December 5, 2021 – 2nd Sunday of Advent

The journey of Advent – the stories from Scripture about the coming of God’s Kingdom - only become potent in our lives when we open ourselves to be shown God’s Kingdom in our midst.

Let us pray.  God for whom we watch and wait, we thank you for your presence in this time and place, and within each one of us.  Help us now to open our minds, our hearts, our whole lives, to receive the gift of your living Word for us this day.  And may the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength, and our redeemer.  Amen.

I want to begin this morning with a question for you – have you ever found yourself in this kind of embarrassing situation?  You share something you’re very familiar with – perhaps it’s a picture, a piece of art, or the lyrics of a song, that you really like.  And you share it with someone who maybe you’re trying to impress a little bit, or at least make them as appreciative of this thing as you are – only to have them look at you with furrowed brow and respond with something like, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t see it.  It seems like a bunch of disjointed pieces.  The picture doesn’t make sense,” or “I can’t understand the song lyrics.”  Then you start to dig in and try to create a plausible explanation and analysis of this thing that you feel is a beautiful whole – that you thought you understood – but it begins to fall apart when you break it up.  You become less and less certain that the thing you love even hangs together at all!

Well – I think that’s what today’s Scripture readings and Proper Prayers are like.  In the Collect Prayer we prayed, “Almighty God, who sent your servant John the Baptist to prepare your people to welcome the Messiah, inspire us, the ministers and stewards of your truth, to turn our disobedient hearts to you.”  Ooh!  That’s a little sobering.  We who are the “ministers and stewards of God’s truth” - and in sense we are being told to get our act together – to get back on track.

Then we move to the First Reading – from the Book of the Prophet Malachi.  And that sounds very good and familiar – we’ve heard it lots before – especially if you’re familiar with Handel’s oratorio Messiah, where we hear those words sung out to us, “The Lord … whom you seek … shall suddenly come to his temple … but who … can endure … the day of his coming.”  But Malachi is actually prophesying to an increasingly complacent Israel, about 500 years before Jesus’ birth.  And he’s taking them to task about superficial worship – their lack of concern for the call to righteousness and to ethical living, according to the Law of Moses.  How does that fit for us?

Then today, in place of the Psalm, the choir led us in a very beautiful rendition of the Benedictus – the Canticle: “Song of Zechariah”- who was the father of John the Baptist.  That’s very familiar, especially if you’re used to Book of Common Prayer Morning Prayer.  And it kind of rounds out the story of John’s birth, who would preach about the coming Messiah.  But it focusses on the coming of a Saviour from the ancestral lineage of King David, a thousand years earlier, who will deliver Israel from its enemies and bring it to peace and wholeness – two thousand years before now.

So then, let’s move on to the Second Reading.  It’s written by Saint Paul while he’s in prison.  He’s written that to the Church in Philippi, which is a city in the eastern part of modern-day Greece.  And the author is expressing appreciation to that Church for the care and concern that they’ve shown for the imprisoned apostle.  Paul encourages them that God is indeed at work in and through them.  Again – it’s very nice and it’s good – but it doesn’t fit our situation.

And that brings us to the Gospel Reading – Luke’s description of John the Baptist.  Luke goes to great pains to explain the political and historical context – who’s in power in the various governments, who’s on top in the religious institutions.  And then, over and against this, and definitely outside these power structures, Luke describes the prophetic call and word of God given to John, son of Zechariah, and talks about this ministry and the water baptism – grounding his ministry in the promises of the prophet Isaiah some 500 years earlier – promising deliverance and return to their homeland for the exiled Israelites, living in Babylon.  Well – we live halfway around the globe from where this took place.  And the equivalents of our Jordan rivers would be frozen now.  So how does this all speak to us today?

And to top if off – here’s our Prayer Over the Gifts: “God our strength, we are nothing without you.  Receive all we offer you this day as you sustain us with your mercy …”  If we were lulled into a quietly euphoric and contented space, because we’ve heard these bits of Scripture many times before, this Offertory Prayer wakes us up quickly out of that!  If we were to open ourselves to a fresh and objective reading – what are we to make of all these various pieces?  Or to use contemporary vernacular language: “What is our takeaway from today’s liturgy and God’s Word?  As it turns out, we have to do some work ourselves.  We have to do some serious reflection on our world, our context, and on ourselves, to receive the grace of God’s Word for us today.  Each of these passages of Scripture, that I’ve pointed out again to you, describe a time and place where God’s People were looking for God to establish God’s reign – to make God’s Kingdom a reality on earth – where all of God’s creation is restored to the peace and harmony that God intends. 

The Proper Prayers - the Collect and the Prayer Over the Gifts – both challenge and encourage us on how to start living into God’s Kingdom now – here!  The Collect Prayer challenges us to begin with asking God to restore us – “Inspire us the ministers and stewards of your truth to turn our disobedient hearts to you …” – to get us pointed in the right direction.  And then, the Prayer Over the Gifts – “we are nothing without you, receive all we offer you this day as you sustain us with your mercy …”, reminds us that the Kingdom of God will only come about by God’s grace at work in us – not by our human designs. 

So now, our work in this time of Advent – this time of watching and waiting - sure it’s a time to prepare to celebrate the nativity of Jesus Christ, but that’s only to fill us afresh with the reality that God’s Messiah has conquered evil and death, and is now establishing God’s Kingdom in and through us. 

So we need to struggle with some questions in light of all this word.  So what are we ‘watching and waiting’ for?  Where is God’s Spirit at work?  Where in the context of our lives is God’s grace calling us to be, and to act?  This is where the final section of today’s Second Reading – the Letter to the Philippians – holds the key.  Here’s what Saint Paul says, “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, (or an alternate translation – ‘what really matters’) 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.”  As we realize our need of God’s grace to accomplish anything of real value; as we offer ourselves to the outpouring of God’s love in and through us; we grow in knowledge and full insight, to help us to determine what really matters – what matters in our lives – in the lives of our families, the lives of our friends, and the lives of those who seem to oppose us; in the lives of our communities in the middle of a pandemic; in the present and future life of this planet in the midst of a climate crisis – and much closer to home – in the effective ministry and mission of this community of All Saints.  As we yield ourselves to the inner searching of God’s Spirit, and the outpouring of God’s love, the vision of this world as God would have it – God’s Kingdom – becomes clearer.

So all of the disparate pictures in today’s Scripture Readings do, in fact, make sense when we then add our picture of ourselves and our world, and strive to be agents of God’s Kingdom – watching and waiting for it’s promised coming.

Today’s final hymn beautifully summarizes this for us.  I’m reading on p. 14 beginning at the end of the third verse.  “proclaim the day is near: the day in whose clear-shining light, all wrong shall be revealed, when justice shall be throned with might, and every heart be healed: when knowledge, hand in hand with peace, shall walk the earth abroad, the day of perfect righteousness, the promised day of God.”  As we sing those words at the end of today’s worship, make those words your heartfelt prayer.

Amen.