Repentance and Rejoicing

The last time I preached on this Gospel passage was three years ago, in December of 2012. A young man had just days earlier opened fire on Sandy Hook Elementary School, and we were all devastated by the utterly senseless, perhaps preventable, loss of life. I remember how I struggled with John the Baptist that weekend. I couldn’t make peace with his fiery language. “You brood of vipers!” He yells. “Who told you to flee from the wrath to come!” What I kept hearing in his words, and it still rings in my ears, is the same kind of annihilating wrath that I imagine that terribly disturbed young man with a gun must have been feeling. “Judgment day is here! Your time is about up! Already the axe is laid to the root of the tree!” John the Baptist’s words made me shudder that weekend.

Let me hasten to say that the problem is not with John the Baptist or with Luke’s Gospel, and the problem is definitely not with Jesus. It’s just hard to hear John the Baptist because of the way we are living. The problem is that we are surrounded by cheap, pointless, fraudulent, bad ideas about judgment day. We are surrounded by individuals and groups and whole swathes of our population who don’t see the point of continuing. People who imagine that they are prophets of some terrible judgment. People with axes who are looking for trees to cut down.

And there are so many of us too, who just seem quietly to have given up on the day to come. We don’t carry a gun, maybe, but in our complacency we make choices that are disastrous for all of us. There are leaders who care so little about the future of our environment that they actually lie rather than admit that global warming is a reality. Sometimes we are content to be lied to.

It seems at times that we might be more or less content to let our political life become a circus. Why bother to guard against foolish policies or foolish people? Why protect Muslims or Mexicans? Vent your rage! That’s what voting is for, it turns out. Not for building up the kingdom or working toward the future, but for whatever we feel in the moment.

We are surrounded by people who distort religion and turn it into another vehicle for violent rage. There are terrorists in Paris and in San Bernardino, people who look around at the world and see only cause for wrath and destruction. People who would drop off their baby with a relative so they can go shoot up a Christmas party in the name of God. People who hold hostages at Planned Parenthood in the name of saving babies. Like little gods, they are, each one of them, little wrong-headed gods, rendering terrible judgment when they come. They are responsible to no one.

In this era we are living with an “end of the world” mentality whether we admit it or not. Are people even trying to flee from the wrath to come anymore? It seems as though the focus has shifted since the time of John the Baptist. It seems as though increasingly the world around us has decided to remain in a permanent judgment day. And it seems as though our world is bringing about this wrath, this judgment, all by ourselves, just by failing to see the point of sustaining life and working earnestly for the future good. We are making our own apocalypse and it doesn’t bother us enough collectively to stop.

How does a world that is drunk on misguided fantasies about the wrath to come hear the words of John the Baptist? Wrath to come? Who is worried about that? We are choking on the wrath of the present moment. The axe is laid to the root of the tree and we are holding it there ourselves, we are sharpening that axe, by what we have done and by what we have left undone.

I can tell you think I’ve forgotten that this is Gaudete Sunday. “Gaudete” is Latin for “rejoice.” It’s the first word of the Latin translation of this morning’s epistle, part of which used to be the opening prayer, or introit, for today’s Mass: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.” Gaudete. Though we have been in a season of prayerful repentance, the Church bids us to lighten up a little on this third Sunday of Advent. The colors of our vestments turn from violet to rose. Rejoicing, thanksgiving, gentleness, prayer, an absence of anxiety: these are signs for Paul that the Lord is near, and so the Church teaches us to make room in our repentance for the joy of the Lord.

This is how you and I are meant to proclaim the day of his coming: by rejoicing in the love of God. By loving Jesus who is the alpha and the omega, the end and the beginning. When you look around you and see so much purposeless destruction, remember that you are bound in a relationship of love with the alpha and the omega, with Jesus who embodies the beginning and the end. Jesus who is where we come from and where we are heading, and his salvation is for the world.

Remember that you are invited, that the world is invited, to a banquet of rejoicing. Every time you receive the Eucharist you are at the table of the Lord on the last day, celebrating the great feast of the beginning and the end. This is God’s idea of judgment day. God’s judgment, the judgment brought by the Prince of Peace, is God’s unfathomable love and healing, and forgiveness. What burns away like chaff is hysteria, and fear, and anxiety, and they do it to themselves. Remember that God’s love in Christ pours out for us, measure upon measure, infinite in mercy and in power to save. And that Spirit of God is within us.

It is not for us to lay the axe to the root of the tree. Our job is to tend to the tree. Our job is to be so well loved by our God that we are able to trust. “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

And what about John the Baptist? Listen carefully to his words. He has a great deal to say to us for our good. He too is asking us to tend the tree, not to chop it down. For all his fiery speech, when it comes time to get to specifics, he is remarkably reasonable:

The crowds asked him, “What then should we do?” In reply he said to them, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, “Teacher, what should we do?” He said to them, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.” Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”

You know, any self-respecting prophet of doom would be deeply disappointed to deliver a message like that. Be satisfied with your wages. Don’t extort money. Don’t cheat. Share what you have.

