Preparation, Repentance, and Peace
Disclaimer: While I’m generally against beginning sermons with disclaimers, I’ll begin with one anyway. When I heard that the theme in our worship material for this Sunday was peace, I begin planning for a sermon on Jesus, the way of peace, and policing. I’ve preached a sermon from Ephesians 6 against policing at many GTA Mennonite churches and Jodie and I wrote an article for the Conrad Grebel review to the same effect a while back, but I’ve yet to air any of those views from TUMC’s pulpit. Alas, as I tried to make the sermon work that way, it just wouldn’t. Without letting her know that I was thinking of scrapping the policing portion of the sermon, I asked for Jodie’s help. She spent a couple of minutes reading things over and said she just didn’t feel it was the right time, that we weren’t ready for another sermon on policing. I do hope that I will have the chance to preach on the topic someday here at TUMC, but this morning, I will simply be attempting to help us reflect on some very rich lectionary passages.
Intro: TUMC member and the preaching team’s own Michele Rizoli was part of the phenomenal group that helped to create the worship material that this church and many others are using for Advent this year. It’s really fantastically done work. “Bursting In and Breaking Out” is the title. It’s this theme and that material that has given us the cosmic imagery that you see here behind me in the Sanctuary. I was immediately taken when I began reading the way Michelle, Tim Reimer, Betty Puricelli, Bryan Moyer Suderman, Pieter Niemeyer and others introduced this material. The first three paragraphs are worth reading out in full:
“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” (Luke 21:25-26).
“These words from the first Gospel reading of Advent 2009 establish a vivid context that describes our world today: crises in the realms of economy, climate, violence and war, division and confusion in the church and the sense of powerlessness, uncertainty, fear, even despair. Even the cosmos (the sun, moon, and stars, the “natural order” of things) seems to offer a premonition of terrible things.”
“In this Advent season we are invited to maintain a kind of ‘bifocal vision’; to see both the big picture of God’s purpose and action and the immediacy and locality of the path just ahead of us. Both the macro and micro contexts are filled with cosmic significance. We remember God embodied in the baby Jesus, and look forward to the power of the risen Christ who is setting the world right.”
“The powers of the heavens will be shaken”
“All flesh shall see the liberation of God.”
Last week, Marilyn encouraged us to focus a telescope in different places, “because what we see depends on where we focus.” Marilyn directed us to polar ice caps, Afghanistan, panhandling, the gap between rich and poor and most strikingly, the wonders of the “crab nebula” which is a star that flamed out a 1,000 years ago and is still sending off the heat and energy of a 100,000 suns.
Marilyn highlighted texts on “the desolation of the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem.
Before returning in her closing sentences to the crab nebula and the helpless and vulnerable baby in Bethlehem, she insisted that
God’s vision for our universe,
God’s great and cosmic vision for our universe,
God’s reign as it breaks into our universe,
has already come in an unexpected way, even as we await something more.
This Week our focus is on preparation.
And repentance.
And guiding our feet into the way of peace.
All four of the lectionary passages for this second Sunday of Advent, three of which have been read aloud already, call for preparation. “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways.” Luke 1. Philippians 1 “may your love overflow more and more … to help you determine what is best, so that in the messianic day you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness.” Luke 1’s invocation of a messenger who goes before the Lord draws on the tradition of the lectionary text that was not read this morning from Malachi 3:
“See I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and 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 a like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and a 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.”
And then there’s Luke 3, which echoes Isaiah 40, a passage Marilyn Zehr preached from in October. “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low.”
Preparing the way of the Lord. Making paths straight. All of this reads well with the Bible’s mythical, mystical connection between feet and peace. Zechariah concludes his parallel to Mary’s Magnificant in Luke 1:68-79 with the image of the dawn from on high which has broken upon us, giving light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
Guiding OUR FEET in the WAY OF PEACE.
This connection between the feet and peace goes back to the Psalmist who praises the feet of them who bring good news, announcing peace, proclaiming news of happiness. Ephesians chapter six, according the old King James Version, encourages Christians to stand against the wiles of the devil by among other things, having “feet shod with the preparation of peace.” And when Jesus wants to demonstrate the peaceableness of God’s reign to his disciples, he washes their feet. I enjoy thinking about these passages when I am encouraging others to join me on Lazarus Rising street walks. There is something about peacemaking that simply has to do with walking around in the particular location to which we’ve been sent.
