The Third Sunday of Advent - December 15, 2002

 

The Rev. Dayle Casey

The Chapel of Our Saviour

Colorado Springs, Colorado

December 15, 2002

3 Advent - B

Isaiah 65:17-25

1 Thessalonians 5:12-28

John 1:6-8, 19-28
“Live at peace among yourselves,” St. Paul tells the Christians in Thessalonika. “Rebuke the idle, encourage the fainthearted, support the weak, be patient with everyone, do not take revenge, think of what is best for the community, pray, give thanks, rejoice. These are the things we do while we wait for the kingdom of God.”

Some of the Christians in Thessalonika figured that since Jesus was going to return soon, then what they did in the meantime was not important. But Paul wanted them to know that people of faith are not people who just wait for God to lay the kingdom on them; people of faith are people who act while they wait, people who live the kingdom the best they can during the time of waiting.

Those who share biblical faith act while we wait for Our Lord’s return because of what we believe about the world we live in. We act while we wait, because we believe that the world is no accident, that life is no accident, and that the kingdom of God is no accident either. People of faith believe that the world and human life were created for a purpose and that, therefore, life is to be lived with a purpose. Nothing ever “just happens,” as if by hap, as if by chance or accident, not even the kingdom of God. All things are caused to happen.

Even when things occur that may appear to be caused by no one -- like an earthquake -- is it not actually, as Robert Capon suggest, that somehow, deep within the mystery of Creation, God has given to his world, even to rocks, a kind of freedom, so that even rocks exercise their freedom from time to time?

God acts purposefully; God creates purposefully. And God creates us in his own image, to act purposefully, and that we do, either in accordance with God’s purposes or in accordance with our own.

This faith is fundamental to the biblical view. It’s basic. It’s one of those “back to the basics” of our faith that we need to remind ourselves of constantly, because it’s the foundation of our hope, the foundation, in fact, of all hope.

For if the world were an accident, if life were purposeless, there could be no hope, for life would be nothing more than the result of some great cosmic hiccup, the result of nothing more than a cosmic convulsion, here one moment and gone the next.

But this is not the Christian view. The Christian view, Paul reminds the Christians in Thessalonika, and us, is that God is an agent in history and that, created in the image of God, we are agents in history. We wait -- actively, expectantly, not passively -- for the coming of Christ because of the things God did in history long ago and because of what we expect him to do in the future.

Long ago, with a purpose, God created the world. And God created us with a purpose -- to be like him, to share in his creation, to share in his creative, purposeful activity.

In order for us to share in God’s creative, purposeful activity, we too had to be free. We had to be more than puppets that God could manipulate at will. So God created us as free persons, and he told us what his purpose is, his purpose for his world and for us.

But in our freedom we developed some ideas and purposes of our own, and we acted on them. And we still act on them. And we have created an awful lot of things with these purposes of ours, all by ourselves, all on our own, without any help from God. There is a whole litany of things we’ve created all by ourselves, beginning with Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel. It is a litany of envy and arrogance and pride and murder and injustice and war and greed and jealousy and death. The litany goes on and on throughout our life as the people of God, the litany of our fall from being all that we were created to be by the purposes of God.

And time and again God has reminded us of his purposes and has urged us to try his purposes instead of ours. But we were so full of ourselves, so busy with our own creations, that we didn’t listen. And we tore the world apart, and we killed ourselves doing it, and we died.

But not before, one day, when God looked upon the world he had created and upon all the people he had created, and in his compassion he said, “Behold, I will make all things new. I will create new heavens and a new earth. And the past will not be remembered, nor will it ever come to mind. Be glad and rejoice for ever and ever for what I am creating, for I am creating Jerusalem as a delight and her people as a joy.”

And no sooner was it said than it was done. God sent a man, a man named John, to bear witness to his new creation, to bear witness to the new light and life he was sending to the world. God would send his own Son, who would redeem the world from its folly and sin and who would again reveal to the world God’s own purpose for his people, this time in “people language,” in flesh and blood.

And God did. And his son lived that purpose and he died that purpose, living, and dying too, as his Father purposed, right to the end. And then, on the third day, God raised his Son to new life, and the new creation was complete.

It is, of course, the story of the Creation and the New Creation, the story of Creation and Fall and Incarnation and Resurrection, the story of a God and a world with a purpose, the story of hope. It’s not the story of something that “just happened,” but the story of things that were willed, created, the story of things that were made to happen. “In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth,” and then he sent his Son to make them new. And in the last days, he will send him again as Judge of what he has made. And it is for that that we wait.

This story -- this history, this future -- is what we are baptized into when we are baptized. And Father Benson, the founder of the Cowley Fathers, called baptism “the greater sacrament,” because baptismal life is rooted, grounded and earthed, in this given world of hope. Baptismal life, he said, “is saying ‘yes’ to God in creation and re-creation.”

The older I get, the more evident it becomes to me that faith has a certain complexity to it. Sometimes you hear people say, “When I became a Christian....” And by that they refer not to their baptisms, not to the time when they were grounded in this hope, but to a time when they began to be obedient and to follow Christ, as if by their obedient walk with Christ they are able to prove their faith.

But I don’t think that’s the way it is in reality. I rather think that faith and hope are more complex, more mysterious, than that. Because I know myself too well, and because the Scriptures, too, affirm that there is none who is obedient save Christ, no one, not even one, but that all have sinned and fallen short of the righteousness of God.

So the point of my becoming a Christian cannot be the time of anything that I have done. It cannot be when I became obedient and began to follow Jesus. No, the point at which I became a Christian was at my baptism, at the point at which my parents or I, and the community of faith I was part of, said “yes” to the time and history and hope of God, even though I didn’t know it fully at the time. It was the time when we said “yes” to the faith that the world and life, and you and I, are not accidents, but are part of a purposeful creation, whose purpose is seen in Jesus.

