Advent People are Preparing People

(A sermon based on Luke 3:1-6 for the Second Sunday of Advent)

The Advent season, during which we move inexorably and excitedly and apprehensively toward Christmas, is a season of preparation, a time to get ready.

We prepare—we get ready—for Christmas to come by decorating our homes and, if we have company coming, by cleaning them. We prepare—we get ready—for Christmas by making shopping lists of gifts and groceries. We prepare—get ready—for Christmas at church by hanging the green and by lighting the candles.

While we naturally and appropriately think of Advent as leading up to Christmas, it is of course the coming of Jesus for which we are preparing—and we are getting ready for that coming in all of its aspects: his coming in his birth, his coming in the future, and his coming to us here and now. I want us to think today about getting ready—about being prepared—for Jesus to come to us. What should we do—what will we do—to prepare our hearts, our lives, and our church for the arrival of Jesus?

Calling people to prepare for the coming of Jesus was the life work of that wild preacher called John the Baptist. Related to Jesus as kinsman, John’s more important relationship to him was as his forerunner, his herald. John went around “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” and his message was, Luke says, a fulfillment of the prophecy found in Isaiah 40 which said that there would be one “crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God’” (3:4b-6). The prophet, who was speaking to Jews in Exile in the 6th century B.C.E., used the image of the way being cleared through the desert for a highway on which God would go to Babylon and take his people home; the prophet also talked about the people getting their lives ready for God’s arrival—and that’s what John preached about, too.

In a sense, John was making room for Jesus and he was challenging his listeners to make room for Jesus. John’s message, as paraphrased by Frederick Buechner, was “Your only hope…was to clean up your life as if your life depended on it, which it did, and get baptized in a hurry as a sign that you had” [Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures: a Biblical Who’s Who (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1979), p. 78]. And so I say to us today what John said to his listeners: “Get ready because Jesus is coming.” “How do we get ready?” you may well ask. John’s answer is today’s answer: “Repent!”

To prepare for Jesus and to make room for Jesus means to repent and to repent means to change the direction of your life, to turn around and go the other way from the way you have been going. While such turning is finally made possible only by the work of God in our lives, it is nonetheless the case that we must do our part—we must exercise our wills to do those things that make room for Jesus in our hearts and in our midst.

“What things?” you might ask. “How do we need to turn, to change, to repent?” John’s listeners asked him the same thing and his answer to them is the answer for us:

“Whoever had two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, “Teacher, what should we do?” He said to them, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.” Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages” (Luke 3:11-14)

Maybe we cannot be truly open to the coming of Jesus into our individual lives and into the life of the church until we are truly open to the coming of other people into our lives and into the life of the church.

This much is clear from the words of John the Baptist: to get ready for Jesus by repenting means to turn from our unthinking self-centeredness to an intentional focus on the needs of others; to get ready for Jesus by repenting means to turn from our unthinking use and misuse of others for our own benefit to an intentional commitment to do no harm and to do much good; to get ready for Jesus by repenting means to be honest and open and generous and fair and just and righteous and loving in the way we think of ourselves and in the ways we treat others; to get ready for Jesus by repenting means to think of love others like we love ourselves and to act like it.

In his poem “Advent Stanzas,” Robert Cording wrote,

Each year you are born again. It is no remedy

For what we go on doing to each other,
For history’s blind repetitions of hate and reprisal.
[Robert Cording, “Advent Stanzas,” The Southern Review, Spring 2004; reprinted in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005, ed. Philip Zaleski (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), pp. 18-22]

His coming really is the remedy for such things, of course—the problem is not with him but with us, and the truth is that we have the ability to turn our hearts and lives in the right direction ourselves and then, with his arrival, we will experience the full turning that will make all the difference to those and to those around us.

The hard truth is that all those people who are out there who need so desperately for Jesus to come to them too often cannot see around the curve that we allow—and even cause—to remain in the road rather than straightening it out—by which I mean that we don’t straighten our selfishness into selflessness, our greed into generosity, and our cynicism into grace. Once we straighten the way, the prophet said, “all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (v. 6).

