The Fourth Sunday of Advent: C 24-25

Micah 5:1-4a | Hebrews 10:5-10 | Luke 1:39-45 

Pour forth, we beseech you, oh, Lord, your grace into our hearts that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ your Son was made known by the message of an angel, may by his passion and cross be brought to the glory of his resurrection who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen. 

There’s something about that song.  You just listened to it, and it was in, obviously, German.  So you didn’t really hear the words, but it’s a song that just the melody itself, the way it works on the person who’s listening, it creates an inner stillness.  It creates peace.  The first reading that we just listened to, from Micah, is one of those passages, so many of them in the Old Testament, that refer to the coming of a Messiah.  From the very beginning, right after what we know as the sin of Adam and Eve, that incredibly interesting and difficult to interpret story, what we’re told is there will come one day someone that will crush the head of the serpent.  The serpent is that lie that was given to Adam and Eve, and the lie was, “You are enough.  You can do everything on your own.  All you need to know is right and wrong, and you’ll be fine.  That’s all that God asks.  Do what’s right.  Don’t do what’s wrong.  That’s the whole relationship.”  That’s the lie.  What we’re told is that there would be a man from a woman.  Interesting, most of the time you talk about a man in the Old Testament, you wouldn’t say a man of a woman.  You’d say a man of a man, because the women weren’t considered to be as important as the men.  So we were sons and daughters of a father.  Well, this is the son of a mother, a woman who gives birth to someone, and that someone in this story is peace.  And the someone in that first prophecy of a Messiah in the Old Testament, the Book of Genesis, is the son will crush the head of the serpent, but he’ll also be bitten.  He’ll crush the head, but he’ll be poisoned.  He’ll die.  Amazing.  From the very beginning in the Old Testament, you were being told that this isn’t the fullness of the message.  Someone’s coming.  

So in the second reading, you hear from the author of Hebrews that it’s clear that, when Jesus came into the world, and the Messiah is Jesus — so the Messiah who comes eventually to reveal the truth makes an astonishing statement about the Old Testament.  It was all based in the law, and it was fundamentally based in the law that required that you didn’t sin, and sin was always a kind of curse.  So if you sinned, you would be punished, and so in the Old Testament, what we see, the major relationship that we have with God is one struggling to make up for our sins, to find forgiveness and, through some mysterious way, find a way not to sin.  So at least when I grew up in the church, and that’s what I felt was the most important thing.  Stop sinning, and if you do sin, you have to make up for it.  And the making up for it was yes, you went to forgiveness.  You went for forgiveness.  You went to be forgiveness, but at the same time, it seemed that there was something inside of us that felt there was a debt that was created by our sins.  And that’s something human beings feel.  I’m responsible for causing this pain, and I should make up for it.  And yet what the Old Testament taught us is that that kind of system, based on you keeping a law that you’re not really able to do perfectly, being caught in failure always and then being caught in trying to pay for the failure means you’re always going to be primarily thinking about the future as, “Oh, God, I hope I’m enough not to sin in the future.”  And you’re going to be thinking about the past.  “Oh, my God, I’ve got to make up for all that.”  And so sacrifices, offerings were made, and that was pleasing God.  And here is the Messiah coming along and saying, “That whole system never pleased God.”  It’s almost to say that your sins are not, in any way, shape or form, the issue with God.  God does not turn against us because we are sinners.  In fact, the more you understand the mystery of life, you realize that we are given by God, from the beginning, a weakness that leads us into sin, and what is sin?  Sin is yes, doing the wrong thing, but it’s mostly not seeing what is true, seeing something that looks like the truth and aiming for that, and then it never produces what it promises.  

So what we learn in the Old Testament is that just making up for your sins and trying not to sin is not what God wants.  It’s not what he’s interested in.  Shocking.  What that must imply is that there’s something about sin that has its purpose, its meaning, and we’re supposed to be engaged in that.  And the engagement in it is somehow to accept that’s part of our human nature, that we fail, and in that failure, there’s something promised, something good, something that will happen to us.  I’ll call it experiencing that which is not what we want and knowing therefore that is not the direction we want to go in.  We need sin to grow.  We need it.  It’s part of the plan.  So something is coming.  The thing that’s coming is peace, according to the first reading.  That’s salvation, being at peace.  We have to be at peace with who we are in our relationship with God, and yet it’s always bothered me that he says, “I have destroyed sin,” but then I still struggle with sin all my life  I still feel guilty.   I still feel at times I’m not good enough.  I’m afraid I’ll sin in the future, and I’m not supposed to.  But what if sin is not the thing that is the problem?  That’s our human nature.  

So what is our problem?  If it’s not our weaknesses, if it’s not our faults, then where should we be looking?  The Messiah is the one that comes into the world to show us what we should be looking at, and what is it?  Well, first of all, you have to understand that it’s a change, something radically new, something different than we thought.  We can say, “Well then, the Old Testament is wrong, and the New Testament is right.”  No, no.  We have the Old Testament as the example of what we go through on our journey to become whole, to become complete when we learn what is real, what is true, and what is true is that we are not ever expected by God never to make a mistake.  That’s not his plan.  His plan is that we grow and that we change and become someone.  The someone we become is described in a very beautiful way in the gospel, because we have two figures that represent the old and the new.  There’s two women, one, say, in her 90s.  She found out six months earlier that she was going to have a baby, so she’s in her sixth month, and this baby inside of her, we know who it is.  It’s the greatest of the prophets, John the Baptist, and the thing that was so great about him is he announced the new way.  He announced the new kingdom, the surprise, the thing we never expected, and so she represents the righteousness that people struggle for, always doing what’s right and then still finding themselves cursed, because Elizabeth always felt she was cursed with not being able to [sic] child.  So why was she cursed when she did all the right things?  Well, it’s because your parents sinned somewhere back, but she was burdened by the shame of sin.  It kept her from bringing new life into the world.  It’s called shame.  It’s an infection that saps energy and takes away hope. She represents the end of that and the beginning of something new, and then there’s someone 13 years old, a little girl.  What do we know about her?  Well, we know that she has amazing faith.  The one thing the story tells us is Elizabeth looks at her and gives such praise for who she is, and she says, “We’re all blessed because you believe in what God has promised, the Messiah.”  

