Advent 3, Year B, December 17, 2023

Prayer

God of peace, whose word is good news to the oppressed, healing for the brokenhearted and freedom for all who are held bound, gladden our hearts and fashion the earth into a garden of righteousness and praise! Sanctify us entirely, in spirit, soul and body, for the coming of the One who even now is among us, your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who was, who is and who is to come, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen.
From Prayers for Sunday and Seasons, Year B, Peter J. Scagnelli, LTP, 1992.

Some Thoughts on John 1:6-28

"If last week we met the camel hair wearing, locust and honey eating John the Baptist, this week we do a 180 degree turn and meet a whole different John."

Commentary, John 1:6-8, 19-28, Karoline Lewis, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2011. 

"Much of the pain and suffering around us comes from people imagining that they are the light themselves. In psychological terms, my mind turns to Carl Jung when thinking about light and darkness within us. Jung warned of the dangers of trying to live only in our light. The shadow within is dangerous when ignored."

John 1:6-8, 19-28, Rev. Todd Weir, bloomingcactus.

Oremus Online NRSV Gospel Text

As I walked out on the streets of Laredo, As I walked out in Laredo one day, I spied a young cowboy all wrapped in white linen Wrapped in white linen as cold as the clay. I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy; I see by your outfit you are a cowboy, too; We see by our outfits that we are both cowboys. If you get an outfit, you can be a cowboy, too. (listen to it here)

I grew up listening to the Smothers Brothers, and this was their version of The Streets of Laredo.  I have always loved it.

Who are you?  I can tell you who I am by telling you my life story. Ultimately, you will guess it by my clothes and by my car and by my house...the rings on my fingers and bells on my toes.  Today's Gospel lesson asks, who are you?

To get to the bottom of this, we must take a good look at what is going on this week in the Gospel Text; especially since we have taken a dog leg into John's Gospel from Mark!

This week's Gospel reading is really in two parts. Those of you preparing a sermon (if doing so on this text) will find that it is really two different parts of John's introduction.  The text for Sunday is 1:6-8 and 19-28.

The first piece falls well within what many scholars believe to be the greatest part of the New Testament.  Raymond Brown, in his first volume, writes this about the prologue, which stretches from 1:1-18.

"If John has been described as the pearl of great price among the NT writings, then one may say that the Prologue is the pearl within this Gospel.  In her ccomparisonof Augustine's and Chrysostom's exegesis of the Prologue, M. A. Aucoin points out that both held that it is beyond the power of man to speak as John does in the Prologue." (18)

I think it is important to think of these first verses well within this first piece of writing which has both a form and a purpose. Brown breaks it up this way...  The first section is 1:1-2; this is the Word of God section, which offers a poetic vision of God's very being.  The second section, verses 3-5, reveals the Word's work in creation.  It is the light shining in the darkness, shining through man's sinfulness, shining in the birth that flows from the fallen woman Eve in Jesus.  Then, and only then, do we arrive at our piece, which is nestled quite nicely here.  The third portion is verses 6-9 and is John the Baptist's, witness.  As Brown points out the second part is about the Word's work throughout creation, here that comes to fruition in the proclamation of God's incarnate Word Jesus. (Brown, John, vol 1, 18-17)  Many bloggers this week noted the difference between the John of Mark and the John of this Gospel.  I think the reason for the striking difference is primarily this Gospel's tightly focused presentation of God in Christ Jesus. The only reason to even have John in this section is to make clear he is preparing the hearts of humankind for the incarnation, and proclamation of the Word made man.  Brown tells us that following this proclamation, we return to the fourth section (continuing the ancient hymn outlined in the text), which is about the Christ of God working his mission in the world.  This is followed by the community's response.   The last of the five sections is another few words by John the Baptist, but here in 14, 17-18, is John's proclamation that the Word spoken before time is this Jesus.  He is the pre-existent one.  A radical, revolutionary, and prophetic revelation is being offered in this last section, for in this time, the common person would have understood that God is invisible, so it makes sense that the Word spoken, the Son is the only one who has seen this God.  The unique relation between Son and God not only helps with the contemporary thought of the day but it gives rise to our common understanding of who Jesus is: God's only Son.  (For my theological followers, there is a great discussion in Brown's Vol 1 on pages 35 and 36 about this last section; and it is well worth reading.)

To summarize then, we have in the first two verses of our reading a very clear focus on God in Christ. Jesus is the Word, Jesus is the Word made manifest, and the Word is at work in the world.  As if marching to a drum, we hear for the first time in these very first words what we have faithfully memorized as Christians and Episcopalians who have a Common Prayer Book, and that is that the only Son of God has come into the world to save the world.  Such comfortable and hopeful words. Everything in this first section of our reading verbally illustrates that John the baptist is someone they knew but now is so transparent to the Gospel that all they see now is the coming of Christ.

On the first day of John's ministry in the Gospel, he disappears as the living Word and Jesus take centre stage. On the second day, he offers a vision of who Jesus is; he is the transparent vessel of a living Christ - of light in the world.