John C. Morris tells of

a highway in southern Vermont where many serious accidents happen because cars and trucks build up their speed descending a mountain, only to come upon a sharp curve in the road. The people living in the house near that curve keep a pile of blankets on their porch because they know there will be accidents regularly, and the victims will need to be covered while waiting for the rescue squad. Residents of the area have been petitioning the state for years to straighten the road out in order to prevent accidents and save lives. John the Baptist seems to be saying something similar -- the curves of injustice, immorality and inhumanity need to be changed into smooth paths so that everyone will see God’s salvation. [John C. Morris, “Smoothing the Path (Mal. 3:1-4; Lk. 1:68-79; Phil. 1:3-11; Lk. 3:1-6)”, Christian Century, November 22-29, 2000, retrieved from http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2011]

I know, I know—we do a lot of things as individuals and through the church to provide blankets to those who need them.

But I wonder: how many people out there can’t see Jesus around the curves in the road—around the crooked ways of our hearts, around the distorted ways of our relating, around the graceless ways of our actions—that we refuse to straighten out?

I wonder.

A Prayer for the Second Sunday of Advent 2009

We praise you, our God, for you are the One who has come, who comes, and who is coming.

Make us ready, o Lord; prepare our hearts and lives for your coming.

Cause us to take time to rest and wait before you so that we will have the spiritual, mental, and emotional capacity to perceive your coming.

Convict us to repent of those attitudes and actions that hinder us from openness to you so that we will have room in our hearts and lives to receive your coming.

Empower us to be vulnerable and gracious toward each other and toward those who seem truly other to us so that we will in them grasp your coming.

Enable us to have such grace and faith that, whether the circumstances and situations we face are good or bad, we will in them experience your coming.

In the name of the One who has come, who comes, and who is coming,

Amen.

I Believe in Santa Claus

(Another Christmas rerun from 2007--so add two years to the age references!)

I am a forty-nine year old Baptist minister who has been married for almost thirty years and who has two grown children--and I believe in Santa Claus.

I believe in Santa Claus because of what the Bible teaches. The Bible says, “Honor your father and mother.” My father always told me, even when I was a teenager and he was in his fifties, that he believed in Santa Claus and that I should, too. “Without Santa Claus,” he said, “we would lose the spirit of Christmas.” I am bound to follow the teachings of the Bible. Therefore, I continue to honor my father and believe in Santa Claus.

Visiting Santa Claus was one of the most exciting and anxiety-producing aspects of my childhood Christmas experience. I would plan ahead, polishing and perfecting my list. It had to be just right. You shouldn’t ask for too much and appear greedy, I figured; that might land you on the naughty list. But you also shouldn’t leave anything off that you really wanted. If you did, you might not get it! And if I didn’t get the exact G.I. Joe accessories that I needed, then what kind of Christmas would that be?

I have so many memories of visiting Santa Claus.

In my hometown of Barnesville, Georgia, Wisebram’s Department Store was Santa Headquarters. Our Santa was a down-to-earth accessible Santa. There would be none of that fancy Santa throne stuff for him. No, he just sat himself down in the shoe department, right there on one of the seats where we sat to try on our shoes. Well, I didn’t sit there because I wore prescription shoes and had to go to Griffin to get them, but he sat where most Barnesvillians sat.

I confess that I had my first doubts about Santa right there in the Wisebram’s Shoe Department. One year, as I was sitting on his knee, I noticed that a staple was stuck in his beard. I puzzled over that until my puzzler was sore (credit: Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas). I was concerned that maybe, just maybe, that beard had been stored in a box somewhere and there it had acquired that staple. I puzzled my way out of it, though. Who could say from where the staple came? The mystery was only enhanced! Besides, doubt is necessary as a complement to real faith.

Some years my parents and I would go to the Greenbrier Mall in Atlanta to do some Christmas shopping. In the 1960s that mall was the most magical place I had ever seen. Every department store there had a Santa Claus! That did not trouble me, for my father had long ago explained to me that Santa had to have many stand-ins while he was working at the North Pole.

