\u00a0<\/p>\n
Preparation, Repentance, and Peace<\/font><\/strong><\/p>\n Disclaimer:<\/font> <\/font><\/strong>While I\u2019m generally against beginning sermons with disclaimers, I\u2019ll 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.\u00a0 I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve yet to air any of those views from TUMC\u2019s pulpit.\u00a0 Alas, as I tried to make the sermon work that way, it just wouldn\u2019t.\u00a0 Without letting her know that I was thinking of scrapping the policing portion of the sermon, I asked for Jodie\u2019s help.\u00a0 She spent a couple of minutes reading things over and said she just didn\u2019t feel it was the right time, that we weren\u2019t ready for another sermon on policing.\u00a0 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. <\/font><\/p>\n Intro:<\/strong> TUMC member and the preaching team\u2019s 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.\u00a0 It\u2019s really fantastically done work.\u00a0 \u201cBursting In and Breaking Out\u201d is the title.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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.\u00a0 The first three paragraphs are worth reading out in full:<\/font><\/p>\n \u201cThere 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.\u00a0 People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.\u201d (Luke 21:25-26).<\/font><\/p>\n \u201cThese 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.\u00a0 Even the cosmos (the sun, moon, and stars, the \u201cnatural order\u201d of things) seems to offer a premonition of terrible things.\u201d<\/font><\/p>\n \u201cIn this Advent season we are invited to maintain a kind of \u2018bifocal vision\u2019; to see both the big picture of God\u2019s purpose and action and the immediacy and locality of the path just ahead of us.\u00a0 Both the macro and micro contexts are filled with cosmic significance.\u00a0 We remember God embodied in the baby Jesus, and look forward to the power of the risen Christ who is setting the world right.\u201d<\/font><\/p>\n \u201cThe powers of the heavens will be shaken\u201d <\/font><\/p>\n \u201cAll flesh shall see the liberation of God.\u201d<\/font><\/p>\n Last week, Marilyn encouraged us to focus a telescope in different places, \u201cbecause what we see depends on where we focus.\u201d Marilyn directed us to polar ice caps, Afghanistan, panhandling, the gap between rich and poor and most strikingly, the wonders of the \u201ccrab nebula\u201d 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. <\/font><\/p>\n Marilyn highlighted texts on \u201cthe desolation of the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem.<\/font><\/p>\n Before returning in her closing sentences to the crab nebula and the helpless and vulnerable baby in Bethlehem, she insisted that<\/font><\/p>\n God\u2019s vision for our universe, <\/font><\/p>\n God\u2019s great and cosmic vision for our universe, \u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n God\u2019s reign as it breaks into our universe,<\/font><\/p>\n has already come in an unexpected way, even as we await something more.<\/font><\/p>\n This Week<\/strong> our focus is on preparation.<\/font><\/p>\n And repentance.<\/font><\/p>\n And guiding our feet into the way of peace. \u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n All four of the lectionary passages for this second Sunday of Advent, three of which have been read aloud already, call for preparation.\u00a0 \u201cAnd you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways.\u201d\u00a0 Luke 1.\u00a0 Philippians 1 \u201cmay your love overflow more and more \u2026 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.\u201d\u00a0 Luke 1\u2019s 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: <\/font><\/p>\n \u201cSee I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.\u00a0 The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight \u2013 indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.\u00a0 But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner\u2019s fire and a like fullers\u2019 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.\u201d \u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n And then there\u2019s Luke 3, which echoes Isaiah 40, a passage Marilyn Zehr preached from in October.\u00a0 \u201cPrepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low.\u201d<\/font><\/p>\n Preparing the way of the Lord.\u00a0 Making paths straight.\u00a0 All of this reads well with the Bible\u2019s mythical, mystical connection between feet and peace.\u00a0 Zechariah concludes his parallel to Mary\u2019s 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, <\/font><\/p>\n Guiding OUR FEET in the WAY OF PEACE. <\/font><\/p>\n But there are other images from our lectionary texts which aren\u2019t so, well, hip and groovy.\u00a0 John the Baptist\u2019s way of preparing for peace doesn\u2019t always sound so peaceful.\u00a0 And the text I just read from Malachi refers to a refiner\u2019s fire and fuller\u2019s soap.\u00a0 I was immediately familiar with refiner\u2019s fire from camp fire songs and sermons.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 A fuller, I learned this week purified wool to make garments made from the as pure of white as possible.\u00a0 In a fuller\u2019s field just west of Jerusalem, fullers cleaned and bleached wool vigorously before it was turned into clothes.\u00a0 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 \u2018the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.\u2019\u00a0 \u201cWho may abide the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he appeareth?\u201d<\/font><\/p>\n \u201cBursting In and Breaking Out\u201d warns the preacher for this week that both the passage from Malachi and, implicitly, the passage from Luke 1, launch criticisms against the priesthood.\u00a0 The refiner\u2019s fire and fullers\u2019 soap are threatened by Malachi for the \u201cdescendants of Levi,\u201d and John the Baptist\u2019s father Zechariah is a priest struck mute by an angel for laughing or yitzhaking, like Abraham\u2019s wife Sarah, when told that he and Elizabeth will have a child in their old age.\u00a0 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\u2019s people.\u00a0 Christmas is a time when all Christendom affirms the crucial connection between Christ\u2019s gospel and peace!\u00a0 A very Mennonite sentiment.\u00a0 We could be smug, thinking of ourselves as the high priestesses and high priests of peace in the Christian order.\u00a0 Perhaps, however, it would be better to submit our commitment to peace to further honing and refining.<\/font><\/p>\n Living Biblically:<\/strong> This past week, I finished reading a sort of companion book to The Year of Living Biblically, a book that\u2019s made the rounds here at TUMC.