This is the sermon delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Unfinished Community on Sunday, December 3 2023, drawing from Isaiah 64:1-9 and Mark 13:31-37
Old Testament Reading: Isaiah 64:1-9
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence -- as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil -- to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence! When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence. From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him.
You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.
We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
Yet, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Do not be exceedingly angry, O LORD, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people.
New Testament Reading: Mark 13:31-37
Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. "But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.
Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch.
Therefore, keep awake--for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”
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Sermon: Preparation Anxiety
We’ve been talking about it for a while now, but as of today it is officially the first Sunday of Advent! It’s the beginning of the Christian calendar year; our new years day! Now I’ve been looking forward to this for a while now - Advent is one of my two favorite seasons in the Christian year, after all - but in recent years I’ve been surprised to discover that there are quite a lot of people who either don’t know what Advent is at all or, oddly enough, only know that it’s the time before Christmas when all the pastors start talking about the end of the world for some weird reason.
And I have to admit, the lectionary doesn’t really help with this strange image of Advent, because just look at the passages we have for today. Straight from the lectionary, we have this passage from Isaiah talking about God tearing open the heavens and shaking the mountains, set beside a comparison between the those who “do right” and those who are “unclean.” And the Mark passage is little better; even though it’s the words of Jesus actual Christ, it’s that old chestnut about “no one shall know the day or the hour,” and “You do not know when the master of the house will come,” and other anxiety-inducing things which many of us have been told are warnings about the literal end of the world.
But why would we start the year with apocalypse-induced anxiety, especially when we’re gearing up to celebrate the birth of Christ? In fact, why don’t we start the Christian year there instead? Why is it that we need four weeks of stuff like this before we can get to the good stuff, the Christmas carols, candlelight services, children’s pageants, cookies, presents, and all that fun stuff?
That is what feels like a new year’s celebration, so why is it that we start here instead?
Well, it’s simple…we’re not ready yet.
That’s a rough thing to hear for a lot of us, I know, but it’s a hard, necessary bit of truth. If we are meant to start our year by happily embracing the arrival of sweet, sinless lil’ baby Jesus, then we have to look at ourselves, at our communities, and our world and admit, hard as it may be, that we simply aren’t ready to do that.
I mean, just look around; this place is a mess! There’s oil and gas all over the place, there’s systemic injustices that we haven’t bothered cleaning up for centuries now, and we haven’t even started bringing down the powerful from their thrones, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry with good things, and sending the rich away empty!
We’re just. Not. Ready.
Yet.
You know, whenever we’re going to have someone over to our house, for any reason, my wife and I will usually spend anywhere between hours and days cleaning every nook and cranny of the house to make it ready. For the most part, it doesn’t even matter who it is that’s coming by; just this last week we had a scheduled visit from the gas company, and even that necessitated a full half-day of deep cleaning! And I know it’s not just us; the truth is that, for almost all of us, we really step up our game whenever we know that someone will be coming to our house. We try to make our home look clean, comfortable, and suitably “adult” to the eyes of whomever might be visiting.
But what is our reasoning for that? Well, when we’ve got acquaintances, work colleagues, friends, or even strangers coming into our home, we tend to want things to look perfect because we’re afraid of judgement. We want things to be juuust right because we imagine that these other people will see our imperfections and think less of us for it, might think that we’re dirty, unfit, or somehow unworthy.
We clean because we fear judgement.
But what about when someone we love is coming to visit; a dear friend, a family member, or someone like that. For some of us that might even be our parents, though I know there’s a lot of people who have very judgmental relationships with their parents, so I’ll admit that this is not universal! But in all seriousness, when the people we truly love come by, our cleaning takes on a decidedly different tone, doesn’t it?
When it’s someone we love that we’re expecting, we want to make our home the best it can be not because we’re afraid judgement, but because we love the person we’re expecting, and we want to do whatever we can to make them comfortable and happy. Preparing for their arrival isn’t something we do out of fear, it’s something we do to show love, to demonstrate how well we know them, and how much we value the relationship we have with them.
So we go the extra mile. We use our knowledge of them to make things perfect for them, rather than just using our own idea of perfection as our guide in making the house clean “enough” for others. Sure, we’ll still take the time to thoroughly clean places we didn’t even know existed of course, but once that’s done we’ll go to the store and get their favorite snacks, stock up on that one drink we know they like, make sure their favorite movies or games or whatever are ready to go, and do up the guest bed just the way we know they like. In fact, if time grows short, we may even let some of the general cleaning slide - trusting in their love to give us a bit of grace - so that we can focus on those things that are more important to them instead.
Think about that again. When we don’t know who’s coming, we clean to our own impossibly perfect standards out of fear, but when someone we know and love is coming we’ll usually clean a bit differently because we’re working out of love instead.
In truth, this is all you really need to know about Advent; we’re housecleaning for Jesus!
Of course, once you understand that, you begin to see that how we understand our relationship with Jesus determines how we understand this season of the Christian year.