One particular year I was in a quandary. I wanted a toy electric guitar. There were two models of it and I could not make up my mind which one I wanted. When I thought I had my mind made up, I went to one of the Santas and told him. He said that sounded fine to him. But then I got to thinking that I would really rather have the other model. So I went to the Santa in one of the other stores and told him that I had changed my mind. He looked at me a little funny but said that it sounded all right to him. Then I changed my mind again but I got concerned that I might confuse Santa so much that I would get a harp rather than a guitar so I decided to just leave it up to him.

Once during my childhood I entered an agnostic phase in my attitude toward Santa. I felt that there was plenty of evidence that there was no Santa but I was not willing to say for sure. I mean, what if there was, you know? This much I knew, though: the stand-in for Santa Claus that came to our church was Dock Knight, who was married to my mother’s cousin and who I had been raised to call “Uncle Dock.” I was convinced of it. And I told my father that I was convinced of it, over and over and over. That year, as Santa was prowling around the sanctuary, my father said to me, “Look back there.” There in the back of the church, standing with his arms folded across his chest, was Uncle Dock. Someone might as well have scattered magic Christmas dust all over my brain. Hope was rekindled! I had found a reason to believe again.

Such memories!

One of my friends was told by his mother from the very beginnings of his Christmas consciousness that there was no Santa Claus. I noticed that he always got just as much good stuff as I did. But I also noticed that he never had much joy about the Christmas experience.

I still have joy. There are much more important reasons that I have Christmas joy, of course, than that Santa Claus is coming to town.

But he is coming.

I may be a forty-nine year old Baptist preacher who has been married for almost thirty years and who has two grown children, but I’m all tingly just thinking about it. I wouldn’t trade that feeling for all the rationality and maturity in the world.

The Christmas Play

(This is a repeat of a post from 2007)

In the church of my childhood one of the major events that took place during the weeks leading up to Christmas was the Christmas Play.

I have no idea how the casting was done. Somehow, parts would be assigned and rehearsals would begin. The cast and crew would work for weeks and weeks in preparation for the single performance that would take place on a Sunday night a couple of weeks before Christmas.

The plays were horrible.

They were also wonderful.

If you want to get a feel for what they were like, watch the movie Waiting for Guffman, which revolves around a community theatre production. Compared to the Christmas plays at Midway Baptist Church, the play in the movie was Tony-worthy.

To be fair, that play was a musical. We did drama at Midway.

I don’t remember the plots. I do remember some of the scenes.

I remember my overall-clad father, standing at an open window outside of which a red light glowed, declaring “That’s a big fire (he pronounced it ‘far’) over there (he pronounced it ‘thar.’)” I suspect that he had pronounced it straight during the rehearsals. Daddy was a ham.

I remember two brothers, portrayed by Randy Berry (later to become my college roommate)and Danny Bates (later to become my stepbrother), getting into a fight over a toy—I think it was a toy train—under a Christmas tree.

I remember my one and only appearance in one of the plays. The play was set in a department store. I was in line at a cash register. I wanted to buy a gift for my sick mother. With my quarter I planned to purchase a gray rose. Who ever saw a gray rose? The nice clerk told me that for the same quarter I could purchase a pretty red one.

It was stark, moving drama. Preacher Bill rolled in laughter during the entire scene.

I remember the obligatory nativity scene near the end of each play. It was usually a dream sequence, I think. Somehow, though, they got the Christmas Story into whatever Christmas story they were telling.

Like I said, the plays were horrible. It would be kind to call our actors amateurs. But like I also said, they were wonderful. They were wonderful because those were our church members, our friends, our brothers and sisters in Christ, up there on that stage making fools of themselves, whether they knew it or not, all for the sake of our entertainment and especially for the sake of telling the story of Christmas.

They were wonderful exactly because of their amateurish character. In these days of slick production values and hyper-critical “make sure it’s quality stuff” church audiences, it’s refreshing to remember the sincerity and maybe even integrity of those cheesy performances.

But the main reason they were wonderful is in the point that was made: the Christmas Story is our story. The epiphany in those plays had to do with the fact that the Christ who came at Christmas comes into our run of the mill lives in our run of the mill world and changes things—he changes us.