Baptismal life is saying “yes” to hope and leaving despair behind. It is somehow seeing, if only dimly, that in Christ, who has come as Savior and who will come again as Judge, God is working his purpose out, even in me and you, even when we are not obedient. For somehow, in my engagement with Jesus of Nazareth, even when I am not obedient -- even then, mysteriously -- I know I am engaged with the purpose of God himself, just as Peter, too, knew it on that awe-ful night when the cock crew the third time and Peter looked the One he had denied in the eye and then went off and wept. Somehow Peter, too, even at that awful moment, knew that life was no accident, but that even in his unfaithfulness and cowardice he had been touched by the loving purpose of God. And, deep down, the seed was replanted, the seed of hope, the seed that was able to grow into new life when he met the risen Lord, because he knew, even in his disobedience, that God loved him, even him, and that, therefore, there was hope for him.

Now hope has a lot to do with time. And the size of our hope can be only as large as our view of time, only as great as our vision, only as great as our vision of the past and of the future. And of the present.

Not long ago in time, about ten years ago, I saw a newspaper article about time and hope. “Students in Danger of Flunking the Future,” the headline read. And the article was about students being in danger of “flunking the future” because they did not know math and science and therefore wouldn’t be able to get a job at Hewlett-Packard.

Well, that’s very important. But it is a very limited view, a view limited by human lifetimes and the jobs we can get. There are, I can tell you, more profound ways to flunk the future.

In the same newspaper there was a second article that had a larger view of time, a greater vision, and that therefore reflected a larger hope. It was a George Will column in which Will urged Time Magazine to start thinking soon about a selection for “Man of the Millennium,” because selecting a “Man of the Millennium” would be a tough decision, and there were, at the time, already nine hundred ninety-nine years down and only nine years to go before the end of the second millennium since the birth of Christ.

Picking a “Man of the Year” is relatively easy, Will said, because it’s a matter of watching what has been made to happen over a relatively short period of three hundred sixty-five days. But picking a “Man of the Millennium” is much more difficult, because there are very few people who are large enough to throw their shadows over the span of a thousand years.

Will said that the twentieth century clearly belonged to either Albert Einstein or Winston Churchill, but that he saw only five candidates for “Man of the Millennium” for the thousand years of time that happened between the year 1000 A.D. and the year 2000 A.D.

Will’s candidates were Machiavelli, Luther, Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. And Will’s choice was Jefferson. Maybe. Maybe he’s right. But I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure but that even Jefferson and Lincoln weren’t really only tinkers in the longer view of history, great and able and visionary men, to be sure, but men who really were only tinkering with events that Machiavelli and Luther began to make happen half a millennium ago, just as Whitehead observed that everyone since Plato is only tinkering with what Plato set in motion 2,500 years ago. 

The point of all this is that Will’s view of time reflects a purpose and a hope that is a lot larger than landing a job after college, larger even than Time’s “Man of the Year.” But even Will’s vision of time was limited to just a short time -- only a thousand years. What about really big time, God’s time?

Sometimes I wonder about the Church’s view of time. I wonder, sometimes, if our problem in the Church these days isn’t that we are so focused on ourselves, and have become so accustomed to taking our own short lifetimes so seriously, that we don’t take God seriously. Because if, like Paul, we were to take God seriously -- when, like Paul, we do take God seriously -- then we’re talking about really big time, about a future really worth flunking, about the time from Creation to Redemption to the Last Days, about God’s time. And it’s a future one certainly can flunk, just as surely as he can flunk math and science and Hewlett-Packard.

So what about the meantime? That’s the question of Advent. What about the meantime of all time, the meantime of God’s time? That’s the question Paul had for the Christians in Thessalonika.

What do we do in the meantime, as we wait, as Peter waited between the moment of his deepest unfaithfulness and that moment, three days later, of his greatest joy? What are we to do in the meantime? “We remember his death,” said Paul. “We proclaim his resurrection, and we await his coming in glory.”

But we do not wait as idlers just whiling time away, thinking that God will lay his kingdom on us like some celestial Santa Claus. That’s Paul’s point. We wait as ones who have been re-created. We wait as ones who have been redeemed from the life of despair and made new by the purposeful love of Christ. We wait as ones who share the creative power and life of God. We wait as ones who use the time God has given us to live kingdom life as best we can in our time.

What do we do in the meantime? We bring the stuff of our lives -- the bread and wine of his creation, along with our joy and all our pain and grief, and along with all our energy and all our weakness, and all our vision and all our blindness, and all our generosity and all our greed, and all the other stuff of our lives -- we bring it all and place it on God’s altar. And we pray that as God has acted in the past, so, even today, God will act now “to send his Holy Spirit upon these gifts” of ours, as glorious or as pitiful and poor as they may be, so that through his purposeful power they may be “the sacrament of the Body of Christ and his blood of the new creation,” so that we, too, “united to his Son in his sacrifice, may be acceptable through him.”

This is why the meantime of God’s time is not a time for idleness. It’s a time for action, a time to remind those who are idle that they are called to share in God’s purposeful activity. It is a time to make peace. It is a time to give courage. Like Luther. It is a time to care for the weak, a time to be patient with one another, a time, like Jefferson’s time, to think of what is best for the community, a time, like Lincoln’s time, to seek reconciliation and not revenge, a time to pray and give thanks. Like Paul...

And especially it is a time to rejoice, a time to rejoice in the fact that we are more than the issue of some great cosmic belch. We are sons and daughters of God, called, like John the Baptist, to witness to the Light, called to witness to God’s Word made flesh, through whom God is working his purpose out.

We are part of that purpose! So, in the meantime....

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.