Christmas is Coming; Are You a Voice in the Wilderness?
Psalm 85: 1&2 & 8-13
MARK 1-8
December 10, 2023 – SECOND SUNDAY of ADVENT
Last Sunday morning … right over here <<WALK BACK>>… in the Narthex … just as our worship service was ending, I spotted Pat Parker coming towards me … I knew that she was headed to the hospital on Monday. You might not have noticed her and perhaps you did not know that she had no real choice but to go to the hospital … for surgery … on her brain … due to a critical health issue. Imagine if you were having brain surgery … would you be smiling before the event? I went up to Pat who greeted me with a smile. My question, “I didn’t expect to see you here today.” Her response with her ever present and growing smile was … “Where else would I be, Dave?” We hugged, whispered a few words, and today, she is in Cooper’s ICU due to complications, and I have no updates on her condition, but I will be headed there when church is over.
I am sure she wishes that she was able to be in church today and I have a feeling she can’t even watch us online… you know, she is almost always in church on Sunday’s … she has a strong incredible faith where God matters … she values her time investment here at St. Paul’s … worship is a priority for her not an occasional choice for her time. But today her time is in the hands of God and of the medical professionals.
Good morning church … CHRISTMAS is coming but is that why you are in church today? If this was March the 10th and it was stormy outside, would you be in church? Would you gather your family to watch the service online on our FACEBOOK page or would CBS Sunday Morning have more pull? Do you even look at our FACEBOOK page?
Where else would you prefer to be on a Sabbath morning? Do you ever think about Sabbath and God and you? Where are you telling your friends, your family members, your neighbors, and your co-workers that you would prefer to be on a Sunday morning … IF NOT CHOOSING to worship God, if not lifting your voice to praise and thank God, to sing praises to God, and if you had a young child like the Walsh family … would choosing to have your children baptized and with you in church be your priority for your life and theirs? IN CHURCH on a regular basis … for God … with God and with other believers who together create entities called churches. Churches where people are ready to share their time and finances so that amazing things can be done for God.
CHRISTMAS is coming and are you DEAR CHURCH ATTENDERS the VOICES in the WILDERNESS declaring the Word of the Lord … a WORD of TRUTH that the world around us needs to experience? Is your voice and your smile reflective of your joy like Pat’s was last Sunday morning whenever the subject of faith comes up? Do you shine brightly when worshiping God and when Jesus Christ is part of any conversation? Do the songs of faith start to stream quietly inside your heads? <<HUM Joy to the World>>
Do you associate church with worshipping the God of Creation whose love brought us Jesus … yes, His birth occurred in a manger scene we can recreate in big blow-up balloons on our front lawns or in miniature displays in our homes … but are you focused on Jesus the One whose arrival answered the psalmist’s quest in this season and beyond … “Faithful love and truth have met! Righteousness and peace have kissed! Truth springs up from the ground. Righteousness gazes down from heaven! YES … the LORD GIVES WHAT IS GOOD!”
WHAT IS GOOD … God’s everlasting gift for all of us. And, we have Jesus TRUTH! Jesus’ RIGHTEOUSNESS!! The Good News of Jesus! Friends are you DECLARING the SON of GOD in your life? Through your words? Your actions? Your invitations? That frankly is the annual and ongoing challenge of the CHRISTMAS season. It is the call of ADVENT to the faithful!! God’s calendar gift of Christmas anticipation to prepare us again for a new year of being amongst the joy-filled faithful rather than in the crowd of the rejectors of the Son of God.
We are in the second week of ADVENT and I have found some varying words of focus for this week. We celebrated the HOPE of CHRIST last week but still some like the Sisters of Notre Dame declare that the second Sunday of Advent represents the hope of Christ coming to the world … preparing us for Jesus while commemorating the First Coming of Christ in Bethlehem. HOPE friends but truly this is the week of Peace.
Peace coming from the Hebrew shalom, which means the completeness of being. I know we try to squeeze shalom into one English word peace that has so many meanings but when we think about Jesus’ arrival as the Prince of Peace it wasn’t about ending wars but about changing souls. Personal peace and rescue from turmoil. Jesus came to complete who we are … to bring us peace … by saving us from ourselves, the world, and our sins.
And the third word I have read a lot about this week associated with the second Sunday of Advent is faith but that just makes sense. Faith brings us completeness and well-being in other words it brings us peace and therefore we have the strength of our hope in God’s truth. Faith inspires our works and lives in Christ because we are faithful!
That brings us back to John … the baptist … out in the wilderness whose invitation was transformational … CHANGE so we can receive God through Christ! But then …. Then friends the onus is on us to leave behind who we were and to become God’s and Christ’s … this week’s opening slide featured a quote of Jimi Hendrix that I have posted on the walls of my various offices for the last 20 years or so … “When the power of love overcomes the love of power. The world will know peace.” That power of love is what we possess through God but all too few people are willing to set it free even though God calls us to do so!
It seems that my social media’s faith messages lately have offered reminders to me that we are called to be the Light of God in the world. We are the ones who answer prayers more frequently than not … at least when God gifted people of faith with the Holy Spirit’s presence and then had Jesus use his last words to effectively tell us we are to get off our butts and get to work … I can sense our purpose in the resonance of the first words in Mark’s Gospel. “THE BEGINNING of the GOOD NEWS of Jesus Christ … that beginning lies with you and me friends.
The beginning friends at least in our small circles of life … the beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ needs to be us. The actions of our lives … the words of our lives … the examples we set through the people we are because after all … I can look out at all of you who are here today … I can smile at Thomas Charles Walsh through his baptism … I can think about our dear friend Pat lying in Cooper’s ICU … and I can sense a faith-connection we share through God’s Christmas gift of Jesus Christ.
I see you, I sense you, and I heard the men sing LEAN on ME …. Knowing that as people of faith I can and have leaned on you over these past months and I can in the days to come. We are the ones whose God experiences allows us to realize that although there is an incredibly special holiday tied to Jesus’ birth in the manger … that there should be a life altering teaching example through the shepherds in the fields whose rush to see a baby is enunciated in Linus’ message in a classic Christmas cartoon show … we are the one’s baptized with the Holy Spirit … we are the one’s who have been blessed that someone in our life’s journey was the messenger who prepared the way in the wilderness of our lives to get Jesus … to have Jesus … to experience Jesus.
The other day it snowed … for an all too brief 15 or 20 minutes real snow … if you were on my social media, you saw me alive with joy! One of my high school friends even commented, “I love your joy and enthusiasm for the white stuff! It made my day.” She actually ran outside to take a picture of the snow in her yard and sent it to me. Yes, I know how to show joy … but I was also happy when she said that seeing me, after my health realities, “strengthened her belief that we are guided by God!”
So, you might not dance wildly in joy with me at the next arrival of snow, but I ask that you allow God’s peace to fill you with the joy that I have in our God and in Christ so that your joy shines in the world! Let those in your world experience you as their voice in the wilderness for God’s purposes not just at Christmas time but at least beginning now.
May the Lord’s life within each of us be a fire burning brightly in our hearts, enabling us to witness by our words and deeds to the truth of the Gospel with great joy, that Christ has come into the world, and is calling everyone to life without end in the kingdom of God, who has created us and loves us without measure. AMEN