This is what Isaiah, Amoz’s son, saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. 2 In the days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house will be the highest of the mountains. It will be lifted above the hills; peoples will stream to it. 3 Many nations will go and say, “Come, let’s go up to the Lord’s mountain, to the house of Jacob’s God so that he may teach us his ways and we may walk in God’s paths.” Instruction will come from Zion; the Lord’s word from Jerusalem. 4 God will judge between the nations, and settle disputes of mighty nations. Then they will beat their swords into iron plows and their spears into pruning tools. Nation will not take up sword against nation; they will no longer learn how to make war. 5 Come, house of Jacob, let’s walk by the Lord’s light. (Common English Bible)
“A Place at the Table: An Advent in
Solidarity With the Poor,” Week Three
Because
for the past few years I have been dedicated to purchasing at least some of my
family’s Christmas presents from humanitarian vendors, I now am blessed with an
abundance of catalogs every holiday season—seriously…buy a (in Elmer Fudd
voice) wascally wabbit for one family, and you get mail for years
afterwards. And, like clockwork, the
catalogs arrived this year from WorldVision, Heifer International, and other
amazing organizations that do incredible work.
And
they recently fine-tuned their sales pitch to know exactly what would get my
attention: my ancestral homeland of Armenia, because right there on page five
was the headline “Heifers Help Families in Armenia Escape Hunger.”
You
know the pictures your family takes of you on Christmas day? The ones of you sitting next to the tree,
surrounded by presents, and grinning toothily like a maniac? Imagine instead of getting to pose next to
your new DVD player or pair of sneakers, you are posing next to…well, a
cow. A cow is your gift for Christmas
this year, and it isn’t because you wanted one, it is because you needed one
for your livelihood because you live on $2 a day.
And
I began to realize something, flipping through those pages after pausing, and
looking at the picture of this young man with the same skin complexion, the
same facial structure, as me…that what I was being asked to give here were not
gifts, but tools. Tools for life, tools
for provision, tools that had nothing to do with the luxury of being able to
ask for what you want for Christmas, and everything to do with the necessity of
having to ask for what you so desperately need.
And as we focus so much on buying gifts everybody else wants, we lose
sight of the reality that we are giving gifts to celebrate the arrival of that
which we so desperately need: a Savior.
This
liturgical season—called Advent—is relatively short, only four weeks long, and
unique in that it is largely a waiting game as we count down the days to
Christmas (which, let’s be honest, how many of us started doing after
Halloween?). Even though Advent is a
time of festiveness in our culture, with Christmas carols on the radio station
and gingerbread this and peppermint mocha that, Advent actually began as a
penitential season—a season in which we were meant to follow the exhortation of
John the Baptist as he foretold Christ, telling us to repent and believe in the
coming Messiah. One of the most
prominent spiritual disciplines of penitence is fasting, and so for this
Advent, I chose a source of sermon series material you may be familiar
with. If you remember my “Advent
Conspiracy” sermon series two years ago, about trying to find Christ within the
crass consumerism of Christmas, well, one of the Advent Conspiracy authors,
Pastor Chris Seay of Ecclesia in Houston Texas, has written a sequel called “A
Place at the Table,” in which he details fasting as a spiritual
discipline. Though the book is actually
written for Lent, the season when we are supposed to give something meaningful
up, I have shanghaied it for Advent because I think that the holiday season is
probably when our charitable goodwill is often on the front burner, and I
wanted to be able to speak to that here.
This week, we turn to the chapter of Pastor Chris’s book entitled “Tools,”
in which he writes in part:
Christianity is filled with truths that
seem so paradoxical on the surface: the last will be first, we must die in
order to live, in weakness we are made strong, the poor and the persecuted will
be blessed. How can these things be?
I enjoy the feeling of strength, power,
and security—not insecurity, vulnerability, and frailty. I like having enough money in my account to
cover my bills and groceries for months to come. But the truth is, when I am satisfied with my
life and provisions each day, when I am not striving for a Ferrari or any
version of my own personal extravagance, I am better off…
The world’s economy drives people by
fear. God’s way is to bring people
comfort in grace and love. May we lay
down our desires and seek the heart of God.
When we begin to panic, when discomfort surfaces, may we turn to our
Savior… (from
the book’s conclusion) at the end of the
day, our greatest calling is to love God and to love our neighbor. My greatest struggle is to take myself and my
selfish desires and ambitions out of the way and to replace those selfish
desires with the desires of God.
