Second Sunday of Advent 2005

Isaiah 40:1-11
2 Peter 3:8-15a, 18
Mark 1:1-8

As I prepared for this week, the passage from 2 Peter wouldn’t leave me. I tried – after all, it’s 2 Peter. I love Isaiah 40 – it is one of the most beautiful passages in Scriptures. The Gospel reading focuses on John the Baptist. It speaks of Jesus’ coming to baptize with the Holy Spirit – a very important phrase within the tradition of the Church of the Nazarene. But I couldn’t get away from 2 Peter. I’d like to begin there, move to the Gospel, so that we can hear the Word of God in Isaiah 40 this morning. But let’s begin with the 2 Peter passage.

The passage speaks of our hope – a new heavens, a new earth, where justice is at home.

End times speculation is rampant within certain segments of American Christianity. People support wars in the Middle East, even the practical elimination of Christians from the land where Jesus walked, on the basis of new readings of the bible outside the tradition of the church, the saints who’ve gone before.

The text speaks of Christ’s coming like a thief in the night – by definition, unpredictable. The texts speaks of a melting, a dissolving of the elements – language taken from popular philosophy of the time for a cataclysmic ending to the world. The language describes the indescribable – the culmination of all things, a rift in time that lies ahead, a time not brought about by human efforts, but by God, as creation, a new heavens, a new earth that finds its true life in God; a new heavens that finds its true being in God. In advent we look forward to that which is absolutely future, and thus, utterly unpredictable, utterly free because it is absolutely in God.

The text speaks of a future irruption of a world where justice is at home. On the basis of the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ, we boldly proclaim the coming irruption of justice into the world where justice really is at home. You know, kick off your shoes, put on the shorts, wrap up in a blanket at home. In the in-coming age, God will bring forth the world as it really is in God. Justice does not come slowly through human effort -- state run economies, free market global capitalism, United Nation’s policy or First World Colonialism. It will come only from God and in God.

2 Peter speaks of our hope: in a rift in history, a rift already seen in the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, when God will bring forth a creation where justice is at home.

"And everything will be revealed." Justice emerges as the revelation of what really is. The real truth, goodness, and beauty of all things become evident. No more Fox News, no more reporting on weapons of mass destruction by the New York Times or the Washington Post. No more personal arguments over whose interpretation really describes reality. All these things will be dissolved. Everything will be revealed. Good news! Yet it raises a certain question: What sort of persons ought we to be?

The call of the Scripture becomes clear: in light of the Advent of our Lord, we are called to holiness and godliness.

As soon as we mention God bringing forth justice, a massive cultural gap arises within the sanctuary. We live in a world that doesn’t even know how to talk about justice. Shoot, I don’t know how to speak of justice. The whole concept of justice seems impossible to me, an impossible possibility that even now breaks into our world only by the gift of the Spirit in glimpses of what is to come, like in the gaze of an infant into the face of her mother, even as the mother smiles back. I see it, but before I can name it, comprehend it, put it into words, it seems gone. I just don’t know justice.

But this I do know. A Christian account of justice differs from what our modern society teaches us. Unlike the New Testament, we’ve learned that there is justice on one side, a public side, and righteousness on another, a private side. We can’t even speak of justice any more; we have to speak of social justice, the formulation of policy the right way for the society in the right way. Righteousness is private, personal, basically being nice, upholding the main moral tenets of society: don’t cheat, tell the truth, don’t make waves, drink and have sex responsibly, pay your taxes, support the troops, and don’t use coarse language. By dividing righteousness from justice, the private from the public, by thinking that the world can ever be just without just people, and that it is possible to have just people without a society committed to justice, we will only contribute to the domination of sin in the world and in our lives.

