Advent I, Year A , November 27, 2022

Prayer

Unknown the day and unexpected the hour when Christ will come at last: O God, whose word even now goes forth and whose house welcomes all the nations home, rouse our household of faith from its sleep. Strengthen us to beat our swords of war into plows that work in peace. Then nation will not lift up sword against nation and all your children will be ready to welcome your promised day of peace. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen.

From Prayers for Sunday and Seasons, Year A, Peter J. Scagnelli, LTP, 1992.

Some Thoughts on Matthew 24:36-44

"The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment."
"Advent," sermon discussion from Frederick Buechner, Frederick Buechner Blog.

"...God reveals enough about the future to give us hope, but not so much that we do not have to live and walk by faith day after day."

Commentary, Ben Witherington, Matthew 24:36-44, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2010.

"Thank you for proclaiming the wild grace of this frighteningly merciful God, Working Preacher. Because sometimes I need to be startled out of the comfortable daydream in which I have unintentionally trapped the biblical God."

"The Undomesticated God," David Lose, Dear Working Preacher, 2010.

Oremus Online NRSV Gospel Text

We begin our new year and a new cycle of readings of Matthew’s Gospel at the end.  We are in a section wherein Jesus is telling his followers to be watchful.  And, he is giving them parables that challenge them. 

We begin simple enough: we will not know when God is coming.  Then we are reminded of Noah’s flood. And, we are told people will be taken up and some left behind. Then we have the parable of the householder and the thief.  This is normally where we get in the weeds with Jesus’ teaching. We typically want to spend all our time trying to either decipher how and when this is going to take place, or we spend our time attempting to understand how we get to be the ones taken away with the Son of Man.  However, no sooner have we taken steps down this road and we have missed Jesus’ message to his disciples: be watchful.  Be watchful and be ready.

It is actually just how well we are prepared for the coming of the Son of Man which will determine our being gathered.  This major shift in eschatological thinking and argument provides for the Christian today a particularly sharp message on this first Sunday of Advent: if you are not ready you must be ready.  Moreover, it is a rather big change from the Lukan readings of the past months.

In this one series of parables where Jesus calls those who follow to prepare and be ready, he unifies theology of the end times with theology of behavior.  Eschatology and ethics may no longer be separated. 

How we are in this world has an impact on our life in the world to come.

It will be easy to slip this first Sunday of Advent sermon into a discussion about preparing our home for Christmas, or preparing for the incarnation of God, and even preparing for a season of watchfulness.  The message from Jesus and this Gospel author are clear, we are to be ready through our actions.

As we seek to understand what is expected of us in regards to the message of Jesus herein Matthew’s Gospel we might be reminded of the theologian Origen’s comment: Just as Jesus is offering this grace he fulfills and embodies his own words and thereby becomes the model to be imitated.  If we look back we discover the unique qualities of Jesus that fulfill not only the prophetic message of Isaiah but also are the basics of Christian discipleship in the world.

Jesus was meek (11.29; 21.5)

Jesus mourned (26.36-46)

Jesus was righteous and fulfilled all righteousness (3.15; 27.4, 19)

Jesus showed mercy (9.27; 15.22; 17.15; 20.30-1)

Jesus was persecuted and reproached (26-7)

These qualities are clearly defined in the beatitudes and serve as a basic road map throughout the Gospel of Matthew.

As you and I begin again a time of reading a new cycle we must endeavor to understand clearly how our actions are part of our faithful following of Jesus.  We must now listen and read the Gospels together as we begin a year of discerning the message and proclamation of Jesus as given in the Matthean account.

Some Thoughts on Romans 13:8-14

"The future is not a choice between keeping your head down and quietly paying your taxes and other obligations on the one hand, and carousing and quarreling on the other. For those clothed with Christ, the future is characterized by seeing the "other" as neighbor and seeking the neighbor's best."
Commentary, Romans 13:8-14 (Pentecost 17A), Mary Hinkle Shore, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2011.

"Just imagine despite what the messages on television and Web advertising tell us we don't need to worship the gods and goddesses of financial security, the perfect body image, or even our limited ideas of personal honor and respectability!"
Commentary, Romans 13:8-14 (Pentecost 17A), Mark Reasoner, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2008.

"Our passage should be understood as directly and closely connected to the entire exhortative section of the letter. In that manner, it is impossible to simply understand the section as an invitation to focus on one's personal salvation to the neglect of those around us or to construct the world in terms of 'us' versus 'them.'"
Commentary, Romans 13:11-14, Valerie Nicolet-Anderson, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2013.

