The season we often use to anticipate Christmas can be an invitation to both plan and dream, not only what’s possible, but what God will make possible.
Advent’s game-changing invitation
Advent 2A
Matthew 3:1-12
One of the challenges about the church’s new year starting on December first is that we’re just not there yet, are we? Right now while we’re here, it’s actually next year. The rest of the world will catch up in about a month. So we’re doing something different than the rest of the world.
We might say that it feels out of step.
But when we say this, we’re really saying that there is a norm and we’re messing it up. Like clapping wrong to a good a spiritual.
But here we’re doing it on purpose.
So I’d say we are making a bold choice.
The church is following a different way of being that has historically struggled with the norms of earthly power. So this thing we’re doing isn’t off. It is similar to what musicians call syncopation. Not only using the downbeat, (ta, ta, ta, ta) but also the upbeat (umTA, umTA, umTA, umTA).
Listening for God involves listening to the whole thing, not just the parts our friends and family think we should listen for. Because God’s using the whole beat to expand and delight.
So what do we hear when we start our year in early December?
We hear some of our familiar ideas with more resonance. Things like patience, anticipation, hope, and expectation. We’re hearing these as we are starting something new, embarking on a way ahead, and forming what our lives are going to look like.
Advent’s Bad Boy
And we know it is not Advent until our boy John the Baptist shows up telling us to repent! Calling us a brood of vipers! Saying get your junk together because it’s about to get real!
With our new year eyes we’re like yes! But it is a qualified yes. We hear John like the personal trainer we just hired because this is the year we’re going to drop those pounds. {shaky} Yay! I’m really looking forward to this torture!
Maybe you’re not quite like me on this one. But I’m sure these connections between Advent and New Year’s and expecting and buying a new calendar and forgetting to write 2020 on the 12 checks we’ll write for the whole year—all these things breathe meaning into this moment in rich and provocative ways.
It is good to think of secular New Year’s traditions now—we’re exploring the breadth of our own tradition using syncopation. There’s a richness to shifting to other parts of the beat.
Which is what I want us to do with that maniac personal trainer dressed like a prophet, coming out of the wilderness, and driving us to see what he sees. Let’s shift our thinking about this message to hear it more clearly.
Repent!
Like a lot of the best church words, repent has been linguistically abused by the narrow-minded and the fearful. It is often wielded like a weapon, not for understanding and life-change, but for control and manipulation.
Repent is not confession. And in a certain way, even confession isn’t really confession anymore.
To repent just means to turn.
And how John and Jesus use this idea is to turn from the things that are steering you wrong and toward what is good. And to dig into the theology a little deeper, repentance, to repent, is for us more directly related to our relationship with God.
We’re sitting here, stewing in all our obsessions and all the dark thoughts, thinking something is wrong in my life and in my world. We perceive a distance between us and God. So, in that context, we make a choice. We turn toward God.
The truth is that we are never far from God. We perceive a distance or separation from God, but that’s our imaginations. God is there. We, therefore, can choose to get rid of that illusion, turn to God, and say Now we’re going to do what you want. Or Thy will be done if we’re fancy.
This is repentance. Don’t let all that other garbage screamed on street corners or the vile threats hurled at our siblings in faith be this word. These acts of disobedience masquerading as pious and loving! They aren’t the whole story! Let us embody a more robust word, a more simple word: repent. To turn.
Turn!
It is no accident that Presiding Bishop Michael Curry started the sequence of practices called The Way of Love with Turn. Of course, it doesn’t have the baggage of “repent” but it reminds us of what the act of repentance actually means.
First, we turn. It’s an act. Somehow singular — as in one specific moment — and at the same time circular, repeating, present in every moment.
Turn is like the secret to meditation. It isn’t a steely resolve, it is a fluid resiliency. When you notice your mind has wandered, turn. Bring it back to the center, to the breath.
Something’s off, turn. Bring it back. Decisive in that moment, but also persistent and common.
Turning is the incredible epiphany that bursts through and says Yes, I need to make this life-changing decision! And it’s also Dang! I forgot to love that stranger who cut me off in traffic. It is simultaneously unique and common. To turn, repent, is both normal and making a new normal.
Now here’s the uncomfortable truth.
Are we ready?
Some junk needs to change. For ourselves and for our community.
And the key to this change is that turn to God. That’s a turn toward health and vitality and hope and love and commitment and joy. It is centered and intentional.
We like to say we don’t like change for the sake of change, but the truth is we really do. We need to change out that ratty toothbrush or that stinky dish sponge. Change that junk. For our health.
And we need more exercise, less stress, more time with people. So we need to go to the gym and maybe get a psycho personal trainer. Maybe that’ll make it stick.
But we’re not doing these things just to do them or out of obligation or empty desire or even a vain image of self-love. We’re not turning toward health only.
We turn toward God. And we’re bringing ourselves along.
As Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary said on OnBeing this week:
“[Repentance is] really saying, “That is horrible. And this is the path that we’re going to walk on together to fix it.” Not “fix it” in the sense of “cover up the past,” but fix it so that the horrors that hold us don’t keep happening. And so, that active grasping, walking towards a different future, has to be done together.
An Invitation
I’m going to invite you to take time this week to dream. To let your imagination run through this whole Advent season.
This is God’s persistent desire going back to the very moment of creation—that we dream, imagine, and create. And we keep ignoring God’s voice, pretending God is all about the rules and our following the rules. Like if we’re just good enough, we’ll get a treat.
And God keeps coming back saying No! I want you to dream dreams with me! Create something new and surprise me! Bring joy to the world around you!
Imagine and dream what God’s vision for us is.
And that’s going to take some turning.
Think back to the Isaiah reading. This is one of my favorite dreams. We bring it up as God’s great dream for humanity. When there are no more wars and we can live in peace.
“The wolf shall live with the lamb,
—Isaiah 11:6-7
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”
That dream takes turning. It takes the prey learning to trust the one who doesn’t deserve their trust. But first, it takes the predators laying down their weapons. It takes the powerful refusing to oppress, manipulate, or take advantage of the weak.
In other words, it doesn’t take equal turning to build equality. It takes an ultimate goal of equality to bring the fear-filled from where they are into intimacy.
Imagine and dream about what God is calling our world to be. And our place in it.
And then turn.
Turn in our own lives and in our community.
Because this is a dream for individuals and the church and the community and the region and the country and the continent and the world and the cosmos. Because we can’t go it alone. And even if we could, God doesn’t want us to.
There are deep hungers in this world and God is calling us into a practice of turning, learning, praying, worshipping, blessing, going, and resting, of following Jesus’s way of love so that we can be an answer to prayers, hope in the midst of suffering, lovers in a world filled with hatred and arrogance.
But most of all, we are called into this way of love that is woven with cords of love, connecting us to our neighbors far more intimately than any of us wants to admit, drawing us toward practices and commitments we’d rather avoid even thinking about, and with trust in each other when we’d rather put that all on a superhero—to do it all for us.
The Right Time
This season of anticipation, rich with hope and charity and music that fills us with good memories and emotions is probably the best time to syncopate our faith and hear the rest of God’s musical notation. To dream of what could be when we’re already dreaming of the future. To reconnect with our tradition when we’re already feeling nostalgic.
And to turn now, when our hearts are full of love, to our loving, grace-filled and generous God. Who says Right back at ya! You got this! Take that cheer on the road and spread it!
That’s Advent!
It’s John the Baptist shouting about repentance. It’s Isaiah’s dreaming of peace and Paul’s vision of beloved community. And it is our invitation to join the festival feast, turning and returning to dreams and of this world being that much closer to what God wants. With us a shade braver. Our shivering neighbors a shade warmer. And our cosmos a shade more just.
Dream, my friends! Repent, turning to an ever-loving God and be freed. We have just a few more weeks of anticipation. Just a few weeks to prepare for when dreams come true.
This video describing syncopation as “The Secret Rhythm in Radiohead’s “Videotape”,” is really fun to watch. I think it also extends the metaphor really well. Particularly because it helps us delight in our music and to find the novel in our common reality.