Brought Back Together: A Sermon for Advent 2, Year C 2018

Text: Luke 3:1-6, Malachi 3:1-4

Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ who puts us together.

            What is hope? With a theme of Hope and Delight, it makes sense to ruminate on that for a little bit. I think the answer to what is hope is often, well, it’s stuff you hope for! Which really doesn’t help all that much. Is hope simply something like, I hope I get a new truck for Christmas? I and we too often mix hopes and wishes together. There are similarities, but I think hope has more to do with our situations. Wishes are for things like gifts or presents, but hope. Hope has to do with emotion, life, everything, not what might be under the tree. I wonder if wish is connect to want, and hope is connected to need. There are things we need, for survival, for life, for being, they are hopes, not wishes.

            We don’t wish for God to come to us in Christ, we hope that God does so, because we need Christ to be born for us.

            Our hope is rooted in that fact that the only thing that brings us up and out of the pits of despair that sin digs for us is God removing those sins, and God does so by being born in Christ, and living and dying, and rising, all for us. The hope is that God will do this all for us, the delight is that God has, is, and will always do so.

            Hope and Delight are fundamentally intertwined for us in Advent. We constantly hope for an event that has already occurred. We long for God to be with us, when God has always been with us. We desire love from a God who loved us from our first moments, and claimed us in the waters of Baptism. We hope for God to be with us, and delight that God has already been born for us.

            Advent then is not a time to prepare for Christ to come, he already has, Advent is a time to be aware of what Christ is doing within us through his coming to us two thousand years ago.

            We have two texts of preparation today, Malachi talking of the refiner’s fire, and fuller’s soap, and Luke giving the message of John the Baptist, “Prepare the way of theLord, … every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight.”

            Refining is the process of taking all the part that you don’t want and removing it. Through fire, eliminating that undesirable and keeping the good. Taking ore and making gold useful for jewelry. Fullering is taking raw wool from the sheep and cleaning and straightening the wool, removing the oils and dirts, so it’s can be used to make cloth.

            When I read these texts the thing I notice is that all the preparation is on God’s side. I notice that it’s not that John is telling us to go out and make the mountains and hills low, and make the crooked straight. All the work is going to be on God’s end, not ours. every mountain and hill shall be made low, … and the rough ways made smooth. God’s the one who will do the refining and the fullering. It’s all wot our work, but God’s. So, prepare the way of the Lord seems to be, God’s about to do stuff, brace yourself.

            We often hear this and think it means our destruction. That God’s going to come in and rip us apart. We get Santa mentality in mind, better be good, Santa’s watching. Like a ball coach yelling and shrieking at all the things that we have done wrong. We can get this image in our head, that’s Vikings coach Mike Zimmer, and he’s none to happy about something there. We get that in mind, that in removing sin from us, God is so angry, God will rip us apart.

            The thing is though, we are already ripped apart, sin has already done that. Sin is what destroys us. Sin is what rips us apart. Sin is letting people tell us that things like disabilities and mental illness, abuse and mistreatment mean we are worthless. That is what destroys us, when we let things of this world define us, and tear us every which way. God’s forgiveness is the undoing of that. It’s the refining. Removing that which is unwanted, and bring us back together. Rebuilding of our selves. God in forgiveness is not breaking us down, but putting us back together. We come to God not to be torn apart, but united.

            And in this process God see us as who we are, and works to make us who God wants us to be, as we are. God sees your imperfections, sees who you actually are. God doesn’t want you to be truly perfect, God wants you to be you. There’s the verse that says, be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect. It’s an incorrect translation of the Greek, it should be, be whole, as your father in heaven is whole. God sees you as you are. God sees that your disability, your mental illness, your fear, anxiety, are part of who you are, Sin can be removed, but these things are not sin. God sees that you are not unworthy of love, or unworthy to be an important part of God’s kingdom and world. God sees you as whole, just as you are. God sees you as an integral part of God’s world, exactly as you are, forgiven and restored by God.

I have a good friend, Pastor Lisa Heffernan, who’s pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Chamberlain, SD. Lisa has Spina Bifida, which means she’s been in a wheel chair her whole life. She just recently wrote about this, as Monday of this week was the International Day of Persons With Disabilities. She starts by talking about people who tell her, I don’t see your wheelchair. She doesn’t like when people say that, her understanding is that that wheelchair is part of who she is. She wouldn’t be the same person without it. She’s not unwhole or incomplete or imperfect because she’s in a wheelchair. She is living into exactly who God wants her to be as a person who uses a wheelchair.

            A quote from her, “I am a whole person. All people with disabilities are “whole.” Our realities don’t match up with a world that looks to ridiculous standards of beauty, wealth, physical and mental perfection. And that’s okay. People with disabilities have the same range of emotions, desires, and aspirations as those without them.”

I close with this, as God remakes us, God doesn’t say that part of who we are, things like our disabilities, our fears, anxieties, worries, are wrong. God says those things are part of what makes you you, and you, as you are, are capable and needed to go out.

            There is a Japanese art, called Kintsugi,  where they take broken dishes or bowls and repair them using gold. In taking this gold, the seeming flaws, and perceived imperfections are accented and brought to wonderful beauty. Those elements are what make that bowl distinct and different. Those elements are what make that bowl, what make you, someone with a distinct background and set of experiences.

People of God, through your beautiful distinctions, you are the answer to someone’s hope in this world. Because you know the pits of despair they find themselves in. You are part of bringing the delight that “God is with us” to the world. Through your beautiful distinct backgrounds, you are capable and needed to reach out and bring love, welcome, and comfort, to those who don’t feel whole. I can’t reach the same people that you do, because I don’t have the same experiences you do. God makes us distinct so that this world is one of diversity and beauty, where everyone can find a place where they matter, can find wholeness, where they can find completeness, where they can find comfort in the arms of their God.