Advent II +
12/4/05 + St. Paul’s Church, Morganton,
Life is filled with warnings
of many kinds. From the words on cigarette packages “Caution: the
Surgeon-General has determined that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your
health” to the piercing sound of a siren on an emergency vehicle, or even
the words of a mother to a youngster saying “don’t eat that candy before lunch
or you’ll spoil your appetite!” A warning I find wonderfully humorous
however is one my son quoted in a sermon to his parish – it is a warning found
on a sign in a parking lot which reads: “Absolutely no trespassing!
Violators will be prosecuted to the full extent of the Law” (signed) The Sisters
of Mercy!”
In the Collect for today, we prayed that God would give us grace so that we
would heed the warnings given to us by the Prophets. You and I
are accustomed to the presence of warnings in life, and have learned
(sometimes painfully) that, if we trust the source of a warning, we do
well to take its message seriously. But the warnings of the Prophets often seem
to lack much punch for us – they have little or no sense of urgency. We
have heard them year after year, and yet life goes on much as it has before. I
suspect we’d react quite differently if the Advent wreath were knocked
over and caught on fire! We’d need to do something about it, and
do it immediately! Sin, on the other hand, seems to be such an un-urgent
matter, something to be thought about, and perhaps dealt with “when we have
more time.” The business deal being worked on, getting the roast in the oven, or
even watching a basketball game are apt to get much more immediate attention.
Words like cancer, murder, or terrorist attack have a harsh
clarity about them, quite different from so many of the words we are apt to use
in church such as sin, repentance and redemption. We hear those
words in Bible readings and sermons, we sing them in hymns and pray them
in prayers, but they can so easily be just part of a funny kind of jargon we
associate with religion, rather like the way we are used to hearing other kinds
of jargon from sportscasters describing football games, or an expert chef
instructing students in the culinary arts.
Ask yourself – do you think sin is really so bad?
After all, if, as the Church teaches us, everybody sins, why get so
upset about it? Why not just accept it as part of life and let it go at that?
The answer is found in the meaning of two words: sin is one and
love is the other. Sin is a deliberate rejection of God in
favor of whatever it is that I want. It may consist of any kind of
thought, word, or action in which one has consciously rejected what one
knows to be the will of God and, instead, chosen one’s own desires. Isn’t the
very same thing true in human relationships? If I claim to love
someone, but I reject that person’s desires and needs whenever they differ from
my own, would that be a truly loving relationship? The worst part of what would
or would not be done would not be in my actions themselves as much as in my
rejection of the other person. It would be the fact that his or her needs would
not be considered as important as mine. To claim to love someone, but
consistently to ignore or reject the other’s wishes would surely lead an
impartial observer to conclude that my claim of love was not very credible.
So it is with sin. Sin is not so much any particular act but a putting of
oneself in the place of God, choosing our desires instead of His. Whether we
sin, that is, whether we betray God by lying, gluttony, committing a robbery, or
some other sin is only a question of the means being used – as secondary in
meaning and importance as whether a murderer shoots a victim with a revolver or
an automatic pistol.
The Prophets and St. John the Baptizer warned that unless we repent, unless we
wage a continuous war against our tendency to sin, we will not be able to greet
the coming of our Lord with any kind of joy. While still in St. Mary’s womb and
about to be born, there was no room for Jesus in the Inn at Bethlehem, so He was
born in a stable. You and I can be such “Bethlehems,” so full of self that there
is simply no room for Him in us, either.
2
When we were infants, you and I
cared only about ourselves and our needs – we didn’t know any better, but
perhaps we have made some progress since. In this holy season of Advent, it’s
worth pondering how much we really want Jesus to come into our hearts & lives,
how much we really care. Let me ask what may seem to be an odd question. Do our
sins bother us? Do we see in them a barrier between us and God? If Our Lord
suddenly appeared before you and said “OK – it’s all over. Judgment time!” Would
you feel (or be) ready?
As we acknowledged in the Collect for today, God has sent messengers – the
Prophets – to utter, even to shout warnings. Through the centuries, the
Church has repeated those warnings over and over again, and does so this morning
to us here in St. Paul’s Church. The warnings are real! They are serious!
There is a wonderful episode in the Peanuts cartoon strip in which little
Lucy is having a temper tantrum. She shouts: “Why have the grownups made such a
mess of the world? Why should we have to inherit their mess? I’ll give
them two years to get everything back in order! Two years and no more!” The
Advent Message isn’t all that different, except that instead
of pointing the finger at others, we are called to face our
responsibility for some of that mess. Maybe what we have done to others, or the
state of our relationship with God, or, most likely, both. It may be
things we have done, or things we have left undone, but the need for
change is hard to miss!
Ask yourself if there is something in your life, right now, for which you are
yearning, something important, something which may or may not happen, but which
would be profoundly meaningful to you if it did. It might be restoration of
health for a loved one, or for yourself. It might be a new job or a new home. It
might involve regaining the love of someone from whom you are now estranged, or
the coming of a new love into your life. Think about it – think about how much
you long for it and how wonderful it would be if it came to pass. Our sense of
longing for something truly important to us is just what the Church is placing
before us in this Advent Season, but instead of the kind of examples I have just
mentioned, we are pointed toward an even greater, more important need ,
our need - for God!
For some, Advent is just a brief pre-Christmas time when we sing particular
hymns, when the candles on the Advent Wreath are lighted week by week, and the
old debates rage anew as to when it is proper to begin singing Christmas Carols
or putting up decorations. But Advent can and should be so much more! It is
above all a time when God, through the Church, asks us the great question: Do we
yearn for the coming of Jesus into our hearts and minds, into our lives?
In the lovely, familiar hymns we sing “Come, thou long-expected Jesus, come
and set thy people free,” and “O come, o come Emmanuel and
ransom captive Israel.” Do those words ring true? Are we conscious of
the degree to which we are captives, enslaved by selfishness and pride
(or, in its traditional name, “sin”)? Do we see our need to be set free,
to be ransomed, or have we become so used to our enslavement that it
seems not only normal, but quite acceptable, even comfortable? So, again,
we come back to the question of what Advent really means to us.
While out driving, I heard an announcer proudly boast that, from that very
moment until Christmas, his station would play nothing but “Christmas
music.” A few minutes of further listening showed that, for them,
“Christmas music” meant everything from “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer”
to “Silent Night but mostly much more of Rudolph than traditional carols.
Shopping areas now offer the same non-stop “Christmas” music and are all
decorated with Christmas finery. Christmas cards are beginning to arrive at our
homes and it’s no wonder youngsters cry out “I can’t WAIT till Christmas!”
Adults may express our excitement in slightly different terms, but we can easily
identify with that sense of longing and expectation.
3
In a book of letters written by
little children to their Pastor, I found this straight-forward note: “Dear
Father, please say a prayer for our Little League football team. We need God’s
help – or a new quarterback! (signed) Your friend, Alexander.” Alexander
knows what he really longs for. What about us? Is it Frosty the
Snowman, or the Son of God in our lives?
+ In the Name
of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
The Rev’d
Alfred T. K. Zadig
