difficult and windy as we initially thought. Rather his message is one of almost excruciating expectation and hope.

Hope.

It’s something we all feel occasionally, but it’s something we very rarely ever discuss or personally examine. Hope. What is hope in our lives? What do we honestly hope for? Or do we? Do we hope anymore? I think we do. I don’t know if we necessarily name it as hope. I don’t know if we articulate it as such. But I think we all live with a certain hope. Because when we think for one moment about having no hope, everything suddenly seems bleak and horrendous.

Now to put it in its proper context, maybe the only thing we hope in anymore is God. Of course, if that’s all we hope in, I think we’re doing pretty well. But even then, I don’t think we ever really think about the hope we might feel.

Our Prayer Book, appropriately enough, does deal with hope. Let’s take out our Prayer Books and I want you this morning to walk with me, yet again, to the back of the Book. Please turn to page 861. There, in our trusty Catechism we find the question, “What is the Christian hope?”

The answer, “The Christian hope is to live with confidence in newness and fullness of life, and to await the coming Christ in glory, and the completion of God’s purpose for the world.”

Now, that is a good answer. Hope for us then, as Christians, is a matter of confidence. It is a matter of believing that no matter how fractured and crazy this life gets, there is the promise of newness and fullness to this life. And, as this season of Advent promises us, it is also a matter of waiting for Christ to come in glory.

Like John, we are waiting in joyful hope for our God to come to us, to appear to us as one of us in Jesus. As we know, waiting, in hope, can be excruciating. It can be more difficult than anything we can possibly imagine.

So, what do we, as Christians, do with this hopeful waiting? This season of Advent offers us a time to slow down a bit spiritually and too look long and hard at our lives as hopeful Christians. It is a time for us to prepare for the Incarnate God’s coming to us. It is a time for us to shed some of those things that separate us from God. It is a time for us to find a place in ourselves, if no where else, in which we can go off and be alone with God. A place in which we can wait for God longingly.

In Advent we can fully express our hope. Because, we are hoping. We are looking longingly for God to come to us. Those of us who dwell here in the darkness—in this life of uncertainly, of hectic day to day activity, of the struggles and problems of our own lives—find ourselves clinging to that blessed hope, looking longingly for the light to burn away that darkness.

That Light is, of course, Christ. That Light comes into our darkness in the form of a Child. And that Light can be frightening, because it reveals things to us we might not want revealed. It reveals to us aspects of ourselves we might not want revealed and it reveals things about our world that we don’t want to see. But by enlightening us and making us see fully and completely, we know that we are freed. We are freed from those things that keep us in the dark and we are freed to go forward into the Light and dwell there.

So, yes, John’s message in the wilderness is a frightening one at times. It is frightening because the Light he is telling us is coming to us can be frightening, especially when we’re used to the darkness. But it is also a message of hope and longing. It is a message meant to wake us from our slumbering complacency. His is a voice calling us to sit up and take notice.

The kingdom of heaven is near. In fact it’s nearer than we can probably ever hope or imagine. So, be prepared. Watch. Wait. Hope. For this anticipation—this wonderful and beautiful hope—is merely a pathway on which the Christ Child can come to us here in our darkness and appear before us as one of us.