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Wonderfully insightful and entertaining.\u00a0 The author is David Plotz, a New York Jew secular enough almost to imagine eating a bacon cheeseburger on Yom Kippur.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 While somewhat bored at a relative\u2019s bar mitzvah, he picked up a pew Bible and happened upon the story of the rape of Dinah in Genesis 34.\u00a0 Stunned, he wondered what else he\u2019d missed and set out to record his thoughts as he read through the entire Hebrew Bible.<\/font><\/p>\n Our reading this morning from Luke ends in chapter three verse six.\u00a0 This is not surprising.\u00a0 The lectionary editors, like Plotz\u2019s childhood rabbis and Anglican religion teachers, are notoriously unwilling to include any of the really uncivilized material in the Bible.\u00a0 Starting in verse seven, John the Baptist begins to upbraid people.\u00a0 And it is not his enemies he\u2019s taking out to the woodshed either.\u00a0 It\u2019s his friends and followers.\u00a0 \u201cYou brood of vipers!\u201d he screams at those who are already coming to be baptized by him. \u201cRepent!\u201d\u00a0 It seems a little like Bob Dylan going electric against Pete Seeger and the Newport Folk Festival.\u00a0 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. \u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n And yet, for all of this John is really a rather tame preacher. \u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n The Baptist gets all hot and bothered about this \u201cone who is more powerful than I\u201d that \u201cis coming,\u201d but when the fire hits the ground it fizzles.\u00a0 In verses 10 through 14 the crowds ask him what he means by repentance. John doesn\u2019t hesitate.\u00a0 \u201cWell, let\u2019s say you have you an extra coat.\u00a0 Give it away.\u00a0 If you have any extra food, do the same.\u201d\u00a0 And what about us, ask the tax collectors?\u00a0 \u201cCollect only what is lawful to collect.\u201d \u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n I\u2019m sure this was difficult enough advice for those who were a little more wealthy in John\u2019s crowd, but it certainly wasn\u2019t as radical as the plan concocted by Jesus and the tax collector Zacchaeus.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And when Jesus talks about coats, it\u2019s a bit more radical as well.\u00a0 Essentially Jesus says, if someone sues to take away your only coat, give them your underwear too.\u00a0 And then there are the soldiers.\u00a0 There\u2019s no \u2018put away your sword and love your enemies\u2019 for John the Baptist.\u00a0 He just wants military people to be nicer, more contented soldiers.\u00a0 \u201cDo not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusations, and be satisfied with your wages.\u201d\u00a0 John\u2019s 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. \u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 I was in the midst, as I am prone to do, of waxing eloquent against Martin Luther.\u00a0 A younger friend, whom I consider quite intelligent, said that she really appreciated Luther\u2019s concept of daily repentance.\u00a0 \u201cSounds like a recipe for capitalism and anorexia,\u201d I said without thinking, momentarily realizing that two of the women in the group had struggled or were struggling with eating disorders.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I can understand both women\u2019s positions a bit.\u00a0 Jodie is always reminding me that for people who grow up thinking God doesn\u2019t I managed to avoid saying what I thought about repentance that evening, but it\u2019s something I\u2019ve been wrestling with throughout the week.\u00a0 Given my fundamentalist Baptist childhood, I\u2019m as prone as anyone else here to avoid talk of repentance and altar calls and guilt trips.\u00a0 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\u2019s Day inward focus on what I can be doing better.\u00a0 It\u2019s a massive turnaround.\u00a0 Repentance for John and Jesus is not so much like watching your weight as it is like a collective midlife crisis.\u00a0 And, of course, not the kind that involves an electric sports car and a younger man or woman. \u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n Conclusion:<\/strong> Marilyn\u2019s sermon last week referred us to the polar ice caps and this coming week\u2019s meeting in Copenhagen.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The theme for this Sunday in advent, however, is not creation care; it\u2019s \u2018guiding our feet in the way of peace.\u2019\u00a0 It\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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. \u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n I\u2019ve said that I wouldn\u2019t speak directly to the question of policing and prisons, and I won\u2019t, but are there other areas where urban Mennonites might consider a massive change of direction?\u00a0 Intentional Christian community living in a way that allows homeless people to find homes?\u00a0 A change of careers or from a career to a vocation?\u00a0 Getting rid of buildings and cars and large personal safety nets?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Are we too well situated for God to ever call us or our children, or our children\u2019s children\u2019s children to give up comfortable jobs and educations and pensions and free health care to keep alive our witness for peace?\u00a0 Maybe the right answer to all of these questions is a solid \u201cno!\u201d\u00a0 And I genuinely mean that.\u00a0 A part of what I have said about repentance not meaning daily flagellation means often being able to say we are right with God.\u00a0 We are doing what we are supposed to do.\u00a0 We are seeking peace and pursuing justice in just the way God would have us to do so.\u00a0 We are equitably making paths straight for that which is to come.<\/font><\/p>\n But every so often we must take stock.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The dawn from on high has broken upon us.\u00a0 Prepare our feet, O Lord, for the way of peace. <\/font><\/p>\n And, if necessary, prepare them by way of a refiner\u2019s fire or a fullers\u2019 soap.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 \u00a0 Preparation, Repentance, and Peace Disclaimer: While I\u2019m generally against beginning sermons with disclaimers, I\u2019ll 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.\u00a0 I\u2019ve 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons-a-worship-audio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nparticularly like them, Luther\u2019s thinking can initially seem powerfully freeing.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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. \u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n