Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
December 8, 2019
Scripture:
Matthew 3:1-12
(Each Sunday in Advent we are watching a bit more of the movie, The Muppet Christmas Carol. Here is the clip that we watched this week - part of the encounter with the Spirit of Christmas Past.)
No matter which of the
four gospels you are reading, John the Baptist comes across as an interesting
character. He wore clothing of camel’s
hair, held up by a leather belt. He ate
locusts and wild honey – I picture his beard sticky with honey drippings, and
maybe a few bees buzzing around him – though maybe he spent enough time in the
Jordan River that the honey washed out of his beard.
And it wasn’t just how
he looked or what he ate – he definitely was NOT a nice polite person who
didn’t want to cause a fuss. No, John
set up his camp out there in the desert and he shouted at people, calling them names,
calling out their hypocrisy. “You brood
of vipers! You children of the
slithering snake! Who warned you to run
away from the wrath to come?”
But there must have
been something very compelling about him, at the same time as he looked and
sounded a wee bit crazy. There must have
been something about him that was compelling enough to make people go out into
the desert to hear what he had to say, and to be baptized by him in the river. He must have been compelling, because it
would take more than a spectacle to make people leave the comfort of their
homes and their cities to see and hear him.
Last week, we started
talking about Advent as the period of time in which we prepare ourselves for
the transformation that is coming at Christmas, and this is the mission of John
the Baptist – preparing the way for Jesus and his ministry.
And the core of John
the Baptist’s message is “repent.” Now
the word “repentance” has come to have a bit of a bad reputation in our world
today. It has come to be associated with
fire-and-brimstone preachers as a threat to their listeners – repent or else.
Repent from your sins or you will face the eternal fire. It is a word that makes me think of a
traditional prayer of confession that reads, “I, a poor miserable sinner
confess to you all my sins and iniquities with which I have ever offended you
and justly deserved your temporal and eternal punishment. But I am heartily sorry for them and
sincerely repent of them.”
But the problem with
this understanding of repentance is that it turns grace into a
transaction. It implies that if we can
be sorry enough, if we can repent enough, that we can somehow win God’s
favour. It makes fear of punishment the
motivation to do good.
But if you look at the
root of the word “repent” it doesn’t mean “to feel heartily sorry” for
something – it means much more. The
Greek word that is translated as “repent” is “metanoia,” and “metanoia”
means to turn back, or to change your ways.
It is an action word, not a feeling word. You don’t feel repentance, you do repentance.
And so John the
Baptist isn’t telling people to feel sorry, he is telling them to do
differently. God desires a different way
for the world, and so we need to change.
And in the story of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge also needs to
change. As we saw last week, Ebenezer
Scrooge begins the story as a mean and miserly man, more concerned about money
than about people or love. And in the
story, he is given an opportunity to change his ways.
The first spirit to
visit him is the Spirit of Christmas Past.
This spirit pulls Scrooge back through time, to re-visit the Christmases
of his childhood and young adulthood.
And through these visits, he begins to see that he wasn’t always the way
that he is now. He begins to see that he
once had love in his life, he once had joy in his life, he once was surrounded
by people he cared about – his sister, his friends, his colleagues. And this is the nudge that our hero needs.
As he is reminded of
where he came from, he begins to realize how he has drifted away from that
starting path. He realizes that he has
lost his way. And that is the nudge that
begins him on the path towards transformation.
He changes his ways. He repents.
And so even though
that word that John the Baptist uses – repentance – might seem scary on the
surface, it is an important part of Advent.
If we want to be transformed by Christmas, we have to turn away from the
path that we are on, and turn back towards God.
But, you might be
thinking to yourself, Scrooge had help from those three spirits that
night. He didn’t have to do it on his
own. How am I supposed to change on my
own?
But that is where we
can find the good news. We don’t have to
do it on our own either. We may not have
the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet-to-Come guiding our journey,
but we do have the Holy Spirit with us.
We always have the
Holy Spirit with us, guiding us, and transforming us. We can never transform ourselves into who God
calls us to be, but the Holy Spirit is the Transforming One. The Holy Spirit is always transforming us
more and more into the Body of Christ.
When we say “yes” to repentance, when we say “yes” to transformation,
when we say “yes” to changing our path, then it is the Holy Spirit working in
us who makes this transformation possible.
John the Baptist
prepared the way for Jesus – he called on people to repent, to change their
ways, to turn back to God. He made
people sit up and pay attention and think that maybe, just maybe, another way
of being in the world was possible.
The Spirit of
Christmas Past prepared the way for the transformation of Christmas. They made Scrooge realize that there was a
different way to live; they threw Scrooge off balance; they shattered Scrooge’s
superficial peaceful existence. For I
think that sometimes we need to have our inner peace shattered in order to
realize the deeper peace of God – the peace that surpasses all of our
understanding.
And so Advent can be a
season that throws us off balance as well.
As the world around us is in full-blown Christmas, in Advent this is the
season of not-yet-Christmas. Advent
gives us time to pause in the busy-ness of this month. Advent makes us wait, even when the waiting
is uncomfortable. And as we wait, and
especially if the waiting is uncomfortable, I encourage you to sit in that
discomfort. Scrooge’s transformation
wasn’t comfortable – it would have been easier for him to stay the way he was. But in my opinion, it was worth it!
In this season of
waiting, I encourage you to take some time to examine your life. Is there anything in your life that needs to
change? Is there anything that you could
be doing or not doing that would re-align your life with God? Is there anything in your life that makes you
a bit uncomfortable?
Because, like I said,
you don’t have to change yourself – I would argue that it is impossible for us
to change ourselves on our own, no matter how hard we try. It is only by inviting the Holy Spirit to
work in and through us that true repentance, that true change, that true
transformation is possible.
And so in these weeks
of Advent, we wait. We wait in the
silence. We wait in the discomfort. We wait in the disequilibrium. And we invite the Holy Spirit to bring the
change in our hearts and in our lives that we long for.
May we all prepare the
way of the Lord, may our lives prepare the way for the Prince of Peace for whom
we long, may our hearts prepare the way for God’s Word-made-Flesh born at
Christmas. Amen.
Christmas Past - The Dance of Mr. Fezziwig
Original Illustration - Public Domain
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