And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”  ~ Matthew 3:13-17

The light. How it shone bright as the noonday sun… and what it revealed as they peeked through their shaking fingers… an army. Was it an army? Rank upon rank of beings that did not stand on the hillside, but who hovered, circled and danced above them, swooped unsettlingly close, and whose wings… were they wings?... were the colors of rainbows and rivers and new blades of grass in the spring.

This is the heart of the story: a young couple is on the road, far from home. They are poor, and there is no real, appropriate space for them in which to bring a child into the world. But that is exactly what happens. They bring a child into the world. A child is born.

The people to whom this letter was written were Jewish Jesus-followers. The people to whom this letter was written were beginning to know persecution because of being Jesus-followers. And the people to whom this letter was written were trying to figure out what Jesus-followers should do while they were waiting for Jesus to return.

The return of Jesus is, in fact, the elephant in the room of every single word written in the New Testament. Every gospel, letter and apocalypse was written with the expectation that Jesus would return soon, and very soon. Every single believer for whom these words were written was sure they would see the return of Jesus in their lifetime.

Everyone wants world peace. Or, everyone is supposed to want world peace.

The state of the world, however, would suggest otherwise. In another, more current film, two different linguists are asked what is the literal translation of the Sanskrit word used for “war.” One answers, “disagreement.” But the other says, “a desire for more cows.” World peace is a worthy goal, until one party needs more cows, and the other party disagrees. The pursuit of peace isn’t general. It’s specific, and it challenges us to keep at that question: What are we willing to put aside to find it? What if we need more cows? How do we find peace then?

Advent is a strange season. It may be the strangest season of the church year

The Christmas season is straightforward: Christ is born, and we celebrate with gusto!  The season of Lent has a clear trajectory: we are walking with Jesus towards Jerusalem, and the cross. Easter season is the celebration of God’s victory over death in Jesus.

But Advent is strange. It’s almost a season of bait and switch.

I must confess that I have had an uneasy relationship with this particular celebration for many years. I take my cue from Jesus’ own words. Now, Jesus talks a lot about “the kingdom of God,” or “the kingdom of heaven.” He tells us that God’s kingdom is just about here—right around the corner, rising like yeast, hidden like treasure in a field, embodied in a boss who pays people too much, not too little. Jesus says things like, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,” (Matt 5:3, 5): These folks, Jesus says, the poor and the persecuted, are the ones to whom the kingdom of God belongs. They are its true owners.

Jesus teaches us to pray for the fulfillment of God’s kingdom: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” And we do that…so Jesus doesn’t seem to believe God’s kingdom is fulfilled by his coming alone—at least, not yet.

And when people in the gospels try to call him king? Try to lay that title on him? Well. Jesus seems to reject that… “Your words, not mine,” he says (Matthew 27:11; Mark 15:2; Luke 23:3). He says, “Who told you to ask me that?” (John 18:34). Or, he says, “I am not an earthly king. My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). And then, in exasperation, he says, again, “Your words, not mine! My one and only purpose is to tell the truth.”

These passages, offered up by our lectionary, have a profound punch this week. You know, and I know, that we cannot help hearing these words in our own context, the outcome of a hotly contested presidential election which seems, to some people, to echo in the words of Jesus, and, to other people, to echo in the words of Isaiah. And not only is our nation divided, but Christians are divided, proponents of each major candidate seeing their guy or gal as Jesus’ obvious choice.

So that’s where we are. We are people living at the same time, in the same country, but somehow, in two entirely different worlds, one in which it looks as if everything is about to crumble, and the other in which it looks, finally, as if everything is going to be alright.

For us, we Protestants in the Reformed tradition who take our cue from the author of this scripture passage, “saints” are every single person who is a member of the church, which is also called the “body of Christ.” We are made saints by baptism, and we are joined to that body—we become a part of that family which, just like our own families, are enormous and in some ways unknowable assemblies of the living and the dead, whose origins travel back, generation after generation, into a mysterious past...

Dear Church,

I’m writing you today because we have just heard a tiny portion of a letter to the ancient church from Paul, one of its pastors. And Paul had a way of both encouraging and challenging his people in his letters… I think he was really on to something there.

And so, I’m writing today to tell you three things, and it’s my hope that it will be both encouraging and challenging...

