2nd Sunday of Advent: Cycle B 23-24

The 2nd Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11 | 2 Peter 3:8-14 | Mark 1:1-8

Almighty and merciful God, may no earthly undertaking hinder those who set out in haste to meet your Son, but may our learning of heavenly wisdom gain us admittance to his company, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

I’ve always wondered why the Old Testament is so long and the New Testament is so short, because really, what you need to know and to focus on is the New Testament is the fullness of who God is. He reveals fully his plan for us, and so it would seem that we would spend much more time talking about that than we would the centuries of recorded story after story of people who have struggled to try to understand this God and who he is and what he’s asking of us. And God had a problem in the Old Testament. He had to be both the God of good and the God of evil, because gods were the source of everything. So many people look back on the Old Testament as a way of saying, “That’s the God I don’t want to be a part of. That’s the God that frightens me. He’s violent. He destroys people, because they don’t respond to him, and that’s not a God I want to get close to.” And what we need to understand fully, and especially it's important to listen to those words that we just listened to from the letter of Peter, time ⎯ time is really not the issue. Time is, in God’s way of looking at things, a day is the same as a thousand years. So the length of the Old Testament is not anything to pay attention to, in a sense. It’s a story about human beings’ resistance to who God really is, and when God knew that this resistance was there, he worked with people patiently, guiding them through patriarchs and prophets and kings. And all kinds of important things took place that would shape the way in which people were thinking and change it so that it could be something seen as new.

So just imagine with me, when we look at the stories of the Old Testament, they’re all terribly important, but what’s important is to do what God did in the Old Testament. And that is slowly he revealed himself, not as a God that lives like other gods, a god of vengeance, a god of destruction, but slowly, slowly he began to reveal himself as who he fully is. And that didn’t come until the time was right, and it’s hard to know exactly what it was that had to be in place, but it had to be some kind of basic instinct that they were ready to hear, ready to open themselves to a new image of God that would have been considered absolutely insane in the beginning of the Old Testament. God was always holy, other. He was always so holy, and we were always so evil that, when we got too close to God, we just ⎯ we burned up. His light was so strong. Our inability to receive anything directly from him was so limited, and yet in the story, over centuries, we see this change coming over people, being more receptive to their openness to God, perhaps because they suffered to much, and they did so much in terms of turning to God and trusting in him. Even though they would fall away, they would go back and trust him.

It’s interesting in the first reading, when Isaiah is talking about something that’s going to come, some new thing is going to happen. This is the season when we focus on this great shift in the Old Testament to New Testament, and he says something there when he says that the people in the Old Testament paid for all their sins. They were so often punished and went through difficult trials, and it’s almost to say, if we ever feel like we’re not worthy of this great gift of God freely coming and choosing to be with us, our ancestors paid a high price. And human nature likes somehow to say, “I earned this,” but it’s already done. It’s already finished, and now something is going to happen. And what happened at this time was that God revealed himself for the first time as one who comes with power and enters into a human being, and we need to shout this out. We need to proclaim it to the world. The God who was the distant God, who was demanding and required reconciliation and repentance constantly, has now shifted into the God who fully is who he always has been. He’s this incredible, loving, human-like God who shepherds us, feeds us, gathers us, carries us next to his heart and leads us as children are lead. No one in the Old Testament ever could imagine that there would be a God like this, a God so caring and so interested in us that anything that we think now, in the New Testament time, that is our responsibility to create something in us that allows God to enter into us, if we think about that as our weakness and our greatest sin, then the answer is simple. It’s this: stop saying no to God’s presence. Don’t look at reasons why you don’t deserve it. All God wants ⎯ and this is so important for you to hear. All that God wants from us is our permission for him to enter into us and to somehow reimagine what it’s like to be filled with divinity.

