The Rev Joanne Sanders
Stanford Memorial Church
December 9, 2007
2nd Sunday in Advent
RUMORS OF PEACE
May righteousness flourish and peace abound, until the moon is more.
~Psalm 72:7
While it may seem a bit like literary clumsiness, this abrupt appearance of John the Baptist in the gospel of Matthew we just heard, on this 2nd Sunday of Advent, is considered by some to be a matter of theological design. The action of God in history is often sudden, unexpected, and to our eyes, even intrusive. To the contrary, God’s purposes perhaps do not always work gently, climbing quietly like ivy up the lattice of history. They can seemingly shatter the mold, violate all categories and break in on a world as a jarring surprise. Sometimes an Elijah-like prophet appears, a nation repents, a Berlin Wall is dismantled, and a Martin Luther King Jr. strides across the landscape.
So the doors of the Christian narrative suddenly swing open today, and there stands this John the Baptist in the wilderness of Judea, looking for the entire world like Elijah the prophet of old. It’s a shock to encounter him. Though considered uncivilized he spoke clearly of the one who was coming. He didn’t offer many details, but somehow seemed to know that the old world was about to end and a new world was spinning toward him. It was a world that would be built out of new materials, not the rearranged stones of the old religion. Pretentious piety has a way of covering up the vitality of God’s Spirit, as John the Baptist speaks words of harshness to religious leadership, the Pharisees and Sadducees, and dismisses their claims of pedigree.
Conversely, this proclamation is happening out in the wilderness, under the stars, nowhere near a church or temple, where it’s flame is fanned by a highly socially unacceptable character dressed in animal hair with a diet of locusts and wild honey. John is proclaiming that someone is coming, someone so spectacular that it’s not enough to simply hang out and wait. It is time to get ready, prepare a way, and provide a straight path to the doorways of their lives.
The late Trappist monk and one of my favorite spiritual guides, Thomas Merton wrote: Advent is the beginning of the end of all in us that is not yet Christ. This was the good news John the Baptist was the beginning of. He was a messenger, and the message lit him up like a bonfire in the wilderness. Some scholars suggest that people were drawn to him not only because of who he was or what he said, but also because of what he offered them – a chance to come clean, to stop pretending they were someone else and start over again.
Advent, the nearly four weeks leading up to Christmas, incidentally, is literally the beginning of the New Year in our Christian liturgical calendar. It is a wake up call so to speak, to turn around and notice the new thing that God is doing right before us and among us still. A time that suggests anticipation, hope and expectation, as well as spiritual preparation. A time that deserves some deliberate attention. Advent is like a pilgrimage, a time of sacred travel. Perhaps it is a way that we answer what some call “the holy longing.” During Advent we leave the place of our birth to journey to the birthplace of another, with an invitation to our own rebirth and renewal, a call to newness amidst the old trappings of a heavily secularized cultural consumerism.
Advent is also the insistence that coming soon is the great plus of a newness that is at hand but not yet visible. It is about hope in a culture that attempts to fend off its despair by frantic self-indulgent busyness that is determined to work itself into a frazzle – a frazzle that serves in the end to keep us from hoping and to keep us from the hopelessness that saturates our common society. Breaking through this frazzle is a vision offered in the Isaiah text that Bob read for us this morning: A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. Many scholars and theologians suggest that this stump shoot business can move into larger circles, beyond King David, beyond Jesus. “Take this poem,” writes theologian Walter Bruggemann, “as a vision of a new humanity in which God raises up new life where we least expect it. The stump is any closed off historical possibility, any place in life that has failed and collapsed and ended in despair. It is like an old potted plant, dead and thrown into the compost pile, forgotten and abandoned. And then you look later: out of that deadness has come a new shoot, a plant, perhaps blooming with new possibility and promise. The poem imagines that God can and does raise up new life where none seemed possible. The vision may be of a king, but it is in fact a deep claim all over the Bible that God raises up new human actors, new human characters, and new historical possibilities.”