Yes, he came to the manger and was visited by shepherds; yes, angels announced his coming; yes, something marvelous and miraculous happened all those years ago.

Just as much of a miracle, though, is that it still happens now.

And that’s what those awfully terrific and terrifically awful Christmas plays taught me.

Advent People are Longing People

(A sermon for the first Sunday of Advent based on Psalm 25:5 & 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13)

Our family does not steer in the direction of Christmas until we have arrived safely at Thanksgiving. Only after we make the ten minute drive from Yatesville to Barnesville, ten minutes that pass quickly because we spend them listening to the greatest non-religious Thanksgiving song ever recorded, which of course is “Alice’s Restaurant,” eat our traditional Thanksgiving meal with my mother’s family, stop by to visit my step-brother and step-sister’s families, then drive back to Yatesville for the Ruffin family’s traditional Thanksgiving bonfire, hot dog roast, and hayride, do we start intentionally listening to Christmas music and plotting our Christmas shopping.

That approach is wise, I think, because once you start giving your attention to Christmas it pulls you forward like a super-magnet. Why? I suspect it is because to our minds Christmas has the potential to bring out the best in people; after all, who could not be at least somewhat affected by all that talk about peace and love and giving? I certainly remember how, when I was a child, the days leading up to Christmas brought out the best in me because I took seriously those rumors about a “naughty and nice” list and didn’t want to run the risk of not getting all of the G.I. Joe stuff for which I had asked.

The longing for Christmas, you see, affected my attitude and my behavior—my life—in the meantime.

As strange as it may sound, though, from the Christian perspective it’s still not time to turn our full attention to Christmas because on the Christian calendar the Christmas season starts on Christmas Day and extends over the twelve days between Christmas Day and Epiphany. These four weeks leading up to Christmas are known in the Christian tradition as “Advent,” a word that means “arrival” and that refers to the arrival or coming of Jesus Christ in at least three ways: (1) his coming all those years ago to Bethlehem’s manger, (2) his coming in these days to our lives, and (3) his coming in the future to our world.

These days of Advent, then, are days of longing—we long for the celebration of the birth of Jesus, we long for his second coming and, most significantly for today, we long for his coming to our lives here and now in ways that will affect our attitudes and our behavior—that will affect our lives in the ways that matter the most. We long for his coming to our lives here and now in ways that will form and shape our lives so that the presence of Christ in them will be evident to the people who are around us a lot or who come into our lives for a few seconds.

Paul longed to see the Philippian Christians because he loved them and because he wanted to help them fill up their faith. Paul knew that they, like all Christians in every place and in every time, had a long way to go and he wanted them to get there. Unlike Paul, I am not away from you, but like Paul, I want what is best for you, what is best for all of us; what is best for all of us is that we, here in this time between the first coming of Christ and the last coming of Christ, take full advantage of his coming to us here and now so that we will grow in our faith.

Notice Paul’s prayer: “May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints” (vv. 12-13). Paul prayed that the Lord who had been born in Bethlehem, who had died on the cross at Golgotha, who had risen from the dead from the garden tomb, who had ascended to the Father from the Mount of Olives, and who had come to the Philippian Christians’ lives to love and save them would work in their lives to make them holy—which means to be useful in God’s purpose—and blameless—which means to have matured as they should have—so that they would be ready when the Lord returned.

And what is the essence of being holy, of being blameless, of being ready? It is to “increase and abound in love for one another and for all.”

We are Advent people—we long for the celebration of Christmas and for the fulfillment of all things, but let us also long to be all that God means for us to be here and now; let us long to be holy, to be blameless, to be ready—which means to be more and more loving toward each other in the church and toward all those folks out there in the world.

This is a noisy, busy, hectic time of the year. Frederick Buechner, after talking about all the hustle and bustle surrounding Advent, said, “But if you concentrate just for an instant, far off in the deeps of you somewhere you can feel the beating of your heart. For all its madness and lostness, not to mention your own, you can hear the world itself holding its breath” [Whistling in the Dark: a Doubter’s Dictionary (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), p. 3].