Oremus Online NRSV Epistle Text

Our Advent theme of preparation is sounded again in Romans.  In this passage, Paul is focused upon love.  Followers of Jesus love others, in so doing they mimic the ministry of Jesus and the work of God.  In loving others they also fulfill God's law.

Paul offers a very clear view that not loving another will, in fact, lead to adultery, murder, theft, and covetousness.

Love others - this is the highest rule and the highest goal.

Adeptly he has moved from a discussion on what is owed to the authorities to what is owed to one another - which is love. (Joseph Fitzmeyer, Romans, 677)  Deeds are the way that a Pauline faith is lived.  Love lived creates the framework for all other questions about the law and quickly moves Paul from legality to grace in future discussions (Fitzmeyer, 677; Gal 5:6)

To understand Paul's full treatment of love you must go to 1 Corinthians 13.  In Paul's economic discourse of love, we discover the following.  All other gifts are worthless without love.  Love is: patient and kind, not jealous, not arrogant, not rude, it does not seek its own interest, is not irritated, does not reckon things wrong, does not delight in wrongdoing, rejoices in truth, puts up with all things, believes all things, and never fails.  Love lasts and is superior to all other things.  All of which is summed up in vs 13:  Faith, hope, and love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Paul then ends concludes his reflection on love in Romans with urgency.  Now that you have become believers you can see that this is true.  There is urgency and we need to be about this work now and immediately.  Let us live in the light, and love in the light putting away the behaviors that will cloud and deform this love: drunkenness, debauchery, licentiousness, quarreling, and jealousy.

Let us instead do what Jesus Christ does and love.

Some Thoughts on Isaiah 2:1-5

"Isaiah isn't naïve. He is not a Pollyanna prophet. This vision of weapons of war turned into agricultural tools, images of death-dealing turned into food-producing is a promise for 'the days to come.' But biblical visions in both testaments come to us from the future, longing to shape the days in which we are living."
Commentary, Isaiah 2:1-5, Barbara Lundblad, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2013.


"What a simple summons then, to walk in the Lord's light, in divine glory, in the path of God's instruction. But it is not easy. What trust does it demand of God's people, to be led by teaching and walking on the path revealed by truth?"
Commentary, Isaiah 2:1-5, Anathea Portier-Young, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2010.

"One of the important aspects of looking forward to something better is to look at ourselves. The good news is that the light of God, God's gracious presence, means we can choose to be the kind of people who are essentially living light, living out of a spirit of kindness and generosity and compassion."
"Living Light," Alan Brehm, The Waking Dreamer.

"We all see dark places we long to see light invade. We turn on the news, talk to our coworkers, and look at our family. We do not have to look far to find the dark corners of our life in desperate need of light. This first Sunday of Advent, the season of faithful preparation, we might ask the question, will we allow our cry for the light turn into demands on how and when the light will come?"
Commentary, Isaiah 2:1-5 | Ben Cremer | Pastor, Euclid Ave. Church of the Nazarene | A Plain Account, 2016


Oremus Online NRSV Old Testament Text

As we begin our new year we start out with Isaiah who wrote some 760 or so years before the birth of Christ. Isaiah is writing prior to the crushing fall of Jerusalem to Babylon. You may remember that God has chosen not to save Jerusalem because the people and their leaders had forgotten God and so God will not save the nation from the invasion. People doubt God's power to do so anyway, and others are sure God is on their side. Many thought their nation would last forever and never fall - certainly not to another army.

Scholars have settled on the notion that what we see here in chapter 2 is evidence that we have multiple documents combined in the text. We see too some reflection of other prophets like Micah. 

What strikes me as the most important is the prophet's commitment to the future and God's power and might to gather God's people. (Remember we just heard Isaiah 65 where God indeed promises this.) God, Isaiah speaks, will gather a new Zion on a holy hill and many will make a journey to the great mountain - they shall go up it says. Here God will place a holy people who will be examples of God's love and justice. They will accept God's message and be good leaders and depend upon the Torah to guide them in all things. God will be the judge, not the people. This righteous living and Godly judging will, in fact, bring about a new age of peace.

This age of peace will come when the people are faithful says the prophet. When it comes it will be a time of great harvests and people will be in the need of plowshares and pruning hooks as farmers return to the work of the land and give up the study of war. 

He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. 5O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!

