Advent 2A, 12/7/2025

Recall, friends, that Advent is weird.

That is what I talked about last week, that Advent is weird. While just about everywhere else around us it is the Christmas season, in here at St. Bede’s it’s Advent. It’s not the joy of Jesus’ birth – not yet. Instead we have the prophets calling us to repent, to turn back to God, and to return to the vision God has for our world of peace and prosperity. No, if you want to hear about the baby you have to wait another two weeks until we get the promise of the child to be born at Bethlehem. 

For today, we get John the Baptist, sometimes just called The Baptist, par excellence, and sometimes John the Baptizer, to distinguish him from John the Southern Baptist, or John the General Association of Regular Baptists, Great Lakes Area Division. John appears in the desert, wearing the clothing of a prophet of old, and is baptizing people while calling them to repent of their sins as he prepares them for Jesus’ arrival. 

John’s purpose, as it was written in the Gospel, was to prepare the way of the Lord; to call upon the populace to turn from their sinful and destructive ways, and to do the things that are pleasing to God, because God was going to send someone to deliver the people from oppression and servitude and to justice and freedom.

It’s worth asking, if John were to live in our day and age today, what would he call us to repent of? 

That’s a delightful, Advent-y question, in this season of preparation. What would the Baptist call us to repent of today?

For today’s answer to that, I want to look to the readings from Isaiah and Romans. Start with Isaiah. When the branch of Jesse appears, when the descendant of King David comes, what then? What will he bring with him?

Over and again, the message is that he will bring peace and justice to all, and that he will do so in the righteousness that comes from God. The poor and oppressed will be lifted up, and those who have done wrong to their fellow human will be held accountable. Then, the wolf shall lay down with the lamb, and the lion with the baby goat. The predator and prey will be at peace with one another, where the one does not attack and the other does not fear. Peace and justice will flow forth when the promised one appears.

Then in the letter to the Romans, Paul here is addressing the new challenges of bringing Jews and Gentiles together in the Body of Christ. How are the two to come together as they follow after Jesus? How is Jesus, a Jewish man who came to share a message of love and peace with all people, Jew and Gentile alike? How is everyone to coexist in this newly formed “church” that is learning from Jesus and what he taught his friends about holy living? 

In it we find that God is in the business of tearing down divisions. 

For much of the time period covered in the New Testament, and especially in the period after Jesus’ ascension into heaven, those living in the way of Jesus faced all kinds of divisions that they needed to address. Nationality. Gender. Slave and free. 

And while the close of the New Testament didn’t address all of these divisions fully, completely, and perfectly, the writings that we have show that the arc of history is headed in the direction of equality and community, not division and exclusion. The trajectory left to us is that those who were separate, even those who were enemies, will one day live in peace and harmony.

In line with the message that I shared earlier this week about my response to the violence in the new, as violence is one of the most extreme expressions of the divisions in the human condition, where much too often violence is seen as an option for addressing injustice, for dealing with one’s problems, and for getting back at those who have wronged you. 

And we have a lot of it around us. The bombing of boats in South America has stayed on as the major headline for most of the week, as well as the path that we seem to be on to go to war with Venezuela, plus other scattered bits of violence and shootings and death in there as well. There’s lots of violence happening and seemingly about to happen.

I will tell you, it crushes the soul. To hear how more and more death, destruction, killing, maiming, and hurting, it is so despairing. The worst part is that it feels as though it never changes, never will change, and that it’s always going to be a problem. People are always going to be looking for ways to harm other people. 

What are we to do? 

You and I are to do better. We are to be better. We are to be people seeking out peace, reconciliation, and redemption. We are to follow in the footsteps of those who went before us and to tear down walls, to repair and restore relationship, and to beat our swords into plowshares. We are to repent, again and again, and to reform our lives and reform our values so that we would treasure the things that make for peace. We are to bring peace into our neighborhoods, our jobs, and our families.

We are to repent, to prepare the way of Jesus, that when he comes he would find this world a place of peace and joy, a place where the wolf lays down with the lamb, and where all live in safety and equity. That as far as it depends on us, this is the world that we inhabit. 

That’s all highfalutin and all, but what are the real implications, and what are the things that we can do to make this happen? Because for most of us, the violence of the world is outside of us, and we aren’t violent like that ourselves. None of us are doing the shooting or involved in the killing. So what can we take away that we can do about division in our world?

