Tender Compassion

Advent 2 Prayer of the Day and readings (with some slight notation for sermon fodder):

Stir up our hearts, Lord God, to prepare the way of your only Son. By his coming give to all the people of the world knowledge of your salvation; through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Malachi 3:1-4

See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight - indeed, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the LORD in righteousness. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD as in the days of old and as in former years.

-in response to “he shall purify”:

Luke 1:68-79

Blessed are you, Lord, the God of Israel, you have come to your people and set them free. You have raised up for us a mighty Savior, born of the house of your servant David. Through your holy prophets, you promised of old to save us from our enemies, from the hands of all who hate us, to show mercy to our forebears, and to remember your holy covenant. This was the oath you swore to our father Abraham: to set us free from the hands of our enemies, free to worship you without fear, holy and righteous before you, all the days of our life. And you, child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare the way, to give God’s people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins. In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Philippians 1:3-11

I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your community (κοινωνια) in the gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because you hold me in your heart, for all of you sharing community (συγκοινωνος) in God’s grace with me, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus. And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.

Luke 3:1-6

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Iturea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abileen, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to… John (!) son of Zechariah (!!) in the wilderness (!!!). He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”

*******

If there is anything the world needs now more than ever it is God’s tender compassion. We might look at the world around us and pray instead for God’s fire and wrath to wipe the world clean, but the promise of Zechariah’s song, which we sang today after the first lesson in the place of our Psalm, reads in the Scripture text: “In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us.” Or, in the poetic license of Carl P. Daw, Jr., the hymn writer, “Then shall God’s mercy from on high shine forth and never cease to drive away the gloom of death and lead us into peace.” It was the third verse of our Psalm hymn this morning, sung in response to the prophet Malachi’s words calling God a “refiner’s fire” who shall refine us like gold and silver. It’s that fire we are most accustomed to when we think on God’s judgment and the preaching of crazy John the Baptist out in the wilderness dunking every sinner who came too close to him. 

Strange combination of images, that. Fire and water. Judgment and mercy. Bring down the mountains and fill up the valleys. Or in the words of a snarky little bumper sticker: Jesus is coming, look busy.

I wonder sometimes at how preparing the way of the Lord has been co-opted by radicals, and similarly how that radical streak tempts me at times. For example, the protesters outside of Planned Parenthood clinics can be very intimidating. Some folks hand around little cartoon tracts with the question: “If you die today, do you know where you’ll go?” Now we’ve got a resurgence of the “get rid of the Muslims for your own safety,” kind of talk, the same old rhetoric different group. …If there is any way to inspire fear and manipulate people, we can tie it into the second coming and justify just about any behavior. Hey, I wouldn’t mind a little radical preparing the way of the Lord by opening every guest room and vacation home for Syrian Refugees, but I don’t have that kind of power. Nor should I. If I were to paint a picture of Jesus, he would look very much like my ideals in action, which would be way off the mark from reality.

Which is why we need the balance, the leveling of the playing field, the judgment AND mercy. John the Baptist preached repentance as much for me as for the person diametrically opposed to me. As much, say, for Donald Trump as for Bernie Sanders. As Paul writes to the Romans: “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” But as he writes to the Philippians: “I am confident that God who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”

Did you hear that in this morning’s reading of Paul’s letter? We are in a season of preparing for the day of Jesus Christ, and STILL it is God who will bring everything good in us to its fulfillment when that day comes. Not us. Paul doesn’t say to the Philippians “I am confident you will never be a disappointment,” or “I am confident you will never fail.” We fail one another all the time. We fail and we disappoint and we make willfully ignorant choices and we strike out in fear against the demons of our imaginations while feeding the actual evils all around and within our own selves. We need that promised refiner’s fire to make all things new again, to burn away the hate and contempt and distrust, and the cleansing, healing waters of baptism to refresh and revive us again and again as God continues to make us new. 

This isn’t something reserved for those who have proved themselves ‘good enough,’ but it is surprising and wild and uncontainable. Consider John the Baptist himself, for a moment: his mother and father were old and childless, despite their faithfulness, and it took an act of God for Elisabeth to get pregnant past her childbearing years. His Father, Zechariah, was struck mute for the nine months of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, and the first words out of his mouth after John was born are the source of the hymn we sang between readings this morning, the “Blessed be the God of Israel who comes to set us free!" Then John grows up and moves into the wilderness, where he wears camel hair and eats bugs dipped in honey. He’s on the outskirts of the outskirts. So our Gospel reading this morning picks up with him in this great big moment of history: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius…” and so on and so forth. Luke’s Gospel names all kinds of big important powerful people, all of whom have the authority and political backing to make big things happen, and the word of God comes to a scraggly little social outcast prophet living in the wild. He’s completely uncivilized, ranting about the coming of the Lord’s anointed (and we’ll hear more about that next week), and the word of God comes to him, of all people. 

Not only is John the farthest thing from an important person, those who come to hear him preach are from all over the place, too. Most of them don’t have any power, either. I mean, there’s Herod, who finds him more a curiosity than anything, but imagine God bringing a word, a promise, good news, to Chatham, by way of a high school dropout who sleeps in a trash heap behind an abandoned train station. Who would listen to her and believe what she had to say? Who would just disregard her entirely because she didn’t have the proper education and hadn’t taken a bath in months?

But this is where the word of God shows up. And it’s going to get a bit fire and brimstone in a week or so, but even that won’t be what we expect. Right now it’s a word of compassion, of grace, of forgiveness, because you can’t preach repentance without promising forgiveness. It’s a word that “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”   That promise - that “those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death” will have the light of life shine on them - that’s the promise for “all flesh,” because we are all mortal, we are all broken, we are all so fallen short…. we might even all be John the Baptist, outliers in some way or other that we’re not very honest about, not very proud of. Nevertheless, God comes in this way, to this place, in this darkness and shadow, to reveal salvation for not just Christians, not just Americans, not just the middle class or the rich, not just celebrities, not just those who have a picture-perfect family and the most beautiful home, but for ALL flesh. No matter where we are from, what we are running from, what we are hiding, what we are afraid of, God comes into these depths, walks out in the open wastelands of our wilderness, begins that good work IN US, and will bring it to full completion in the end, winding us together into a community of shared fellowship in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

So prepare the way of the Lord. Compassion is coming. Compassion is here already. Compassion stronger than guns, deeper than fear, more lasting than our darkest days. Compassion that will never abandon us. Now let the final word, the benediction, be a return to Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.” This is the promise. Overflowing love, for the glory and praise of God. Amen.