Comfort the Afflicted; Afflict the Comfortable

Matthew 3:1-12

            You brood of vipers! It’s not every day you hear a greeting like that, but if you did, I wonder how many of you would flock to hear the preacher who belted out those words, the next week. In our gospel text, John the Baptist indeed blurted out those words, directed at the Pharisees and Sadducees.  He was one of those preachers - the kind who doesn’t mince words. He told it like it was, or at least, like he saw it.

            Perhaps John went to the preaching school with the motto, “comfort the afflicted; afflict the comfortable.” I’m told that this is what all good preachers do. And I confess that all too often I feel unequal to the challenge.

You see, it’s tempting to make the Gospel good news of grace into a one-dimensional message of comfort and reassurance. We all need comfort and reassurance, and when we look at our lives, at the world around us, it seems we need buckets of it.

When we acknowledge the depth of our own brokenness, when we witness the heinous things human beings say and do to one another, we want a word of comfort. As we absorb our losses and pain, we need the comfort and consolation that comes from God. Comforting the afflicted I can do, and I have the good news of the gospel on my side.

But afflict the comfortable? That, I confess I struggle with.

But when John the Baptist burst onto the scene of 1^st century Palestine, he didn’t have my problem. While pointing to the one who is coming, he indeed afflicted the comfortable;

He challenged those who depended on their own righteousness more than they depended on God. The Pharisees fell into that category. They felt they were specially endowed and privileged by virtue of their ancestry. They followed the Laws of Moses, they claimed the patriarch Abraham as their ancestor, and therefore they claimed righteousness as their own.

The problem is, while they claimed to follow the law, they failed to bear the fruit worthy of repentance. In other words, they talked the talk but often failed to walk the walk. They neglected the relational part of the life of the faithful; to live with love, mercy, and compassion for the poor at the core of their being.

All too frequently they ignored the plight of the widow, the orphan and the stranger, they persecuted the foreigner, and the immigrant and they assumed their own importance. They turned a blind eye and became indifferent to the needs of those around them, and in Matthew’s gospel these are the one we consider the least, the last, the lost, the little and the lifeless. They forgot about addressing the injustice around them and caring for those who were disadvantaged and vulnerable. Instead, they stewed in the juices of their own well-being.

Then along came John the Baptist, and he preached a call for repentance out there in the wilderness; and this repentance involves a reorienting of one’s heart, way of thinking, and action. Real repentance, the kind of which John spoke and Jesus taught, brings us in line with godly living, and godly living bears fruit for the kingdom of God. This kind of repentance and attention to the circumstances of those around you, matters deeply to God.

            Repentance in this gospel is about such godly living. We get a glimpse of what that might look like when we consider the characteristics of those Jesus calls “blessed” in the Sermon on the Mount which follows soon after this passage in the Gospel of Matthew.

The Sermon on the Mount describes how God blesses the poor, the humble, those who mourn, those who thirst for justice, those who are meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those persecuted for righteousness sake. Indeed, not only are they – all those - the blessed ones, according to Jesus, but throughout this Gospel they are the ones with whom Jesus hangs out. This is the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In Christ, the least are raised up, because their lives, their welfare, and their personhood matter.

As John stands in the wilderness, he preaches the good news that the kingdom of heaven has come near, and he bids those who have come out to hear this news to prepare themselves, to prepare their hearts, to receive the one who bears this kingdom to the world. John points to the good news. He points to the one who will deliver and embody kingdom life, Jesus, Our Savior.

It is for this reason that in pieces of art, John the Baptist is almost always painted pointing to Jesus. When Lukas Cranach the Elder painted Martin Luther, he substituted Luther in that pose, with Luther in the pulpit, pointing to Christ on the cross in the tradition of John the Baptist. Pointing toward Jesus, John the Baptist shines the light on the one God sends into the world to redeem it, the one who comes into the world to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.  

As we come to the manger, we must remember the cross. For it is on the cross that God demonstrates for us how much it matters that Jesus came for the sake of the least in the kingdom.

Late Yale Divinity School preaching professor William Muehl told this story to illustrate what Christ bringing this kingdom into being means:

“One December afternoon…a group of parents stood in the lobby of a nursery school waiting to claim their children after the last pre-Christmas class session. As the youngsters ran from their lockers, each one carried in his hands the “surprise,” the brightly wrapped package on which he had been working diligently for weeks. One small boy, trying to run, put on his coat, and wave to his parents, all at the same time, slipped and fell. The “surprise” flew from his grasp, landed on the floor and broke with an obvious ceramic crash.

The child…began to cry inconsolably. His father, trying to minimize the incident and comfort the boy, patted his head and murmured, “Now, that’s all right son. It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter at all.”

But the boy’s mother, somewhat wiser in such situations, swept the boy into her arms and said, “Oh, but it does matter. It matters a great deal.” And she wept with her son.”[1]

            In Jesus, God becomes the one who, rather than patting us on our head to console us, joins us in our suffering, as did that mother,  because the pain in this world, our pain, does matter – it matters a great deal.

