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Advent Part 3
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Those of you I haven't had a chance to meet in person before, my name is Scott. I am part of our team here at Commons. And if you happen to be newer in our community, you don't see a lot of me because most Sunday mornings, I am over on the East Side of downtown setting up and teaching and working with our team of volunteers in our Inglewood parish. And over there, we are just a few short weeks away from celebrating one year since the launch of that community, which is pretty incredible. Right?
Speaker 2:And we sort of celebrated this because in some ways, this week, we released our 2018 donor report, which you can get a link to by heading over to commons.church/donate if you didn't receive a copy in your inbox already. And this report is part of our broader commitment as a community to be transparent and also inviting you to think about how you might help us end this year and well. But then also we're looking forward together as a group of parishes to our shared future in 2019, and there is so much to be grateful for, our continued growth as a community, more people coming to know the story of Jesus in interesting ways, and also the many ways that our efforts as a community have had an impact in our city and beyond. And the truth is that while it's been exciting to see our parish in Inglewood sort of come to life with people connecting and joining groups and having dinner parties and serving together, there is still so much ahead for us as Commons Church as we work to become even more thoughtful and honest, more passionate about authentic spiritual life, and more committed to discovering the ways that being curious about Jesus, it changes us, and then it changes our world too, which is why it's super fun to swap places with Jeremy for a day and to come back and see so many faces that I recognize.
Speaker 2:And then also to be reminded of the way that our dream to become a group of parishes in the heart of this city. This dream is comprised in the beautiful ways that you live, how you care for those who you pass at work and at play and at study, and how you invest in this local parish, and how you join with us in Inglewood in working for the kind of world that Jesus talked so much about, where life and renewal and hope are best found and shared in the relationships, homes, and neighborhoods that we find ourselves in. So thank you for your support, for all the ways that your generosity helps us move forward together, including with the refugee initiatives that we reminded ourselves of this morning. Now today, we're actually gonna take another step in our Advent journey as a community, and I hope that some of you are feeling grounded in this season of getting ready. See, I I didn't grow up knowing what Advent was.
Speaker 2:We were or I was in my early twenties living in Toronto at the time, and I discovered some of what these four weeks could bring to my life. Because I had this recurring experience where with the craziness of the semester ending and having to go to malls, you remember where those are? That's where the Apple store is. Right? K?
Speaker 2:And traveling to see my family. I would wake up on December 26 or twenty seventh, and I would feel like I had missed something. I felt like the beauty and the mystery and Christmas' essence in a way had kinda just passed by me with without me having a chance to notice it. And I didn't like that feeling, that kind of discontent. And somewhere along the way, I was exposed to the practice of Advent.
Speaker 2:And as part of my own spiritual growth, I started to cultivate the work of getting my head and my soul warmed up to the ideas that Christmas brings to bear on the world. And over time, these practices have changed for me. Let's be honest. At our house, we actually decorate in early November because some years, I actually feel like I need an advent for my advent, which isn't very liturgical. I get it, but it works for me.
Speaker 2:Okay? And over time, the changes in features and scenery in our everyday space, in our home, it's become less about the festivity for me and more about this gentle reminder to take up the readying of Advent and to do it on purpose, Where it's not just about lights and greenery and cheap chocolate showing up everywhere, it's about the choice to find quiet moments, and to look out at the places where hunger and longing are rampant in our world, to think about the places where power is being used and fought over, and then to start setting the story of Jesus' birth in the light of such things. Because that's kind of what the story needs sometimes, to be wrenched from the hands of the crooners and the sentimentalists, tranquility rules all the time, and Jesus isn't even crying in the manger. And to set it instead in an obscure backyard shed in an overcrowded village in an obscure province of the Roman Empire, just another baby born into poverty. There's nothing to see there.
Speaker 2:Except when we zoom out a little bit, this story catches us in some unexpected ways where this particular baby's story, quite notably, connects with the tales told by people hundreds of years before his birth. And like Bobby reminded us last week, the story of Mary's womb opening through divine insemination, it finds its moorings in the Hebrew stories of barren wombs and the longing hearts that carried them. And it finds its parallels in the songs of women like Hannah, who longed for a world made right, where liberation could be found and felt and discovered. And these ancient things are so present to us now, I think. Those parts of our story that have yet to yield the flourishing that we had hoped they would.