God’s covenant people of ancient days certainly knew what it was to have their plans disrupted. As God’s people, they expected to be led to “a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey,” where they would live forever. They planned for a Temple in which to worship the God who led them there, and even a good king to lead them through their generations. And yet, when we meet them here, through the words of the prophet Joel, all that is gone. The Temple is no more, destroyed by the Babylonians. The kings are gone (and in the end, they weren’t very good kings after all). As for the good and broad land… well, first, they were exiled from it, for generations. Then, more recently, after their return, they have endured a plague of locusts—colorfully called “the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army.” That is, God’s great army. God is saying: Yes, you had your plans. I changed them...

Imagine. Imagine being an outcast, being a misfit, and then suddenly having the doors that were closed to you, open. The arms that were folded against you, reaching out in embrace. The faces that had been turned away from you, smiling upon you. It’s a dizzying thought. But there are no outcasts in God’s kingdom. There is no one to whom the arms of God remain closed. There is no one who cannot be made whole. There is no one who is not welcomed in.

The book in question is called Hungry Planet: What the World Eats. About 13 years ago, Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio set out to travel the globe to investigate what people eat. Typical people—normal for their own locations and cultures. So they sat down with thirty families from twenty-four countries, and they talked together about their lives and their work, their favorite recipes, and how they got their food. Did they shop at a place like Wegman’s? Did they farm, and grow or raise their food sources? Did they barter with others nearby? Then the authors photographed each family with one week’s worth of the food they consume...

Shown: In Chad, the Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp. Food expenditure for one week: $1.23 US.

Just who does this guy think he is? Tradition names the rich man Dives, but that’s tradition’s problem—“Tradition” can’t understand why a rich man wouldn’t be given the dignity of a name. But Jesus leaves him unnamed, and maybe we should sit with that, we who are inundated day after day with the names of the rich, the famous, and the powerful. We, who are led to assume, by the media, that the names of the poor, the powerless, and the struggling are names not worth knowing. Who wants to know them?

There are many ways to be lost.

We can be lost, literally, as in, not able to find our destination, just like the time when J. was driving, with the help of a GPS, which in its digital wisdom directed us through the woods and up a dark hill, to a deserted neighborhood, instead of to the restaurant we were trying to find.

We can be lost emotionally, like someone who is struggling with inner turmoil, or a difficult choice, or the untimely death of someone one we love; or with memories that traumatize us, memories like those so many people have of September 11, which was a bright, clear, crisp day, until tragedy struck.

We can be lost spiritually, like someone who strains to hear but cannot seem to discern the voice of God; or like someone who has replaced the risky business of trying to hear the voice of God with addictive processes or substances, or material possessions or even amusing people; or like someone who uses religion as a cudgel to beat others into spiritual submission.

We can be lost like a sheep that has munched its way over a hill, and looks up to find it is nowhere near those other familiar sheep.

We can be lost like a coin that has rolled behind a bureau and found a crack between the molding and the floor, where it lives now.

There are many ways to be lost. I haven’t named nearly all of them.

Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.

In your book were written

  all the days that were formed for me,

  when none of them as yet existed.  ~ Psalm 139:16

This intimacy is deeper than logic can account for. God knows all of it, knew all of it, even before any of us existed. We were written in God’s book of life, even before we were the proverbial twinkle in our parents’ eyes. God’s knowledge of us transcends time...

All three of our passages this morning depict the voice of God, in one way or another. In the passage from Jeremiah we get a glimpse of a pivotal moment in the life of a young person—“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” And Jeremiah replies, in effect, “Are you kidding? I’m not even grown up yet. I’m just a boy.”

Eric Elnes, the author of Gifts of the Dark Wood, asks, “Have you ever experienced a sudden flash of insight or awareness that rocked your whole world?"

Jeremiah has. Jeremiah is thunderstruck.

If the people we instinctively think of as good—people like the Levite and the priest—the people we look up to, if they don’t do the right thing, where does that leave us? It leaves us empty. If the people we have suspected, or reviled, thought of as not-us, not-like-us, not-our-neighbors—if they become the heroes of the story, where does that leave us? It leaves us empty. If someone is just trying to live their lives, to do their job, and they are left for dead, and it makes no sense… where does that leave us? It leaves us empty, so empty we don’t even know what to say or how to pray any more...