            Our lives do matter to God. Christ’s coming does matter. How we prepare for him does matter. Repentance, that is, opening our hearts, making adjustments to our lives, bringing our lives into communion with God’s purposes in God’s kingdom come, does matter.

John’s cry of repentance is the call to turn away from our indifference to engage, at a life-changing level. The coming kingdom reorders our relationships and priorities. John’s words are words a challenge to us all. Do we care enough to change our lives and the world in which we live?

Do we love enough to get angry about the suffering and plight of other human beings and to declare that broken dreams and broken lives do matter, they matter very much? Are our hearts aligned with God’s enough to declare that this is true for every child of God, even if we’ve never met them?God cares.

That’s why divine wrath, axes, and fire are good news. God loves enough to get angry. The good news is that God is not indifferent. God is not indifferent to creation, nor to the evil and suffering in this world. God is not indifferent to God’s people. God is not indifferent to your life or my life.

God’s concern and love for creation are the source of God’s anger. Anger is not the opposite of love. Indifference is the opposite of love. The last thing we need is more indifference. The last thing we need is to hear from another that our very existence doesn’t matter. And God forbid that we should ever say or act as if another’s very existence is of no consequence to us.

            So, that’s what we’re about this season of Advent.  Our Advent worship, Advent hymns, Advent expectations, and Advent comforts bring us the reminder that John the Baptist makes so clear. We need to prepare. Our Advent activities, prayers and behaviors point to Christ’s coming. They help us focus. They bring about a different emphasis to our lives. They help us open our hearts and prepare room not only for the Christ child to enter in, but for the comfort of all God’s people.

            Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable. Prepare for the one who comes, the one who will make all things new, who will bring about newly formed hearts, who will call us to new understandings to reorient ourselves, to turn from our former ways to change our attitude and perceptions.

            Repentance is about God’s desire to realign us to accord with Christ’s life. Repentance is about God’s power to transform us into Christ’s image, and it is a transformation worth preparing for.  

            And so, John’s wilderness sermon points beyond him and toward God and what God is doing. John the Baptist points to Jesus. Advent points to Jesus’ coming. The texts point to the reality that Jesus is bringing a changed way of living, thinking, understanding, operating.

How do we, in our lives today, do the same? How do our lives point to God and what God, in love for humankind and all of creation, is doing? How does it make a difference?

Whatever our message, our lives, our witness might be, it must point to Jesus. We do not point to the church, but to the gospel. We do not point to what we are doing but to what God is able to do through and despite us.

Our lives must point ever and always to Jesus. Today, as we lit the second candle of the Advent wreath, we sang, “Christ be our light, Shine in our hearts, shine through the darkness….Make us your own, your holy people, light for the world to see….Christ be our light!” May it be so, that in true repentance, our lives might reflect the light and love of God in Christ Jesus, not only in this holy season, but throughout our year and our lives.

Amen.

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[1] William Muehl, Why Preach? Why Listen? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 82.

Wake, Awake!

Matthew 24:36-44
Blessings to you this season of Advent, in the name of the one who was, who is, and who is to come. Amen.           
            Today begins Advent, the season traditionally marked by the twin themes of watching and waiting. But what, exactly are we watching and waiting for, and what are we supposed to do while we watch and wait?

            When I was little, my cousins, Debbie and Donna, frequently came over to visit on Sunday afternoons and on holidays. Those were the best times. We kids, all about the same age, would play for hours while the adults talked, and drank coffee and sometimes played cards. I loved those days. And so, when I knew company was coming, I would sit at this big window we had in our living room, and watch, and wait for them.
            At five or six years old I might have trouble sitting all the way through a church service, or all the way through arithmetic class (that’s what we called it then) but I could sit for the longest time, with my little nose pressed up against the window, looking for my uncle’s car to pull up and park and my cousins to come running up to our front door.

So, when I think of the watching and waiting of Advent, it is that image that forms in my mind – my nose stuck to the window, still as a mouse, watching and waiting in breathless anticipation for our company’s arrival.

            Sometimes, that is what our watching and waiting is like – we create a kind of sacred stillness around us as we eagerly watch for something to happen, afraid that if we get distracted we might miss its advent – it’s arrival.

It can be likened to the longing for the return home of a sweetheart who has been away at war or an adult child who is returning home from college or from their own home, now thousands of miles away from ours. Such waiting can be like so many other kinds of reunions for which we might yearn.

There are those other times of watching and waiting as well – the ones that fill us with a different kind of anticipation, like what we experience as we await test results or a diagnosis; or when we’re waiting for the boom to fall, perhaps bringing a big change in our job or in a relationship.

And then, of course, there is watching and waiting that happens in its own unique, sacred space, when we sit with a loved one on their final journey in life.

We can all probably name our own associations with the twin experiences of watching and waiting, some of them wrapped in sweet memories, and others accompanied by sadness and pain.

During this Advent season, while we wait in anticipation of Christ’s coming, at the same time we remember that Jesus has already come. So we ask ourselves, what is our watching and waiting about? Are we waiting for Christmas or for something else? While Advent is often treated as a season of preparation for the birth of Christ, what place do the twins, watching and waiting, play in this season for us today, living two millennia after that holy birth?