It is a proverbial vision with a new agenda. It even suggests rumors of peace.
Perhaps this is where our Hebrew and Christian Scripture visions join today. John the Baptist is the teacher who guides preparation so that a people prepared may receive the newness. This anointed one will give voice to the meek that have no voice and don’t know how to use a voice. And strikingly, the one who is to come longs for peace and seeks to make it possible. This extraordinary shift in perception and imagination comes upon us when we understand that in the one to come there is no violence at all, no vengeance, no desire for retribution, only a longing for us to be fully alive.
This is where the habits of Advent, the season of preparation, reawakening, readiness and reorientation becomes so powerful and essential. For at its core is hope and what is to come in the future, that which has not yet been realized but provides a sense of things opening out, of things being verified. What new thing, what hopeful thing might God be doing in us and in our communities, in our world, that we may not yet recognize? What habits do I, do you have that generate hope?
An 8-year-old boy was out riding his bike in a not so pristine neighborhood. It was a clunker, and the boy was clearly wearing hand-me-downs. When asked how it was going, he replied, great! I’m in my 9th week of having fun. While having fun is not the same as having hope, they are related. Dipping in the deep refreshing pool of joy and contentment is one reminder that the world and everything in it, good and bad, yet belongs to God.
The habits of Advent may be ones that teach us to do small things greatly, to do few things but do them well, to love in particular, rather than in general. Perhaps a return to small successes generates creativity, a sense of well-being, a generosity of spirit rooted in satisfaction. It generates hope. All the more reason that we link ourselves to disciplines, to habits that generate hope. All the more reason we change the subject of our lives to health, healing and wholeness.
Advent is my favorite part of the liturgical year because of its promise as Merton says of the beginning of the end of all in us that is not Christ. It is, to return to the metaphor of a time of sacred travel and pilgrimage, to start a journey toward a true home given us in the gospel, a road that leads to the teacher rabbi who will astonish by his brave teaching, who will overwhelm by his inexplicable miracles, who will summon by his authority to a new life. The path of Advent does lead us to the Christ-child, to Jesus. It is the chance for us to change the subject and announce to one another that toxic consumerism, the National Security State that depends on fear and anxiety and commits its citizenry to an endless state of war, or enlightenment rationality with its passion for control are not the truth of our lives. It is an invitation to imagine homecoming. To cross over into a new regime, to come under the protection of a new set of commandments and a new set of permissions.
“It is our work to live in day tight compartments” as writer William Osler put it – “receiving our daily bread, doing good, offering hospitality, choosing compassion and forgiveness, serving the least of these, singing, praying, and when night comes, giving our bodies and souls over to sleep.”
This is what I consider it means to form habits that generate hope and not despair. To embrace habits that entail healing, transforming and caring. The discipline of this holy season, of habits that generate hope is to be ready to entrust life to the coming one. To be ready to change the subject. The good, habit-forming hope of Advent is that there is another home and there is a path there, one that also has our neighbors in purview, where there are no longer victors and victims, but a new society in which all creatures thrive. To get on this proverbial path and toward another home, another way of being, we must be on our way, day-by-day, step-by-step.
To imagine peace as still possible, still expectant, still desirable is to have the courage to hope in spite of circumstances, to persevere beyond the apparent and the convenient and not to take for granted who we are, where we are, or what we do. Habits that generate hope require us to do the best of things in the worst of times. The psalmist declares: May righteousness flourish and peace abound, until the moon is no more.
So dear friends, dear people of God, let’s change the subject and start some rumors shall we?
Notes:
Journal for Preachers; Volume XXXI, Advent 2007
New Proclamation; Year A, 2007-2008
The Christian Century, Nov. 27, 2007
Sojourners Magazine, 2004
New Interpreters Bible Commentary, 1995
The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor
The Rev. Peter Gomes
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