Isaiah 11:1-10
Matthew 3:1-12
Our
lectionary has a 3 year rotation, which means that every 3 years the readings we hear today will
be heard on the second Sunday of Advent.
In 2007 I was the intern at a parish in Tarvin a small village in England. As I stood with the priest after the service,
a slightly older man approached us his face red, his jaw clinched, his fists
tight. “Do you really believe all that stuff?
Do you really believe the
world can ever be like that?” he sputtered through gritted teeth. I was shocked at his obvious rage and had no
idea what to say. David, the priest of the parish, is one of those people who is
soft spoken and has a calm soothing demeanor; he reached for the man’s hand and
softly said, “Yes I do.” The man shook
off his hand and stormed out of the church.
David turned to me, smiled and said, “He’s had a difficult year.”
I know that later that week David
and I processed what happened—but what has remained seared in my memory is the
look of pain and anguish on the man’s face.
On the surface he seemed enraged, but looking closely at him and into
his eyes, there was so much pain, eyes so full of pain that he couldn’t see anything
else. He was blinded by the pain in his
life to the possibility of the type of world Isaiah was describing ever coming. And yet, that type of world—the world where
the vicious lie down with the docile; where the powerful lie down with the weak—is exactly the world
Jesus came to usher in. A righteous
world—a world where God’s will reigns, and God’s will is a world of peace and
love, a world where we all live in harmony with one another. Jesus came to bring that world and to show us
what it means to live a righteous life. To
be righteous, to live righteously means to conform our lives to God’s will—our entire
lives; simply put, it means to live a life of ethical integrity and gracious
actions always. To live
righteously requires not only a change of mind and heart, but also a change in
behavior. It requires a total
transformation of our whole lives. That
world has already begun and yet is also not yet.
We still live in a world where people
prey on others, a world where there are the powerful and there are the victims. We ourselves are possibly both—in some part
of our lives we may be the powerful and in others the victim. We still live in a world where power and
economics and position seem to rule—a world where the weak and vulnerable are
victimized or simply forgotten. We live
in the in between time—I don’t want to be able to, but I think I can understand
how the man in England was blinded by pain and suffering—in this in between
time as we live with so much tragedy, it is easy for those things to divert our
attention from the goodness that is also around us. We must refocus; retrain our eyes to look for
the glimpses of the world Jesus inaugurated.
There are glimpses of that world but we must open our eyes and hearts so
that we can recognize them. We must look
through a new lens.
In the Gospel reading for today,
John calls for us to repent. What does
that mean? It doesn’t just mean to
recognize our sins and say we’re sorry.
It means so much more. To repent means to turn towards God; it means to
see through a new lens, to see with a new perspective and then to behave in a
new way, a way that points to the Kingdom of God. The passage from Isaiah begins with “A shoot
shall come out of the stump of Jesse”—a shoot, a small barely noticeable shoot
brings hope, brings salvation. Perhaps
it is hard to see the Kingdom of God here and now because we are looking with a
lens that ignores the shoot and is only looking for the large tree. Henri Nouwen says, “Somehow, I keep expecting
loud and impressive events to convince me and others of God's saving power; but
over and over again I am reminded that spectacles, power plays, and big events
are the ways of the world. Our temptation is to be distracted by them and made
blind to the "shoot that shall sprout from the stump."
During the turkey give away a young
boy of about two came in with his mother.
She said that this would be his first Thanksgiving dinner; she’d never
been able to afford a turkey. This young
boy’s eyes danced with delight as he saw the doughnuts on the table, but he
hung back until one of our young helpers brought him one. He looked to his mother before accepting it;
she nodded and he took a bite. She told
us that he wasn’t around kids very much—she couldn’t pay for day care or
preschool. At about this moment one of
our children came in, one of our children who would celebrate Thanksgiving with
his family and friends around a table loaded down with food; he was a little older
than our guest but not much. He
immediately walked over to our young guest, took his hand and said, “Hey want
to play with me? Want to be my friend?” And the two began chasing one another around
the room with squeals of laughter and joy; two children from seemingly totally
different worlds running and playing as equals—it was a glimpse of the Kingdom
of God.
Our readings today call us to
repentance; they call us to look at the world believing the Kingdom of God is
here and to point to it. During this
advent may we spend intentional time looking for those glimpses and pointing to
them so that others can see them too. As
I remember the man from six years ago, I pray that he has seen some and that
this advent his world is a little brighter.
And I pray that as we each point
to the glimpses we see, the world becomes a little brighter until that time when
the Glory of God is fully and completely present and the darkness is no
more.
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