You ve heard it said that big gifts come in small packages. The prophet Micah seems to think so, too. According to him, the

Transcription

1 3 rd Sunday in Advent, Year C, 12/13/2015, Greeneville, Tennessee 1 You ve heard it said that big gifts come in small packages. The prophet Micah seems to think so, too. According to him, the great big gift of the Messiah, the one to restore Israel and heal the world, was coming in the small package of Bethlehem. There wasn t much to Bethlehem, but in her streets, Christ was born. Since we live in a small town, Micah makes us feel good. We re not Brussels or Washington, D.C. We re not even Nashville. But we re just the kind of place God might show up with a big gift to give. I like what James Limburg said regarding this text, When God is about to do something great, human estimates of size, status, power and influence are completely irrelevant. In fact, God often chooses the last and the least to accomplish his purposes. So, as we take the bow off the tiny town of Greeneville, and lift the lid this Christmas, we might find a diamond inside. Our little town is just the kind of place God would choose to introduce the Savior to the world. But there s something peculiar about God s gift, if we follow Micah closely. The giver of it and the receiver of it are the same. Before the baby lying in the manger is a gift to us, he s God s gift to God. You and I will sit around the tree in a few weeks and give gifts to each other, Mom to Dad, brother to sister. But God gives the greatest gift first to himself.

2 3 rd Sunday in Advent, Year C, 12/13/2015, Greeneville, Tennessee 2 I wonder if I ve seen something like this happen in my extended family. The relative shall remain nameless. He loves all of the gifts on Christmas morning from his wife. But that s because he went shopping back in October, picked them out himself, and told her exactly where to find them. And since all the gifts were bought with the same checking account, From me, for me. Merry Christmas! Since we assume the Messiah ought to be for us ( for unto us a child is born, right?), it might appear that God is being selfcentered here, working the holiday system for his own benefit. But of course that interpretation totally misreads the text. When God says of little Bethlehem, from you shall come forth for me one who will rule Israel., God simply means the Messiah will work for God before he works for us. He will rule as God intends for him to rule instead of serving as our proxy. He will execute God s plan, not necessarily ours. He will use God s methods, which may or may not correspond with what we think works best. Given our propensity to confuse our will with God s will, this is exactly what we need a Savior who knows the difference between our program and God s vision for the world, a gift that is both from God and ultimately for God. If you ll notice, once he descended to our world, Jesus, our Messiah, didn t exactly meet the expectations of his constituents.

3 3 rd Sunday in Advent, Year C, 12/13/2015, Greeneville, Tennessee 3 They were expecting something like a war lord, a throwback to King David, who would vanquish the oppressors and put Israel on the map again. Instead, they received a savior who forsook violence. For certain, Jesus went to war. I don t know any other way to put it. He faced off against those forces that destroy us, divide us and overtake us from the inside out. Every day he woke up to do battle, and he still has the scars to prove it. But not once not for a day, an hour or a second cause physical harm to another person. His conflict wasn t with flesh and blood, but with the unseen powers behind human craziness. To use violence only would play into the hands of those powers. So Jesus never pointed a sword at anyone in spite of the many good chances he had to do so. He confronted. He challenged. He got in people s faces about their misuse of power, mostly religious leaders like me. But his greatest weapon was his refusal to resort to those tactics that were so easily used against him. He showed another way. And so we call him Prince of Peace. We don t mean Jesus was a kind fellow who helped people calm down, nice but a little wimpy. Read any of the gospels, then try to call Jesus wimpy. We mean he didn t impose his will on others. Peace on earth was his goal, nonviolence was his method, and from all we can tell, God was pleased.

4 3 rd Sunday in Advent, Year C, 12/13/2015, Greeneville, Tennessee 4 If you re like me, the first question that pops up into your head when confronted with God s Prince of Peace is, If Jesus rejected violence in his campaign, should we? Christian tradition has held that on rare occasions violence is permissible, especially when it comes to protecting a neighbor because we still live in a fallen world where sometimes we must choose between the lesser of two evils. But then, to be completely honest, I have to ask another question, which is, Why am I so eager to learn if there are exceptions to the rule? And the only answer I can come up with for myself is that I must count on violence in some way. I feel like I need it and can t imagine a world without it. But God can and God did and God brought that world to us in Christ, which is the Greek word for Messiah. Jesus won by the way. Sin and evil locked him in a grave and threw away the keys. But it didn t matter. Three days later, the Prince of Peace was up and at em again, wooing his disciples to believe in his victory. And from there he ascended into heaven, where he reigns at God s right hand. So the gift from God, who lived for God, has looped back to God, encircling the whole creation in the tethers of God s love. And finally nothing in the creation will be able to outlast his saving grace. He will stand as a shepherd and feed not only the scattered children of Israel, but every family of the earth. He shall be the one of peace. All this from a tiny baby, who turned out to