But there are other images from our lectionary texts which aren’t so, well, hip and groovy. John the Baptist’s way of preparing for peace doesn’t always sound so peaceful. And the text I just read from Malachi refers to a refiner’s fire and fuller’s soap. I was immediately familiar with refiner’s fire from camp fire songs and sermons. A refiner purified away the dross, the non-metallic impurities, from silver and gold by heating and cooling it through several fires hot enough to liquefy the precious metals. I have to confess though, that I had no idea what fuller was or why a fuller would use soap. A fuller, I learned this week purified wool to make garments made from the as pure of white as possible. In a fuller’s field just west of Jerusalem, fullers cleaned and bleached wool vigorously before it was turned into clothes. The alkali used probably included nitric acid produced by way of fermented urine. The picture of a coming messianic figure as a consuming fire or fermented urine is quite a bit less idyllic than our Christmastime odes to ‘the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.’ “Who may abide the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he appeareth?”
“Bursting In and Breaking Out” warns the preacher for this week that both the passage from Malachi and, implicitly, the passage from Luke 1, launch criticisms against the priesthood. The refiner’s fire and fullers’ soap are threatened by Malachi for the “descendants of Levi,” and John the Baptist’s father Zechariah is a priest struck mute by an angel for laughing or yitzhaking, like Abraham’s wife Sarah, when told that he and Elizabeth will have a child in their old age. In fact, however, while the preacher should indeed be forewarned, we are committed as heirs of the radical reformation to the priesthood of all God’s people. Christmas is a time when all Christendom affirms the crucial connection between Christ’s gospel and peace! A very Mennonite sentiment. We could be smug, thinking of ourselves as the high priestesses and high priests of peace in the Christian order. Perhaps, however, it would be better to submit our commitment to peace to further honing and refining.
Living Biblically: This past week, I finished reading a sort of companion book to The Year of Living Biblically, a book that’s made the rounds here at TUMC. The title of the book I read is Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible. Wonderfully insightful and entertaining. The author is David Plotz, a New York Jew secular enough almost to imagine eating a bacon cheeseburger on Yom Kippur. Plotz had been introduced to the good book by Rabbis telling Bible stories at Saturday school and by well-intentioned liberal Christians at his prestigious, private Episcopalian high school. While somewhat bored at a relative’s bar mitzvah, he picked up a pew Bible and happened upon the story of the rape of Dinah in Genesis 34. Stunned, he wondered what else he’d missed and set out to record his thoughts as he read through the entire Hebrew Bible.
Our reading this morning from Luke ends in chapter three verse six. This is not surprising. The lectionary editors, like Plotz’s childhood rabbis and Anglican religion teachers, are notoriously unwilling to include any of the really uncivilized material in the Bible. Starting in verse seven, John the Baptist begins to upbraid people. And it is not his enemies he’s taking out to the woodshed either. It’s his friends and followers. “You brood of vipers!” he screams at those who are already coming to be baptized by him. “Repent!” It seems a little like Bob Dylan going electric against Pete Seeger and the Newport Folk Festival. John predicts an ax aimed at the root of the covenantal branch, a baptism of fire, a righteous warrior with a pitchfork in one hand a stick of dynamite in the other.
And yet, for all of this John is really a rather tame preacher.
The Baptist gets all hot and bothered about this “one who is more powerful than I” that “is coming,” but when the fire hits the ground it fizzles. In verses 10 through 14 the crowds ask him what he means by repentance. John doesn’t hesitate. “Well, let’s say you have you an extra coat. Give it away. If you have any extra food, do the same.” And what about us, ask the tax collectors? “Collect only what is lawful to collect.”