Most of us have given up on the Messiah.  What we worry about is our sins, trying to make up for them.  No, there’s somebody here in our midst who is there to save us, and he’s peace.  He’s forgiveness.  He’s acceptance.  He’s everything we think we have to earn by not sinning, and so the radical statement of the New Testament is sin is not our problem.  Human weaknesses are who we are.  What is our problem?  Whether we believe or not.  Believe in what?  The truth. What’s the truth?  Reality.  What’s reality?  God announces John the Baptist, makes everybody aware that this person Jesus is the announcement of the most incredible, impossible thing that anyone could ever think is going to happen.  God, the God who punishes, who rewards, that God, he wants to live inside of you.  He wants to come and be a part of you.  He wants to be your partner, but he comes to you as a sinner.  He comes to you in your dirtiness, in your darkness.  That’s when he comes.  Well, wait a minute.  The old way said I had to be pure, had to be clean, had to be sinless in order for God to even pay attention to me, much less do something as come inside of me.  That’s blaspheme.  God doesn’t do that.  We’re dirty.  He’s clean.  We’re imperfect.  He’s perfect.  It’s incompatible.  The opposite is true.  We’re made for each other.  What we want more than anything else is to find a place of peace in the world where we feel all is well, that things are as they must be, but if you live in the world of sin, then you live in a world where either you worry about the sins that you might commit in the future and worry if you’re going to be strong enough, and you’re worried about the past, because you have to make up for those sins.  So you either are in anxiety about the future or shame about the past, and so what’s missing?  The present.  What’s in the present?  “I don't know.  I don’t spend much time there,” is what most of us would say.  “I’ve got a plan for the future, and I’ve got to make up for the past.”  No, the kingdom that God wants you in is the kingdom in which he joins you by entering into you and you with him living in a present moment.  And what is the moment like?  Grace.  What is grace?  God’s presence.  What is God’s presence?  Unconditional love?  What is unconditional, unmerited love?  What does that mean?  It means you, as you are right this moment, is everything that God has ever wanted you to be, and everything you want to be in the future is in the present moment with God working with you. 

Listen again to the words of Elizabeth.  “Mary, blessed are you who believed that what the Lord promised would take place.”  It’s so hard for me to think God lives in me, in my messiness, in my dirtiness, in my failures.  I was so trained by a church that kept saying, “No, no.  Sin is the obstacle.  Sin is the biggest problem you’ve got.  If you stop sinning, you’ll be happy.”  Well, the only way I know you can stop sinning is by turning off almost all your wants and needs, and then you’re in a kind of empty vacuum where there’s not much happening, and you think, “Ah, this is it, peace.  No wants, no needs.  Nirvana.”  No.  No, your wants and needs are the energy that is in you to push you into a situation where you’re going to make mistakes, and you’re going to grow, and you’re going to learn.  And where do you get that energy?  Where do you get that confidence to go into something where you know most likely you’re going to fail at it?  It’s this indwelling wisdom, this indwelling love, this indwelling forgiveness that says, “Look, right now in this moment you are all you need to be.  Don’t worry about what you weren’t, and don’t worry about what you think you should need to be in the future.  You are right now everything you are needing to be.”  

I’ve had two, three moments in my life that stand out where I’ve just had that feeling.  I was doing some nondescript thing.  All of a sudden, this overwhelming feeling came to me.  I wasn’t thinking about my past.  I wasn’t worried about the future.  I was in the present, and it felt so good, so rich, so full.  Could that be the kingdom?  Could that be the mystery of this Jesus, this Messiah who came into the world and did the strangest thing, died in a form where he was looked at as sin?  It’s like he was wrong, and so they had to kill him.  They had to destroy him, and in the very act of destroying this man, they didn’t know what they were doing, but they were teaching us something.  You’ve got to believe that sin is not the enemy, and sin, when you can accept it as part of who you are, you’ll be saved.  And that’s exactly what Jesus did on the cross.  He accepted the fact that people saw him as sin, and he wasn’t angry.  He wasn’t mad.  It was unfair.  He said, “It’s all right.  You can think of me as sin.  You can try to destroy me.”  But when you try to destroy a sinner, all you’re trying to destroy really is a part of them that needs to die.  What needs to be born is this new creation, this new Messiah, this new person.  That’s Christmas.  That’s the gift, to discover the beauty, the essence of who you are with God inside of you, guiding the present moment, using you, healing through you, loving through you and making you really, really happy.

Father, the way to salvation is really, really difficult for us.  There’s something in our nature, something in the way we see the world that we think we’re the problem.  We think, if we could just be better, if we could just be perfect, then we’d please you, and we’d find happiness.  And nothing is further from the truth.  Perfection, not making mistakes is never to be our goal.  Our goal is to grow, to change, to evolve, most especially to see, see you as you are, to see you as a lover who is drawn to us because of our weaknesses, who wants nothing more than to connect deeply with our will and our desires and not focus on what’s wrong but focus on the potential we have of bringing life and love into the world, true forgiveness and mercy.  Thank you for this great gift, but like Mary, give us the faith to believe in it.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name.