A few things that come to mind: To be patient with one another. To be non-judgmental with one another. To forgive the people who have hurt us or been unkind toward, unfair toward us. To show welcome to those who we have snubbed or left out or cut out. 

Community is a messy thing, even for us who are committed to doing better and to doing that which is right and good. It’s not easy, even in the best of circumstances, but it is good. Building community is a good thing. 

So may that be true of us as we join in after God in tearing down division. And in doing so, to find that the way prepared by John the Baptizer is the best possible way to live.

So together with you, my friends in Christ, may we…

Advent 3A
12/14/2025

Advent is weird.

That’s likely the last time you’ll hear me say that at the start of a sermon, that Advent is weird, because next week we finally get to the promise of a baby that is to be born. Today, we sort of bounce off that with the magnificat in place of the psalm today, but we’re still on the second coming of Jesus, of his return in glory following the ascension and his absence from us. Because that’s Advent. It’s weird.

And it’s about preparation; preparing for the coming of Jesus, and specifically preparing for his return after his absence. Historically, that had been the second coming, his return on the clouds to judge the world, and to judge the living and the dead. But I want to focus on another coming.

To that, instead of the normal language, let’s think about it this way: that Jesus had his first coming at his birth, his final coming at the end of the age, and the daily coming of Jesus into our lives here and now, today.

It was Bernard of Clairveau who most famously wrote about this, that in between the normal advents of Jesus, his appearance at his birth and return in majesty at the end of the age, we have the daily encounters with Jesus that you and I share in now, today.

Up to this point we have been talking about preparation for Jesus final appearance, his final advent so to speak. That’s what the focus of Advent has been for us in our readings, and that was historically the whole point of Advent – a time of looking ahead to Jesus’ eschatalogical return. Our readings and our collets that we inherited and continue to use during these weeks of our worship continue to speak of such things, and so this is a time of preparing our hearts and our lives for the day that Jesus is coming back.

Now, that’s assuming a lot theologically, which is especially crazy that many of us don’t necessarily believe that it’s going to happen. Not like that, anyway.

And getting into that will take us way too far into the weekends for our purpose this morning. But I want to think about the advent of Christ into our lives today, and to do so through the lens of the experience of John the Baptist.

Normally when we think about John, we think about the fiery preacher at the River Jordan, boldly proclaiming the coming of the one promised by God, calling the people to repent as he prepared the way for God’s chosen one to come and to find a people made ready for his arrival.

Even the message we had last week was bold. He was at the river baptizing, and when he saw some Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he calls them out as living unholy lives and not showing their trust in God through their actions and deeds.

Which, not a great way to build a following there guy, or to gain the trust and respect of the people. You might want to reconsider the message. I’m just saying.

So that’s John. Unperturbed in his message to prepare for the coming of God’s anointed one. That is, until he actually came and started to do what he did, and until John was imprisoned for calling out Herod for his misdeeds and stayed there without release. That’s when John broke, and he wavered in his faith.

That’s what we see today in our reading. A John who is rattled at what’s happened, and he doubts, and he sends messengers to Jesus to ask if he got it wrong, that Jesus is not actually the expected one. John sends his disciples to Jesus to ask him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

John preached a message of the coming of the Kingdom of God, and he was probably longing and hoping that God would use Jesus to make the world a better place, to end oppression and tyranny, and to restore goodness and righteousness to the people and to the nation. But that hadn’t happened. And not only had that not happened, but now he was in chains and locked up for the message he thought God had called him to bring.

He was someone who was trying to make the world a better place, and the world pushed back.

With Jesus, the kingdom seemingly wasn’t coming. Jesus was a gentle teacher and a worker of signs, not a king, not a judge, and John was unjustly suffering for his work at calling the people to repentance and toward faith in God.

See, however, how Jesus responds to John’s question if he is indeed the expected savior from God: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”

God’s arrival in our lives isn’t always where we expect it, and it doesn’t always come in the ways that we expect. In fact, it most often doesn’t happen at all in the ways that we hope for or expect. And those unmet expectations frequently prevent us from seeing the ways that God does show up in our lives each day.

Back to Bernad of Clairveau, who wrote “Because this [daily] advent [of Jesus] lies between the other two [advents], it is like a road on which we travel from the first coming to the last. In the first, Christ was our redemption; in the last, he will appear as our life; in this middle coming, he is our rest and consolation.

