Advent Dreams

“Imagining a new world about to begin is what Advent and Christmas

is all about.”

Advent Dreams

A Sermon by Jeffrey K. Krehbiel

Fourth Sunday of Advent

December 21, 2008

Text: Luke 1:26-45

And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior...

Who has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” (vs. 46-47, 52-53)

Church Of the Pilgrims

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Washington, DC 20037

(202) 387-6612

www.ChurchOfThePilgrims.org

T here is nothing quite like holding a newborn to put you in the Christmas spirit. It was my great pastoral privilege on Thursday to visit Shera Jenne in the hospital and hold her new baby girl, Frances, and then the next day, to visit Erin Sharpe at her home and cuddle her month-old daughter, Iona (isn’t that a wonderful name for a baby girl!). Being in the presence of their fragile little lives has a way of focusing the mind. It made me wonder just what sort of world these two precious infants will inherit.

It made me think of the story of Simeon and Anna in the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke, a story that we won’t hear read until next Sunday. After Jesus is born, Mary and Joseph take him to the temple in Jerusalem in order to make the appropriate rituals following the birth of a child. Simeon and Anna are in the temple. Both are elderly, righteous, and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel. When they see Jesus, they announce that God’s salvation is at hand. Then, as often happens in Luke’s Nativity story, Simeon breaks into song. We know it by the title Nunc Dimittis, from the first two words of the song’s Latin translation. The song has deep resonance with the Old Testament, especially the prophets, and scholars believe that it may have been an early Christian hymn that Luke has place on the lips of Simeon:

“Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word;

for my eyes have seen your salvation,

which you have prepared

in the presence of all peoples,

a light for revelation to the Gentiles

and for glory to your people Israel.”

Simeon has been waiting for this moment his whole life. He had been given a vision by the Holy Spirit that he would not die until he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. In the same way, Anna, a widow of eighty-four years, worshiped in the temple night and day, fasting and praying. When she saw Jesus, she began to praise God and encourage all those who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.

I magining a new world about to begin is what Advent and Christmas is all about. You’ll have to forgive me if I count myself among those who are suffering from Rick Warren fatigue. As you may know, the anti-gay mega-church pastor has been invited by Obama to give the invocation at his inauguration. I am very glad that he is now urging his church to be involved in such things as poverty and AIDS in Africa, but I find it absolutely astounding that it took him forty years to figure out that the Christian faith has something to do with social justice. I honestly can’t understand how anyone can get through the first two chapters of the Gospel of Luke without recognizing that Jesus’ birth is not primarily about miracles like the Virgin Birth but about the transformation of the world. Jesus isn’t even born when Mary sings in the Magnificat,

“God has scattered the proud

in the thoughts of their hearts.

God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

God has filled the hungry

with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.”

It is in Jesus’ very first sermon in his hometown of Nazareth that Jesus quotes from the prophet Isaiah to define his own ministry:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.

God has sent me to proclaim

release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free.”

And it is in the Gospel of Matthew, a writer ostensibly less concerned about poverty because he has Jesus say such things as “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” instead of “Blessed are the poor,” that Jesus tells the parable of the Last Judgment where the king separates the sheep from the goats according whether or not they fed the hungry, clothed the neighbor, and welcomed the stranger. How anyone could miss that is beyond me.

What Simeon and Anna foretold is that in Jesus they saw the fulfillment of Isaiah’s hopes and dreams. Or, more accurately, the hopes and dreams of God that Isaiah proclaimed. What the early Christians believed and taught and lived is that in Jesus Christ a new world was at hand.

I t’s probably a bit too early to see a silver lining in our current economic crisis, but at the very least it helps us to define exactly what sort of world we believe in, what sort of world we dream of, what sort of world we are struggling for. For the better part of my adult life people have been insisting that liberal-types like me who care about the poor are just horribly naive and just don’t understand how the world works, so that while it might seem obscene to pay CEO hundreds of millions of dollars a year when the minimum wage is under six dollars, that’s how the economy works, and so it is in the end good for the poor too; and while it might seem to warp our values to convince everyone to drive big SUV’s and want humongous flat-screen TV’s in their living rooms, that’s how the economy works, and so in the end that too is good for the poor; and while it might seem shortsighted to burn carbon gases at environmentally unsustainable rates, that’s how the economy works, and so we need to think about whether we care for the poor or we care about the trees, because you can’t care about both; and that distributing credit cards like monopoly money and letting people run up tens of thousands of dollars in debt might seem like a recipe for economic disaster, that’s only because we don’t really understand how credit markets work; and while to the uninformed naif allowing poor people to take out mortgages with no down payment and no real proof of income seems neither wise nor charitable to the poor, they were only doing it because advocates for the poor like us were insisting on it, and the fact the mortgage brokers were making commission on these foolhardy loans had nothing to do with it.

(And I can’t help but notice that the very same people, after bailing out the financial industry with virtually no strings attached, are now making the same argument that the problem with the American auto industry is that union workers make too much money, and it has nothing to do with the fact that people prefer Japanese cars which, by the way, cost more than American cars, not less.)

Suffice it to say, that’s just not the world I believe in. In Advent we are invited to dream of a new world. At the core of the gospel is the call to announce to the world that in Jesus Christ another world is on the way. The late Jesuit writer Henri Nouwen put it this way: “You are a Christian only so long as you constantly pose critical questions to the society you live in ... so long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo and keep saying that a new world is yet to come.”

That’s what Mary said when she found she was with child: A new world is yet to come. That’s what John the Baptist said from his perch in the wilderness: A new world is yet to come. That’s what Anna and Simeon said when they laid their eyes on the baby Jesus: A new world is yet to come. That’s what Jesus said when he began his ministry: In my presence, a new world is now at hand.

N o wonder the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke are so suffused with joy. As Marcus Borg and John Domminic Crossan point out, the very names we have given the famous hymns in the Gospel of Luke express this joy: the Magnificat, the Benedictus, the Nunc Dimittis. Mary sings, “I magnify God because of what God is doing in me.” Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, sings, “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel who has visited and redeemed God’s people.” Simeon sings, “Now I can depart in peace for I have seen your salvation.” And when the angels appear to the shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night, the angelic host announces, “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.”

This is what our hymns proclaim as well:

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!

Let earth receive her King! ✞