A
Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent, Year C
Rejoice and exult with all your
heart, O daughter Zion! The Lord is in
your midst. [1]
Rejoice in the Lord always,
again I will say rejoice. The Lord is
near. [2]
You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath that is
to come? One who is more powerful than I
is coming. He will gather the wheat into
his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. [3]
Today’s Advent lessons speak of God’s presence, God’s nearness, God’s
coming. God, the Scriptures tell us, is
in the midst of God’s people, near at hand, soon to arrive. Our texts have this assurance in common.
But what different responses to that same reality we have heard! For
Zephaniah and Paul God’s nearness and presence is great good news. They call upon their hearers to rejoice. But for John the Baptist, it is quite another
matter. God’s coming, John says, is a
coming of wrath, of judgment, of fire. The only possible response to that coming is
repentance.
Which picture of God’s nearness and coming are we to believe? Are we to rejoice or repent? Is John right and the others wrong, or vice
versa, or are they talking about two different gods? What are we to make of
this seeming contradiction?
The truth, of course, is that each of these pictures tells some truth
about what happens when human beings encounter God. Zephaniah speaks of God present as a liberator
and deliverer, the God who brings people out of captivity and distress. The people of Israel experienced God as their
deliverer when they were freed from bondage in Egypt and again in their return
from exile in Babylon. So also,
African-Americans knew God as a liberator in their deliverance from slavery in
the 19th century, and again in the civil rights movement of the 20th century. I hope that each of us have also encountered
God as deliverer when God has brought new freedom to our lives at times we had
thought we were hemmed in beyond hope of forward movement. When God comes to set us free for new life, like
Zephaniah, we indeed rejoice.
St. Paul has a different reason
to rejoice in God’s nearness. With God
near, Paul says, we need not have anxiety about anything, for the peace of God
which passes understanding will guard us, keeping our hearts and minds rooted
in Christ. This is the God whose nearness
helps us in times of loss, fear, and pain; who gives comfort when we hurt; security in uncertainty; peace where the circumstances of life offer no
peace at all. This is the God we flee to
in times of trouble, the One whose strength and love we so much desire when the
going gets tough. Paul is right – to
know the nearness of the God who is with us in need is indeed cause for
rejoicing.
John the Baptist tells of a very different experience of being in God’s
presence, an experience that we talk about less but that is just as real and important
as the others: the experience of God’s
presence as judgment. We sometimes joke
about the judgment people can encounter in God’s presence by talking of the proverbial
lightning bolt that will strike when someone who has been absent from church
for a long time suddenly shows up. But
God’s judgment is a much more serious matter.
When we encounter God as Judge, God’s nearness challenges us with
searching questions about the choices we have made and the sorts of people we
have been and are becoming; we have to
face the things in our lives that are not of God; we are called to repent of the actions and
attitudes that separate us from God, from others and from our truest selves.
Russian Orthodox Archbishop Anthony Bloom writes of a man who came to
him in the early years of his priesthood.
This man asked Bloom to show him God. Bloom said he could not do that; but he did
say that to meet God involved finding some kind of commonality between God and
ourselves that can give us eyes to see and ears to hear.
Bloom asked the man to name a Scripture story that moved him deeply to
see if they might find where the connection between him and God. The man chose the famous story of the woman
caught in adultery, who is brought before Jesus by a group of men ready to
stone her to death. Bloom asked him
which of the people in the story he identified with. “Are you the Lord, or at least at his side,
full of mercy…?” he asked. Are you the
woman taken in adultery? Are you one of
the old men who walks out at once because they are aware of their own sins or
one of the young ones who wait?”
The man thought for a few minutes, then said: “No, I feel like I am the only [one] who
would not have walked out but who would have stoned the woman.”
Bloom said to him, “Thank God that He does allow you to meet Him face
to face.” [4]
Bloom knew that for this man so caught up in yet unaware of his sin, to
come near God, would be a devastating experience of judgment. It is not that there are some attitudes or
actions that make it impossible for us to come into God’s presence, or that
there are some sins so dreadful that they are beyond God’s willingness or
ability to forgive. Rather, when our
actions and attitudes place us under God’s judgment, the only way to come into
God’s presence is the way John the Baptist calls us to: the way of repentance, in which we
acknowledge our separation from God, ask forgiveness, and seek what John calls
fruit worthy of repentance -- changes in our lives that turn us again towards
God’s desire for our lives.
The man who came to Archbishop Bloom did not know he needed to come to
God in repentance until he had that conversation. His experience of God’s absence that had led
him to Archbishop Bloom was, in fact, an act of grace on God’s part, one that
created the possibility for the man to first face his sin himself with this
priest so he could then face it in God’s presence in repentance.
That God’s response to this man so deep in sin was a gracious absence
tells a vital truth about the God whose presence we experience in different
ways. Our different experiences of God’s
nearness do not mean that God is somehow different as God comes near to us, but
rather that at different times we are
different as we come to God’s presence. God’s stance towards us is always the same --
a gracious stance; a stance of deep and
abiding love that desires our good above all, a love that has done and will do
all in God’s power to make us whole. But
depending on where we are in our stance, towards ourselves, towards others, and
towards God, we will at times encounter God’s love as that presence of freedom,
peace, and security that leads us to rejoice;
and at other times, we will encounter God’s love as the fire of
judgment: the challenging presence that
calls us to face and repent of what needs changing in our lives
if we and our relationships with God and others are to be whole.
In Advent, we proclaim the coming near of God in Jesus Christ. Jesus is God’s presence here now in Word and
Sacrament. Jesus is God’s presence in
the baby of Bethlehem and the One who will come again to judge the living and
the dead. As God in Christ draws near to us this Advent
season, may we know that God is indeed in our midst -- in our midst as comfort and as challenge; as peace and as judgment; calling us to rejoicing and repentance. May we have the grace to know how we each need
to approach God this Advent. And may we
know that however we come, in joy our repentance, the God comes near to us in
Jesus comes in love.
The Rev. Jack Zamboni
December 13th, 2009