Second Sunday of Advent
December 9, 2007
Sermon by Pastor John Marboe
The
Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew.
(Matthew 3:1-12)
In those days, John the Baptist
appeared in the wilderness of
“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.’”
Now, John wore clothing of camel’s hair
with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild
honey. Then the people of
But when he saw many Pharisees and
Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to
come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have
Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to
raise up children to Abraham. Even now
the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not
bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
“I baptize you with water for
repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not
worthy to carry his sandals. He will
baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.
His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor
and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with
unquenchable fire.”
The
Gospel of the Lord.
Last week I spoke about hope. I spoke about how Advent is a season that
ritualizes our hope for a more peaceful and just world, and that we do
so in the midst of the world as it is, in a society addicted to various kinds
of mindless distractions and in the midst of a world at war.
We
express a ritual of hope, not to deny reality or to escape it, or to pretend it
doesn’t exist. We express hope ritually
because it reminds us that hope is powerful, even when it is faint, and even
when what we see and experience does not seem hopeful. When things don’t seem hopeful, those who do
hope seem either audacious or maybe even a bit crazy. When people dare to dream of what does not
seem possible, they seem, to the rest of us, perhaps a little fanatical.
But
just such a person was the Apostle Paul.
Now the Apostle Paul is remembered differently by different
people—sometimes admiringly and sometimes resentfully. I personally feel there are reasons for both
of these reactions to the Apostle Paul.
But today I wish to lift him up as a person of courageous and humane
hope.
Most
of what we call the New Testament was written either by Paul or by people he
influenced so profoundly that they wrote in his name. Paul’s interpretation of the Hebrew
Scriptures and of Christ in relationship to those scriptures is at the very
foundation of Christianity. But it’s my
contention today that Paul’s essential hope, the focus of so much of his
thinking, and working, and traveling, and writing, has been lost by
Christianity; and that hope that Paul had, even though forgotten, is perhaps
more relevant and more important to us today than it ever has been before. A summary of that hope, that audacious hope
of Paul, is found today in our second reading from the end of his letter to the
Romans, where he says, “Welcome one another, therefore, just as God in
Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”
Now,
on the face of it, it doesn’t seem like such a remarkable thing to say, “Welcome
one another, as God in Christ has welcomed you.” If I said this to you this morning, you would
not be so impressed. Of course, you
would say, “Of course, we welcome one another, or at least we try to, or at
least we know we should.”
But
our kind of welcome is not the kind Paul was talking about. Our kind of welcome is about welcoming people
who are quite a lot like us. Most of us
here are Lutheran, almost all of us consider ourselves Christians, and the same
can be said of most of the people who visit our church.
Well,
isn’t that what Paul meant? Wasn’t he
writing to a church? And wouldn’t that
church be a lot like ours in this respect?
No. No. The “one another” to which Paul refers
does not refer to all the individuals within a relatively homogenous faith
community. It’s not primarily addressed
to each individual as an exhortation to welcome everybody else in the
church.
He
has two specific groups in mind. His
exhortation to “welcome one another” is addressed to each of these two
groups in relation to each other, and the two groups are Gentiles and
Jews. It was to his fellow Jews, and to
Gentiles who had been persuaded by his message, that Paul said, “Welcome one
another as God in Christ welcomed both
of you.”
Well,
who are Gentiles? Often, because it’s a
Bible word and one we don’t use so much ourselves, we think of Bible people who
weren’t Jews. We think of Romans and
Greeks, maybe. But “Gentile” is a word
Jews used to mean “everybody in the
world who is not Jewish.”
The
Book of Romans has long been loved by Christians—especially Protestant
Christians—as the letter in which Paul most clearly states the Gospel, that “We
are saved by grace and not through works of the law.” Martin Luther loved the Book of Romans. In his preface to his own translation of
Romans, he said, “This letter is truly
the most important piece in the New Testament.
It is the purest Gospel.”
