SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT 

Isaiah 11:1-10 | Romans 15:4-9 | Matthew 3:1-12

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 into his company, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The opening prayer always sets the tone for the homily, and it’s beautiful in this particular passage, because this is the season of being awakened, awakened to who Christ is, because Christ is the fullness of God.  So it states in the opening prayer that we long to reach a place where we can meet God in the person of his Son and learn from him, and the heavenly wisdom that we gain is what creates the community that we belong to.  Let me say that again.  The heavenly wisdom that we have in our hearts, where God dwells within us, is what unites us.  It's what religion is primed to do.  It just doesn’t do it as well as it can, because it doesn’t realize that this invitation is not to be so much riveted to the church and its rules and regulations, though those can be very important, but to a personal encounter, to meet with God in the form of his Son and to be taught.

So let’s look at the first reading, because it’s reminiscent of the period in the history of the Old Testament where God was ruling his people with kings, and it was a major disaster.  Almost all the men that were chosen to lead the Israelite people as a ruler couldn’t handle, I suppose, in one sense, the power that they had, and they fell always to the side of indulgence and egocentricity and false gods.  But there was one king, one king that was special, and that was King David.  And so this reading is really about King David, longing for someone like King David to come, and there’s a beautiful image of a trunk of a tree.  And out of that trunk of the tree, the stump of Jesse, which Jesse is the father of King David, there sprouts something new, and definitely King David was something new in terms of his own wisdom and understanding and counsel and strength and knowledge and fear of the Lord.  I want to say something about fear of the Lord, because in this sense, this great king is King David, but also it is a foreshadowing of Jesus.  It’s delight shall be the fear of the Lord, and fear is so interesting, because you look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, and number six of its meaning is awe and reverence for God, awe and reverence, not being scared of but being filled with awe and reverence.  And basically it says that he will come to judge, and that’s the remnant of the Old Testament constantly going back, in this New Testament that we live in, reminding us always that there is something about justice that is so important and needs to be followed, but it’s not enough, because justice can only divide the good from the evil, can only reward the good and can only punish the evil. 

So this reading talks about a new king that’s going to come, and even though it goes on to say that it will create this wonderful place of peace, the only one that’s been able to do that, the only leader who’s come, is Jesus, who’s enabled things that were at odds with each other or things that were poisonous or so dangerous that you had to stay away from them.  No, in this new kingdom, it’s really interesting, the cobra’s den, the place of harm, it’s fine to be there.  The child can lay his hand on the adder’s lair.  No harm on this holy mountain.  What is that trying to say?  It strikes me that one of the things that the Old Testament sought to do over and over again was to remove sin, and you did it by punishing sinners or, even more dramatically, by killing them.  And yet this new king, this Christ figure that’s coming, that’s longed for in our hearts, says that no, that deadly thing called sin is not the problem.  We can’t get rid of it.  That’s not God’s plan, but God’s plan is somehow to allow that sin in the world to be a source of deepening what we prayed for in this beautiful opening prayer, wisdom, divine wisdom.

So we look at Paul.  Paul is talking about this new thing that has come into the world, and listen to the difference of the words.  In the Old Testament reading we just listened to, it was basically the idea that this great king would come, and he would be filled with justice, and he would punish the evil and save the good.  And here we have something different.  We have a new leader, not so much just filled with justice but something else, endurance and encouragement, and that creates hope. Hope is not the wish and the desire that we’d be saved by God but the conviction that we can be.  If we just simply open ourselves to him and admit our faults, we are absolutely part of the fruitfulness of being engaged with someone who never, ever limits his enduring love and never stops infusing ⎯ that’s what the word encouragement means ⎯ infuse with courage and strength so that we can live in harmony with one another, so a very different shift, or a shift from the difference of a world of justice and now a world of justice and mercy.

