GENESIS PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Monday, December 9, 2013

08 December 13 “Repent” Matthew 3:1-12

08 December 13 “Repent” Matthew 3:1-12 Last Sunday we were admonished to “Stay Awake.” This morning we are to “Repent,” and “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” Someone is trying really hard to help us this Advent season. I realized the other day the change coming about at our house as we sat to plan for the holidays. With family coming, cleaning came up. We could not seem to get beyond the need to make sure the house was clean. Then I thought, what an appropriate way to jump-start our Advent preparation. What if Jesus were to be a guest in our homes? What would we need to clean before he came? Then things sort-of spiraled out of control. If Jesus were to be a visitor where we work, what would we want to be sure we fix up before the visit? If Jesus were to come to a special called family gathering, who would we invite and what sort of celebration would we prepare? If Jesus called and asked if he could come by and sit on the porch with just you, what would your talk about? We are not always the easiest folk to be around. And Jesus, well, Jesus knows us all to well. Jesus’ coming may create so much anxiety we RSVP and decline the invitation. I suppose we can try to decline the invitation. But Jesus is persistent. Here he is extending another invitation this morning. Now, before we begin to suspect these are last minute unexpected invitations we must not forget, this is an invitation from God. There is nothing last minute about God and regardless of the timing, these invitations should excite us. And perhaps we are. Especially when we remember this invite is not for us to come to a place for an event or even to have someone come to our house. This is an invitation to come to a person, to a baby, the baby Jesus. He is the only one who will be our salvation, our Christ, our Messiah. This reason for the season does not surprise us. The fact that the Holy Spirit has worked up an invitation for you and me, well, that surprises us. But, do we really expect anything less from God? God often surprises us with Gods radically different way to see life. This case is no different. The Holy Spirit has promised to arrive into our lives bearing the Christ Child. Surprise! So let’s not be distracted by the world’s booming noise this time of the year. The one saying buy me, you deserve it, go ahead, it is a small price to pay for such deep and abiding pleasure. Let’s not be distracted and miss the critical call from the word in our heart, with scripture and the Holy Spirit saying, come to Jesus, get ready, be prepared, the day is nearing, stay awake, make straight the path. Vast differences are evident in how we respond to our distractions. The ones out there may draw us in to consumer consumption hell. The sort with dire consequences. For we may run out of money and have more presents to buy. To debt we will go. Unless we make Black Friday or Cyber Monday our particular savior that is. The others, in here, may draw us also into hell. Hell of another sort. The sort with equally dire consequences. For we might not pay attention to Advent and miss our savior, lose our soul, and be perpetually lost. Unless, that is, we consider a radically different way to make it through this Advent time to move our body, mind, and soul closer to God. Consider again that invitation I mentioned earlier. One of our own making. A different approach to our usual Christmas preparation, for sure. Consider we seriously were to invite Jesus to our home to share a meal, and visit, and exchange gifts. Consider you were bold enough to invite Jesus to bring you to a time freed from each day’s urgency. Or, can we not let go of our need to clean, and fix, and prepare our external world at the expense of our internal spiritual world? If Jesus were to be a guest in our lives what would it take to not run screaming into the night and instead be comfortably sitting on the couch ready, eyeing the front walk, so we can be there at the door when he knocks? If Jesus were to be a visitor where we work could we be calm, letting our past work speak for itself. If Jesus were to come to a special called family meeting, would we be at peace and celebrate our deep sense of love for one another. If Jesus called and asked if he could come by and sit with us on the porch, would we anticipate his great gift of grace in humble thankfulness and let the gentle porch swing direct the conversation. Or will we sit in our new gentleness and all of a sudden be so distracted the old panic returns and we start thinking, in the presence of God, have I been naughty or nice. It is true! We cannot help ourselves. So we look for ways out. Ways to decline the invitation to move closer to God. But wait. Advent leads to Christmas and it is the baby Jesus who is coming. Oh, thank goodness, the adult Jesus, the one who