The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
December 14, 2008

3 Advent – B
Isaiah 65:17-25
1 Thessalonians 5:12-28
John 1:6-8, 19-28

The followers of Jesus in Thessalonika knew that Christ had been raised and that he had ascended into heaven, and since Jesus had also promised that he would return soon, some of them figured that how they lived 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 act while they wait; they live the kingdom the best they can during the time of waiting.

We act while we wait for Our Lord’s return, Paul insists, because of what we believe about the world we live in. We act while we wait, because we believe that life is no accident, and that the kingdom of God is no accident either. People of faith understand 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 God’s kingdom. All things are caused to happen.

Even when things occur that may appear to be caused by no one – such as an earthquake – is it not likely, as Robert Capon suggests, that somehow, deep within the mystery of Creation, God has given to his world, even to magma and to the earth’s crust, a kind of freedom, so that even rock exercises its freedom from time to time?

God acts purposefully and 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 one of those 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 life were an accident, if life and the world were without purpose, there could be no hope, for we would be nothing more than the issue of some great cosmic hiccup, here one moment and gone the next.

But this is not the biblical view. Our faith, Paul reminds the Christians in Thessalonika, and us, is that God is an agent in history and that we, created in the image of God, are also agents in history. So we wait – not passively, but actively and expectantly – for the coming of Christ, because of the things God did in history long ago and because of what we expect God 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 creative, purposeful activity. And 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 in the beginning God 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 mayhem, a litany of injustice and greed and jealousy and war and death. The litany goes on and on throughout our life as a people, this litany of our fall, 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 listened. And we tore the world apart, and we killed ourselves doing it, and we died.

But one day, God looked upon the world and 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 God 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, our story. It is the story of the Creation and of 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 this that we wait.

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

My baptismal life begins when my parents, or I – together with 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. My baptismal life, and yours, begins at the time when we say “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, and in whose re-creation we, with the help of Jesus, play a part.

Baptismal life is saying “yes” to hope, and leaving despair behind. Baptismal life 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 you and me, unfaithful as we are. For somehow, in my engagement with Jesus of Nazareth, even when I am full of myself and my own purposes rather than God’s – 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, that night when Peter looked the One he had denied in the eye and then went off and wept. Somehow, even at that awful moment, Peter, too, 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 Peter knew, even in his failure, that God loved him, even him, and that, therefore, there was hope for him.

Now hope is a function of time. And the size of our hope can be only as large as our view of time, only as great as our vision of the past and of the future. And of the present.

Hope was strong in the days of John the Baptist. The people were watching and waiting then, says Luke, because “a feeling of expectancy had grown among the people.” Ever since the days of the prophets, they had been watching and waiting, wondering when the One the prophet promised would come, the One who “has taken away our punishment” and “swept away our foes.” And they were beginning to wonder whether John might be the Christ.

“The Lord God is in your midst,” the prophet Zephaniah had proclaimed. “There is no longer any need for your hands to hang limp. The Lord is mighty to save, and he will rejoice over you and be glad. He will quiet you with his love, and will rejoice over you with singing, as on a day of festival.” He is the Lord “who will gather you and bring you home,” says the Lord’s prophet. And all the people at the Jordan were wondering if John the Baptist might be the One they expected.

But John said, “No, I’m not.” “But, he is,” John added, pointing to Jesus.

Raymond Brown reminds us that like everything else in God’s world, “the Baptist does not appear as a happy accident, but as a mark of the providence of God.” John was sent by God, sent to bear witness, to point to the One we are to expect. “Pay attention to Jesus! He is the One!” John tells us.

John is saying, to borrow Karl Barth’s description, that the conception, birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the “surprise” of creation, “the key to the secret of creation” The coming of Jesus, whether in John’s time or in our own, is ”God’s initiative going beyond anything man or woman has dreamed of.”

During Advent in 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer waited for Jesus in a Nazi prison cell. He waited, once again, for God to take the initiative in a world that was as grim as John’s world and our world. “Life in a prison cell reminds me a great deal of Advent,” he wrote. “One waits and hopes and putters around. But in the end, what we do is of little consequence. The door is shut, and it can be opened only from the outside.”

But the good news, Bonhoeffer knew, is that God is coming, even there in his cell. Even at that time the rescue mission is underway. “Christ has died. Christ is risen,” Bonhoeffer recalled, and so with Christ an invasion of holiness takes place in the world, even as we wait, even in a prison cell. And even as we putter around, life takes on purpose and fills us with hope.

So in his cell, looking back in time, Bonhoeffer remembered the beginning of the invasion: “Incarnation, in-flesh-ment, God in human form in Jesus entering our history: this is what started Christmas [to begin with]!” (Eugene Peterson, in God with Us, 2007)

And looking ahead, what did Bonhoeffer recall? He remembered the mystery of time: “Christ has died. Christ is risen.” And, yes, as John witnessed: ”Christ will come again.”

And we? What do we see of the mystery in our John-the-Baptist kind of time? What do we see up ahead? In the Year of Our Lord 2009, will God come among us again in the power of holiness only to find us unheedful, only to find us acting as if our salvation lies in the halls of power, in the palaces of Herod and Caesar, or only to find us acting as if our salvation lies at the mall or in the catalogues or in the frantic pace of holiday fever? Or will God come among us and find us paying attention to Jesus, to the One John implores us to embrace?

“Christ will come again,” we say. “But in the meantime,” we ask, ”what are we to do to prepare for him.”

“Live at peace among yourselves,” says St. Paul. “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 followers of Jesus do while we wait for the kingdom of God, because they are God’s purpose for us in Christ.

What are we to 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 expect holiness. 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 Jesus. 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. It is a time to care for the weak, a time to be patient with one another, a time to think of what is best for the community, a time to seek reconciliation and not revenge, a time to pray and give thanks. It’s a time to find the lost, to preach good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted.

Finally, Advent and Christmas is a time to sing, a time to rejoice in the fact that we are more than the issue of a cosmic hiccup. 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.

So “come, O come, Emmanuel,” we sing.

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