The passage ends with an invitation. For Christians, we see a prefigured Jesus here, a revelation of the incarnation. That God will bring about a time when peace is the highest good and people will follow a lord of peace, who feeds where there is scarcity and catches fish where there is none. Jesus is the one who brings about the new age and his work of feeding and catching overthrows old economies where people are owned by the king and work towards the betterment of the ruling class. They are nothing more than armies of workers like they were in Egypt. God comes then and frees them into a new life and new age.



Sermons Preached On These Texts:

The Tide, Advent One, and God's 2nd Coming
Dec 3, 2013
Preached at St. John the Divine, 2013



Regarding Romans passage here is an excerpt from my book entitled Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

We see the first generation of Christian citizenship captured in Romans 13. Paul writes that the Christian citizen is a dual citizen. We are subject to governing authorities. Paul says that the authorities are given power by the way God has given freedom to the world. Similar to Jesus’s reminder to Pilate that he has no power but what is given, Paul says the powers are part of the creation. They can be used for good or ill. (Romans 13:1) In his 1939 essay The Church and State, Karl Barth argues that Paul is advocating an approach to common government that respects Jesus Christ in order to make the state better.[i] We breathe life into the image of the garden through our work of shared governance. We often use elections as proxies for God’s will--at least when our chosen candidate has proven victorious. But Paul did not think of the emperor as God’s hand-picked appointee. Paul is merely pointing out what the scripture said: power is part of a free creation.

In the next verse, Paul suggests that our work is not to resist authority. When we do, we incur judgment. Paul then says that if the authorities act justly, then we should act within the good; but if we act against injustice, we will ensure the state’s wrath. Ultimately, we hope that the state will do more good than bad. But, whatever the state does, it uses the sword. “Be afraid, very afraid,” Paul warns. (Romans 13:2-5)

Repeating Jesus’ sayings about taxes, Paul places our duty within the state to do what the state asks. If revenue is due, then we are to honor our social agreement and pay it. We are not to build up debt with the state or others. (Romans 13:6-7) Then Paul reminds his readers that they are part of God’s social imaginary. He tells them they are to love and follow the commandment to love. They are to live out the Ten Commandments from Sinai. They may live in Rome, but as Christians, they are a dual citizen. Their Christian citizenship is first because they are part of God’s reign. (Romans 13:6-10)

As Christian citizens, we are to be awake because we have accepted our place in God’s story. We must see things differently. We have to put away the works of darkness, powers, and principalities and take on the work of light. We are to live honorably and live virtuously. (Romans 13:11-13) We are to live our citizenship by creating a just society within our smaller communities, and we are to make society just through our prophetic engagement with the authorities.

Many Christians have read this passage and come up with a completely different understanding of Romans 13. For them, Romans 13 mandates that we follow the law and obey the God-chosen powers of this world. Across history, people have used Romans 13 to support their political bias.[ii] In 1933, on the eve of the rise of Nazi Germany, Joachim Hessenfelder preached a sermon at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church,. He used the words of Romans 13 to suggest that the German citizen should obey the authority of the state. This text was used repeatedly to create support among Christians for the Third Reich. The church’s authority to read scripture was morphed into using the church to support politics, law, and the domination of humanity by a governing power.[iii] We must remember that it wasn’t that the government itself used the passage to justify their power; it was the Church that used Romans 13 to justify its support of the government and its rule of law. It is all too easy to suggest that the use of the passage was a Nazi ploy. That is far from true. Good German Protestants used Romans to justify their support for the unjust rule of the Nazis.[iv]

There are two important ways in which Christians have used Romans 13 in American history. During the American Revolution, loyalists in the new colonies (including Samuel Seabury of my own tradition) used Romans 13 to suggest that the rule of England should prevail and that the revolutionary fervor of the patriots was immoral. Romans 13 was trotted out again to counter the arguments of the abolitionists. American Christians used Romans 13 to justify the ownership of people.

Romans 13 has justified all manner of human domination and violence by the empire and state all in the name of God. This text shows up so reliably as a defense for a bad government that demeans humanity and supports dominion and violence, that it can almost be seen as a canary in a coal mine. If it is being used--and especially when Christians are doing so--it is likely being deployed to excuse a nation’s vices.

