Sermon
It's not just preachers. It's anyone who enjoys words and metaphors. My friend was telling me last night that she was watching the movie A Christmas Carol and she fell asleep in the middle. She said she saw Christmas Past and Christmas Future but missed Christmas Present.
Well isn't that the truth. It's a perfect metaphor. We might look at the past with nostalgia, or regret; or we might try to predict the future which can be anxiety producing; but now, in the moment, the present – well, we often sleep right through it.
This inability to be in the moment is something people have been trying to overcome for some time as we can tell by the rise in popularity of the concept of mindfulness. A quick google search using the phrase “mindfulness books” brings up 258 million results. Using the phrase “books about being in the moment” brings up 818 million results.
Some teach that being in the moment means that we don't consider the past or the future. I can see where that would be great. But most of the time, I need the past in order to help me with my present and my future. For example, maybe I once made a mistake, I remember that mistake now in order to not make it again in the future. Or I remember that I loved that chocolate cake in the past so I now eat that piece of chocolate cake in front of me in order to make my present even better. Of course the future stomach ache would have to be remembered from the past also. This kind of predictive behavior – using the past to direct our present – hoping for the best possible future – is very natural.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist and psychologist, says that our brains are one big predicting device, constantly predicting all of the things that regulate our bodies, taking input from all of our senses and comparing them to data we have gathered in the past, and updating our experience of the world every single moment. From regulating our blood chemistry, balancing hormones, to our livers cleaning our blood, to telling us a color is red, by comparing past data to present data, our brains predict and keep track of every single microadjustment that our inside and our outside bodies need to remain on track.
On a larger scale, there's the concept of history, where we learn about events and societies by intentionally looking to the past to enlighten us and provide insight into ourselves today. Societies flourish or fail based on their histories and lessons learned or not learned combined with new ways of being.
Living in the moment has great advantages. But for the most part, humans need to float between all three tenses – the past, the present and the future. Here in the church, that's what we do every week in worship as community, and as individuals every day – we read scripture – the history of our faith, words put down generations ago way in the past, and we give them great weight as followers of Christ because they represent God's interaction with all of humanity throughout all of time. Our scripture and our faith is a living faith which means that the Christian past means everything to the Christian present. Every week the lectionary gives us scripture from the Old Testament, the New Testament, a psalm and a letter. We may read one or more or all on any given Sunday to find a focus for the day.
Today we've chosen two. A prophecy from Isaiah 11, and the introduction of John the Baptist early in the gospel of Matthew. Our Isaiah 11 text is a prophecy about the future that we recognize as the prophecy about God coming to earth in the person of Jesus. But the crowd who came to see and hear John the Baptist wouldn't have seen it that way. To them, it would make sense that John was the one Isaiah was talking about. They would have come to find out. Remembering past words of the prophet Isaiah, seeing and hearing their present in the person of John the Baptist, they would hope to predict the future. Are you the one? They would ask. No, says John. I'm not the one from Isaiah 11 – I'm the one from Isaiah 40: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'” (Isaiah 40:3 “A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”) I'm the one before the One.
Of all of the crooked paths before them, John the Baptist was the one coming to straighten out the path for Jesus. Clear the way, make room. The stern warning that John gives to the Pharisees and Sadducees is harsh and makes it clear that division is coming in society. John sees Jesus as being on a mission to repair that division. His call to repentance is not just a call to perfect all of our little idiosyncrasies and change some bad habits, it's a call to admit that those divisions are there. To admit that we are culpable for the divisions and brokenness in ourselves and in our society. Baptism and repentance for John the Baptist is a call to admit to and desire to participate in Jesus' mission of repair. Commentator Matt Skinner says that John's call for repentance is “less about bad people, than about a bad state of affairs.”
The division John warns about sounds pretty brutal. The winnowing fork is at hand, the kingdom of heaven has come near. The people listening were being prepared for something like they had never seen before. This is what advent is. For us today, Advent is about reenacting that first coming of Christ as we await the second coming of Christ.
If John the Baptist were here with us today and warned us about the division coming in society, we would heartily agree with him. We can see those divisions. Civil discourse, the survival of our young republic, national borders being fought over with wars, our very planet being sold to the highest bidder for oil and shale and rights, and the rich being less affected than the poor by the damage the wealthy do to the planet. And the micro-divisions here at home in our own cities and neighborhoods caused by the imbalance in economic circumstances, health access, options, accessibility of guns.
The topic for the Advent Study this year is Make Peace. At our first class last week we had a conversation about what peace meant to us. The workbook we are using gave us a few options of definitions of peace and we were asked to reflect on what we thought of them. One of them was “Peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy.” “Peace is the absence of war.” Jesuit priest Joseph Paprocki writes, “Peace is the reality that occurs when heaven and earth connect—when God's will reigns in our hearts as it does in heaven.”
As dire as John the Baptist's words are to the brood of vipers, and despite the divisions that we live and see so clearly, there is much reason for hope. If we use the definition that Peace is the reality that occurs when heaven and earth connect – let's think about where we have witnessed that. Can you name some times of peace that would meet that definition?
Everything that happens at Hospitality House is a moment when heaven and earth connect. Every time food is given out at a food bank. Every time someone cares for a child. Love in families. Offering a blanket, giving someone your warm leftovers you just took from the restaurant, random acts of kindness. A smile. Witnessing someone's sorrow. When God's will reigns in our hearts, what we do in the moment will benefit someone else; will be one point of light; one place where God's love has moved through us and created heaven on earth.
Let us pray,