Comments for Jim Other sermons.                 

"Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in every- thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

You will not find a more complete nor beautiful expression of the Christian Gospel than these words by the Apostle Paul. Always rejoice. Always. Be gentle. Do not worry about anything. Take what you need to God. And your hearts and minds will be secure within a peace that is inexplicable. As beautiful as this message is, I have a problem with it. There are times when I just feel the truth of it down in my bones and deep in my heart – feeling the worry lift, experiencing the peace Paul talks about. And I know without a doubt that it’s real. But, to be honest, there are times when the message just doesn’t connect with me at all. It seems unreal, naïve and foolish. Rejoice always? Don’t worry about anything? Experience a peace that keeps me centered when everything around me is falling apart? It seems too hard. I hear the message, but I can’t allow myself to fully trust. I can’t let go. I hear the message, but I don’t really get it.

The Bible says that when we aren’t getting the message, we need to repent. Repentance means change. We need to change our attitude and our behavior. Advent is about getting ready and getting ready is about repentance. I think many Christians seriously misunderstand what repentance is about. They think it’s like this: We act bad, God gets angry and punishes us. We repent, confessing our sin, and start behaving better. Then God loves us and forgives us and bestows blessings on us, if we repent. I think that’s wrong. Instead I believe that it works this way. God creates us in God’s image. God gives us all we need and asks only for our trust and obedience. But we start relying on ourselves more than God. We become self-centered and unloving. God is dismayed. God keeps loving us, not giving up on us, and trying everything to get our attention. God’s message, which we may hear as anger, is "Because of your attitude and your behavior, you are making yourself and everyone around you miserable. Just stop. Trust me again to love you and take care of you. Change your attitude to trust and your behavior to compassion and justice." In this understanding of repentance, the story begins and ends with God’s unconditional love. If I can’t get that message, then something in me needs to change.

The Word of God always lands in a context. The Word of God comes to a particular people, place, and situation. It is remarkable that this message I just quoted from Paul was delivered to a Christian community under severe persecution, and written by an imprisoned man awaiting execution. Yet the words are radiant. What is the context of the words of the Prophet Isaiah? By the seventh century BCE, the southern Kingdom of Judah had lost its moral and spiritual way. Injustice and oppression were growing, even as the kingdom became more reckless. Yet the King and the people lived in a dream world of arrogance and national pride, certain that God was on their side, no matter what their latest and stupidest military adventure. Isaiah rebukes the King, "You must change." If you repent: With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. And you will say in that day: "Give thanks to the Lord.…Shout aloud and sing for joy,.."

Repent and you will joyously draw water from the wells of salvation. You will always rejoice. God is trying to break through to a nation that is blindly, arrogantly, and self-righteously headed toward doom.

Last week, in Luke’s Gospel, we met John the Baptist, a tough, hard-edged iconoclast. John’s message was "Get ready, God is coming." Change your attitude. Change your ways. Now, in today’s lesson we read that the crowds, mainly Jews from Jerusalem, come down to be baptized. And how are they greeted by John? With a ferocious rebuke. He calls them a self-righteous "brood of vipers." How would you react to such a tirade some Sunday? Well, the amazing thing is "..the crowds asked him, ‘What then should we do?’" Somewhere in their hearts they were uneasy. They knew something was wrong and had to change. But they didn’t know how.

What is the context of this story? 1^st Century Palestine was a Jewish nation oppressed by Rome. They were a people desperately trying to retain their cultural and religious identity, a people yearning for a military liberator, the Messiah. John’s message is "God is coming. But you aren’t ready! Repent." And the people say, "Okay. Okay. But what do we do?" John says, "Here’s how you do it. You don’t stockpile weapons. You practice justice and compassion. If you have two coats, share with someone who doesn’t have any. Same goes for your food. Share generously of all you have." The hated tax collectors ask what they are to do. John says that they are to only collect what they are supposed to. Don’t cheat. No skimming off the top. Soldiers ask him what to do. He says to not extort money from others by threats or false accusations. In other words, be an ethical soldier, do not abuse your power, and do not take advantage of the victims of war. John is preaching neither pacificism nor revolt. Now think about what John is telling these people. Isn’t his advice very sensible? It isn’t even radical. He is saying "Be honest. Be fair. Be generous." Despite the ferocity of John’s style, it is a message like that of Paul, "Be gentle." It is a message of simple decency. But hard to hear.

In Luke’s Gospel the context of John’s preaching is right before the arrival of Jesus. But there is another context. That context is the Christian community that Luke is writing for, over fifty years later. When Luke tells about John, and even when he quotes the Prophet Isaiah, he is doing so for the benefit of his contemporary church. This is a predominantly Gentile church. The Temple has been destroyed. They believe the Messiah has come. They believe that the message of John the Baptist in his time and place is still valid. But it has been embraced and enlarged by Jesus. For them, baptism has become both a baptism for the forgiveness of sin, and a baptism in the Holy Spirit. They are struggling at their particular time and place to understand what it means be to a Christian congregation. They have been told that they are called to be a church in which there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. They are to be inclusive. Simple message. Hard to hear.

What about us today? Into what people, place, and situation – personally and collectively – is God yearning to deliver this word? What is God trying to get our attention about? The word of God comes to us in the year 2003, during the third year of the presidency of George W. Bush, two years after the September 11^th attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan, nine months into the second Gulf War, fifty years after the Supreme Court decision of "Brown vs. the Board of Education," a year and a half after the return of Christ Congregational Church to its newly renovated and expanded facilities, at the close of a successful five-year interim ministry, at the half-way point in a Recommitment Campaign, and at a time to begin thinking about who we are and where God wants us to go. That’s a context. How would you describe the context of your own life and that of your family? What’s going on? Whether it’s you or the United States of America, what needs to change? How do we apply John’s message of justice? How do we live Paul’s message of love? For example, do we, as a people share generously of what we have with one another and the world, or are we content to let it trickle down? Is our nation infused with a passion for justice, or are we motivated by what St. Augustine called it libido dominande – the lust for domination? Does our government deal with others with decency, patience, and uprightness; conscientiously modeling for the world the values we affirm, or are we seen as petty and vindictive towards those who dare to disagree with us? Are our financial dealings, at every level, honest and transparent, or will investigations of Wall Street and Halliburton yield even more scandal and disgrace in high places? Is racism still eroding our lives and communities at the deepest levels, perhaps less noticed, but still insidiously real?

How do we change our attitudes? How do we change our behavior? There is the story of a great saint noted for her sacrifice for the poor. She was once asked if it gave her satisfaction to see the fruits of her selfless efforts. She replied, "How much satisfaction does it give a tool to see what the hand holding it has done with it?" To truly change and trust God means that we decide to become, in the words of St. Francis, instruments of God’s peace, tools in the hand of God. And we are promised that those who are ready to change, those ready to live lives of trust and compassion, will joyously draw water from the wells of salvation. They will rejoice always. Always. AMEN.

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