Romans is the place where Paul clearly states that we’re justified by
faith. But what has been forgotten is
that the reason Paul was so passionate to write about justification by faith
was not to unburden guilty Lutheran consciences, but so that Jews and Gentiles
might come to see each other as children of God.
Time
won’t permit us to dig into this argument throughout the Book of Romans fully,
but if you’re interested in digging yourself, I recommend Krister Stendahl’s
book, “Paul Among the Jews and Gentiles,”
which I think we might have in our library.
Paul’s
hope was not the salvation of individual souls, though Paul cared about
individual souls. Paul was preoccupied
with the question, “How can Jews and Gentiles learn to welcome each other as
brothers and sisters?” Perhaps this
question has been lost because the church as we know it is no longer comprised
of Jews and Gentiles; pretty much only
Gentiles. Our assumption for a long time
now has been that “Jews really don’t want anything to do with Christianity, so
fine, the church is fine without them.”
Well, Paul would be horrified. He
says early in Romans, with regard to the Jews that rejected his message about
Christ, he said this: “They are still and always will be children of the
promise.”
The
dark and shameful development of anti-Semitism that has at times become
murderous in our world, for Paul, would simply be unthinkable among those who
claimed to know Christ. And, yet, that’s
what happened, and not least within our own Lutheran tradition.
Someone
sent me an e-mail last week with a link to a web site of the National Holocaust
Museum, and there’s been a new discovery, a photo album never seen before,
documenting the life of the officer corps at Auschwitz. It belonged to the assistant to the
commandant of Auschwitz. And these
pictures are so disturbing, not because they’re the pictures we normally see in
relation to the holocaust of gaunt and starving and tortured people; but, no,
these are happy people. These are people
who are laughing; they are eating, they are drinking, they are lighting candles
on a Christmas tree; they are having a sing-along with an accordion, all the
while the Jews are being tortured and killed just about a mile away.
Paul,
a Jew, spent his later life reinterpreting his own scriptures in light of
Christ in a way that might include, and not exclude, non-Jews. Everything he wrote about faith and salvation
was done in the hope that Jews and non-Jews might learn to welcome each other
as God’s dearly loved children, not by way of Gentiles becoming Jewish, mind
you, nor of Jews becoming like the Gentiles, mind you, but it’s being Gentiles
and being Jews together.
To
find the basis for that kind of fellowship, Paul writes, “We Jews need to look
back beyond the Law of Moses,” the law that defined for his people who was a
child of God and who was not. “No,” he
said, “we must look instead to Abraham and to the promise that he would be the
father of many nations.” “The Law of
Moses,” he said, “is not for everyone, just for the Jews. But God’s promise is for
everyone.” And that promise, as Isaiah
so beautifully wrote, is for the healing of the nations.
In
our day, we can see that Abraham has become the father of many nations. The promise came true. Three great world religions recognize Abraham
as their father: Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
Because of his experience of Christ, Paul came to envision the
possibility that people, united in the faith of Abraham and in God’s promise to
Abraham, whether Jewish or some kind of Gentile, might find a way to be
together, to worship God together, without becoming just like each other.
Last
week, we read the passage from Isaiah of a vision that from Jerusalem, that
Holy City, regarded holy by Christians, Jews, and Muslims, from Jerusalem
justice and peace will flow to all nations, and that, as a result, spears will
be turned into pruning hooks and swords beaten into plowshares.
What
might it mean for this world, for our children and for our children’s children,
to consider that it may just be God’s will that, in the words of Paul, we learn
to welcome one another, that children of Abraham’s faith, the people of these
three great faiths, come to see one another as Abraham’s legitimate children?
We
can’t determine how others will relate to us, but we can determine how we will
relate to others. Paul couldn’t have envisioned
the world as it is today. And we can’t
know exactly what he might say about the relationship between Christians, Jews,
and Muslims. But if we thought that
being children, people who accept the New Testament, exempts us from concern
about our relationship to Jews and Muslims, we must think again, because, for
Paul, that issue would be central to what it means to be a Christian.
A
relationship of peace between the children of Abraham would be his desire, his
prayer, and his hope. Let it be ours as
well.