3rd Sunday of Advent - Cycle B 2020

Isaiah 61:1-2A, 10-11 | 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 | John 1:6-8, 19-28

Oh God, who see how your people faithfully await the feast of the Lord’s Nativity, enable us, we pray, to attain the joys of so great a salvation and to celebrate them always with solemn worship and glad rejoicing.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This third Sunday of Advent is always set apart from the other three by one thing, the color pink.  The robes that a priest wears for these three or four Sundays is usually a more penitential color thangreen, and so purple is the normal color.  But then on this third Sunday, we wear a color that is lighter, filled with light.  So something about this Sunday, where we pause from a kind of reflection perhaps on our weaknesses, on our shortcomings and think about something that we often forget, and that is the incredible mystery of God’s incarnation, God becoming one of us, entering into life with us in the person of Jesus and then inviting us to believe with all our heart and with all our mind that he too enters into our life.  And the image of God living inside of you as a dynamic presence is so essential if you’re going to enter into the kingdom, because without it, we’re left with nothing other than our own efforts, our own struggle with darkness. 

So let’s look at this set of readings, because each one of the readings has a message that it resounds in a similar way.  It’s saying the same thing.  For example, from Isaiah, we’re talking about — he’s talking about something that’s going to happen more fully in the future than it is right now, but there’s a promise coming from God in that God is saying, “I will enlighten you.  I will anoint you.”  And the anointing is such an interesting image.  It’s an empowerment given to a human being that is often described as light or breath, spirit, and it comes into those that are poor, the brokenhearted, those that are feeling captive, imprisoned.  And what God is so interested in sharing with us is that this struggle that we have with our weaknesses, our humanity, our sinfulness is something that we’ve struggled with mostly, in the Old Testament, by trying to do it ourselves, that first story of human beings and God together.  The Adam and Eve story is all about Adam and Eve being caught in an illusion where they’d rather know what to do and then struggle to do it on their own than to find wisdom, which was the other tree that they could have been — well, that they were destined to eat some day.  But they didn’t choose wisdom.  They chose rather, “Give us the rules of the game, and then we, as human beings with the consciousness that we have, will do our best to accomplish it.  And when we do a really good job, you are going to say to us, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.  Welcome into the kingdom.  You did it all on your own.’”  But here Isaiah is saying, when you’re in that struggle all by yourself, you’re going to find yourself brokenhearted.  You’re going to find yourself often captive by longings and needs that you have that you want to satisfy in a way that never produces what it really promises, but we’re kind of imprisoned with them.  It’s called addiction.  And so this first reading is saying, “Look, rejoice, because what you have to understand is that this God is faithful to you, and his plan is that this work that you’re called to accomplish, the work of evolving and growing into the people that God has called us to be, is something that he will help us with.“

“The one who calls you into a faithful relationship with him,” says St. Paul in Thessalonians, “He will also accomplish it.”  Notice the word also.  God promises that he’ll enter into our life to be a part of our life in terms of our being able to do the work that we’re called to do, which is the work of transformation from simply a human being on his own or on her own, trying to do the best that you can, into a being that is entitled to, by a gift, not by effort, to be in partnership with this God who says, “I am going to be with you, inside of you, a part of you, and together — together, we’ll accomplish this.  Not me doing it for you, not you doing it for yourself, but it’s a partnership.”  That’s why there’s a beautiful image in the first reading, from Isaiah, that he’s talking about those who are poor, those who know they can’t do it by themselves, brokenhearted, captive prisoners.  What he wants to say is, “I’m coming to you, and I really want to give you something that you could never have.  And what I’m asking you to receive is this beautiful, wonderful thing of you being clothed with me.”  Imagine God is the clothing around you, the resonance that comes forward from you, filtered through his truth, and you’re wrapped in him, and you’re adorned like a bride, like a princess, this being adorned with a diadem, meaning it’s almost like he’s saying, “You with me inside of you, I am giving you this new authority, this authority of a regal person.”  And you know what?  He ends it with this beautiful image.  “Just like the earth brings forth plants and everything springs up, so will God do this work inside of you.  He puts it inside of you like a seed, and then it grows.”  And it will grow, as long as you know that seed is there.  It’s not dead.  It’s bursting with life, and what he’s inviting you into is the kingdom, the kingdom of life and light and hope. 

It’s amazing that we so have — I’ll just say for myself.  I’ve grown up in a church that told me that, if I would just do my best and if I would work really hard, I would be rewarded, and if I didn’t do enough, if I didn’t work hard enough, I would be rejected by God — rejected, thrown into hell, like in my struggle, if I’m not, he’s going to kill me.  When the truth is not that at all.  When we’re in a place where we can’t accomplish the things that we know we should, we can’t move from a world of, “I’ll do my best to surrender to a law or a rule, and I’ll follow that rule with all my energy, and I will make myself in a prisoner in the sense of this system of the law.  I will deny myself all kinds of things so I can prove that I’m worthy of being loved.”  And God is looking at us and saying, “Wait, wait, wait.  No, I’ve come to tell you something radically different, but it had to come at a time when your consciousness was evolved enough where you’d understand it.”  It was impossible for someone like Adam and Eve to understand that God’s plan was to enter into a place of wisdom where we understand that God and ourselves are going to be so deeply connected that we will accomplish everything together — together.  He would enlighten us to see this beautiful companionship, so to speak.

