Tomorrow’s Sermon: Positive Preparation For Advent

Well, it’s been another crazy week where I’ve had to revise an old sermon for Sunday. I lost two or three days to a virus this week, and that set me back. So I looked through some old sermons to see whether I had ever preached on any of tomorrow’s Lectionary readings. Sure enough, I had preached on the Epistle. It was a confirmation service sermon. I hope in my editing and revising I have removed all traces of that context!

Oh, and by the way, the book from which the opening ‘letter’ comes is a fantastic resource, full of wonderfully humorous pieces based on Luke’s Gospel.

Romans 15:4-13

Introduction
To:          John the Baptist
                The River Jordan
                Salim
                Galilee

Dear Mr the Baptist,

I am writing to you to express my reservations concerning your somewhat unorthodox lifestyle. The Department for Health and Safety – Food Division (DHS-FD) exists to monitor and support the dietary habits of the general public and I am afraid that your ‘prophetic’ lifestyle has given us cause for concern.

The DHS-FD has gone to a great deal of trouble to encourage the general public to adopt a healthy, balanced diet, helping to ensure good health, long life and a general feeling of well being. With this in mind, I regret to inform you, Mr the Baptist, that locusts and wild honey is not such a diet. Now, I am sure the honey provides plenty of much-needed energy – vital when wandering about the wilderness – and I have no doubt that the locusts contain some proteins and vitamins useful for maintaining good health, but you cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, call this a balanced diet. Where are the vegetables? Where is the vitamin C? And where is the calcium? I shudder to think what condition your teeth must be in after all that honey.

You have to understand that you are a high-profile individual and, as such, you have considerable influence over the lifestyle choices of those who look up to you, and I am afraid that this diet of yours is undermining a great deal of hard work that we are doing in schools across the country. With fame comes responsibility, Mr the Baptist, and I am urging you to face up to that responsibility by encouraging your admirers to eat a healthy, balanced diet. With this in mind, I would like you to consider endorsing our new Healthy Eating campaign. I have enclosed a sample poster for you to look at and I would be interested to hear your thoughts. I look forward to hearing from you and, hopefully, working with you.

Yours in anticipation,

Joel ben Achmed
Director, Department of Health and Safety – Food Division[1]

John the Baptist: a laugh-a-minute guy? Probably not, and usually when readings about him appear during Advent you know you’re in for a heavy sermon about sin. Preachers mix their fire and brimstone in anticipation. We have good reason. In Church history, Advent was a season like Lent, with spiritual preparation by self-examination, fasting and repentance.

But I don’t plan to take that route today. I want to emphasise the positive and happy aspects of our Advent preparation. I shall do that from the last verse of the Romans reading. When Paul has described how Jesus fulfils the Messianic hopes and in doing so blesses the Gentiles, he concludes with these words:

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. (Romans 15:13)

The hope of the Messiah fills us with three things: joy, peace and hope itself.

1. Joy
The American writer Erma Bombeckwent to church one Sunday and couldn’t help noticing a little boy who was looking around and smiling at everyone. He wasn’t being naughty or noisy. He wasn’t playing around or playing up. He wasn’t disturbing anyone else, he was just sitting there smiling. But when his mother noticed, she shook him and said in a loud whisper, “Stop that grinning! You’re in church!” Then she smacked him, and as he started to cry, she said, “That’s better,” and carried on praying.[2]

If you think that’s extreme, let me tell you this. I once had a church member who told me that the purpose of coming to church on Sunday was to make people miserable. Yes, misery was in the design of church to this man!

But the Gospel promise and the prayer of Paul is that those who trust in the God of hope will have joy. Not the forced joy when someone up the front tries to whip up the emotions of a reluctant congregation; not the false joy where we smile because that’s what’s expected of us, even if we feel lousy, which one retired Salvation Army major told me Christian leaders should do. Nor is it the escapist joy that concentrates on the good and ignores the bad.

No: it’s the joy of knowing that Jesus brings us into the family of God, where we call God ‘Father’, ‘Dad’. It’s the joy of the Cross: not only the forgiveness of our sins, but also the sign that the conquest of evil is assured and that violence will not have the last word. It’s the joy of resurrection faith, knowing that in Jesus God is making all things new.

It’s the joy found in what a new book calls ‘the conspiracy of the insignificant’[3] – God isn’t dependent upon celebrities to achieve worthwhile things. Why? Because we follow a Saviour born in obscurity in a backwater occupied nation, but who changed all history. And so as Paul said elsewhere when writing about the Resurrection,

‘Your labour in the Lord is not in vain.’[4]

When Jesus walked the earth, his opponents slandered him by calling him a glutton and a drunkard[5]. He was neither, but what made them say that? Was it his sense of joy and celebration?