The advent of Jesus in our lives is like a path that we walk between Jesus’ first and final coming, between redemption and life, and on this path it is rest and consolation in the midst of struggle and adversity. That is deeply appropriate in our discussion about John, who needed reassurance and peace in knowing that he hadn’t gotten it wrong that Jesus was the long expected one that God would use to help the people. His expectations needed modification, but if he could do that then he would see the good and wonderful things that God was doing that he had lost sight of – sight was restored, people could walk again, and all people heard the good news that God loved them and cared for them and hadn’t forgotten them.

And what adversities do we face today? Thankfully, you and I generally don’t suffer more than a little social or emotional discomfort for our faith. No one is losing their lives for professing Christ, no one is having their houses burned, being exiled from their hometowns, as were those early followers of Jesus to whom Matthew wrote this story about John and Jesus’ encouragement to not lose heart. But sometimes it feels to me as though we, at times, are trying to make the world a better place, and the world is pushing back.

To this, I have three main thoughts of how we respond to our Gospel reading before us and the advents of Christ;
To continue to do what is right and remain faithful in the face of adversity and disappointment. It’s easy to lose heart and to give in when we feel that our good deeds are going unnoticed, or are actually causing pain or distress for us, but we should not lose heart. In our relationships, with spouses, with family, friends, or in our work to make the world a better place, the deed itself is worth it, and we should value persistence to that which is right and good.
To fight against religious intolerance and religious persecution in all forms. We are privileged that we face little more than social or emotional discomfort for our faith. Others truly have to worry about their well-being, their safety and their lives because of what they believe and their religious identity. No one should have to live in fear because of what they believe or who they are.
To continue to look for Jesus’ advent in our lives, each and every day, and to see God at work in the world around us to bring about God’s Kingdom, where “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”