In this third week of Advent, a number of things are going on in our context here in the U.S.  One is what I would call the holiday breather.  We began the holiday with a Thanksgiving mad dash to fill our bellies and our shopping carts.  We redoubled our efforts to get to church. And, we are now in the slump; it is the week-long Wednesday between Holiday and Christmas Day.  Unfortunately, preachers are in the same predicament.

Into this slump, we re-read a passage about John the Baptist. Now, you and I both know that is not precisely true. This Sunday's passage is very different from the last.  Brown and practically all modern scholarship recognizes that John the Baptist in John's Gospel is completely different than the one portrayed in the Synoptics.  He looks different than the previous version we preached on last week.  This week he is the transparent vessel of God's grace - Jesus Christ. He points only to God and to Jesus.

Just as John the Baptist in John's Gospel, you and I are, as Christians, intimately tied to who we say God is.

You might remember Stephen Colbert's radical statement that caused so much attention recently:

"If [America] is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it."

I will tell you that not being who we say we are is a crippling missionary stumbling block in a world that is seeking some kind of authentic view of God and Grace and hoping someone will be a true voice of transformation and life in a world of gifts and purchases whose shimmer and shine will fade a few weeks after their delivery.

The truth is that as Christians, we proclaim and reaffirm that the pre-existent Word of God is Jesus Christ, who is God's only son.  And that we are, as a people and as individuals (as is proclaimed in the Isaiah passage for this Sunday), inheritors of a divine relationship with the unseen God through the waters of baptism.  And, that we DO believe we are related as brothers or sisters of God's family.  And, therefore we are to treat people in a certain way, with special attention to God's most intimate friends - the poor.

We say and affirm as a defining part of who we are that we, as Christians, believe we meet God in the text of scripture and in the faces of our neighbour.

We meet God in John's proclamation. We meet this unseen God in the very speaking and retelling of the story of the incarnation of God offered here on the other side of the Jordan, just as it is offered from the ambos and pulpits of our churches.

Moreover, like John, we meet God by venturing out across the doorway of our church onto the other side of the sidewalk, where we have the opportunity to meet the living Word in the storied lives of the people we find out in the world.  We encounter God and his Son in the words of scripture, which helps us to hear the same living incarnate God spoken in the story of our neighbour.

This week we did a bible study with this passage at our meeting of the governing board of the diocese.  A friend and fellow clergyman said he had been praying and thinking about this passage. He realized and offered to the group that, quite frankly, we were simply to be at work being witnesses to Christ (like John the Baptist and John the Gospeller), and if we were not, then we were being witnesses for something or someone else.  In the latter, he had in mind those folks who travelled all that way to meet John the Baptist in the desert and to shut him down for not bearing witness to what they stood for.

This religious stuff is a dangerous thing.  The world right now is taking a breather from its holiday consumption. It is quiet before the holiday storm.  We have an opportunity to tell the truth.  The truth is that how we live out our holiday will reveal if we are bearing witness to God in Christ Jesus, or if we are representing something else.  Yes, what we say and what we do are incarnational symbols of the living God or something else entirely.

Religion on a Sunday like this is dangerous because when we don't tell the truth about the world we live in (the addictions we have, the way we attempt to purchase our belongings, and how we are stewards of God's things), we sell a little piece of our corporate soul to the secular world; creating a consumer faith.

How will the church, how will you, the preacher, how will the people answer the essential question asked on the shore of the Jordan River so many years ago, and which is still relevant today: "Who are you; because you look like someone I once knew?"

Some Thoughts on I Thessalonians 5:12-28

"Once again, on this Third Sunday of Advent, we have an appeal, now from Paul, to a community of faith about the way it is to live in the world."
Commentary, 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 (Advent 3), Dirk G Lange, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2011.

"Closely associated with the ability to rejoice always is a constant prayerfulness. As mentioned, these imperatives are each in the present tense."
The Conduct of the Assembly and The Concluding Remarks from An Exegetical and Devotional Commentary on 1 Thessalonians, by J. Hampton Keathley III at the Biblical Studies Foundation.

Oremus Online NRSV Epistle Text 

In this part of the Thessalonians passage, he is focused most of all upon the relationships of the community members. We are to work for one another's best behalf, and we are to comfort those who are suffering. He offers himself as a model and gives some basic advice:

1. Respect one another.
2. Esteem one another.
3. Admonish the fainthearted by encouraging them.
4. Help the weak.
5. When evil is done to you do not repay it with evil.
6. Always seek the good and to do good in one another and to all.
7. Rejoice and pray.
8. Be grateful.
9. Be patient.
10. Do not quench the spirit.
11. Hold fast to what is good.
12. Abstain from evil.

This is a good list. Some time ago a woman came up to me and was complaining and upset about the church and other people and our culture and our loss of what is important. It was sad. I truly felt for her.

It was hard to do these 12 things for her. It was difficult to invite her to do these 12 things. Yet, this is the Gospel in action. Isn't it?