It turns out that rejoicing is repentance. That was true in the day of John the Baptist and it’s truer than ever now, as we meet this morning. Rejoicing in God’s abundance, letting go of our anxiety because we rejoice in God, is the very repentance that the world cries out for. It brings with it justice and healing and mercy and forgiveness and peace. It is the prophecy that we gather to see fulfilled.

It turns out that for John in this passage the proper response to the coming of Jesus is to labor on in your profession, to keep doing what you have to do, and to do it honestly and with integrity and with grace. People who don’t cheat and don’t steal and share what they have and don’t grasp for more are bearing fruit worthy of repentance. They are showing, through simple, gracious daily life, that they know the love of God well enough to let go of anxiety and hoarding and competition and morose speculation.  

We may have the grace to live this way, simple though it sounds, if we know that we are fed at the banquet of the Lord. If we know that we are waiting for the Prince of Peace, and if we know that just as the church does in the midst of this Advent season, when we long for the coming of our deliverer, that we may pause and rest and be grateful, for we are exactly where God has us be. We are exactly the people whom God calls to live in this day and at this time.

It is not for us to lay the axe to the root of the tree. Tend the tree with rejoicing and thanksgiving.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

13 December 2015

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Winter Is Coming

At 5:02 on the evening of January 26, 1967, it began to snow in Chicago, and it kept on snowing until 10:10 the next morning.  In those seventeen hours, a record 23 inches of snow fell on the city and its suburbs.  Among the many effects of the blizzard, one was the impression it left on a young writer who later said this about it, “There was so much snow that winter, you couldn’t see; all snow, all ice, and it was very cold.  I remember walking through the trenches and the tunnels of ice, the wind blowing so hard you couldn’t even see.  It’s an experience that never left me.”[i]

That experience would translate, years later, into a vision of a dark and cold world where kingdoms and peoples clash in ongoing and protracted conflict fueled by generations of jealousy, mistrust, and dislike, and where the struggle for honor and power eclipse any possibility of justice or goodness, or even much discussion of them, and where the chilling air is only one implication of the foreboding warning, reiterated again and again, that characterizes the bleak outlook for nearly anyone, no matter how great or how small, as one personage after another repeats the gloomy forecast that “winter is coming.”

This tag line from the Game of Thrones series bespeaks the inevitability of darkness and death.  Winter is coming – have truer words ever been spoken?  Winter is always coming.  Life is always headed toward death.  The seasons return, one way or another, and even if winter is warmer now than it was generations ago, this is not a positive development.  Winter is coming.  It hardly takes the high production values, the large cast, or the recognizable score of Game of Thrones to see how true it is that winter is coming.  We don’t need a novel or a cable series to teach us about the threat of wars, the clash of ethnic groups, the suspicion between families, the tragedy borne of lust, the wickedness of despotic rulers, the madness of marauding thugs, the twisted reality wrought by political games, the cruelty of religion warped and abused, or the harsh conditions of an ever more extreme climate.  Political, personal, ethnic, environmental discord is all around us even now.  Game of Thrones tells these stories in the fantasy genre, but too much of the fantasy is, frankly, too close to home, if you ask me.  Winter is coming - not just to Winterfell, but for us all. 

Winter is coming, and perhaps the fictional winters that come again and again to Westeros provide a useful stand-in or shorthand for the winters that relentlessly revisit us too.  Easier to talk about the complexities, dysfunctions, cruelties, and failings of the Stark family, or the rulers of the Seven Kingdoms, than to look again at the details of another shooting, another election cycle, another legislative standstill, another terrorist threat. 

Yes, winter is coming.  And lately it seems like a succession of hard winters, despite the unusually warm temperatures.  Winter can come with brute force even if the globe is getting warmer, even if the climate is changing.  Winter blows in like a blizzard of bullets, or an impending wave of refugees, or the chilly realization that yet another candidate is simply saying whatever must be said.

And if you don’t like my characterization of what it might mean that winter is coming (no matter what the weather is like), you can provide your own list.  Whatever your position on gun control, or Donald Trump, or President Obama, or immigration, or Syrian refugees, or the nature of Islam, you can agree that winter is coming – and you will be able to describe that winter in your own terms (perhaps detestable to me, but unarguably, wintry, I am sure).  Winter is coming.

And every year in the church, Advent, too, reminds us that winter is coming.  As the days get shorter we add a few extra candles, tinting them with color of mourning, but also wrapping them with evergreen boughs, as if to be both painfully honest and mildly encouraging about the implications that winter is coming.  Advent has its own predictions of doom and gloom that make their appearance every year (wars and rumors of wars, etc.).  Advent has its own threat of impending darkness (foolish virgins who have no oil for their lamps). Advent has its own indictments of those who will be cast into outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.  Every year Advent reminds us that winter is coming… as if we need a reminder!

And Advent has John the Baptist, who in many ways seems like he could be a character right out of Game of Thrones, clothed as he is in camel’s hair, a leather girdle about his waist, and eating locusts and wild honey, as he does.  He would, admittedly, never make it through a cold snap in Winterfell with his limited wardrobe, but one imagines that he would adapt, and that a bearskin or some such thing, used in just the right way would suit him well.

