1 Advent Year A
November 27 2016
And so beloved… we begin another church year… the themes of this season should be familiar… hope, waiting, love, light, worship, peace, just to name a few. I love this season most of all. The music, the colors, the readings…. Perhaps most of all, I am moved by the journey from darkness into light… with light, there hope … and we wait for the coming of a Holy child, as well as the second coming of the one who was crucified, Jesus…. It’s an in between time, which admittedly, can feel a bit unsettling. Our biblical lessons will take us to all sorts of places where we will talk about the end of times… it’s not particularly gentle, and it’s not really comforting in a lot of ways…
But it is hopeful. Because as followers of Jesus we know who it is we are waiting for, we know that he has promised to be with us to the end of the age; we know who we are waiting for; we know that we have nothing to fear…
Perhaps the challenges that we feel in this season are even more keenly felt when we look at the world we live in. As I was reading our lessons for this morning, I was struck this year by the passage from Isaiah, speaking about God and about God’s people, “He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
What a beautiful image, one that is filled with such life giving hope… what would it mean for us to beat swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks? Well, most of us don’t use swords or spears… and most of us aren’t farmers that plow or take care us crops… so it might be that these images are a bit lost on us. In this day of social media and instantly given information, none of us are unaware of the war that goes on daily; although I think we are all guilty of not truly seeing it…
So what might the swords and spears be in our own lives? The tricky thing about Advent is that we are reminded, as we are in our opening prayers today, that we are not to stand by idle and just wait for things to happen… yes, we are waiting for God to act, but God is also expecting us to act; we are the instruments that God has chosen to cast away the works of darkness; with God’s abundant grace upon us, WE are the instrument of peace and of hope to others; even now, it is our swords and spears that must be remade into peaceful tools that help further the kingdom… In our gospel reading, Jesus warns that no one knows the hour that the Lord is coming, but it is time to keep vigilant, time to watch, and oddly enough a time to do…
But we don’t just spin our wheels doing things that mean nothing; Lord knows there is plenty of that going on… Culture and Empire would have us believe that happiness is available in a shopping mall or in a political platform. We know that joy cannot be bought; Judas Iscariot tried and it ended in the death of his teacher and friend, and in his own desperate life ending act; Joy, is not merely a feeling, but the knowledge that Jesus is with us no matter what is going on around us; and that is what we come to know as we journey along in Advent, that we wait for Emmanuel, God with us… the Holy one who taught us that culture and Empire aren’t going to bring us closer to God, but that relationship with our neighbor would bring us closer to God… so Joy, something that culture and Empire like the claim as a feeling they produce in people, is not theirs to claim. It is ours to claim, and it will keep us going when culture and Empire disappoint us…
So back to swords and spears… what swords and spears are there in our lives that need to be reimagined into tools of God’s Kingdom? Maybe some of our own attitudes about our neighbor could be turned around and used for good… perhaps the energy we spend on protecting ourselves from those who we think are “out there” could be used to actually help those who are near; perhaps, we all need to look at the money the Empire uses to fuel the war machine and try to spend more on feeding and clothing people; perhaps we need to look at how we feel about refugees and immigrants and quit trying to build walls and borders to keep people out, both in our country and our neighborhoods, and rather share our resources so that others may experience safety and security… war, the kinds of war that we are experiencing and in some cases even waging on others, is not simply a problem of politics, but it is also a problem of the individual’s heart… we cannot make all of this war waging around us go away with the check of a box… there is work to do beloved, hard, soul searching work that requires us to change something about who we are and how we engage God’s world. The works of darkness are everywhere… and guess what else? We have participated in them in some way… every one of us. We have watched war happen, both in big ways and small… we have turned our hearts and our eyes away from the death dealing that has gone on in our names, in our neighborhood and in our world. But we don’t have to turn our heads or our hearts any longer…. God’s grace can give us what we need to cast away the works of darkness so that we might be bearers of hope and light. Bend the swords and spears of your heart; spend you money in ways that help those who need your help; may we feed our neighbors rather that fight against them… may we always support the cause of peace rather than war… may we always be bearers of kingdom light and hope to others… let’s get to work, beloved. There is much work to do as we wait for Jesus….
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