teaches the right way to live and then judges how we do on the exam is not coming to our house yet. It is the baby Jesus. Why he is still in diapers. What could he ask? “In those days, John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea proclaiming, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’” There is a crowd of folk who come to see John. Some are there to see him because of his severe reputation. He dresses odd, eats strange things, and does the most curious ritual he calls baptism. Others have come for serious reasons. They struggle with their life. They are not happy the way the world has treated them. They are looking for change, for the hope for a better life. John’s message does not disappoint either group. It is a message for everyone, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven has come near.” Part of his truth telling is that God is coming to lead the Jews safely home from their captivity. For that journey, they must prepare themselves. They must prepare also the way of the Lord. By God’s grace, and God’s power they were to change their minds and hearts. They were to make an easy path, not for themselves, but for God. They were to make the way easy for God to enter their lives. They were to make life straight where their living had become crooked. This is the small print on the bottom of our invitation. We begin to make a way possible for right living by first confessing our sins. Then we join John at the River. Without confession there can be no baptism. Romans teaches baptism is a visible sign and seal of God’s invisible grace. Baptism is the beginning point for a true conversion of an inward change outwardly expressed in our way of living that glorifies God and moves us closer to God. The people who came to John, there in the wilderness of their lives, were not the kind of folk who gave up on God. Why should folks with no hope of knowing God come to John? If life has no chance for such hope there really is nothing to look forward to, no reason to get close to the River Jordan. What happens there makes no difference. The people who came to John were not folk who see their life as being perfect. Folk who see their life as being perfect do not come to John for baptism either. Why should they? Life has been perfect. Why mess things up being dunked in a river. What for? John warns these brood of vipers that their comfortable little life is on the way out. A new world, a very different world, the Kingdom of God, is going to come! He is placing a critical choice before them and before us. Have we given up on hope for anything in our lives that would be good? Have we become senile and hardened our hearts and refuse to change one thing in our lives? Are we afraid to invite Jesus into our lives? Or, are we longing to make the pilgrimage to the Jordan. Are we expecting and hopeful that hearing God’s voice through John, or perhaps our favorite scripture, or perhaps our own lives, we are hearing a call for a new life, a fresh start. Be alert then this Advent time as we prepare to accept this life changing invitation to the birth of this baby, Jesus. Be alert to the hope he brings that can be seen all around us. Be alert to where you might see proof of a visible sign and seal of God’s invisible grace in yourself, your loved ones, even strangers. Be alert to see the presence of the holy in the wilderness of the neighborhood park, seeing the diversity there as part of one glorious thread of God’s good creation. Be alert to see the presence of the holy in the wilderness of a shopping trip. I cannot believe I just said that. Jesus, what have I done. Or more appropriately, what have you done. When we dare see the mass of shoppers as one continuous life force of preparation for invisible grace we may have a glimpse of baptism’s sacrament. If our hope is to prepare the way for God’s coming consider living differently in the presence of the holy at work, in school, or at home. See there not right or wrong, good or bad, joy or disappointment, fair or unfair, but a common spirit that moves in the ordinary fabric of our everyday lives. See a spirit that works at sorting out, even in the sometimes murky interior of the human heart, where and how God invites us into the fullness of our being as a Christian. Be alert, dear ones, to these movements in life as part of the way we prepare for the coming of the Christ child and our life of faithful discipleship. God is so very proud of us. God’s love for us is never tarnished. With our eyes now open to the presence of the holy and our most cherished invitation of the year, we see God’s love a little more clearly and we take up our burden and prepare the way and it does not matter much if the house looks clean or not. What matters is the impact on the lives of those around us. For there is life giving hope just a few days away, and his name is Jesus. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen 120813.gpc

