Sermon on December 6, 2009
Sermon for the Episcopal Church of St John the Baptist, Capitola,
given by Rev. Steve Ellis
The Episcopal Church of Saint John the Baptist welcomes all to worship God and to share Christ's love in the world. We are a parish family committed to provide liturgy, Bible study, music, counseling, and Christian education for children, youth, and adults, and to equip all our members for life and for service to others.
Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Old Testament Lesson
See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight-- indeed, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?
For he is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the LORD in righteousness. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD as in the days of old and as in former years.
Malachi 3:1-4
New Testament Lesson
I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because you hold me in your heart, for all of you share in God's grace with me, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus. And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.
Philippians 1:3-11
Gospel
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,
"The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
'Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth;
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'"
Luke 3:1-6
Sermon: More Than We Can Ask or Imagine:
Ephesians, chapter 3 says, “Glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. . . “
Today’s lessons remind me of that delight in God, that trusting sentence. Advent gives us angels, messengers with promises. Today it gives us prophets like Isaiah and Zechariah. They bring us a message that may be hard for us to imagine.
Hard to imagine if we think God is exacting. Hard to imagine if we feel that God is interested in our faults. So many people think of God as disapproving and harsh. What Isaiah and Zechariah suggest to us is God’s yearning for us to be free.
God was always in the freedom business. First, I suppose in creation. Then in letting the world know through Abraham that God wanted light for all nations. Then in freedom from slavery in Egypt, freedom for a new life with commandments that set them apart and made them much admired for their justice, their mercy, their self-sufficiency and inter-dependence. In the prophets that gave them intimations of things God would do as they were ready. And these developments always talked of a day when much more would come to human beings. The law written on their hearts, a new heart and a new spirit. A time of justice, a healing of the world. Many of those promises were about a different kind of freedom, a healing of the world that started with healing the human heart from within. Justice that came about not by violence and control, but by transformation of the human spirit.
No one much understood these promises. They saw the demands of the law, and it seemed hard to keep. The justice of God sounded fearsome to them. Isaiah knew that bringing the people back from exile was close to God’s heart – gave us an image of God as a Shepherd tending his flock, bringing them home, carry the lambs to weak to walk in his own arms, taking them personally through the dangerous desert until they were home and safe.
Zechariah gives us God as remembering promises, standing by promises, still wanting for the people every blessing, sustaining them when enemies stand against them, God who keeps faith with an oath sworn in times almost forgotten.
John the Baptist says the time for these things to happen is again coming on the people. The Divine is about to move again, and in a new way. God’s Chosen leader is coming to the people and they should be ready. God longs to restore the people’s dignity, their prosperity, their shalom.
But Isaiah and Zechariah and John join a long history of people who could not imagine what God was up to in Jesus. It was not freeing Israel from Rome, except in the sense that Israel didn’t have to be obsessed with hatred of Rome. It was being freed inwardly; being freed by the love that came to them from the center of the universe, that came to them through Jesus, that flowed to all humankind. But no one could ask for it, no one could imagine it.
This kind of freedom had never been seen in the world. It is no wonder that no one could imagine it. You have to experience it to imagine it. Until you are loved unconditionally, you can’t know the freedom that comes to you when you aren’t trying to avoid criticism, when you are trying to justify yourself, when you are trying to get “even” which shows that you feel you are less than the person who hurt you, that they are ahead or above.
It is tragic when we are governed by the need to justify ourselves. It is also perfectly normal. It is the way we start, and the state we revert to when we forget that we are loved, absolutely, completely, without conditions, by God, no less than God. When you sit for a time each day basking in the love of God, when you take yourself just as you are without any pretense, and offer yourself, resentments and joys and faults and dreams, just as you are, and God loves you, a transformation occurs. What other people think doesn’t matter so much. Their slights, their praise become just another fact of living, because you no longer need to be justified.
The freedom begins a transformation. This kind of freedom amounts to a new heart and new spirit, and it is the gift that humankind received in Jesus, in his birth, his life, his death, his resurrection and ascension. But that is getting ahead of our story.
In Advent our story is this: God was doing a new thing. No one could think it, so no one could imagine it, so no one could ask for it. And Michael Card has a song that conveys the mystery. [The Promise]