Living the Word: Called to Wait

WE'RE ENTERING “the most wonderful time of the year,” as the song goes. Christmas gifts are piling up. The retail stores are busy as ever. Folks are anticipating the coming weeks with lots of food and time with family. For others, excitement is not what they feel at Christmas. Instead Christmas conjures memories of loss and neglect. For many, it’s a time of pain and suffering. How is the Christian to navigate this range of experiences? We practice Advent. The church invites us to live as though Christmas can wait. We hold off on all the celebration and consumption. We learn what it means to wait for God.

The pressure is pervasive to turn Christmas into being busy and buying stuff. Anxiety is high. Resentment’s in the air. Waiting, especially the Christian practice of waiting, is furthest from our minds and habits. Yet Jesus calls us to wait, to interrupt the world’s addiction during this season so that we can be surprised by Christ coming anew, in unanticipated ways. Because God is hidden. God has hidden God’s self in the most unlikely of places, in a Jewish baby named Jesus. But this is no meek and mild infant. Leave sweet baby Jesus for Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights. The baby born to Mary is the coming Messiah who confronts the world’s violence with the way of peace. God in Jesus continues to hide in unlikely places. We learn how to wait, and pay attention, to where God will show up, to wait for the peaceable world God is birthing in our midst.

[ December 4 ]

Fire of Love

Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12

ISAIAH IS SPEAKING to a people that will be redeemed. Exile is their present reality. The movement from exile to redemption is part of the flow of Israel’s story. How does Israel maintain sanity with such ebbs and flows of their freedom? Patience. Yet something is amiss if what scripture means by patience is the microwave sensibilities of this age. It’s crucial that all four gospels begin Jesus’ story with John the Baptist’s message of repentance. We should not sentimentalize the baby Jesus. The Advent message requires that we be attentive to Jesus, the coming judge. Repentance is fundamental to Advent.

For John, repentance is tied to place: the wilderness. John is pushed into the wilderness because he is a threat to the status quo. He is a fugitive; he experiences lack; he is an outcast; he suffers. John is the embodiment of Israel’s repentance, the picture of what it means to be God’s holy people. Wilderness is the place where Israel is both punished and formed, the place of disobedience and faith, of pain and gift. From the wilderness, the prophets promise exodus.

What does it look like for us to wait for Jesus’ coming, to practice Advent? Slow down. Be attentive to pain and suffering, to the wilderness. Repentance is not about teary faces and altar calls. It’s about interrupting the world’s tendency to silence suffering. This will bring persecution from those who benefit from the suffering of others. We need not worry about the fruit of our repentant life, though. John exposes that any fruit we claim as an exercise in securing status is not the fruit of God. God has the power and freedom to raise up from stones fruit to bear God’s name. This power is made manifest in Jesus and his baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire. All that is not right about our lives, the fruit we bear that is inconsistent with repentance, will be put into the Spirit’s refining fire, a fire of love whose intensity is so strong that neither we, nor the world, can stay the same.

[ December 11 ]

Manna or Macy’s?

Isaiah 35:1-10; Psalm 146:5-10; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11

JOHN THE BAPTIST is a polarizing figure. He lives in the woods, eats from the land, and dresses like a beggar. No doubt he was smelly and ungroomed. Who’d want to travel to hear such a man? Sounds like a fire-and-brimstone street preacher. Everyone avoids them. Not the Baptist. Jesus calls him “more than a prophet,” one of the greatest to walk the earth. Jesus definitely redefines greatness. John is a vagabond preacher in the wilderness. He is beheaded. He’s not unlike the king of which he preaches, Jesus, who is murdered by the Roman kingdom’s death penalty. Because Jesus’ kingdom does not operate by wealth and power, John must be the forerunner. There is no room for sentimentality in the life and ministries of these men. Neither should there be for us.

