Advent 2, Year A
December 5, 2010
Advent is about waiting, and preparing ourselves. And so I love this morning’s Old Testament reading from Isaiah with its reassuring promises:
The wolf shall live with the lamb…. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together…. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp…. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
Now that is a promise worth waiting for this Advent season. I picture my children cuddling with Aslan from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. What a sweet Christmas card photo that would be!
And on a day like today I really wish we had one of those pull down screens so that I could project onto the wall a painting of Isaiah’s vision by a Quaker artist and minister from the 19th century named Edward Hicks. It’s got to be out there somewhere on Christmas cards.
Hicks painted what he called “the peaceable kingdom” more than 60 times, but probably his most famous painting shows all the animals hanging out together, predator and prey, with a happy child safely among them. In the background there’s a delegation of Quaker settlers having a peaceful conversation with some Native Americans.
It sure beats the portrait of John the Baptist that we get this morning in our Gospel. He makes me uncomfortable with his camel hair clothes and his locust diet. But it’s his words that shake me up the most. All this talk about repenting and about the ax lying at the root of the trees ready to cut down and incinerate anything that isn’t bearing fruit.
Please! Here I am, relaxing into the image of the predator lying down in peace with its prey, relaxing into the beauty of Christmas with my hot chocolate, Christmas carols on the radio, and twinkling lights all around, when out pops the prickly reality of John the Baptist. It’s like the old Seinfeld shows where Kramer suddenly bursts into Jerry’s apartment with his wild hair and clothes and you just know something truly bizarre is about to come out of his mouth. John the Baptist crashes our solemn worship; he crashes the pleasure of the season; he crashes the hopefulness of our Isaiah vision.
I’d rather just stick to the lion and the lamb thing, thank you very much.
Of course, the problem with Isaiah is that the promise seems so unlikely. You might say that the promise doesn’t show a lot of promise. I look around and see wars and injustice and poverty and broken dreams. If this shoot that comes out from the stump of Jesse, this righteous counselor, is supposed to prefigure Jesus, as the Church likes to point out during Advent, then where exactly is this holy mountain where there is no pain or destruction? Why aren’t all the predators and prey (animal and human) hanging out in unity? I'm not letting my sweet baby play with an asp anytime soon, I can promise you that.
Hicks had the same dissatisfaction, it turns out. He looked around even his own community of Quakers and saw schism and too much attention paid to worldly desires. And his paintings began to show his increasing frustration with the world around him. They started out hopeful and idealistic, but as the years went by, the predators in his drawings weren’t looking quite as peaceful, the prey weren’t looking quite as safe. The teeth got pointier and the claws sharper and the youth perhaps a bit less cherubic. He was ready for a little John the Baptist action; ready for that winnowing fork to start clearing the threshing floor and separating the wheat from the chaff.
And as much as I hate to interrupt my peaceful pre-Christmas reverie, I’m starting to think that maybe we need John the Baptist to shake us up as well. Maybe we’re getting just a little too smug and self-satisfied, a little too lazy in our faith. Maybe John is right; maybe it’s going to take more than just waiting passively for the Peaceable Kingdom to appear magically before us.
I’ve been reading a new book by Kenda Creasy Dean who is the professor of Youth, Church and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her book is called Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church. It is based on the results of a national study of the religious faith of youth done from 2003-05. And I’m sorry to report that it indicts us as a Church, indicts me as an ordained person, indicts all of us as parents, grandparents, mentors and baptismal witnesses of the young people around us.
The good news from the study is that three out of four American teens claim to be Christian and most are affiliated with a religious organization. The bad news is that their faith is lackadaisical at best. Few of them think it matters at all for their daily life; and few of them are able to articulate much at all about their faith that would distinguish it from any other religion. In fact, rather than Christianity, the majority of teens are apparently practicing what the study calls “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”
The guiding beliefs of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism are:
1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over life on earth.
2. God wants us to be good, nice and fair to each other.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about myself.
4. God is not involved in my life except when I need God to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
In other words, Be nice, Feel good, and Leave God in the Background.
And the really bad news, the part that indicts all of us, is the finding that they’re getting this belief system from us. The study found that the vast majority of teens mirror their parents’ religious faith, with other relatives, mentors and ministers being influential predictors as well. So while it is presumably not our intention, the message we are giving our children is apparently that our religion is not much more than a do-good, feel-good spirituality. And that it doesn’t have anything at all to do with the radical love of Jesus or his challenging call for us to follow him into the world.
So maybe we could all use a little shaking up after all. Maybe we do need John “preparing the way of the Lord,” as uncomfortable as it makes us. Maybe we do need him with his forceful call to repentance and his shaggy, smelly camel’s fur and his gross diet to get us thinking about what to do next.
So here’s my suggestion for us as we prepare ourselves this Advent season: Let’s think of ways to share our faith with our kids, and each other. Let’s look for opportunities to tell them what we believe and why we think it’s important. Let’s share with them what this church community means to us. Let’s make sure they see us reading the Bibles, praying for the things that are worrying us and the things that we’re thankful for. Let’s make sure they see us caring for people that we don’t even know with as much compassion as we do for them. And let’s make sure they know we’re doing it because we’re trying to love God and our neighbors in the radical and all-encompassing way that Jesus shows us.
And -- thank you John the Baptist -- let’s examine ourselves this Advent season -- pruning some of the branches in our lives, and looking for ways to encourage new growth. All in the hopes of preparing ourselves to be a dwelling place for Christ this Christmas and beyond. Amen.