John the Baptist, the man who came crying out and saying, “There’s something coming after the law, something coming after this whole notion of a religion surrounding rituals that primarily do nothing more than forgive,” though I shouldn’t say that’s just forgiveness, but they were constantly given a way to be forgiven. And instead of a ritual doing that, now we have a God who comes in the form of Jesus, and he looks at you, and he looks at me, and he says, “There is no need for you to make up for your sins. It is already done for you.” Jesus says, “That’s why I died on the cross for you.” And I’m not talking about you trying and struggling to do better and you going to confession. That’s fine, but I’m trying to say that the heart of what God is saying about the new earth, the new heaven that he’s creating is it’s nothing like the old. It’s so radically different, and the difference is in the intention of God. He's not looking at you, and he’s not looking at me, saying, “Why aren’t you better? Why don’t you work harder? Why don’t you get your act together?” None of that is applied to the heart of a human being from a God who is love. He’s rather saying, “I want you to listen to me and learn from me, and I’m going to do this by being your teacher. And the way I’m going to teach you is by entering into you and living inside of your heart, and from there, I’m going to guide you into doing the things that you saw me doing when I was on this plane, on this earth.” We are children of the Father. We are like Jesus.

When I was growing up, I always thought I had to be like Jesus, and all I could think of is that I had to try to be sinless. Jesus is so much more than a person who came on this earth and was sinless. He was a person who came on this earth to teach us about the mystery of the incarnation. God was living inside of Jesus. The part that was God and the part that was Jesus is indistinguishable. You can’t tell one from the other, and we don’t have that kind of intimacy with God, but we have something like that. He enters you. He enters me, and he wants so much for us to give comfort. “Comfort my people.” And we can do that so powerfully by not making us the source of that power, not using our ego to do the right thing, to impress or to help or to heal. No, he just wants us to let him work through us, and we need to give him permission to not only use us but to change us.

So many images of the end of the world are so dark and frightening, and many people feel the kingdom of God will only come when there’s a great catastrophic destruction of everything. That’s one way to look at that, but another way to look at destruction and fire is to look at radical change. A landscape is radically ripped of everything that’s there when a great fire goes through it. When an earthquake shakes everything, everything crumbles. They’re all images of radical change, not ending, not God destroying those who aren’t worthy and then saving the few that are good. That’s such a misunderstanding of the final times. We are in the final times, and the final times are this extraordinary invitation to be like the Christ, to be Christed, that is to be anointed as he was anointed with spirit and power and healing.

And I tell you, when you shift from thinking about, “How do I make myself more attractive so God will love me,” and shift it to, “How can I open my heart and my very being to the God who loves me beyond anything I could ever imagine and has one single longing, to bring us to the glory that God has created us to be, to bring us into fullness,” that’s the obligation. And when you realize that the entire New and Old Testament are all directed toward these final times ⎯ and we’re living in the final times now. The image of the destruction is about everything being broken open, everything being seen for what it is. There’s no way you could miss the fact that, in today’s world, everything that is being ⎯ everything is being exposed that is there for a purpose, and the purpose is not being accomplished, because the people who are doing the work have lost the sight of what the work is fundamentally about, to care and to encourage and to grow and to comfort people into fully who they are. When that’s gone, then there is this darkness, and the darkness, when it’s below the surface, is so powerful, and the darkness is so vulnerable when we see it, when it’s evident, when it’s clear. If there is any kind of confrontation with the disaster that fits the end of the world, it’s the breaking down and breaking open and breaking new into something that was corrupt and broken into something that is renewed and glorified by the presence of God that continues to use everything for us, for our comfort, for our sense of value, our sense that everything is as it must be. These are his gifts. It’s a new earth. It’s a new world. It’s a world that’s been redeemed and now is ready to be filled with light.

Father, open us to this great mystery of your indwelling presence, your life living within our hearts, resonating a healing presence, a life-giving presence, a comforting presence.  With this gift, we have so much to accomplish for the good of the human race.  It longs for a transition, and the transition has begun, and our task is to surrender to the part that you’ve asked us to play.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.