Stanley Hauerwas has said that “the true enemy of Christianity is not atheism, but sentimentality.” The Christmas season reeks of sentimentality. The way that U.S. Christians prepare the way for Jesus each year is with consumption and greed, with bells and whistles and shiny things. Is this what it looks like to wait for Jesus’ coming (Matthew 11:7b)? Maybe for Santa, but not Jesus. James says that the way Christians wait for the parousia should be characterized by suffering, a patient suffering modeled by the prophets (James 5:10). Only a patient suffering makes the signs of Jesus’ coming kingdom recognizable: “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor” (Matthew 11:5). A heart and mind formed by the market doesn’t recognize these signs as good news. Pity, maybe? But not good news for the salvation of the world. This Christmas season, Christians would do well to be more oriented to the wilderness than to downtown. Just maybe we’ll recognize and point people to the way of Jesus, and not Macy’s (Isaiah 35:8).

[ December 18 ]

Choosing to Stay

Isaiah 7:10-16; Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25

MATTHEW'S GOSPEL gives us the best look at Joseph in the story of Jesus’ birth. Before Joseph and Mary get married, Joseph discovers that Mary is pregnant. At this point in the story no one knows that Mary’s pregnancy was by the Spirit of God. The town would have seen Mary and Joseph as unholy, disobedient, and driven by passion. Joseph is surely aware of this. He knows that he has not slept with Mary. She must have cheated on him, right? Custom required Joseph to publicly divorce Mary for cheating. To expose to the community her “wickedness.” For Joseph, to not divorce her was to invite the harshest insults and embarrassment upon himself—and on Mary. To publicly divorce Mary would have meant Joseph’s reputation could have been almost wiped clean. He would have even walked away with some money. Who wouldn’t have stuck to law and order? Preserve your reputation, financial status, and the status quo. This is the way of revenge!

Yet, Joseph is declared righteous because he was “unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, [and] planned to dismiss her quietly” (Matthew 1:19). Joseph seeks to save Mary from public punishment, shame, and humiliation, and thus preserve for her a future to be able to marry again and have a family. If Joseph is to be made the father of Jesus, Joseph must be a fitting reflection of the character of God. The virgin birth reveals that God refuses to abandon us. Joseph’s quiet divorce is his refusal to abandon Mary and Jesus to be torn to pieces by society. To refuse to abandon is to show mercy. Through the story of this young, poor family, from an oppressed community, comes the embodiment of mercy. The affirmation that God will restore us, shine God’s face upon us, and save the world (Psalm 80:7, 19).

[ December 25 ]

Prince of Peace

Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14, 15-20

THE DANGER OF the conflation of Christianity and empire is the co-opting of story. The narrative of Jesus’ birth has become a story of accommodation. We’ve settled for the intellectualizing of the virgin birth, the reductionism of excavating the fulfillment of prophecy, and the sentimentality of re-creating the scene for Christmas plays. We have missed one of the most important lines of Luke’s telling of the story: “And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7).

Jesus is a baby, born in a trough for animals, outside of the space of comfort as an oppressed Jew from the inconsequential town of Nazareth. The Incarnate One, the Messiah, the Lord emerges from marginality, as the dispossessed, without the world’s structure of power. No wonder everyone is “amazed.” It is Mary’s posture, her discipleship, that we must follow. To receive the poor, disinherited Messiah is to find treasure, but not silver and gold, or the plunder from “finding” land not your own.

This is the treasure of liberation delivered by the Messiah whose reign is characterized by justice, equity, and peace. Which means that those who operate in this world by war will never recognize the Messiah, now or in the time to come. Their way of life is controled by the passions and powers of this world. Their rods of oppression and boots of combat “shall be burned as fuel for the fire” (Isaiah 9:5). Those who treasure the Messiah live lives of self-control and uprightness. Lives demonstrating zeal for the good deeds of breaking the bondage of those who are oppressed. It is in the liberation of those once imprisoned by this world that the Messiah reclaims us as his own treasure!

"Preaching the Word," Sojourners' online resource for sermon preparation and Bible study, is available at sojo.net/ptw.