Speaker 2:Think about our work or our relationships or even our faith. And then there's those places where we feel constrained and all bound up and restricted, maybe in a loss that you've suffered or in a confusion you carry or helplessness you feel over children starving and economies failing and the powerful just tweeting about it. See, Advent comes to us, and it normalizes these things for us by placing them in the lives and experiences of characters we know in the story. But it doesn't just do that. Perhaps in the fleeting stanzas of Hannah and Mary's songs or maybe in a lamenting tune that you're going to come across in a preference generated playlist this week, these things are going to sing to you of possible reversals.
Speaker 2:Where in spite of all the dark and the heaviness and the unrest, we're reminded that fragile hope, this is a holy practice to hold it with roots as deep and as strong as these ancient stories. Where we learn year by year to ready ourselves for the surprising ways that grace can turn even our most daunting challenges. And then we choose to work and give and serve so that this hope can be seen by others. Now today, we're actually gonna take another step in the story from Jesus' infancy. But before we do that, let's take a moment, quiet our hearts and minds.
Speaker 2:Pray with me now. Advent god, divine parent and source, drawn near to us in Christ and holding us now, o gracious spirit. Our hearts are restless until they find their place in you, that place where we are aware of your coming to us. And so we pray that you would give us open hearts like Mary to receive you, and give us open eyes like the magi to search for you, and give us open hands like Joseph to hold you, wriggling fragile hope of the world that you are in these moments. And where our world roars and groans in search of peace, and our hearts all the same, we ask, give us grace to make room for you.
Speaker 2:We pray, come, Lord Jesus. Amen. We're gonna jump right in to the story of Matthew's gospel, chapter two. But before we do, I just wanna bring us up speed on what's happened right before this, because what has happened is that Jesus has been born. Just think angels and shepherds and barnyard smells.
Speaker 2:And then these mysterious magi show up. These are kings from the East, the text says, and they're in Jerusalem inquiring about a new king that's been born in the area apparently, and they wanna honor him. And they have this run-in with the puppet king, this guy named Herod, who quite understandably is a little insecure and paranoid about why these kings from another country are there looking for a different king other than him. Anyways, the wise men, as they're called, they finally make their way to Nazareth, and they worship the toddler Christ, who's about two years old at this point. And the text tells us that when they had gone, the magi that is, an angel of the lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.
Speaker 2:He said, get up, take the child and his mother, and escape to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him. So Joseph got up, and he took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so it was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet, out of Egypt, I called my son. And I want to pause here just to make a quick reading note, which is that I think it's important to read a thick layer of suspense into this narrative. And maybe that's because I've watched my share of mindless action films, which makes it easy for me to imagine Joseph sort of getting a midnight phone call, so groggily answering, who is this?
Speaker 2:And then the angel probably sounds a lot like Liam Neeson, so like get up, but with an Irish accent. Right? And actually, this reminds me of some of the images I've seen in my own life over the past couple years of panicked parents in the aftermath of a Syrian bombing, or in the middle of Typhoon Haiyan that hit The Philippines in 2013. Some of you might remember that. I remember watching parents desperately trying to get their children to safety.
Speaker 2:And the vocabulary of our text implies that Joseph is in a moment like this, and it's riddled with urgency. And they get up, and they hit the road in the middle of the night, and they're running for the border trying to stay hidden. And what happens when we read this way is that all of the emotions and intensity of our human stories, they find their place in the text, which means that then the story can disrupt us with its intensity as we do it the honor of letting it be human. And to think of how nerve racking this nighttime escape was. And when we do this, we make room for good theology, where the incarnation isn't some abstraction, but instead, this clear picture of the costs associated with being human.
Speaker 2:Costs that God does not sidestep in Jesus because you and I, and so many that we know, we can't sidestep them either. And we're gonna come back to this idea a little bit at the end, so just put it to the side if you can. Because we need to look a little closer at what the writer of the gospel is doing here. See, you heard the text say that Joseph is taking his family to Egypt to escape the threat of a murderous king, and then how the author sees this part of Jesus' story as fulfilling these words from an ancient Hebrew prophet. Out of Egypt, I called my son.