When the Holy Spirit fell on the believers at the first Christian Pentecost, their detractors said they were drunk. Again, why? They were so full of praise, singing and joy.

2. Peace
In his book The Life God Blesses the American writer Gordon Macdonald describes his encounter with a black South African, a high-ranking member of the African National Congress. He was profoundly impressed by the man’s understanding of African history and politics and his insights into the challenges facing his nation, and so he asked, “Where did you get your training?”

He expected to hear the name of some famous university, and was amazed at the reply: “I trained on Robben Island.” This was the notorious offshore prison where the apartheid régime sent its most troublesome opponents.

The man said, “Every few years the government would search out and jail all the young black leaders. They would sweep them out of sight and eventually dump them on Robben Island. But for us it was a profitable strategy. Because that was where we got our education. From [Nelson] Mandela and the others … You see, all of us who came to Robben Island came straight from school. We were angry; we were ready to kill the white man, any white man.

“In prison we lost our names; we were only numbers to the guards. And they kept their guns pointed at us all the time. Each morning we marched to the rock quarry, and in the evening we marched back. The days always belonged to the guards. But the nights were different. The nights belonged to us. During the evening, we who were young sat with the old men. And we listened while they told us their histories, their tribal languages, their dreams for the black person in South Africa.

“But most important, Mandela taught us that you can never accomplish anything as long as you hate your enemy. Hate his politics; hate the evil behind those politics; hate the policies that put you in prison. But never hate the person. It takes your strength away.”

“You stopped hating?” Macdonald asked.

“Not right away. It took me almost five years to forgive … five years of learning with the old men. But when I did forgive, I was a different person. I knew I had forgiven when I could go to Holy Communion on Friday and invite the guard to lay down his gun, come and receive the sacrament with me. So that’s the answer to your question. That’s where I got my training.”[6]

The peace of God is in knowing I am forgiven, then taking that peace and sharing forgiveness with those who have wronged me. A forgiving peace transforms society.

That peace also guides us at other times. We have been praying this last week that two particular friends would have God’s peace in that sense. One has come back into the ministry after a time out, and has been visiting a potential new circuit. We have prayed that she and the circuit in question will make their decisions, clearly guided by a sense of God’s piece. Another has been far from God in recent years, but is facing worrying hospital tests. She may be clear, or she may have something serious. We pray she will find God’s peace at the centre of her life again.

So Paul prays that we will not only have the gift of joy, but also the gift of peace. The peace of Christ changes our lives, guides our lives, and transforms the lives of others.

3. Hope
Do you believe the glass is half-full or half-empty? I’m a half-empty person: one disagreement at home and I think our marriage is failing, one defeat for my football team and I think they’ll be relegated, one major reversal at church and I think about chucking it all in. I’m a happy soul!

Here are some half-full versus half-empty variations:

* An optimist looks at an oyster and expects to find a pearl; a pessimist looks at an oyster and expects food poisoning.

* A pessimist is someone who feels bad when he feels good, for fear he will feel even worse when he feels better.

* A priest travelling on a bus finds himself next to a hippy wearing only one shoe. “I see you lost a shoe,” says the priest. “No,” says the hippy, “I found a shoe.”

* The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds. And the pessimist fears that this is true.[7]

Whatever our temperament, Christians receive the gift of hope from God. Our text says that hope is his nature – and that as we receive the first two gifts of joy and peace, so by the power of the Holy Spirit we receive this third gift, the gift of hope.

It is not a vague and uncertain “I hope everything will work out” kind of hope. It is a certain hope that says in God’s great future love will conquer evil, right will defeat injustice, death will be abolished and decay will be replaced by renewal. We have this hope because Jesus is risen from the dead and promises to return, bringing the fulness of his Father’s kingdom.

I spent some time once at the bedside of an elderly and deaf dying woman. I read some Scriptures loudly to her as she flitted between sleep and a half-wakeful state. One passage I read was from Revelation 21, which promises a new heaven and a new earth, where there is no more death or mourning or crying or pain, and all things are made new[8].

But this hope is not only for the hour of death; it gives energy and passion to us now in our witness. Jürgen Moltmann put it like this:

Whenever faith develops into hope it does not make people serene and placid; it makes them restless. It does not make them patient; it makes them impatient. Instead of being reconciled to the existing reality they begin to suffer for it and to resist it.[9]

So Paul prays that we will receive this gift of hope: a certain hope that will enable us to face the worst life can throw at us with peace and joy. But that gift of hope will also make us passionate to see more of God’s Kingdom in justice, healing and evangelism.

If we do, we will be like those early disciples of New Testament times who were said by their opponents to have turned the world upside-down. We will be full of the joy of Jesus, people who receive and give peace, endued with a rock solid hope. Can anything stop us? The Advent hope invites us to live our destiny – a destiny to change the world in the power of God’s Holy Spirit.

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