John the Baptist is a crier of sorts: not just a baptizer, but a proclaimer, too.  He is a man with something to say, and something about his manner implies a certain dire probability in his message.  He addresses his audience as a “brood of vipers,” and he warns them about “the wrath to come.”  You’d think he’d be the perfect character to declare the universal and unarguable message that “winter is coming!” and leave it at that.  He does, after all, quote the prophet of the exile, who spoke to the children of Israel as they were driven out of their homes and into a foreign land, seeking refuge.  And John’s message is a call to repentance, too.  He might have borrowed from any of the great prophet’s words of dire warning:

“The LORD is enraged against all the nations,
and furious against all their host,
he has doomed them, has given them over for slaughter.
Their slain shall be cast out,
and the stench of their corpses shall rise;
the mountains shall flow with their blood.
All the host of heaven shall rot away,
and the skies roll up like a scroll.
All their host shall fall, as leaves fall from the vine,
like leaves falling from the fig tree.”[ii]

Winter was coming, and John knew it, and he might have declared doom; a word of damnation might have been his only refrain, and it might have found a ready hearing, too.  The Lord had called him, had given him his life and his voice for a reason.  And winter was coming, as it always is.  So what did the proclaimer have to say as he called God’s people to repentance in the face of another winter?  What words did he appropriate from the prophet Isaiah?

“Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her that her warfare is ended,
that her iniquity is pardoned,
that she has received from the LORD's hand
double for all her sins.
A voice cries:
‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.’”[iii]

“Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the rough places plain.  And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”  Winter is coming, but a voice cries out tenderly to us.

Winter is coming, and with it there is cold, and there is bloodshed, and there is terror, and there is death.  There is reason to huddle together for warmth, to be sure; there is reason to tremble with fear, as with cold.  The winter is harsh, and it comes around like clockwork, again and again, and with it we are given new reasons, again and again, to be tempted to revile God, or to curse his name, and to turn from him and seek some other balm for all that wounds us and chills us to the bone.

But our prophetic baptizer does not insist on reminding us that winter is coming, as we feel the wind on the back of our necks.  He has, in fact, few harsh words, though he certainly knows that he could have borrowed those words too.  He knows that the way seems too steep for us, and that we can go neither up nor down.  He knows how frightened we are of the Muslims, of the Syrians, of the Russians, and of each other; he knows it can hardly get worse than this; he has seen it before.  We have not the vision to ascend the mountain, nor the strength to clamber down to the valley: we are stuck in the predicament of approaching winter here in this place where we fear we cannot withstand it.

But every valley shall be exalted, he assures us, and every mountain and hill shall be made low.  Comfort, comfort.  He speaks the future into the present: your warfare is ended, and your iniquity is pardoned.  Comfort, comfort.  The glory of the Lord shall be revealed.  Comfort, comfort.   All flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.

The proclaimer speaks the future into the present, and it is not a word of winter, but a word of comfort and of hope.  Every year winter comes.  And every year our Lord sends us his messenger, not to remind us that winter is coming, but to remind us that his peace and his pardon are coming too.

Another way of putting this message is to say that Jesus is coming.  I want to say that when you’ve said this, you’ve said it all.  But, of course we live in a world that knows intimately the ice and cold of winters, but that hardly knows Jesus at all.  To say that Jesus is the antidote to winter is to put things too minutely.  Jesus is not the spring, Jesus is the Sun: he is the center, and the power, the light, and the warmth of all things!

And every Advent assures us that God knows that he sends his Sun to rise on a wintry world where it’s very cold, and sometimes the wind blows so hard that you cannot see, and you feel that you are living and moving in trenches and tunnels of ice streaked with blood.  Yes, winter is always coming.

But Jesus is always coming too.  He is on his way, and his messenger beckons us to be ready for him, and to join him.

Jesus is coming into the wintry world precisely because he knows that the constant struggle for honor and power eclipse any possibility of justice or goodness, or even much discussion of them.  He knows how afraid we are, how vicious, and how well-armed we are.  He knows how cold and how bloody the winter can be, and how we are trapped on the hillsides, unable to go up or down.

But God sent his Son to rise on his wintry world once already, and the promise is that that same Son will rise again to melt the awful ice of our hatreds, cruelties, meanness, and violence.

Jesus comes, and he not only speaks of justice and goodness, he holds these both in his hands, and he carries them to us as he comes.

Every valley shall be exalted, for Jesus is coming.

Every mountain and hill shall be made low, for Jesus is coming.

And the rough places shall be made plain, for Jesus is coming. 

And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, for Jesus is coming.

Oh, winter may be coming, too, as it always is.  But Jesus is coming with justice and goodness in his hands, and although we know neither the time nor the hour, he will not be stopped! Jesus is coming, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it! 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

The Second Sunday of Advent, 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[i] George R.R. Martin, speaking at Northwestern University, Nov 2015

[ii] Isaiah 34:2-4

[iii] Isaiah 40:1-5

Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent

Preached by Bishop Bill Franklin

29 November 2015

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia