The Church of the Ascension
December 9, 2007

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  AMEN.

When I heard about the shootings in Nebraska this week, I had a sadly familiar feeling.  We don’t go long, a few months, sometimes a year, but not long without hearing of another senseless mass killing.  Each of us has his/her own way of dealing with the news.  Some of us rail about the availability of guns, others about how poorly our children are being parented, some about a more generalized rupture in our moral fiber.  I suspect many of us accommodate such horrendous moments by attributing it to some deep personal pathology within an individual. “I've just snapped,” he wrote, “I can't take this meaningless existence anymore. I've been a constant disappointment and that trend would have only continued."  And snap he did.  He also stated in his eerily typical suicide note about his certainty that now he will at least be famous.  For his victims, their families, and many in Omaha, Robert Hawkins will indeed remain famous, infamous in fact, for as long as this generation lives.  But elsewhere, within a few days, certainly weeks, most of us will not remember his name.

Come, Lord Jesus, come.  We need you.

And that is just one story this week that reminds us of how we need a Savior.  There are many others, political ones, personal ones, some little, some enormous but all poignant moments that remind us that fullness of God’s realm is far from us.  We are a people in need of a Savior, and the need is not new.  Both the Old Testament and the gospel remind us of how long we have been waiting.  Isaiah speaks of a time when the wolf will live peaceably alongside the lamb, when leopard and calf and cub will romp happily together.   The scene depicted speaks of a longing for harmony that is so deep that we rarely risk giving it voice – for it seems like a fairy tale or a stylized painting of something that exists only in our imagination.  But it is precisely that longing, the longing for a time when God’s reign on earth will be full and characterized by peace which gives us the character of Advent.

Come, Lord Jesus, come.  We need you.

John the Baptist was a bit less poetic than Isaiah.  Not known for his diplomacy or his fashion sense, John was prone to … ah…..shrieking.  Sort of evangelism on steroids.  “Confess yours sins, straighten up, and get ready,” he yelled at any who would hear (and many did), “for the Lord is coming.”  Why was he so mad?  He was enraged because the prophetic image of Isaiah was still just a dream.  Wolves were wolves, and lambs were lambs; and encounters between them did not end happily for lambs.  The realm of God, as far as John could see, was as far away as ever.  He believed that the religious elite in their self-satisfied piety stood in the way, that in fact they – the religious – supported an ordering of life that protected the high and mighty at the expense of the poor.  Dubbing them “broods of vipers,” he won few friends in high places.  It is enough to give religion a bad name.  Again and again it seems that the more religious a person is, the more outwardly pious one is or claims to be, the farther the fall.

Yet, even today religion is all the rage.  We still have some notion that how one practices faith on the outside tells us what he or she is like on the side.  Can a Mormon be president?  Can a man whose name sounds Muslim-ish be president?  Should we have one who claims to be a Christian leader?  How religious is religious enough?  The longer the primary season goes on the less I like a conversation that has “religion” and “government” in the same sentence.  Jesus seemed to be less concerned with the quality of words and affiliations than with the quality of hearts.

Come, Lord Jesus, come.  We need you.

John the Baptist certainly did not care what brand of religion someone embraced, but he care passionately about righteousness.  He believed in a God who was still involved in the ongoing drama of creation and redemption – no wimpy distant creator for him.  God was present and God cared how the way we live with one another.  The entire notion of “righteousness,” about which he talked with such vehement ardor, had less to do with moralizing than with the world working the way God meant for it to work so that the joy of God can become the joy of God’s creatures.  Righteousness, John thought, would bring not self-satisfied religiosity but a passion for caring for the less fortunate.  He was a “show me the money and keep all your religious tomfoolery to yourself” kind of guy.

His call to repentance resonates for us for we know how split our lives are – between the values we truly hold and the co-opted ways in which we live.  For folks like us, though, the difficulty with hearing John’s call to repentance is that it is often understood as a call to be even more religious.  The Pharisees had gotten that right.  They were appropriately generous along carefully prescribed lines; they knew whom to keep in and whom to keep out of temple practice – nothing personal, just what was “right.”  They knew how to worship beautifully.  It had become second nature to them.  What had not become second nature was the preparation of their hearts to receive the reign of God.  That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  So when we hear John’s message every year during Advent, it could be that repentance is about practicing our faith a bit more religiously; but more likely than not, it is about the process of genuine transformation, about turning more and more of our lives over to God in the ways that really count – how we spend our time, how we treat those nearest to us, how we regard the least fortunate in our culture.

Come, Lord Jesus, come.  We need you.

Last week one of our little kids asked her mom why we were looking for the baby Jesus this year since she emphatically remembers his having come last year.  Hmmm….smart kid, no doubt destined for a heap of trouble.  But a really good question – and one, I have thought a great deal about this week.  Sweetie, the answer is because we still need him so badly.

In fact, that can be defined a bit more precisely.  The real truth, the only truth of which I can speak with absolute assurance is this one: I need him.  I have known about him all my life; at times I have even known him, really known him; and I still need him to come because the need for repentance is a need for me – not just for the world of politicians and powerbrokers - but for me.  I am as broken as the next guy – more so than some and a little less fragile than others.  But I need something that the world cannot give.

Advent reminds me that I am neither responsible for nor capable of saving myself.  I can’t be smart enough, religious enough, activist enough, generous enough to do it myself.  And I don’t have to be.

Come, Lord Jesus, come.  I need you.

In the name of God: AMEN.