December 5, 2010
Advent is about waiting, and preparing ourselves. And so I love this morning’s Old Testament reading from Isaiah with its reassuring promises:
The wolf shall live with the lamb…. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together…. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp…. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
Now that is a promise worth waiting for this Advent season. I picture my children cuddling with Aslan from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. What a sweet Christmas card photo that would be!
And on a day like today I really wish we had one of those pull down screens so that I could project onto the wall a painting of Isaiah’s vision by a Quaker artist and minister from the 19th century named Edward Hicks. It’s got to be out there somewhere on Christmas cards.
Hicks painted what he called “the peaceable kingdom” more than 60 times, but probably his most famous painting shows all the animals hanging out together, predator and prey, with a happy child safely among them. In the background there’s a delegation of Quaker settlers having a peaceful conversation with some Native Americans.
It sure beats the portrait of John the Baptist that we get this morning in our Gospel. He makes me uncomfortable with his camel hair clothes and his locust diet. But it’s his words that shake me up the most. All this talk about repenting and about the ax lying at the root of the trees ready to cut down and incinerate anything that isn’t bearing fruit.
Please! Here I am, relaxing into the image of the predator lying down in peace with its prey, relaxing into the beauty of Christmas with my hot chocolate, Christmas carols on the radio, and twinkling lights all around, when out pops the prickly reality of John the Baptist. It’s like the old Seinfeld shows where Kramer suddenly bursts into Jerry’s apartment with his wild hair and clothes and you just know something truly bizarre is about to come out of his mouth. John the Baptist crashes our solemn worship; he crashes the pleasure of the season; he crashes the hopefulness of our Isaiah vision.
I’d rather just stick to the lion and the lamb thing, thank you very much.
Of course, the problem with Isaiah is that the promise seems so unlikely. You might say that the promise doesn’t show a lot of promise. I look around and see wars and injustice and poverty and broken dreams. If this shoot that comes out from the stump of Jesse, this righteous counselor, is supposed to prefigure Jesus, as the Church likes to point out during Advent, then where exactly is this holy mountain where there is no pain or destruction? Why aren’t all the predators and prey (animal and human) hanging out in unity? I'm not letting my sweet baby play with an asp anytime soon, I can promise you that.
Hicks had the same dissatisfaction, it turns out. He looked around even his own community of Quakers and saw schism and too much attention paid to worldly desires. And his paintings began to show his increasing frustration with the world around him. They started out hopeful and idealistic, but as the years went by, the predators in his drawings weren’t looking quite as peaceful, the prey weren’t looking quite as safe. The teeth got pointier and the claws sharper and the youth perhaps a bit less cherubic. He was ready for a little John the Baptist action; ready for that winnowing fork to start clearing the threshing floor and separating the wheat from the chaff.
And as much as I hate to interrupt my peaceful pre-Christmas reverie, I’m starting to think that maybe we need John the Baptist to shake us up as well. Maybe we’re getting just a little too smug and self-satisfied, a little too lazy in our faith. Maybe John is right; maybe it’s going to take more than just waiting passively for the Peaceable Kingdom to appear magically before us.
I’ve been reading a new book by Kenda Creasy Dean who is the professor of Youth, Church and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her book is called Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church. It is based on the results of a national study of the religious faith of youth done from 2003-05. And I’m sorry to report that it indicts us as a Church, indicts me as an ordained person, indicts all of us as parents, grandparents, mentors and baptismal witnesses of the young people around us.
The good news from the study is that three out of four American teens claim to be Christian and most are affiliated with a religious organization. The bad news is that their faith is lackadaisical at best. Few of them think it matters at all for their daily life; and few of them are able to articulate much at all about their faith that would distinguish it from any other religion. In fact, rather than Christianity, the majority of teens are apparently practicing what the study calls “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”
The guiding beliefs of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism are:
1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over life on earth.
2. God wants us to be good, nice and fair to each other.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about myself.
4. God is not involved in my life except when I need God to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
In other words, Be nice, Feel good, and Leave God in the Background.
And the really bad news, the part that indicts all of us, is the finding that they’re getting this belief system from us. The study found that the vast majority of teens mirror their parents’ religious faith, with other relatives, mentors and ministers being influential predictors as well. So while it is presumably not our intention, the message we are giving our children is apparently that our religion is not much more than a do-good, feel-good spirituality. And that it doesn’t have anything at all to do with the radical love of Jesus or his challenging call for us to follow him into the world.
So maybe we could all use a little shaking up after all. Maybe we do need John “preparing the way of the Lord,” as uncomfortable as it makes us. Maybe we do need him with his forceful call to repentance and his shaggy, smelly camel’s fur and his gross diet to get us thinking about what to do next.
So here’s my suggestion for us as we prepare ourselves this Advent season: Let’s think of ways to share our faith with our kids, and each other. Let’s look for opportunities to tell them what we believe and why we think it’s important. Let’s share with them what this church community means to us. Let’s make sure they see us reading the Bibles, praying for the things that are worrying us and the things that we’re thankful for. Let’s make sure they see us caring for people that we don’t even know with as much compassion as we do for them. And let’s make sure they know we’re doing it because we’re trying to love God and our neighbors in the radical and all-encompassing way that Jesus shows us.
And -- thank you John the Baptist -- let’s examine ourselves this Advent season -- pruning some of the branches in our lives, and looking for ways to encourage new growth. All in the hopes of preparing ourselves to be a dwelling place for Christ this Christmas and beyond. Amen.
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