We won’t be the sort of people that we ought to be in light of God’s coming, the advent of justice in the advent of Christ by centering our lives on social justice or personal righteousness. The text uses different words to speak of who we ought to be to prepare for the coming: holiness and godliness. How old fashioned! How backward! I don’t know. These terms presuppose that the problem with the world today, the problem of our lives, is sin, the absence of holiness, the absent of godliness. Injustice is itself sin-ful – full of the nothingness that is the lessening of God’s creation. And yes, sin makes its nothingness evident. Sin duplicates its perversion by persons who seek to profit from the lack, like a pimp profits from the perversion of sex through controlling the body of a prostitute, through arranging relationships to support the perversion. We as followers of Jesus Christ cannot support a lack, the nothing. But we have to recognize, as moral, as righteous, as committed to justice, to righteousness that we are, that the nothingness that is sin cuts through our lives. We don’t see justice fully. We don’t see humanity fully except through Jesus Christ, Incarnate and Coming. To commit to justice, to commit to righteousness, without this commitment traveling through and staying within Jesus Christ will lead to being coopted by the very nothing that sucks out the goodness of the creation that God has brought forth. To live justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God, to live and prepare for the coming, to be the sort of people that we ought to be, our call is to holiness, to godliness, to a cleansing of the sin within us so that we might witness to the fullness of life, of creation that will come over all things in the coming of Christ, the coming of God, the coming of Justice.

What sort of people ought we to be in preparation for the coming? A holy people, a kingdom of priests, a people cleansed from sin in order to live the coming.

Maybe that’s why, at the very beginning of the Gospel of Mark, John the baptizer introduces the coming one as the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit. Through the baptism of the Holy Spirit, the baptism of the One who is to Come, God prepares creation for the coming of God, the coming of a new creation where Justice is at home.

John came baptizing with water for the forgiveness of sins. Baptism is a cleansing, a bath. It is a means of purification to open one to the coming reign of God. Water baptism seals our faith by initiating us into God’s people through dying and being raised with Christ. It is a baptism for the forgiveness of sins. One receives water baptism only once, and we always live from our baptismal confession of faith as we live towards the future. In all that you do, remember your baptism and the life to which you are called through being initiated into a people, the church. Preparation for the coming of Christ reaches a first culmination at the font. If you have not repented of your sins, believed in Christ, and been enfolded through water into the body of Christ, you risk being unprepared for the Advent of God. Water baptism is for the forgiveness of sin.

Yet Jesus comes baptizing with the Holy Spirit. Like water baptism, the baptism of the Spirit is a cleansing of sin. But sin here is inward, the absence of who God created us to be as human beings made in the image of God for God, a life lived in love of God and neighbor. The baptism of Christ, the baptism of the Spirit, is the perfecting of who we really are in God, the removal of the perversions, the lies that have become encoded into our bodies, a perfecting by the coming of Christ by the power of the Spirit. The baptism of the Spirit immerses our bodies in God as water baptism immerses our bodies in water. Living in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Spirit works continuously, re-forming us from the nothingness that distorts our perspectives, pulls us into conflicts that don’t matter, the patterns of falseness that rip at our bodies and the bodies of others. Unlike water baptism, we don’t come up for air, but we learn to breathe in the Holy Spirit, the breath of God. We live for the coming of God in the Spirit, continuously, every second, time and time again, the coming of the very Love that is God to make us who we really are. The baptism of the Spirit prepares for the coming of God, the coming of Justice, because it is the coming of God, the coming of justice, into our lives, a coming that will reach its fullness in the advent of Christ as the advent of the new creation, where justice is at home.

The baptism of the Spirit is the baptism of Jesus. The baptism of the Spirit cleanses us, fills us. Therefore, we engage in the works of Christ, what we have come to call the works of mercy, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the imprisoned, giving shelter to the homeless, staying with the sick, burying the dead as part of a particular people, a congregation pulled together by the Spirit in Jesus Christ. This personal involvement, an involvement that sees that people are people, not causes, helps us hear the nothingness that is injustice, that shows how that nothingness has come to our lives, rather than always looking to blame others for everything. The works of mercy done in the Spirit bring forth repentance, and therefore cleansing and holiness and godliness that prepares not only us, but all of creation, for the coming of God, the coming of justice into the world in the coming of Christ. The baptism of the Spirit takes us beyond social justice and personal righteousness to holiness, to godliness, the constant in-coming of God through the Spirit in our lives that forms us as a whole into the body of Christ in the world. This is our witness to the kingdom of God, the kingdom of justice that God will bring to the world at its consummation!

The baptism of the Spirit prepares us for the coming of God, the impossible possibility of the coming of the new creation, where justice is at home.

“Comfort, O comfort my people. We have served our term, our penalty is paid, we have received from the Lord’s hand double for all our sins. Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together.” Come to the presence of Christ today by the Spirit at this Table. See here the in-coming of God, the impossible possibility of justice in the coming of Christ in the bread and the wine. Come in repentance; come in faith. Come, and please, be thankful.