At the first, most immature level of faith, we can find ourselves approaching this idea of the coming of the Lord much like Isaiah does. Now the prophet Isaiah was no stranger to the sinfulness of the nation and the world around him. He knew the house needed cleaning, and telling people that much was kinda his whole deal. But in today’s passage, we get him expressing that relationship with God in much the same way a lot of us did when we first found our faith; as an all-powerful Creator, for whom the cleaning of one, measly, terrestrial house shown’t really be that much of a problem, thank you very much.
Isaiah very much wants God to descend, to tear open the heavens and shake the mountains with the divine presence. Isaiah wants fire to be kindled and water to boil, and for all the adversaries of God’s justice, kindness, and unending mercy to tremble with fear as the resplendent glory of the Lord is shined into all the dark places of the world, embracing in the light all those who do right, and revealing the unrighteous as the little more than filthy cloth. If God can clean up the world like this, why should we even bother fighting injustice? Why not just sit back, and ask God to take care of it?
As our faith matures however, we begin to see our relationship with God more like how Jesus expresses it in Mark, understanding the key fact that we are not called to wait on God to do the work, but to do the work ourselves while waiting on the coming of the Lord. The doing of God’s justice, mercy, and love in the world isn’t something we can just sit back and wait for God to do in the divine’s own time; it’s our job, our responsibility. Like renters in an apartment that God owns, we may not have built the place, but we do live here, and keeping it clean is up to us!
But, once we realize that, it is our relationship with Christ himself that determines how, and in what spirit, we approach the great housecleaning before us.
If we treat the coming Christ as a guest, even an honored guest, then our housecleaning comes from a place of fear. If Christ is just some important stranger who we’re looking forward to meeting, then the work we do is done in fear of his judgement, worrying about what he might think about us when he sees how messy, how sinful our earthly house has become. In our fear, we read these Bible verses as apocalypses. In our fear, we hear the call to keep watch as a warning, telling us to live our lives terrified of the moment that Jesus arrives, looks at our small churches and empty offering plates with sadness, and condemns us for not keeping our house in strict, uncompromising order according to that long list of social and cultural “rules” that we have made up, in our own heads and hearts, to be the image of what it truly means to live a good and perfect life.
But when we stop treating Christ as some kind of visiting dignitary, and start to understand him not only as someone who we love, but as someone who dearly loves us in return; when we realize that Christ Jesus already knows how messy our house gets; when we realize that Jesus has already been to our house before, had an absolutely terrible time, and still wants to be part of our lives every single day in love; when we understand Christ in these terms, all our work takes on a decidedly different tone. In love, the work we do is not based on the fear that we might be judged, but comes from a real and loving desire to make a world here on earth that reflects that of God in heaven. We no longer worry about being judged or condemned for our failures, but we begin to look forward to the loving embrace of a dear friend, come to encourage and support us in the great work.
When we embrace the love of Christ, we let our knowledge of who God is and what God wants shape the ways in which we clean house here on earth. Our preparations begin to look different as we stop trying to make ourselves pure and righteous according to our own, limited, harsh, understandings of what it means to be good, and right, and true, and we start trying to shape ourselves and our world according to what we know of the Jesus Christ we love. We stop focusing on all these social and cultural rules we’ve mad up for ourselves, and start to set our minds on the things that are above, and not the things that are on earth (Colossians 3:2, NRSVUE).
When we prepare for the arrival of a Christ we love, we’re no longer fearful slaves hurriedly cleaning house before the master returns with judgement and rage; we become dearly beloved friends, cleaning the house in preparation, excitedly anticipating the arrival of our Lord, and using this time to pursue the things we know God likes; bringing down the powerful from their thrones and lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty, bringing good news to the poor, proclaiming release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to those who are oppressed and - most importantly - proclaiming of the year of the Lord’s favor.
That right there, the year of the Lord’s favor, that’s what we’re working towards; that wonderful time when God walks with and among us again. This is why we start our year not with the glorious arrival of Jesus, but by preparing the way for Christ. We start our year with preparation because we want our home here on earth to be like Christ’s home in heaven so that Christ might feel welcomed here, loved by us just as much as he loves us. We start our Christian year with an expression of our love for God, preparing the way because the arrival of a Christ who we actually love is a big deal to us.
We start our year, every year, with love rather than judgement, anxiety, or fear.
The Advent season is a time of love, a time when we get ready for Christ to come over, when we excitedly work to make our home, our world, the most welcoming place it can be because we’re happy. We’re happy that our God loves us so much that Christ would want to come into our house, into our hearts, and into our lives even knowing just how messy they can truly be.
So we prepare. We prepare by going out shopping for justice, cleaning up oppression, scrubbing the sin off the floors, and dusting off the nice linens for the manger not because we’re afraid of being judged, but because someone we love dearly will be coming by in a few weeks.
So, let’s roll up our sleeves, and get to cleaning!
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