Sermon preached at
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church
December 15, 2013 –
Advent 3A
Isaiah 35:1-10, Matthew 11:2-11
Isaiah 35:1-10, Matthew 11:2-11
Last Sunday we heard from the prophet Isaiah that “The wolf shall live with
the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and
the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.”[1]
It was a passage filled with unlikely pairings that perhaps we can only imagine
in the land of cartoons, digital animation, or, as I suggested last week,
children’s artwork and imaginations. But just as we barely begin wrapping our
minds around what it might be like to inhabit such a world, we come up to this
week’s passage from Isaiah in which we are promised even more: “the eyes of
the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped,” a time when “the
lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.”[2]
In the season of Advent, we are invited to put on a Spirit of hopefulness,
enthusiastic anticipation of a promised future. But, let’s face it, in light of
seemingly over-the-top promises like Isaiah’s and in light of all that goes on
in the world around us that Spirit of hopefulness can feel downright foolish if
not fraudulent. Earlier this week I was
reading Peter Steinke’s book, A Door Set Open: Grounding Change in Mission and Hope and came across an insightful distinction between dialectical
thinking and ideological thinking. According to Steinke, an ideologue is one
who reduces everything to opposites: “everything is reduced to here or there,
this or that. There can be no ambiguity. Thus, in order to see light, the
ideologist minimizes the moments of despair and erases the darkness.”[3] This kind of thinking is an oversimplification
of reality and can seem like a trivialization of the world around us. And, you and I, when we hear such thinking,
have an understandable tendency to stop listening.
Dialectical thinking, on the other hand, allows that the truth of the world
may, in fact, be “expressed in opposites, two ideas that appear to cancel out
each other.” Steinke’s example is the
Scriptural warrant that one must lose one’s life in order to find it and he
writes, “In a broken world, hope and lament are partners. Hope does not need to
silence the rumbling of crisis to be hope. . . . Dialectical thinking allows one to hope in
the darkness.”[4] The hope of Advent is deeply grounded in the
realities of our present condition.
Some etymologists believe that the word hope comes from the Old
English hoppian which means “to spring, leap, [or] dance.”[5] Hope then is more than a feeling – it’s an
action word; it is a word that asks something of us – something more than
imagination; it asks us to give that feeling legs as we leap up, spring
forward, and dance into a new way of being in the world. Physicist and Anglican priest, JohnPolkinghorne, writes:
“hope is much more than a mood, it
involves a commitment to action. Its moral character implies that what we hope
for should be what we are prepared to work for and so bring about, as far as
that power lies in us.”[6]
And perhaps we
know this intuitively because it is especially during the Season of Advent when
Christians – and others – “get busy.” We
step up our collections of food for the hungry, our gathering of clothing for
the poor. We bring cookies and flowers with us when we visit those who are sick
or homebound. We intuitively understand
that the hope of Advent is grounded in the harsh realities of our community as
our attention turns to bringing hope – to being hope – to others.
- Through your spirit of hope, St. Mark’s delivered a shopping basket filled with groceries to the City of Evanston this past week. That food, along with other food donations from throughout the community, will go to nearly 300 families in our community.
- In addition, two St. Mark’s parishioners volunteered at Tuesday’s Producemobile which saw the largest distribution yet – nearly 9 tons of fresh fruits and vegetables shared with more than 220 families.
- In the Parlor, the Christmas tree continues to be decorated with new hats, mittens, gloves, scarves and socks that will be given to the homeless men and women who are guests of the Interfaith ActionHospitality Center and to the children who at Oakton Elementary School who participate in the Blessings in a Backpack program.
Yes, during the
Season of Advent, we are a hope-filled people who generously bring hope to our
community.
The challenge, of course, is to not let this time of hopefulness become
just another “program” of our already over-programmed lives, just another thing
we do in this one season of the year.
The challenge is to allow the Season of Advent, this season of hopeful action
to become a way of being throughout the year, throughout our lives. Today’s passage
from Matthew opens with John the Baptist sending his disciples to Jesus to ask,
“’Are you the one who is to come, or
are we to wait for another?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you
hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are
cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news
brought to them.’”[7]
Quoting Peter
Steinke once again: “God made the first move in his promises, and invites us to
respond movingly.”[8] Jesus is the hope of the world. Hope – “to spring, leap, or dance.” May we be so moved today and always. Amen.
[1]
Isaiah 11:6.
[2]
Isaiah 35:5-6.
[3]
Peter Steinke, A Door Set Open: Grounding Change in Mission and Hope,
(Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 2010), 37.
[4]
Ibid., 37, 38.
[5]
Douglas Harper, “hop,” Online Etymology accessed on December 13, 2013.
[6]
John C. Polkinghorne, God of Hope and the End of the World, (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2003), 47-8.
[7]
Matthew 11:2-5.
[8]
Steinke, 97.
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