Advent 1 @ St. John's

this is the sermon i offered at the 8 and 10 am services at St. John's, Ross, CA. 9am is a different sort of service and the sermon was also about advent, but in the main, correlated the waiting of advent to pregnancy. there are no notes, and it wasn't recorded, so you will just have to take Aulden's word for it, that it was awesome.


Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ, give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous, and all for your loves sake, Amen.

I don’t quite know why Advent makes that prayer come to mind, but every year, it does. Perhaps it is because Advent is when we watch. We watch for Jesus. We pay extra attention to our longing for a messiah.

Longing is an ordinary human action.

Our readings today speak of longing. We long for a time when our needs are met with abundance, when we don’t have to fight over scarcity anymore. Isaiah tells us about this.
We long for a place where God rules and justice prevails and peace is our birthright. The psalms speak to this.
We long for a time when we can be taken away from all our troubles. Jesus hears his disciples talking among themselves about this.

It is really normal to long for the end of fighting and struggling and misunderstandings. And it is really normal to cope with all the difficulties of life by ignoring as much of the strife as we can. It really is normal to wait for God to take care of the big stuff especially when we feel we are just getting by.

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep.

Sometimes, prayer is all we can do. Sometimes, giving the job to God is as much as we can manage, and this prayer carries that hidden desire. Do these things, because we don’t think we can. Jesus certainly teaches us how to pray, and tells us to pray often. But that isn’t all he tells us.

Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.

The gospel today is part of a series of teachings that Jesus offers his disciples, having just led them out of the temple, where he was pretty hard on the Pharisees for following the letter of the law and not the spirit. The letter of the law was keeping the Pharisees comfortable under Roman rule, but it wasn’t doing much for the rest of the Israelites.

So he has taken his disciples out of Jerusalem and he is trying to make it really clear to them
that who he is and
what he is here to do
is not what they think.

Because they thought Jesus was here to set up a government that would make everything good and just and fair, and take care of all the problems they didn’t want to think about. They are thinking that Jesus is going to make a place for them by kicking out the Romans and then the world will be perfect because they will be able to abdicate their responsibilities to Jesus.

That is what the disciples are hoping and thinking. But Jesus is telling his disciples and telling us, that we can’t abdicate our responsibility. We can’t assume that someone else is going to come and make things better, because we don’t know when that day will come. The kingdom of God isn’t what they thought it would be. The kingdom of God isn’t a government. We are the kingdom of God.

And while we don’t get to abdicate responsibility, we don’t have to go it alone. Jesus, over and over again, in his ministry, showed the disciples what to do, and promises that he will be with us.

Here at St. John’s we are part of that same story. We stand alongside the Israelites of Isaiah’s day, and the disciples of Jesus’ earthly ministry. We stand alongside our grandparents and parents and children and grandchildren in the continual unfolding of the kingdom of God. And in Advent we share in the hope and longing for peace in the world.

There are as many ways to share in the watching and working and weeping of the world as there are people. One of the ways is by making a house where all God’s people are welcome. As this is the last Sunday of the stewardship campaign, I am obliged to tell you that money helps make that happen. And I can tell you that the ownership you feel for having made even the smallest of pledges is greater than the guilt you might imagine over the size of that pledge.

And another way to share in that work is with your time and your talent. One of the ways I am doing that this year is directing the Christmas pageant. I am going to be spending some of my time bringing our children into this sanctuary, and some of my talent giving them the confidence to come in and teach us what it means for God to be with us.

I think Christmas pageants are important. Because the Christmas pageant is one of those few times when we let our children teach us what it means to be Christians.

And as I think about this community, and the ways in which we, like the people who followed Jesus during his human ministry, struggle with what it means to be like Jesus. It occurs to me that as a community, we have one line in the pageant. We have one response when the children come to us and look for shelter and warmth and a place to be safe with a new baby. We say ‘no room.’

During Advent, I think of the faith of Mary and Joseph, looking for a place to sleep, a place of peace, a place to give birth to the Son of Man. I think of all the longing I feel for a messiah to come. And I get really busy with all the traditions and responsibilities and think, I don’t have room for one more thing in my life.

But I wonder about that innkeeper, who had no room. I wonder if he was praying something like this prayer, when the knock came to his door. I wonder if it changed his mind.

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ, give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous, and all for your loves sake, Amen.