I’m sure this was difficult enough advice for those who were a little more wealthy in John’s crowd, but it certainly wasn’t as radical as the plan concocted by Jesus and the tax collector Zacchaeus. After dinner with Jesus, Zacchaeus was compelled to pay back quadruple what he had unlawfully collected and to give away half his possessions to the poor. And when Jesus talks about coats, it’s a bit more radical as well. Essentially Jesus says, if someone sues to take away your only coat, give them your underwear too. And then there are the soldiers. There’s no ‘put away your sword and love your enemies’ for John the Baptist. He just wants military people to be nicer, more contented soldiers. “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusations, and be satisfied with your wages.” John’s repentance essentially asks people to drop off their extra clothes and some canned goods at the Salvation Army where Jesus will suggest that hating your mother and father and burning the flag is the way to world peace.
On Thursday night, while enjoying a couple of pints with friends, I was challenged to say what I thought about the biblical concept of repentance. I was in the midst, as I am prone to do, of waxing eloquent against Martin Luther. A younger friend, whom I consider quite intelligent, said that she really appreciated Luther’s concept of daily repentance. “Sounds like a recipe for capitalism and anorexia,” I said without thinking, momentarily realizing that two of the women in the group had struggled or were struggling with eating disorders. I was relieved when one of the two women took up the charge, laughing heartily and insisting that the idea of daily repentance brought out the very darkest parts of her personality. The second woman replied that, for her, it felt liberating to be able to think of herself as standing before God, righteous on a daily basis. I can understand both women’s positions a bit. Jodie is always reminding me that for people who grow up thinking God doesn’t
particularly like them, Luther’s thinking can initially seem powerfully freeing. It’s these very kind of real struggles with Christian understandings of sin and guilt and repentance that led Jodie to preach the sermon she did this past Spring on Psalm 51, the most well-known of the penitential Psalms.
I managed to avoid saying what I thought about repentance that evening, but it’s something I’ve been wrestling with throughout the week. Given my fundamentalist Baptist childhood, I’m as prone as anyone else here to avoid talk of repentance and altar calls and guilt trips. The kind of repentance that John preaches and Jesus gives teeth to is not about a moment by moment, or even a week by week or New Year’s Day inward focus on what I can be doing better. It’s a massive turnaround. Repentance for John and Jesus is not so much like watching your weight as it is like a collective midlife crisis. And, of course, not the kind that involves an electric sports car and a younger man or woman.
Conclusion: Marilyn’s sermon last week referred us to the polar ice caps and this coming week’s meeting in Copenhagen. Repentance in this regard might mean doing a little better about recycling and buying carbon offsets when you fly to Cancun, but it might also mean something a bit more drastic. The theme for this Sunday in advent, however, is not creation care; it’s ‘guiding our feet in the way of peace.’ It’s filling every valley and making every moutain low, which Malachi goes on to explicitly connect to labour justice, care for orphans and widows, and dignity for immigrants. And while there is a very real connection between peacemaking, care for the poor, and environmental concerns, I want to conclude with some questions as to where we, the priesthood of peaceful believers might have some room for a midlife crisis when it comes to peace and poverty.
I’ve said that I wouldn’t speak directly to the question of policing and prisons, and I won’t, but are there other areas where urban Mennonites might consider a massive change of direction? Intentional Christian community living in a way that allows homeless people to find homes? A change of careers or from a career to a vocation? Getting rid of buildings and cars and large personal safety nets? Asking our kids not to sing the national anthem? Our Mennonite forbears clung to peace by being willing to sell or even abandon the farm for new lands. Are we too well situated for God to ever call us or our children, or our children’s children’s children to give up comfortable jobs and educations and pensions and free health care to keep alive our witness for peace? Maybe the right answer to all of these questions is a solid “no!” And I genuinely mean that. A part of what I have said about repentance not meaning daily flagellation means often being able to say we are right with God. We are doing what we are supposed to do. We are seeking peace and pursuing justice in just the way God would have us to do so. We are equitably making paths straight for that which is to come.
But every so often we must take stock. Lent and Advent are times of the year when Christians have traditionally taken stock together. The powers of the heavens and earth are being shaken as we worship. All flesh shall see the liberation of God. The dawn from on high has broken upon us. Prepare our feet, O Lord, for the way of peace.
And, if necessary, prepare them by way of a refiner’s fire or a fullers’ soap.