Some Thoughts on Isaiah 61:1-11

"It is a passage that can perhaps be read placidly by those for whom things are going well, but less so by those who do look around and see only destruction. None of us need look far to see that all is not well in the world."
Commentary, Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 (Advent 3), Kristin J. Wendland, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2011.

"The city where hopelessness had taken root will, by God's spirit and by God's blessing, sprout righteousness and praise."
Commentary, Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 (Advent 3), Elna K. Solvang, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2011.

" How long can we continue to push God’s promise of justice into the future?
"Repurposing the Promise of Release," Russell Rathbun, The Hardest Question, 2011.

Oremus Online NRSV Text 

Why does God just end human slavery? Why is it that in all the cases in scripture, the end of slavery comes after a long time of struggle? 

Rabbi Sacks suggests that Isaiah 61 gives us part of the answer to this question:

If history tells us anything, it is that G‑d has patience, though it is often sorely tried. He wanted slavery abolished, but He wanted it to be done by free human beings coming to see of their own accord the evil it is and the evil it does. The G‑d of history, who taught us to study history, had faith that eventually we would learn the lesson of history: that freedom is indivisible. We must grant freedom to others if we truly seek it for ourselves.

And so it happened. The Quakers, Methodists and Evangelicals, most famous among them William Wilberforce, who led the campaign in Britain to abolish the slave trade, were driven by religious conviction, inspired not least by the biblical narrative of the Exodus, and by the challenge of Isaiah “to proclaim freedom for captives, and for prisoners, release from darkness.” (See Sack's Slow End To Slavery here.)

Rabbi Sacks suggests that the slaves both in Egypt and in Babylon wait an interminable time. They are forever reminded this slavery is not God's will but human sin. Meanwhile, God works for their freedom and the changing of the minds of the captors and masters. All the while, God reminds us that slavery is an offense to dignity and part of the continuation of sibling rivalry.

Let me pair this with a quote from James Cone's book Black Theology and Black Power (1969):

All white men are responsible for white oppression. It is much too easy to say, "Racism is not my fault," or "I am not responsible for the country's inhumanity to the black man. ... But insofar as white do-gooders tolerate and sponsor racism in their educational institutions, their political, economic and social structures, their churches, and in every other aspect of American life, they are directly responsible for racism. ... Racism is possible because whites are indifferent to suffering and patient with cruelty. Karl Jaspers' description of metaphysical guilt is pertinent here. "There exists among men, because they are men, a solidarity through which each shares responsibility for every injustice and every wrong committed in the world, and especially for crimes that are committed in his presence or of which he cannot be ignorant." (24)

See also A Black Theology of Liberation (1970):

Black theology cannot accept a view of God which does not represent God as being for oppressed blacks and thus against white oppressors. Living in a world of white oppressors, blacks have no time for a neutral God. The brutalities are too great and the pain too severe, and this means we must know where God is and what God is doing in the revolution. There is no use for a God who loves white oppressors the same as oppressed blacks. We have had too much of white love, the love that tells blacks to turn the other cheek and go the second mile. What we need is the divine love as expressed in black power, which is the power of blacks to destroy their oppressors, here and now, by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject God's love. (70)

Cone is leaning into a Gospel imagination, narrative, and invitation to act. 

The early Gospellers heard this passage in a very particular manner as well - this is suggested in a review of Matthew's gospel. Matthew is reading Isaiah (and Psalm 146:5-9) with an eschatological imagination.  (Richard Hays, Echoes of the Scripture in the Gospels, 2016, 150) This is a shift to offer hope in a time yet to come when God will make all things right. The eschatological imagination offers a window of justice-making prophecy that suggests hope in the midst of oppression.

Perhaps it is this eschatological imagination that The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. drew upon when from his Washington, D.C.. address in February of 1968, he said: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

The Gospel of Luke takes the eschatological imagination and locates it in the work of Jesus. (Luke 4:18-19). This is the gift of the Spirit that sets upon Jesus. Moreover, Luke suggests that Jesus' announcement is a kind of sabbath time reordered. Richard Hays points out these are not mere words placed in Jesus' mouth lifted from Isaiah, but that they are the lived narrative of Jesus. (Ibid, 225-229.)

The gift of reading scripture with Jewish rabbinical teaching on one hand and the Gospels on the other is that it keeps us from believing that non-action is an option for the Christian. 

We are invited in Advent to remember the eschatological imagination of God, the words and ministry of Jesus, and the ultimate desire of God that human hearts be changed. We might well begin with our own. Yet the combined revelation teaches us that our own hearts are only the first steps in the work of an incarnational faith.

Here I want to end with Howard Thurman. He intertwines both the Jewish understanding of the text, the Gospel's eschatological imagination, and the work of mission together. He wrote in a beautiful essay entitled "The Work of Christmas" in The Mood of Christmas & Other Celebrations (1985), the following words:

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among people,

To make music in the heart.