In the gospel, we see John the Baptist as a bridge between the Old and the New Testament, and what I love about John is he’s on the right track, but he’s really rooted in the Old Testament.  And he calls for a new repentance, and repentance is an interesting word, because it means to regret.  He wants people to simply realize what they’re doing to other people, and he was mostly consumed with the way the Pharisees and the Sadducees treated the people.  The temple had become anything but what it should have been.  It was a disaster in a sense.  It laid burden after burden on people and really did, in a way, focus so much on justice that, if anybody didn’t keep a rule or a law, they were considered to be absolutely worthless.  So he’s now saying that there’s something new coming, and he’s saying, “I want to prepare all of you for this.”  And what he’s talking about is this incredible gift that God is giving us in this person, filled with mercy, called Jesus Christ.  I love the fact, in this particular passage of Matthew, he has a reaction of John the Baptist to those coming forth, the Pharisees and Sadducees.  I was just imagining what it would be like for these men that came forward.  Maybe they were really sincere.  Maybe they felt for the first time that there was something wrong with the temple, and they saw it causing pain in people.  And just as anybody in an institution that is abusive, some of the people know it, and they just don’t know what to do about it.  But anyway, the Pharisees and Sadducees come, and he just calls them right away, “You brood of vipers, you snakes, you poisonous people.  Who warned you to flee the destruction that you deserve?”  That’s so Old Testament and so perfect.  And he says, “You presume that maybe you’ll just get in because you said, ‘Abraham’s our father.’”  What he’s attacking is not, maybe, these men but their attitude toward everything that was going on in John’s life and the community called the Essenes where John was, where he was practicing this wonderful ritual of forgiveness, cleansing everybody everyday with water, saying, “Your sins can be forgiven.  Your sins can be forgiven.”  But then what I want you to pay attention to is, when he’s talking about the baptism that he has been offering to people for repentance, it’s water, cleanses the outside in a sense.  You’ve got dirty hands, and you wash them.  They’re clean, but the hand is the same hand.  So he’s saying, and this is the beauty of this passage, that Matthew is revealing that, without John even realizing it, he knows something about what Jesus is going to do.  Doesn’t fully understand it, but he does have a sense of it.  And what he does, he says, “I do my work, and it has an impact.  It helps people, but he that’s coming after me, the one who is destined to be the Savior of the world, is radically different.  He’s filled with Spirit and fire, Holy Spirit and fire.” 

Holy Spirit could be the wisdom that the first reading is talking about, or rather the opening prayer was talking about, this gift of God giving us understanding of who we are and why we’re here and who he is.  Basically he says that this work of infusing wisdom is also infusing this thing called fire, and fire is a purification.  And it’s so interesting to think that wisdom can be a purification.  So can the fear of punishment.  So can fear be a motive for moving in the right direction, but fire is so different.  And look at this image where he says, “I will clear my threshing floor and gather the wheat into the barn.  The chaff I will burn with unquenchable fire.”  It’s very easy, and maybe even in John’s mind he was saying, “The good people will be saved; the bad people are going to be burned, and we’ve just got to separate them.”  That’s not in the mind of Jesus, not the separation of one from another, good from evil, binary world.  No, he wants everyone to be saved.  So I want you to think of this image that John the Baptist is using and understand, as it may well mean this, that the wheat is the core of who you are, your being, the person that God created you to be, and the chaff is everything in you that isn’t, all illusion, all anxiety, all fear, all worry, all shame.  And what he’s doing, and this is the way it worked when you were on the threshing floor.  You threw the wheat and the stuff that wasn’t in the air.  The wind would blow the impurities away, and there would be left the wheat, and then the chaff would be burned.  But chaff burned could be not so much destroyed in the literal sense of you being destroyed if you don’t purify yourself but rather that wisdom of its nature does this purifying, sanctifying work.  That’s the awakening that God wants us to move toward in this season to see more fully, completely the awesome gift that this God/man Jesus will bring at his birth to the world. 

Father, we long to be transformed.  We have such a hard time changing ourselves, trying to follow regulations and rules that we’re confused at times by and also find so difficult to overcome.  Bless us with this divine wisdom so we see clearly what sin does, be freed from its illusions and its lies and live in the kingdom of peace, oneness and goodness.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.