If
I am honest with myself—and with all of you—I have come to think that
selfishness and selfish desires are the root of most kinds of evil in the
world. I have to think it is why Jesus
tells us that the entirety of the law and the prophets hangs upon loving God
and loving our neighbor as ourselves. We
are more than happy to look out for number one, and woe be to the person who
suggests otherwise: after all, Jesus did precisely that and we wound up killing
Him for it.
And
there are so, so many ways that we have come up with to tell ourselves that
being selfish is okay. We say that the
world is best served by everyone pursuing their own best interests, or that
wanting more for ourselves is what produces excellence. And Isaiah tells us that cannot be true.
It
cannot be true because Isaiah tells us that God is calling us to change the
tools we equip ourselves with—and not just change them out for new tools, but
to take the old, inadequate, and destructive tools and make them into something
new. In other words, we cannot just get
new plows and new pruning hooks, no, we are supposed to beat our existing
swords and spears into those plows and pruning hooks.
How
inefficient of God to expect us to do that.
Doesn’t God know that we can just go out to Home Depot and buy new
tools, right off the shelf? Hell, we can
even buy those new tools, wrap them up with a bow, and stick them under the
Christmas tree if that will make God happy.
But the thing is…I am not so sure that it will.
Think
of yourselves—and I do not, do not, do not mean in the selfish sense. Consider yourselves. Consider humanity. We are flawed. Broken.
Fragile. Imperfect. Do you think that maybe, just maybe, God the
creator of all things, maker of heaven and earth, all that is seen and unseen,
would not want to do the exact same thing with us, to look at our own
limitations and decide that He wanted a new people and could just pick a new
people off the shelf, fashion them with brand-new, state-of-the-art materials,
and be more satisfied with them than with us?
Sometimes,
I do. I wonder why God hasn’t yet. Because sometimes, we just plain suck.
And
here is the whole point of the Christmas story, the entire reason for the
season, that I can boil down into a single sentence: God does create something
new, but that something new isn’t just us, it’s also Him. God sends us something new, a baby boy who is
to be called Jesus.
God
sees our problems and our screw-ups and our messes, God sees the terrible
things that we are capable of doing to each other, but compared to way back in
the primeval past, when He might be content with sending a flood or a curse,
God instead sends His Son, the Prince of Peace, to make us into new creations.
We
are the swords and spears that God is trying to beat into plowshares and
pruning hooks. We are God’s own tools;
battered and broken we might be, but God still is finding new uses for us. God
accomplishes this by making Himself into something new, that’s the miracle of
it all. By making something new Himself,
He in turn can make us into new tools and creations as well.
Like
any tool, though, the making of us as God’s vessels and instruments takes
time. Forged in fire, cooled in water, shaped
and molded by metal, we live our lives with our faces in the fire and our
bodies in the cold. We live exposed and
vulnerable to so much that the world puts in front of us, from financial
insecurity and homelessness to malnourishment and indebtedness, but in the
midst of all these poverties, God is still hard at work, fashioning us again
and again and again.
And
it isn’t just us. It isn’t just what we
would think of as the “elect,” whatever that means. It’s all of us. Isaiah is prophesying of a world in which “all
the nations shall stream” to the Lord’s house…or the Lord’s forge, as it were,
to be made and remade again and again and again.
Yet,
as with all pilgrim journeys, we cannot make it into the Lord’s House merely by
staying inside our comfort zones. The
pilgrims of old risked life and livelihood to make it to whichever holy site
they were journeying. That dimension is
lost for me today, at least in a physical sense. I do not fear being beaten by
highwaymen on my daily commute. Like
Pastor Chris, I do not fear, as those receiving the tools of life from
humanitarian Christmas catalogs do, living on that edge.
But
what I do fear is a world that cannot, will not, shall not take this vision of
Isaiah seriously. I fear a world in
which the reverse happens, where people decide to run from God, to shut their ears to his words, to
decide to beat their plowshares and pruning hooks into swords and spears, to
lift up those ill-gotten weapons once more, to learn how to make war, to walk
not in the light of the Lord but in the darkness of the evils of this world
that we inhabit.
And
I know that fear is in many ways the opposite of faith, and that I am supposed
to be faithful and to call you to faith as well. I know that.
But my hope is that by confessing to you my own fear, by showing you the
poverty that exists within my own soul, you might feel a little bit more ready
and willing to examine yourselves, to see where in your life you are poor, and
to pray to God to meet you there. Because God has already shown a willingness to
meet you where you are, for He already did it once, over 2,000 years ago, in a
tiny town called Bethlehem.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
December
15, 2013
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