Speaker 2:And here, Matthew's actually lifting a verse from the Hebrew prophet Hosea. And just a couple things to help us with this. First, it's widely believed by scholars that Matthew's gospel was written and collected more than thirty five years after Jesus' death and resurrection, after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, which happened in seventy AD. And there's a bunch of reasons why we think this about Matthew, one of them being that Matthew seems to position Jesus at odds with the traditions and leaders of Judaism. Jesus is a disturber in the story, and scholars feel that the way that Jesus is depicted, it indicates that in the years right after the temple was destroyed, there was all this tension and unsettledness in Judaism, which led early followers of Jesus, as they were telling and then collecting the stories about him, to make arguments about Jesus' authenticity by pointing to the Hebrew Bible.
Speaker 2:And they would argue from scripture to legitimize their claim that Jesus was the long awaited messiah, which makes sense. Right? So this is why Matthew's throwing in these references to establish his claims about Jesus. Basically, he's saying, see, Jesus went down on a field trip to Egypt when he was a kid, and this old prophet wrote one time that God said he'd bring his son from Egypt. You see the correlation there?
Speaker 2:It seems what he's hinting at. But here's the deal. Matthew is doing something really interesting here because Hosea, the text he's ripping from, this text was attributed to a person doing their work eight hundred years before Jesus. And the guy's name was Hosea. He lived in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, which was conquered by the Assyrians.
Speaker 2:And Hosea was convinced that they were being conquered because they had been unfaithful and immoral and unjust, which is why in chapter 11 of the book, Hosea begins with God lamenting the people's choices to betray their relationship with the divine and rejecting God's goodness. And the prophet records that God says in response to them, when Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt, I called my son. But the more they were called, the more they went away from me, and they sacrificed to the Baals, they burned incense to images. And maybe you didn't catch it as we read there, but Hosea is depicting a scene from ancient Hebrew history where God's referring to the story of Exodus, where God's people were brought out of Egypt and set free and given a new land. And they struggled to stay true to God, and God responds to them and says, look, while you were young, remember back in Egypt, I called you out of there, and you've thrown this gesture of kindness in my face now.
Speaker 2:What Hosea is not doing is making a prediction that one day Jesus is gonna spend his childhood in Egypt. No. He's looking back in history, which begs the question, what's Matthew doing here when he lifts this line? And I I don't wanna get too caught up here, but most scholars think that Matthew's trying to come up with a typology of sorts, where in looking back at ancient Hebrew history and looking back at Jesus' life, remember a couple of decades later, he started to see some similarities between the two. See, there's these hints that the gospel author saw a parallel between Jesus' life and that of an ancient Hebrew deliverer, a guy named Moses.
Speaker 2:Because in the book of Exodus, Moses is he runs away from a murderous king only to return to deliver God's people when he's told that the person who wanted him dead had died. And in this story that we're reading today, Matthew has Jesus fleeing from a murderous king, only to return when those who were looking for him had died. Now, whether Matthew's really trying to set Jesus up as a new Moses, a new deliverer, that might be interesting. But what's more pressing, I think, is the kind of imaginative holy remembering that Matthew models for us and invites us into as part of our Advent practice perhaps. Because some of what Advent does as a season is it brings us back again year after year to the same themes.
Speaker 2:And this can feel a little monotonous. Or like in so many other areas of our lives, if we have to repeat something, we start to feel self conscious about it. We feel inferior. We feel like we're missing something. Why can't I get this?
Speaker 2:Maybe we're doing something wrong, we think. But what Advent's invitation to cycle back to these stories and themes does is it makes space for us to do some holy remembering ourselves, where, yes, we remember the texts of Christmas as they stand, but maybe too we start to let go of the illusion that our spiritual journey is a direct route that starts over here, and there's this clear trajectory to the future. And instead, like Matthew, we start to see where we are today, and we realize that it parallels with somewhere we've been before. Even if there's no similarity between the two. Let me give you some examples.
Speaker 2:Maybe you've recently become aware of how a rhythm in your life stems from some difficulty you experienced earlier in your story. There's gift in that kind of awareness and holy remembering. Or maybe you've been noticing how your responses to sadness or grief, some long forgotten wound, Those responses have they've started to change for you recently, and there's power in your life. It's actually starting to lessen. Or maybe you're aware today of divine presence and goodness.
