Sermons

“Now Is the Moment”

Romans 13:8-14; Isaiah 2:1-5– Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – December 1, 2019

 Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that we might be inspired to enter into the moment you are offering our world.  In the name of the One coming into the world we pray, Amen.

What a wretched line of scripture!  “It is now the moment for you to wake from sleep.”  Could anything sound less like good news?  One of the great joys of this past week’s holiday for me was going to bed two nights in a row without setting an alarm.  Two days later, and here is the Bible telling me it’s time to get up!  I may have a bit of a bone to pick with Paul about ‘gratifying the desires of the flesh’.

Of course, Paul isn’t talking about literal sleeping, any more than he’s talking about literal darkness and light or literal flesh.  Which is good, because what sense would it make demonize our flesh at the beginning of a season that is specifically about celebrating the miracle and gift of God taking on flesh as an act of love?  A faith such as ours, that is built on the idea of an incarnate God, does not find its good news in devaluing our earthly bodies.  And yet, somehow, a major thread throughout Christian tradition has latched onto Paul’s symbols, rather than their meaning, and behaved as though our bodies are a problem to be solved rather than a gift from God.  As we enter into the season of preparation for Christmas, which in the church we call Advent, we can benefit from exploring what the Incarnation teaches us about living with bodies.  We’re certainly going to be depending on our bodies over the next few weeks, for climbing ladders to hang decorations, and singing with gusto, and cooking and eating all the ceremonial foods, and carrying around the gifts we’re giving, and all the other joyful, exhausting things we do this time of year.

So let’s start with the basics: “Love your neighbor as yourself” almost seems too generic to be seasonal, but there it is in verse nine.  And that, I believe, is our best clue that accusing Paul hating the flesh is too simplistic.  The admonitions he lists a few verses later, when read in the light of “Love your neighbor as yourself”, actually speak to a deep understanding of the need to cherish our bodies.  Paul is not saying our bodies are bad; he’s saying they’re vulnerable and in need of special care.

There are three pairs of unloving actions included, and I think one could argue, one of each pair is about loving neighbors’ bodies and one is about loving our own bodies. If we consider “reveling” to be the kind of loud partying that keeps our neighbors up at night, then we can also recognize “drunkenness” as the kind of partying that messes with our own cells as badly as lost sleep.  If we define “debauchery” as the kind of sexual behavior that violates others’ dignity, then “licentiousness” can be seen as the kind of sexual behavior that diminishes our own dignity.  Where “quarreling” is about wanting others to be different, “jealousy” is about wishing we ourselves were different.  There are a number of places in scripture where Paul lists off a bunch of sins, and to be honest, I usually avoid them when I’m preaching, because nobody wants to hear me harp about sin.  But these pairs caught my eye, because when we read them in combination with verse nine, it becomes clear they are more about how to be loving to ourselves and others than they are about making us feel bad about ourselves.  While the last line uses “flesh” as a symbolic word for our weaknesses, the passage as a whole is about helping us cherish bodies – our own and those of our neighbors.

Taking a moment as this season of festivity begins to consider how we can best cherish our bodies can be an important thing to do.  There is a lot going on.  We may feel tempted or pressured to Do All The Things.  There will be a lot of cookies and candy around.  We may feel tempted or pressured to Eat All The Things.  There will be a lot of stuff on sale.  We may feel tempted or pressured to Buy All The Things.  But we know that this is not how God calls us to cherish our bodies.  We were made for abundance, not gluttony.  We were made for everlasting joy, not momentary thrills.  One of the ways we prepare to welcome the One who taught us to love our neighbors is by lovingly respecting our own limitations.

