Sermons & Meditations

Micah 5:2-5a; Luke 1:26-38
Presented December 18th, 2005, by J.D. Kline
The Fourth Sunday of Advent

The season of Advent is a time of intriguing contrasts. In the church, we set aside the Advent season, the four weeks prior to Christmas, as a time of waiting and listening, a time of expectant hoping for the fulfillment of the ancient promise of a whole new way of life unfolding among us. It is a time of aching, a time of yearning for God’s realm of peace and compassion to make itself fully known in our hearts and lives. It is a time of anticipation, a time that demands our full attention. But in the culture that threatens to envelope us so completely that we lose sight of the unique perspective of faith, these weeks leading up to Christmas have become the very opposite. They are a time of frenzy rather than a time for quieting our hearts. For many, the weeks prior to Christmas are a time of one seemingly endless activity after another—a gift-buying, party-planning, card-sending, present-wrapping, cookie-baking, house-decorating whirlwind of hustle and bustle.

The problem, of course, with living in a whirlwind of activity is that we all too easily miss the power of the Christmas story. If we do not take some time to quiet our hearts and minds this Advent season, something critical is overlooked. I rather suspect this is what the New Testament scholar J.B. Phillips had in mind when asserting that “what we are in fact celebrating [this Advent and Christmas season] is the awe-inspiring humility of God, and no amount of familiarity with the trappings of Christmas should ever blind us to its quiet but explosive significance.”

And what is the quiet but explosive significance of the Christmas story, but the incredible message of Immanuel, God-with-us—of God so loving the creation that he enters fully into human life. As John puts it in his Gospel, “The Word became flesh and lived among us, . . . full of grace and truth” (1:14). It is a matter of God entering so deeply into the human experience that all of life stands at the brink of being transformed and made new.

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Isaiah 35:1-10; Matthew 11:2-6
Presented December 4th, 2005, by J.D. Kline
The Second Sunday of Advent

John the Baptist is one of the more intriguing figures of the New Testament, living in the wilderness, subsiding on a near-starvation diet, a frenzied passion in his voice as he preached a fire and brimstone message. Frederick Buechner, writing in his book Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who, puts John the Baptist’s message this way:

The Kingdom was coming all right… but if you thought it was going to be pink tea, you’d better think again. If you didn’t shape up, God would give you the axe like an elm with the blight or toss you into the incinerator like what’s left over when you’ve lambasted the good out of the wheat. He said being a Jew wouldn’t get you any more points than being a Hottentot, and one of his favorite ways of addressing his congregation was as a snake pit. Your only hope, he said, was to clean up your life as if your life depended on it, which it did, and get baptized in a hurry as a sign that you had. Some people thought he was Elijah come back from the grave, and some others thought he was the Messiah, but John would have none of either. “I’m the one yelling himself blue in the face in the wilderness,” he said, quoting Isaiah. “I’m the one trying to knock some sense into your heads.”

John baptizes Jesus, but as time passes, begins to have some doubts about this One whom he had initially considered himself unworthy to baptize. It’s little surprising that John would have questions, for Jesus does not follow the script John expected; Jesus was not acting as John had anticipated. As Buechner observes,

Where John preached grim justice and pictured God as a steely-eyed thresher of grain, Jesus preached forgiving love and pictured God as a host at a marvelous party or a father who can’t bring himself to throw his children out even when they spit in his eye. Where John said people better save their skins before it was too late, Jesus said it was God who saved their skins, and even if you blew your whole bankroll on liquor and sex like the Prodigal Son, it still wasn’t too late. Where John ate locusts and honey in the wilderness with the church crowd, Jesus ate what he felt like in Jerusalem with as sleazy a bunch as you could expect to find… Where John baptized, Jesus healed.

The differences were so glaring to John that, while languishing in prison, he sends a number of his own disciples to Jesus with a critical question, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Matthew 11:3). Jesus responds with images from Isaiah 35, that powerful chapter anticipating the return of the ancient Israelites from their desperate time of exile, a time of renewal and restoration following a period of judgment. The very desert through which the exiles travel shall be transformed, rejoicing and blossoming, while the exiles themselves will be strengthened. Then writes the prophet, “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a dear, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy” (Isaiah 35:5-6).

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