Speaker 2:Things may not be perfect for sure, but you can look back and see how you've been gently sustained by this persistent eminence along the way of your life. It's these forms of remembering or cycling back that be can become a holy resource for us, where we're reminded that our story isn't meant to be a mad rush to the end so much as an invitation to be more alive and more awake and more present to God's nearness that's always breaking through to us. Now back to the story for a second, because Matthew goes on to tell us that once Herod realized realized that these wise men weren't gonna cooperate with him, that in fact, they'd gone to worship this other king, he was furious. And he gives an order to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and the surrounding vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with how he talked with the magi. And this seemed to for Matthew to fulfill something that was said by the prophet Jeremiah, and he quotes from Jeremiah in chapter two here.
Speaker 2:And this is the quote. A voice is heard in Rhema weeping and great mourning. Rachel, weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because they are no more. And to be honest, the imagery of this text is kind of rough, and one that the church actually commemorates in its feast of what we call the holy innocence, which occurs December 28 during Christmastide. And here, Matthew provides us with a provoking Advent text in which the fragility of Jesus is paralleled in the bodies and the cries of these victim boys.
Speaker 2:The small and the helpless at the mercy of jealous and ambitious power. See, we know that Herod was ruthless. Historians point to his life, how he had his own wife and his own sons murdered because he was paranoid they were trying to unseat him. But even no more how he embodied the cruel self centeredness of the powerful when to ensure that when he died, he was mourned, he ordered that when he died, a member of each family be killed. And these stories are part these stories about Herod are part of why the early church came up with these exaggerated numbers for how many children actually died here at Bethlehem.
Speaker 2:14,000 or 64,000, a 144,000. When in fact, archaeology and estimated mortality rates at the time hinted the fact that given the area's population, the number may have been less than 20. To which we might respond, well, how many children must be lost to the politics of power? And what's interesting is that here again, Matthew is exercising creative imagination and interpretation with the text. See, this passage that I read to you that he pulls from Jeremiah, it's not related at all to messianic prophecies at first glance.
Speaker 2:It's actually a profoundly emotional image of Rachel, who is a matriarch in the Hebrew tradition, and she is imagined lying in her tomb at Rama, which is this place about six miles north of Jerusalem. And she's lying there weeping as she watches God's people, her children as it were, being deported to Babylon. Their lives and their stories are being crushed by the politics of the world around her, and their faces and their names are being lost to a long line of those who are wrenched from their homes never to return, which is maybe how this difficult image can become a helpful advent icon for us. Because at least in part, Matthew is using an image that was well known to his audience, the image of the Hebrews being dragged into Babylonian exile in the sixth century. And he's doing this to say, in effect, there always is sorrow to be grieved.
Speaker 2:There's always sorrow to be recognized and then shared. And Matthew places this image for us in such close proximity to the Christmas story that maybe it makes us a little uncomfortable. And what I wonder is if that discomfort could be an instructor for us. Maybe we take the image of these children in Matthew two, and we place it beside the image of a seven year old Jacqueline Calmacaine, feverish and septic on the New Mexico border earlier this week. Or maybe we take the image and we place it beside somebody that we know.
Speaker 2:Maybe they lost their job in downturn. Maybe they've suffered harassment in the workplace. Maybe they're fighting depression and anxiety that affect their professional performance. Or maybe we take the image and we hold it close to our story, to the innocence we feel we've lost or to the powerlessness we feel, hold it up to the cruel shame that we feel over past failures. And what these images and icons do is invite us into the womb of Advent's mystery, where Jacqueline's father weeping, and the lonely tears of those we love, and even our own choked emotions are joined with Rachel's cries.
Speaker 2:This holy maternal grieving for the lost and the weak and the helpless. Or maybe we give ourselves permission to accept that all sorrow is in fact our sorrow, and that the pain of our experience is innately shared with those around us. And in Advent's darkness, these things are given room to be mourned for as long as they deserve and until the longing for justice and newness forms on our lips, which brings us to the end of the story, where we learn that after Herod died, an angel lets Joseph know that he can return with his family from Egypt, so that's what he does. The text tells us that Joseph heads north and ultimately settles in a town called Nazareth, where we'll meet Jesus in the future. And with that, we see this realization of Matthew's use of Hosea 11 in verse 15, where Jesus is brought back from Egypt.