So we begin this church year, as we all do, with thinking about John the Baptist and baptism.  So there’s something in baptism that I want to see if I can get to that will help you understand the way in which this partnership is going to work.  And this may be hard to understand, but I’m going to do my best, because it’s kind of new stuff that I got from my meditation this morning.  It’s exciting.  I hope I can convey it, but it goes like this:  if the baptism of John is a foreshadowing of what is to come with our redemption, with the coming of God into the world and his dying for us, that changing everything for us, bringing us into a new world and new life, then we must look at what baptism is, because his baptism of John was, as he said, it’s just a kind of baptism just using water as a symbol.  But he’s saying that, when the Pharisees and scribes come to him — and you’ve got to imagine that there were always prophets evolving somewhere, coming to light somewhere, this guy saying, “I am the Messiah.  I’m the Messiah.”  That had to happen all the time, but here’s one that looks like he might be the Messiah.  So they go out, and they say, “Are you the one?  Your preaching is reaching all these people.  Are you the one that we’re supposed to be paying attention to?”  And he said, “No, no.  I’m not him.  I’m not the one.  I’m not the prophet.  I’m not the Messiah.  I’m not Elijah coming back.”  Those are all images of what they were waiting for in terms of God coming to them in the way that he always promised he would.  No, he said, “I am the one that has come to point to someone.  I’m the announcer.  I’m the one that says, ‘And now presenting the real thing.’”

And so what is it in baptism that John was trying to symbolize that then finds its fullness in the baptism of Jesus.  Okay, I’m going to see if I can do this.  It goes like this: baptism is a symbol of death and resurrection.  When you were baptized, water wasn’t poured over you.  You were always immersed in the darkness of the sea, and so the image is there’s something in this transformation that God has planned for us that demands that something die, that something has to die.  And when it realizes that it’s dying, that it has no capacity to raise itself up, one is lifted up out of the water through some kind of mystical power that isn’t in the human being itself but in God only.  That’s transformation.  It demands a recognition in an honest experience of, “I can’t fix this.  I can’t change this.  This is killing me.  This will destroy me.”  And when you’re in that position, you’re saying, “I’m humble.  I’m not in charge of my life.  I’m not the one who is going to make myself into the person that God wants me to be,” because that’s the ego working.  That’s the Adam in all of us.  “Tell us the rules and laws.  We’ll follow them, and we’ll be saved.”  No.  It’s much more mysterious.  “Make us aware of our vulnerability to dying,” because there is something, in a sense, that can destroy us when we’re relying solely on our own strength, our own power.  That’s God’s intention.  He intended it to be that way, and we can resist that all along.  “I don’t need you, God.  I can handle my life.  I can be a good mother, a good father.  I can be a priest.  I can do all of this on my own.  In fact, I really like doing it on my own, because then I look at myself, and I say, ‘I, I, I accomplished this growth, this change in me.’”  Well, the change we can do on our own is probably not that bad but doesn’t go nearly deep enough into what needs to be transformed, what needs to die.  What needs to die is autonomy, our desire to do it on our own, to be the one that is the source of all that I do that is good. 

The one thing that God does ask us to do, and we have to surrender, which is kind of interesting, is our own death.  And to be around people that have gone through this phase of their last moments on this earth, one of the things about the priesthood or anybody’s ministry or those who work in hospitals, there is such an awesome gift of being around people who are dying, especially when we see two kinds of death, the one that’s angry and resentful and stressful and then the one who surrenders, just gives in.  “I can’t continue my life on my own strength.  I have to give in.  This is bigger than I am.”  If we could just realize, that’s the model of the effectiveness of baptism, to say, “I am being held under water, and I will die unless I’m lifted out of this.”  And the being lifted out of it is the image of being anointed, filled with Spirit, filled with light, filled with the capacity to go beyond our human nature. 

So I see in this baptism of John then a real foretaste of what it is that the New Testament is engaging us in, and it’s this mysterious, intimate relationship with the incarnate God.  And I say the incarnate God, because he lived in human beings first in Jesus, and so when we think of God living in us, we often say at the same time, “So does the Spirit live in me.  So does Jesus live in me, so I am like him.”  And what Jesus did is he surrendered with all the power he had as a God, in a way, though he was 100 percent human.  But he surrendered to the fact that he could not change the way the world was, in terms of its desire to reject him and destroy him, and he went ahead and let them do that, which meant he gave up all shreds of his ego and all shreds of wanting things to be the way he wanted them to be.  He surrendered to a thing that didn’t seem to make sense to his ego or his human nature.  “I have to surrender to my enemy in order to conquer my enemy, in order to overpower them.”  It’s all in that mystery of forgiveness, acceptance, surrender.  When one person does it, everybody benefits.  So when you think about what are we here on this planet to accomplish, it’s not perfection in some kind of sense that the world or ego might see perfection.  No, it’s in going through this very simple, powerful experience of surrendering to a reality that we are not enough to make this world into what it’s intended to be.  We have to do it with God as a partner, and we die to that in baptism. 

So what, in a sense, John was then saying is, “Baptism that I’m doing is water.  The baptism that’s going to come with Jesus is a breath of life and Spirit and energy and power. “ That’s what we should be happy about, joyful about.  It’s our gift, and it’s a gift that is life.

 Father, your intention is that we live a joyous life.Yes, we struggle.There’s pain.There’s suffering.There’s letting go of things that we try so hard to cling onto, but your promise is that you’re there with us to enable us to go through this process, and on the other side of it, we find such peace, such joy.As we surrender to all that is, we just accept our reality in knowing, in surrendering to that, trusting through that, growing because of that, we enter as fully as possible into the kingdom while we still live here.Fill us with this joy and this peace, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.