And that’s true—the world and we who live in the world hold our breath in anticipation of what is to come; nonetheless, I want to encourage us to breathe—to breathe regularly, to breathe deeply, to breathe consistently—to feel our breath, to ponder our breath, to increase our breath—and our breath is our love.
Let us pray that we will grow fuller and fuller of God’s love that we might love each other more and more. How do we love? That may not be as important as that we love!

One year, a few days before Christmas, my parents and I went to a magical and exotic place called Greenbrier Mall in Atlanta. That particular year, one of the items on my embarrassingly long Christmas list was a toy guitar; being me, I could not make up my mind which of the two models I wanted. The mall had three or four department stores and each one of them had their own stand-in for Santa, who was of course busy at the North Pole making the guitar that I would eventually receive. I went from store to store, constantly changing my mind and constantly letting the next store’s Santa know of my change of mind. It didn’t really matter, of course, which one I settled on, because either way I would have a guitar; in fact, I do not remember which one I finally received. What does matter, though, is that I never actually learned to play the guitar. It doesn’t matter which one I got; it does matter than I didn’t use the one I got.

So how do you love? What practices will help us to grow in love? Again, that we love is more important than how we love, but here are some simple suggestions.

Forgive somebody.

Help somebody.

Accept somebody.

Understand somebody.

Visit somebody.

You see, to long for Jesus is to long to live like Jesus would have us live. To long to grow is to long to love. To long to be holy is to long to love. To long to be ready is to long to love.

Look into your heart. What are you longing for?

A Prayer for the First Sunday of Advent 2009

O God,

We praise you today as the God who comes.

We praise you as the God who came to this world in the baby Jesus born all those years ago in Bethlehem--the baby who grew up to live a life of humble obedience, who died on the cross for our sins, who rose from the dead on the third day, and who ascended to your right hand from where he will come to judge the living and the dead.

We praise you as the God who will come to this world again when the crucified, resurrected, and ascended Christ returns.

We praise you as the God who comes to us in our world right here and right now—as the God who comes to us in our lostness to find us, in our stubbornness to break us, in our pride to humble us, in our sickness to heal us, in our hardness to soften us, in our fear to comfort us, in our anxiety to calm us, and in our brokenness to make us whole.

We praise you as the God who comes to us in the Holy Spirit and in the Holy Scriptures.

We praise you as the God who comes to us in each other.

We praise you as the God who comes to us in the lives of those who need us.

Help us, O God, to look for you longingly, to receive you gladly, to share you willingly, and to follow you courageously.

Help us, O God, to celebrate your coming, to expect your coming, and to live in light of your coming.

In the name of Jesus Christ, who came, who comes, and who will come—Amen.

Top Ten Things for Which I Am Thankful This Year

10. I am thankful for my first year serving as Pastor to the good people who make up the First Baptist Church of Fitzgerald, Georgia and for the privilege of living in this community.

9. I am thankful for the members of our church staff, all of whom I inherited and all of whom have proven to be outstandingly cooperative team members.

8. I am thankful for the people who do the necessary obvious out front leadership things at church and for the people who do the necessary anonymous behind the scenes things at church.

7. I am thankful for those public servants who actually regard their public service as service.

6. I am thankful for the Fitzgerald High Purple Hurricanes football team that is by far the best high school football team I have ever had the privilege of watching.

5. I am thankful for the good locally owned and operated restaurants we have in Fitzgerald, especially Floyd’s, Cirillo’s, and Our Daily Bread.

4. I am thankful for Frederick Buechner, Eugene Peterson, Kathleen Norris, Brennan Manning, Barbara Brown Taylor, and other ministers/preachers/writers whose words affect both my heart and my head and cause me to say, “Yes!”

3. I am thankful that our children spent the year doing things they love doing—Sara interning at Disney World and Joshua working on his MFA in Creative Writing.

2. I am thankful for my good wife, who loves me both because and anyway and whose middle initial “J.”, which stands for “Johnson,” to me stands for “Joy.”

1. I am thankful for Jesus, who knows me well and whom I most desperately want to know better.