Karl Barth opposed any reading of Romans 13 that gave a blank slate to the state. For him, such a reading was unmoored from Christian theology. It favored natural theology to such an extent that its proponents had lost the mind of Christ. If Romans 13 is disconnected from the garden social imaginary and the cross of Christ, it has no purpose in the great narrative arc of God’s community. Barth believed the Church had a responsibility to hold the state accountable to the rule of love, and that this responsibility became more urgent as the state moved away from the mind of Christ.[v] Barth did not advocate indiscriminate support of the state. The state was subject to the same narrative framework held within the Christian narrative.[vi] Contemporary theologian Stanley Hauerwas likes to remind us that we need to read Romans 13 only after reading Romans 12, where Paul says that if we are to be Christian citizens, we are to be siblings first. We are to place our whole selves into this work as beings in relationship to God and to each other. If we choose to worship God, then our work of citizenship in the world is to be formed as worship itself. (Romans 12:1-2). We are not to be “conformed” to the world and its powers and principalities. In other words, the narrative of these institutions neither dictates nor takes precedence over the urgency of God’s garden narrative. Our minds and our wills are to be conformed to God’s garden social imaginary. In the garden, we find the grace that makes us one in relationship to God and neighbor. We live in a new garden that is birthed from the dung heap of Golgotha. God in Christ Jesus is buried in the ground as the first seed of the new garden, re-planted in the world. This is what Paul means when he is given grace by God. (Romans 12:3a)

Paul calls us to see that we are one body made up of many members. We are different and we have different work. God in Christ makes us one through the work of the Cross, just as God the creator formed us as one in the garden. God raised Christ after raising Israel, and will raise us on the last day. Yes, we are different, but all our gifts work together for one garden society. These gifts are given to everyone regardless of their knowledge of God. Everyone is a member of the garden society by virtue of their creation. Christ’s mission to redeem the whole world. In this way, the body is proportional. The more we live within the narrative of God, the more our gifts are used for the garden social imaginary. Paul writes, “We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.” (Romans 12:6)

Paul says, “We are to love one another. We are to hate what is evil. We are to hold to what is good. We are to love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord.” (Romans 12:7-12) He continues by saying that we are to support those close to us, the poor, those who are strangers. We are to be patient when our actions bring about suffering or when we are suffering with others. We are to, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” (Romans 12:13-14)

We express our Christian citizenship by living in harmony. We are to live the life of Christian virtue: temperance, prudence, courage, and justice. Moreover, we are to not repay evil for evil. We are to live a life of shalom--of peace. We are to live within creation and with our neighbors in a peaceable kingdom. This is the garden social imagery brought into the frame of Christ’s gospel.

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[i] Karl Barth, The Church and State, trans. Ronald Howe (Toronto: Macmillan Company, 1939), 35.

[ii] See Jeff Session's statement: “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes…Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves. Consistent and fair application of the law is in itself a good and moral thing, and that protects the weak and protects the lawful.” Further comments by Jeff Sessions can be found in, "Attorney General Sessions Addresses Recent Criticisms of Zero Tolerance By Church Leaders" (speech, Fort Wayne Rotary Club: Rotarians, Religious Leaders, Lawyers, and Law Enforcement Gathering, Fort Wayne, Indiana, June 14, 2018).

[iii] See Time magazine article from June 12, 1933. “Berlin's vast Sportpalast rumbled one-night last week with a great gathering of the ‘German Christians,’ Nazi Wing of the Evangelical Church (TIME. June 12, et seq.). Joachim Hessenfelder was on deck to demand the super-Nazification of the Church. Their presiding officer was brisk, sleek, pomaded young Rev. Joachim Hossenfelder, Bishop of Berlin and Brandenburg. Their prime hot-head was one Dr. Reinhold Krause. Meeting a few days after the 450th birthday of their Church's founder, Martin Luther, they proceeded to juggle ecclesiastical dynamite. According to Nazi Pastor Krause, German Protestantism needed a ‘second Reformation.’ "Germany: New Heathenism," Time, November 27, 1933, accessed August 15, 2018, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,746354,00.html.

[iv] See interview with Doris Bergen, a professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto. She believes there was never a need “to exhort Germans to be obedient to the regime because it never occurred to most of them to do otherwise.” She reminds us that German Protestantism at the time was enmeshed with the idea that the nation’s rule was supreme. Bergen, author of “Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich,” explains “The whole Nazi system rested on approval of the Christian population, which was 98 percent of the population… The idea some Americans have that there was a faction of Christians opposing Nazis – it was not like that,” Bergen notes. “Most Christians were Nazis and Nazis were Christians, and that’s just the way it was.” See Dina Kraft, "The Real Story behind the Nazi Establishment's Use of 'Romans 13'," Haaretz.com, June 20, 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-the-real-story-behind-the-nazi-establishment-s-use-of-romans-13-1.6194455.

[v] Barth, The Church and State, 35.

[vi] Ibid, 66.