Monday, December 2, 2013

01 December 07 “The Nearness of Now” Matthew 24:36-44

It is usually the title that catches my eye. This week it was, “12 Ways to Take Back Christmas, Save Money, & Stay Sane” by Roger Wolsey. This is a piece to take seriously, I thought. Taking back Christmas, saving money and staying sane. What could I lose, except possibly a little time. So, I clicked in. Wolsey began, “I’ve made my peace with seeing Christmas decorations in stores well before Thanksgiving. I’m down with the pagan influences on the holiday. I’m cool with hanging greens, decorating with holly and ivy, lighting yule logs, and setting up Christmas trees. I’m hip to honoring the winter solstice.” He pretty much covered it all and seemed sensible and pragmatic. We just as well be at peace, down with, cool with, and hip to what surrounds our sensibility and is unlikely to go away anyway. This time of the year helps. We get a little rain, it gets a bit cooler. So we are easily drawn to holidays remembered, times when tradition carried over from generation to generation. These days we do things differently, but we still have our nostalgic moments. What Wolsey does not accept or accommodate is the “stressful madness and rush to “be ready for Christmas.” It is particularly irksome to him that some insist on making it all a contest. This is not the season to brag about all the gifts being bought, wrapped, and delivered by December 25th – as if that is the reason for the season. As if that is what this Advent time of preparation is for. One of his Facebook friends posted a status update that proudly reported, “Happy to have all of my Christmas shopping completed.” The posting was on November 22. Then came a flood of comments. Folk were either in competition – noting they too have most or all of their shopping done, or they were shamed by those braggarts with their own over-reactive confession they are “nowhere near ready and need to get busy shopping to be ‘ready’ for the big day.” Anxiety and frenzy and competitive shopping. Oh, what a delight we have become. Into this torrent these strange scriptures of Advent come. They are strange because of what is happening in the incarnation. God becoming human in Jesus, is strange and new. “Salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers,” says Paul to the church at Rome. God is coming near to us, this strange “Son of Man’ who comes life a thief in the night, according to Matthew. How are we to think and react to such strange newness? Wolsey points out, it was not until several centuries into Christian history that the birth of Jesus became something for Christians to celebrate. Starting in 336 A.D. celebrating the great joy of Jesus’ resurrection at Easter had always been the big event. For the longest Christmas was a rather low-key time without much hoopla, let alone anxiety. When a holiday marking Jesus’ birth was created the focus was on Advent – the five weeks leading up to Christmas. Advent is a time of “waiting” and is sort of a “winter Lent.” Christmas was originally a time of fasting and prayer reaching its triumphant birthing in a twelve day holiday of breaking the fast and feasting that ends the day before Epiphany. In 1823 when Clement C. Moore wrote his famous poem for children, “A visit from St. Nicholas” things began to shift. You may remember the poem. “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse . . . ” But, we should not fixate on the night before or the day of Christmas. Christmas is not a one day holiday. There are twelve days of Christmas and there is no Godly reason for any of us to have our shopping done before those twelve days have come and gone! Jesus, it seems, was probably born in the spring anyway. The coming of the Son of Man, according to Matthew, will be like the story of Noah and the flood. Those who are not awake, those who are unprepared, they will not hear the good news; they will not know Jesus is coming. We, however, are aware. We have heard the good news, we know Jesus is coming. Yet, each year, we allow ourselves to be distracted. Before all hope is lost, Jesus redirects us, again, to “keep awake.” This is critical; we are to keep awake for we do not know on what day our Lord is coming. Always be ready, Jesus says, the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. As we are sucked in to the holiday craziness and join the chorus saying how we are nowhere near ready for Christmas we come to church and find yet another thing we have forgotten to do. How do we ever add “keep awake” to an already impossible “to do” list? How do you ever check something like that off? Once checked off, our task is usually forgotten. Keeping awake for Jesus, watching for God’s presence, is not something we should forget. It is like remembering to take a breath every moment of the day and night. We might check it off, but we do not want it to go away. What then are we to do? This is Advent and the calendar says Jesus’ birth is in 25 days. I know, we can move “keep awake” to our worry list. There is always something on that list. Some things have been there for decades. Setting “keep awake” aside from our to-do list will free us to rejoin the rush to finish whatever we must finish before Christmas. I wonder though, are our mania and our worry in any way coming from a place of faith? I think not. Perhaps a better approach to “keeping awake” is to be hard-wired for Jesus. To be hard-wired for Jesus would be strange and new and have him be as automatic in our lives as our breathing, or our need to eat and sleep. If we truly immerse ourselves in and savor Advent in this new way we would always be prepared, so when Jesus comes we will not only be awake, we will be ready. What if we top our list with an Advent reminder to take some time to go inward and think about our life and our God. Just to think about God glorifies God. This Advent time is our time to slow down, to not allow our getting ready for Christmas to replace giving life to Christ. The coming of our Messiah and the intentional celebration of the amazing gift of Jesus’ life in ours requires our participation. Jesus will not be here without us. We are necessary for God’s participation in our world. God cannot be God without us. Brother Lawrence knows of this strange and new way to be Advent ready. He suggests, “God does not lay a great burden on us, (God only asks for) a little thinking of God, a little adoration, sometimes to pray for grace, sometimes to offer God your sorrows, sometimes to thank God for the good things God does. Lift up your heart to God even at meals and when you are in company. The least little remembrance will always be acceptable to God. You do not have to be loud. God is nearer to us than we think. You do not have to be in church all the time in order to be with God. We can make a chapel in our heart, where we can withdraw from time to time and converse with God in meekness, humility, and love. Everyone has the capacity for such intimate conversation with God, some more, some less. God knows what we can do. Get started. Maybe God is just waiting for one strong resolution on your part. Have courage.” We do not stop living when we make a chapel in our heart. Remember, in Matthew’s gospel, two were in the field, working. Two were grinding meal together. Life and work did not stop for contemplation and wandering in the wilderness. We go on living, knowing God’s desire is for us to know Jesus and to love him and celebrate him as the very fabric of life. God desires we recognize his thread, Jesus, as being God’s grace and be ready with hope when God’s Kingdom comes. In the 1980’s, before Vaclav Havel became president of Czechoslovakia, when his country was ruled by the communists, he wrote: “Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it’s a dimension of the soul . . . Hope in this deep and powerful sense is . . . an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed . . . It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do here and now.” It may be we feel our conditions are hopeless. But Havel says we are to hope for something simply because it is good. Not because it stands a chance to succeed. This is the sort of hope which gives us the strength to live and keep going and see God’s coming as an enabling of that hope. The hope from God is a hope that realizes even though time is short and times are tough, Jesus is coming. Jesus is coming into our lives to be our savior, to be our savior from the darkest of nights. That is a very good hope. It is a lifesaving hope. It is salvation nearer to us now than ever before. It is God coming near to us because God has great plans for our lives. Our duty is to be ready by realizing God is with us in the simplest of our day- to-day. To be awake is to see and feel and engage with God in those moments and receive God’s grace and peace. That, dear ones, is our Advent hope. It is not a great burden, it begins with a little prayer, a little pause for thanksgiving, a little courage, and fills us with such a profound calm we fear nothing. For what can frighten us when we are with God? Not a bad way to take back Christmas, save money, and stay sane. A twelve day party isn’t so bad either. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen 120113.gpc