Renewing our commitment to loving all the bodies God has made – our own and everyone else’s – is a beautiful way to start the season of celebrating the Incarnation.  If we turn from the Romans passage to the verses we read from Isaiah, we can see that what is true about loving bodies on a personal level also scales up to the global level.  In the second chapter, we have another of Isaiah’s visions of global shalom that I talked about last week.  Here we have the peoples of the earth recognizing the wisdom of having God be the sole judge and arbitrator of the world.  And when that happens, justice is distributed so equitably, the need for war and conflict ceases.  Swords are beat into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks.  Weapons of war are transformed into tools for feeding God’s people.  Our priorities are turned from tribalism and defensiveness toward compassion and generosity.  Every body is nourished and fed and loved.

Does it sound like a Hallmark Christmas movie?  Maybe at first, but that’s not really what is going on here.  As we enter into Advent, we don’t read these beautiful passages from Isaiah to pretend this is how things, but to remind ourselves what it is we’re longing for.  Advent is for people filled with longing.  Advent is for when we’re looking around at the world and seeing just how badly we’re doing at loving our neighbors as ourselves.  The difference between Advent and much of what passes as preparation for Christmas in our secular society is that these visions of shalom Isaiah offers us are the opposite of escapism.  A Hallmark movie has a happy ending – for the 2-5 main characters, with no regard for anyone else’s fate.  Isaiah reminds us that everyone else’s fate is connected to ours, and that that connection is the point of Jesus coming into the world.

There’s a reason we start with Hope.  Who would need hope if everything was already hunky-dory?  We claim hope because we require it like the air we breathe.  Escapism isn’t always a bad thing, but it only works so long before it turns dangerous.  Paul wants us to wake up and re-commit ourselves to living out the law of love, for our neighbors’ sake and our own.  Now is the moment to wake from sleep.  Advent invites us to prepare ourselves to confront the world’s problems with renewed courage and hope, because we have remembered that God is with us, that the Spirit of Love has taken on flesh and will not leave us.

“Hope is a star that shines in the night,” we sang.  Again, we are prodded to question Paul’s imagery that assumes daylight is good and darkness gives opportunity to wickedness.  I got the chance to see “Harriet” this week, the new movie about the life of slave-liberator Harriet Tubman.  Night was Harriet’s friend, for it was then, under the cover of darkness that she could safely travel with less threat from slave hunters and attack dogs.  Hope was the North Star that guided her to follow God’s lead to freedom, over and over, until she had liberated over 300 enslaved people.  Hope is what makes it possible for us to look at all that is wrong in our world and find ways to make it better.  Trusting that brokenness and degradation is not what God has intended for our world and our bodies, we can find the courage and creativity to heal and restore.

I learned something this week.  Every Wednesday, Global Ministries sends us an email with the week’s prayer partner.  This week is it eSwatini.  “Where is eSwatini? I’ve never heard of that!” I thought.  So I looked it up.  Turns out that up until about a year and a half ago, we would have recognized eSwatini as Swaziland.  But in April of 2018, King Mswati announced that their country would now officially be known as eSwatini, which he had been calling it for a while.  The new name doesn’t mean anything different, but it reflects a new level of self-determination and a desire to be known for who they are, rather than confused with a small European country famous for chocolate.  As we pray for eSwatini this week, we remember as well that it is World AIDS Day.  Eswatini has the world’s highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS right now.  Mothers, fathers, babies, all suffering.  But again, hope breaks through.  I read in the paper this morning that there is a new AIDS drug coming out.  Perhaps we don’t like to think about the fact that babies get AIDS and have to take drugs that come in hard pills or bitter syrups.  But if we avert our gaze from that reality, we will also miss out on learning that an Indian company has just announced a new AIDS drug that comes in strawberry-flavored granules that can be sprinkled in milk or baby cereal.  Mothers who might have once given up hope for their babies will now be able to nourish their bodies in new, life-giving ways.  Hope is what makes it possible for this kind of incarnate love to break through.  When we live with a strong sense of the connection between our bodies and our neighbors’ bodies all around the globe, Christmas truly comes into the world.  How can we prepare for that?  Now is the moment to open our eyes and our hearts, to all the ways God’s love can help us cherish one another.  Alleluia and Amen.