Speaker 2:And I already mentioned that Matthew seems to be doing this thing here where he's trying to parallel the life of Jesus with the Hebrew hero Moses. He wants them to see Jesus as a new Moses maybe, a new deliverer, a new rescuer, but I want us to pay attention to something else. And that's the parental language used by Hosea and then borrowed by Matthew later. See, in Hosea, Yahweh is a parent, a mother, a father, and Israel, God's people, is a child, a child that needs to be rescued and cared for. And the truth is that this language is found all over the place in the scriptures.
Speaker 2:The prophet Isaiah used this imagery when God's seen saying, I will lead them beside streams of water on a level path where they will not stumble because I am Israel's father, and Ephraim is my firstborn son. Or then in Isaiah, we read where God says, I reared children and I brought them up, but they have rebelled against me. And we read where the poet celebrates God's faithfulness by using this beautiful image. I have calmed and quieted myself, he says. I am like a weaned child with its mother.
Speaker 2:I'm content there. Or where again in Isaiah, we hear God say, as a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you. So what these references mean is that when Matthew uses this image, it's not foreign to his audience, the idea that God has done and will do and has given much to care for his people. The point is that he's doing more than just using a familiar metaphor. He's alluding to something at the core of Advent theology.
Speaker 2:Because all of a sudden, instead of Israel being the child in the story, being the one far from home, being the one in need of rescue, now it's Jesus taken to Egypt as a refugee. God self takes the place in the story, which is this place in effect that we all occupy in our practice of Advent. And some of you might know what I'm talking about. It's that part of our lives, our history, our patterns that seems to exist in a constant state of needing recovery, of needing to be brought home, of needing to be set free. And maybe this is a startling image, and maybe this all feels foreign to you in this season.
Speaker 2:Perhaps because you like the light and the warmth of Christmas, as you should, and some of this stuff feels a little heavy, hard to handle. Or maybe because as we light candles in our liturgy here, you feel like you're just an observer to what's happening. You don't feel like you're participating in it. Or maybe sometimes the per the themes of this season, they feel reminiscent of the sentimentality of Christmas that you are deliberately trying to leave behind. Regardless of the places that we come from to Advent, this text meets us there.
Speaker 2:We're in this depiction of what Warren Carter calls the endangerment of Jesus. His life is threatened, he's displaced, and he's forced into obscurity. And there, the power of entitled leaders lashes out, and the innocent and the weak are crushed. There, we catch an unexpected glimpse of what the incarnation actually depicts, where we don't just see God as a loving parent stepping in to save the day, But we find that in Jesus, God is the one in need of rescue, standing with us in our displacements. And maybe for you, that's in a feeling of the fact that you're far from who you wanna be.
Speaker 2:Or maybe that the choices that you've made or those that others have made have led you on a road that you would happily retrace. Maybe it's just in this quiet hope that in some small way, change might come to you. Whatever the case, my prayer is that in this season, you'd come to trust that the divine will come, faithful to this image that we have of God, leaving the 99 to come to us and search us out. But that too, you discover the startling truth that wherever you stand and wait and long in need of help, Christ is there too, with hope for things made new again. Let's pray together.
Speaker 2:God, you are present to us now in the grace of community and in the mysterious ways that the scripture has come to us in these moments. And some of us are stirred today to maybe practice some holy remembering, where some part of our story, maybe it's different from where we are right now, we were able to see it clearly today. And that clarity we ask that you would give us in this season for all things, to see and remember the ways that you've been near to us, and to see new ways forward. Some of us also are aware of the images and the icons of our lives right now and how this story of your birth and your escape parallels the great suffering all around us, the great longing, the great sorrow that we share, which is why we pray for peace, and we work for justice, and we ask for comfort, For heavy hearts here today, for those we live with that carry brokenness or shame, this Advent, oh God, be near to us, and teach us to trust the truth that you stand with those in need. You stand with us in our need for deliverance.
Speaker 2:And I ask that you'd help us to see our longings for light as actually being sparked by your spirit. Oh, Jesus, sustain us along the way and help us to attend to the unexpected ways you are already here. We ask. Amen.