Advent 4a
12/21/2025

Four Gospels, four different ways that they start their stories about the life of Jesus:
Mark: Nothing at all. The first we hear anything about Jesus he’s already probably an adult and comes to the Jordan River to be baptized by John.
Luke: the most famous, the long and extended version of the angels proclaiming the coming birth of John the Baptist to his father, then of the birth of Jesus to Mary, the census that makes them go to Bethlehem where there’s no room in the inn, the angels announce his birth to the shepherds, alleluia, etc.
John: the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and the darkness did not overcome it.
And today we have Matthew. After sharing a genealogy of Jesus’ ancestors, we have today’s reading where Mary is pregnant, Joseph decides to separate from her, and the angel tells him about the child to be named Jesus. That’s where we are today, with Joseph.
A couple of things, then, stand out. The first, and perhaps the most surprising to us who are likely deeply familiar with these readings, having heard them repeated to us in church in the Charlie Brown Christmas special. We know many of the ins and outs of the various stories that are woven together. But imagine, if you will, that you are hearing this for the first time, or only hearing the words of Matthew with no other backstory. It’s like a novel that you are reading for the first time with no spoilers about what’s about to happen:
I like that sentiment, of reading it like a novel. Too often we – or maybe too often I – have approached the readings like a textbook, like something to be studied. That can make the characters awfully flat, stripping them of their humanity and their emotions. That’s a good temptation here, because there’s a lot of details that are given quickly. But if we allow the characters to be human, with human thoughts and human needs and human emotions, their internal processes start to open up to us so that we can explore what it is that they’re going through and what they must have been thinking and feeling in the moment.
Let that happen for you, and reflect on Joseph and his internal process as the narrator tells us about him: “Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child.”
Stop there. They are engaged, but moral laws would not have permitted them to be intimate together. Not until their marriage ceremony, which would be the time that Mary would go to live with Joseph. But Mary’s pregnant. And the text is clear that it’s not Joseph’s child.
Matthew’s focus is on Joseph, and I want to stay there for the sake of today’s exploration. Luke gets into Mary’s story, but I want to focus on Joseph, because that’s what Matthew does.
So Joseph: His fiance is pregnant, and it’s not his, so what is one to naturally conclude? Logically, he’d presume that Mary has been unfaithful to him, and that she’s gotten herself pregnant with another man. Right? That’s the logical conclusion. That she’s been with another man while they were engaged.
Now the text adds that she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Was it Mary who was saying to Joseph and others that it was because of the Holy Spirit that she was pregnant, that she hadn’t been with someone else, that she hadn’t cheated on him, and that it was God who did this?
Would Joseph have believed her? I wonder, because that’s not a common thing to happen to women, that they become pregnant spontaneously because of the Spirit. In all of the Scriptures, there’s no one else of whom it’s said that they became pregnant solely because of God. Even Abraham and Sarah were said to have become parents because God gave them the ability to conceive in their old age. Would Joseph have believed her easily? Given his response, it seems that he didn’t believe that at all. He didn’t embrace that the was pregnant through the working of God, but he wanted to end their engagement.
But here’s where we see how special Joseph was. Matthew writes, “Being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, Joseph planned to dismiss her quietly.”
He didn’t want to continue their engagement, and he didn’t want to marry her, but he also wanted to protect her and to spare her from disgrace and any consequences that would follow from a single woman who became pregnant. As we see later in the Gospels, the penalty could be as severe as death. But Joseph, being a righteous man, wanted to spare her from that fate and from disgrace, so he planned to break up quietly. He would quietly go his way, and she could go hers.
And that’s when God intervenes for Joseph. That’s when the angel comes to him and stops him from doing what he intended to do.
It’s curious, though, that the angel didn’t come to Joseph earlier. The angel could have come to announce to Joseph that Mary was pregnant at the very beginning. It could have happened at the very start, pronouncing to Joseph what had happened, and spared Joseph the agony and turmoil of finding out that your fiance is pregnant and the internal struggle that followed, culminating in Joseph’s decision that yes, he was going to leave her, but to do so quietly to spare her what may follow. The angel could have come any number of times before it did.
We clearly don’t know why God waited until when he did to appear to Joseph.
Nor do we know about the times that God waits to show up in our lives. Why does God seem distant, when things are falling apart around us and we wonder where God is in the midst of the deafening silence from heaven. Why, when things are at their darkest, and we long for some light to break through into our lives, are the skies shut up against us? Why do we pray and pray, and there is no answer, and nothing changes?
The irony of it all is the unfathomable wonder that was happening unaware to Joseph right in front of him, and his turmoil and distress in the midst of it. As he was cycling through the range of emotions at hearing Mary was pregnant, and wrestling to decide what to do about it, the second person of the Godhead was taking on flesh before him. Perhaps the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of the Earth, of Christ being made man—or at least in the top three—was going on in his midst, and he didn’t even know it.
Taking my life experience as normative, which I know is a dangerous thing to do, to assume that my life is normal, but it has often been in the midst of the darkest, most difficult times, that the greatest good has happened to me. The most wonderful has often only come after the most terrible. After the hurt, anger, sorrow, loss, confusion, and so on, then healing and restoration come, and it is wonderful.
To lay out a model, at times my life has gone forward like this: I make a plan, something happens to get in the way of that plan, I pray to God, God has a different plan, my plan doesn’t happen the way I wanted it to. Live on as faithfully as I can and hopefully at some point recognize the good things that God has from his plan.
Joseph’s plan was likely to marry this wonderful woman, have kids – the normal way – and live happily ever after. Sounds like a good plan. He surely wasn’t planning to marry a woman pregnant with a child that wasn’t his own.
After Joseph has a vision, and the angel of the Lord confirms that the child is of the Holy Spirit, and that the boy is to be named Jesus, Joseph responds in faith and continues on with Mary, takes her to be his wife, and raises the boy Jesus as his own. His response in faith leads in part to the healing and restoration of the world.
Which ought to be our response. This is what we learn from Joseph. In the midst of the darkness, there is a light. That when we least expect it, God is here, ready to come to our aid. In the midst of pain, sorrow, fear, depression, addiction, sickness, and hopelessness, God is here. God is with us, and God will journey with us in the darkest parts of our lives. And perhaps in places where we least expect it, like a feeding trough in a small town in Palestine, God will come to us.
In the face of disease and loss and changes in abilities, God is with us.
In the face of job changes, and moves across the country, and changes in schools, God is with us.
In the face of fights with siblings, with parents, with children, God is with us.
But not only that, in the birth of a child, God is with us.
In new friendships, new church connections, and repaired relationships, God is with us.
In healed wounds and new knees, getting a ride to church on Sunday, and a casserole left on a front porch step, God is with us.
So have hope, because your salvation is nearer to you than when you first believed.
Together with you, my friends in Christ, may we…
Find hope in the nearness of God, even in the midst of our struggles and trials of life.
Set our hearts upon doing that which is good and compassionate in all we do.
Look with joyful anticipation to the coming of Christ into our lives.