5 3 rd Sunday in Advent, Year C, 12/13/2015, Greeneville, Tennessee 5 be a sparkling diamond wrapped in a little town a lot like Greeneville. I wish the reign of God would hurry up and get here. It s tough to proclaim the peace of Christ, and then wait year and year for its completion. Because the God s reign remains hidden, even if real, Christians often make a couple of mistakes, hoping to relieve the tension between the promise and the present age. Some good, loving Christian people try to force the kingdom onto the world. They can be on the left or on the right. But whatever side they are on, they hope to get their guy or gal elected president and pass all the right laws to make this world what it ought to be. Unfortunately, we don t have a very good track record of trying to impose God s reign through the power of government. From Emperor Constantine to 1776, when the church tried to shape the state in its image, it often worked the other way around, and the church became just as ruthless and power hungry as the culture we hoped to reform. So while we hope persons of faith will be elected to serve in government, and while we need not be shy in advocating for Christian concerns in the public sphere, we admit our limits and stay away from the dangerous illusion that if we can gain enough political power, we can force the world to look just like we want it.

6 3 rd Sunday in Advent, Year C, 12/13/2015, Greeneville, Tennessee 6 Another way that good, smart, faithful Christian people deal with the lag time of peace, is to privatize the faith. Instead of speaking of Christ s universal reign, we speak of him reigning in our hearts. The transaction is personal at the level of the soul. But there his reign ends until we all get to heaven. Christ does bring peace to the deepest places of discord within us. But the church has always known that God has broader interests. God seeks to bring peace to every sphere of his creation: between individuals and God for sure, but also between all people and God, among all nations, from one end of the cosmos to the other. Peace everywhere, which is to say wholeness, well-being and harmony among all things. Anything less limits God s redemptive reach across the creation. I guess we have to learn to live with the tension between a Christ who brings peace and a world that isn t there, yet. We don t limit peace to a private affair, nor do we try to impose his reign with all the force we can muster. Instead, we turn ourselves over to the prince, and let him do with us what he will. As we wait for his reign to reach its completion, we become peace under his watchful care. When problems arise, we seek solutions. When it becomes hard to listen to each other, we listen even harder. When we disagree, we speak our mind, but we don t push. We know how to

7 3 rd Sunday in Advent, Year C, 12/13/2015, Greeneville, Tennessee 7 say, I m sorry, and I forgive you. Instead of figuring who s to blame when something goes haywire, we wonder how we can help. Like him, we forsake violence toward each other, whether that violence is physical, verbal or social. We establish a community where wholeness and well-being are the aim of our life together. And then we carry that peace with us toward all our relationships: into our households, into board rooms, to the places where we do business and in the business we do. That way, when we proclaim him, people will look at our peace bearing lives and say, I see. We were able to tour the Vatican on our trip to Italy this past summer. And while our lunch with the pope had to be canceled we were just too busy our tour guide mentioned that the St. Francis was about to declare 2016 as a Year of Jubilee, a year in which the theme will be God s mercy for sinners instead of judgmentalism. He s supposed to declare a Jubilee every 50 years, I think. It hasn t been nearly that long since the last Jubilee year, but you know Francis. He said, Why wait? And then he walked through the holy doors of St. Peter s Basilica to get the ball rolling. Why wait before we become peace, emphasis on God s mercy? We can t make peace happen everywhere, but instead of reducing peace to a private affair, as a congregation, we can live under the reign of Christ now: working for God s good will among us and around us. If we pull this off, if we manage to become an

8 3 rd Sunday in Advent, Year C, 12/13/2015, Greeneville, Tennessee 8 outpost of peace in a violent world, then we ll be a big gift as well in the small package of our life together, one tiny way through which God introduces his Savior to the world. Can you think of a higher calling?