Advent 2, Year A

Advent is like a 3-layer cake of the past, the present, and the future.  We look at the past, the ancient prophecies and the scriptures that tell us of Christ.  We look at the present, which has both its problems and its joys.  We look at the future, and the ultimate fulfillment of God’s glory.

Normally our sermons here at St. John’s focus on one of the scripture passages we read.  Today, however, we’re going to do something a little different and draw from all three of today’s scripture passages.  

We begin with the current state of humanity, with all its lies, corruption, violence, cruelty, inequality, injustice, oppression, exploitation, and scapegoating, and with all the things that make it so hard to get along with our neighbours.  In walks John the Baptist proclaiming that this current state of humanity is not the will of God.  John the Baptist is pretty fierce in calling for repentance.  The ones who might seem the most righteous and least in need of repentance are the ones John the Baptist is most fierce toward.  In this case it’s the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but in every era and every place there are those who convince themselves that they are more righteous than other people because of the group they belong to, or those who assume that they are entitled to more than other people because of their ancestry.  I can think of some examples in our world, and I expect you can too. To them John the Baptist says, “You brood of vipers!  Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Bear fruit worthy of repentance.  Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”  But here’s where the layers in this layer cake come in.  John the Baptist’s calls for repentance in the present comes from a deep sense that something is coming in the future.  He says, “Repent” and then says why, “for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”  He also has a deep sense of God’s action in the past: “This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, ‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’.”  So we see that John the Baptist has a deep sense of God’s action in the past inspiring the prophet Isaiah, a sense of God calling us to respond to God in repentance for the sins of the present, and a sense of urgency that God is coming near in the future.

Now we turn to one of those ancient Old Testament prophets, Isaiah.  He expresses a future of peace.  I came across a quote that said, “For the oppressed, peace is the absence of oppression.  But for the oppressor, peace is the absence of resistance.”  What Isaiah describes is peace that is the absence of oppression.  In contrast to the worldly leaders who only want to gain more money and power for themselves and their rich cronies, at the expense of the poor and the meek, Isaiah tells us of a leader who “shall judge the poor with righteousness and decide with equity for the meek of the earth”.  We note that Isaiah is not opposed to equity; for him equity is the will of God.  The vision of peace Isaiah holds out to us is not the peace of the predator; it is peace for everyone. “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.”  And the change is not in the vulnerable.  It is that the predators no longer act like predators: “the lion shall eat straw like the ox”, “the cow and the bear shall graze”.  The leadership of God is not like worldly power.  Isaiah tells us of this leader, “The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.  His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.”  It is a truly magnificent future Isaiah pictures for us.

That magnificent future what we are ultimately headed for, by the grace of God.  The evils and the sins of the world will not last forever, but God’s peace and glory will.  And God has already granted us the opportunity to see what the leadership of God looks like in Jesus Christ.  We see what it looks like when Jesus embraces the untouchable, welcomes the stranger and the foreigner, includes the marginalized, forgives the penitent, heals the sick, sees the holiness of children, teaches with wisdom, loves with abandon, gives so generously that he offers everything, even his own life, for us.  

In today’s passage from Romans, the apostle Paul talks about all three stages of time in the layer cake.  He emphasizes that the value of the scriptures written in the past is to encourage us in the present to have hope for the future.  As he puts it, “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.”  He credits God speaking through the Jewish patriarchs, and instead of seeing those promises as being for one group only, the Jews, he sees God’s mercy extending to everyone else as well, all the Gentiles, so that everyone might glorify God.  He says, “For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.”  He quotes scriptures in which Gentiles rejoice and praise God.  He sees the reign of Christ as a reign for all people, and quotes, “The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall have hope.”  The ultimate fulfillment of the reign of God, in which all evil is vanquished, is still to come, but the fact that Christ has already overcome death and evil means the reign of God is already present among us.  Because of that, we can follow Paul’s teaching in the present: “welcome one another, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God”.  We can already begin the rejoicing.  Because the fulfillment of God’s magnificent glory and infinite peace and justice is on its way, we can already live in hope.  Paul leaves us with the blessing of hope: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”