This morning, I would like to think about the difference between the passive activities of  watching and waiting which are prominently encouraged during this season, and the call to action which we find in the scriptures today.  

The words from our gathering hymn this morning, and the choir anthem that you will hear in just a few minutes reflect the preliminary kind of action that Jesus calls for in the gospel text I read just now. These hymns together with Jesus’ words implant a repeated refrain in our hearts today – Wake! Awake!

Listen to these words: “Wake, awake, for night is flying the watchmen on the heights are crying, awake, awake, Jerusalem. Arise!”

This definitely sounds more like a call to action than an invitation to quiet observation or waiting. It is a call to leave our complacency behind. The texts this day are intended to wake us up, to disrupt this comfortable, ordinary season of life.

Our Gospel reading was written to Christians living more than a generation after the life and death of Christ. Matthew, the Gospel writer, knew that the longed-for return of Christ was an expectation, but not yet a reality for the community. And so they were struggling…

They had been waiting a long time for the return of Jesus, and at least some of the people were losing hope that the promised realm of Christ, a realm that would bring about justice and peace would ever come.

Jesus had promised to return, but they now debated whether this was ever going to happen, and if Jesus wasn’t going to return, what did that mean for them? What did it mean for life?

            They were losing hope, they were losing faith in their own witness, divisions were growing between them about what following Christ even meant. How should they proceed if maybe, just maybe, Jesus really isn’t coming back at all?
            Here we are over 2000 year later, still with our noses up against the glass, waiting for Jesus to pull into the proverbial driveway and bring about his reign of justice and peace. The world is yearning for peace, for life, for justice, for …….. something, we may not even understand what.
            We live in a day and age when perhaps more people are unchurched than churched and have therefore never heard the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. There is a very good chance that people you know – neighbors and friends and coworkers and even family members have never heard anyone witness to who Jesus is for them.

Rather than simply waiting and watching like I did for our company all those years ago, these texts today are a call to action. They are a call and instruction to go about living during this time of waiting; to go about doing. They are encouragement to not give up hope. And they are for you and me and all of us who are challenged to have faith in the midst of the waiting, because on our own we can’t even begin to imagine what the transforming power of God’s future will be like.

But we know about today. We know that all around us God is present and at work in the world, and we see God present in so many ways, and through so many of the people who surround us. Jesus accompanies us through each day. And we have work to do, to prepare the world for the Jesus’ return.

Isaiah’s timeless message is encouragement to trust in God, knowing that we are to be the beacons of hope and justice and healing for a world that has gone awry, and knowing that there is much to do to prepare the world for Jesus’ return.

We are gifted and called to break the chain of violence in our homes and schools and on our streets. We are gifted and called to reject the vitriol that has taken over social media and conversation. We are gifted and called to be the ambassadors for Christ’s healing peace, to begin by rejecting the obscenity of weapons and creating tools of healing, caring, compassion and safety for those who are most vulnerable.

In the everyday activity of our lives – working in our fields, or offices, or volunteering in the community; caring for our families and our communities, we are blessed to show who we are as God’s holy people, and what difference it makes that Jesus is the embodiment of God for all people, for all ages.

            This is not a message that encourages passivity or complacency. Twice the prophet calls to the people, “come, let us go!” Let us go be the people of God, let us go do peace and justice, ridding ourselves of weapons and turning them instead into tools of hope and harvest. Isaiah’s parting words from this passage are, “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!”
            The apostle Paul also issues a wake-up call, as he instructs all the followers of Christ to put on the “armor of light”. Again, the command leaves no room for passivity or complacency, but calls all within the community to action.
            There is something that followers of Christ do; first, we fulfill the fundamental command to love. And now, Paul commands, wake up – to the reality that God comes like the dawn, and in the light of the new day, with love at the core of our identity in Jesus, we are to live in the light of Christ!
            God only knows when Christ will bring an end to this age, coming with all the saints and angels to bring the final justice, peace, the complete rule of God into the world, accomplishing health, blessing, full reconciliation between people, between God and humankind, between the created world and all its creatures. Only God knows or can bring about the total realm of the divine kingdom on earth.
            But through the incarnation of Jesus, God is present in the world today; is with you and me today; is blessing the world today; through our acts of compassion, feeding, clothing, justice, accompaniment. God is present working in us as we challenge the status quo, combat the evils of hatred, sin, greed, bigotry and blind self-interest.

God comes to us in the word and sacrament of each Sunday, through the community gathered and empowered for God’s mission and ministry today and tomorrow, and in the future at the end of all things.

In Advent we are called to ready ourselves to receive the disorienting God. We resist the temptation to see Advent as only being about God arriving as a baby on Christmas Eve.

Rather, we embrace God’s everyday presence with us as we answer the call to action, and  we embrace God’s promise to come again as judge. We do not shiver in fear, but watch and wait with great and wonderful anticipation for the Advent of the all-encompassing love, mercy and grace God has already enacted and will one day bring to fullness in the coming of Christ.

Amen.

           
           

           
             
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