The Word and Worship
Advent 2
Fr. Tim Nunez
May my spoken word be true to God’s written word and bring us all closer to the living word, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
This Advent we’ve begun Lectionary Year C, which will focus on the Gospel of Luke. (Year A is Matthew, Year B is Mark and John gets sprinkled across all three years.)
Luke gives us some very helpful information this morning which is unique to his Gospel, placing the preaching of John the Baptist and Jesus’s imminent ministry in the context of the current political officials, the Emperor Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, Herod (Antipas), Philip the Tetrarch and Lysanias.
That gives us a good time stamp in history, and it also points to their uneasy times. Emperor Tiberius had become a recluse and was growing increasingly paranoid, which meant none of these local authorities wanted to bother him. The Jewish historian Josephus noted that Pilate was harsh and responded to unrest by asserting Roman power, which stoked more unrest. Herod Antipas was cautious. Philip and Lysanias oversaw regions that were wild and rife with bandits.
Josephus characterized Annas and Caiaphas as politically adept at collaborating with the Romans, and corrupt, profiting personally from Temple funds. Things are unsettled, turbulent, which affects everyone.
How does God respond to turbulent times? First, he speaks to his people. The Word of God came to John, who began to preach a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The turbulent nature of things is always rooted in sin, and the cure always begins with each of us.
John is quoting Isaiah 40:3-5, which is well-known to many of us because we know with hindsight that it’s heralding Jesus. We tend to see John the Baptist as confrontational in the sense of “Buck up! Straighten up!” He is confrontational, but there is another dimension to it.
To them, the hindsight brings forth the context of Isaiah’s time and framed by the verses that immediately precede it, 40:1-2:
Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her
that she has served her term,
that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand
double for all her sins. (Isaiah 40:1-2)
The call to repentance from forgiveness of sins is the call to making paths straight. It’s the call to filling in our lowest lows and lowering the impossibly steep climbs. It’s the call to straightening the crooked paths and making the rough places smooth. All of it is bound up in God’s desire to comfort his people.
We tend to look at history in two ways. On one hand we see astounding progress in technologies, information and communication, and socially as well. At the same time, we have a keen sense of loss, that in important ways things were better before.
I think both are true, but the more you study history the more you find that one thing has not changed. In every age and in every place, humanity suffers greatly and the vast majority of that suffering is rooted in our failure to live as God has called us to live. In short, it is rooted in our sin.
The solution to our individual and collective sin always begins with each one of us. Why? I cannot fix you. You cannot fix each other. All of us, each of us, have to start with ourselves, and as we make progress, we might help each other.
That decision to start, again and again, day by day, is the essence of worship. It’s the acknowledgement that God is the ultimate standard, the ultimate goal, the model of how we ought to be. It’s the acknowledgement that we are falling short of him, and that we are dependent on God to heal what is broken within us.
We are unsettled, burdened with the readily available knowledge of everything going on in the world today. This morning we awoke to the news that Islamist extremists have taken over Syria. We need God’s comfort in our own turbulent times.
We live that out in daily devotionals, Compline and of course our worship services here. Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God…
When I was Canon to the Ordinary, I was blessed to hear Bishop Brewer talk to dozens of people about ordained ministry and I heard him preach dozens of ordination services. He would always make a strong point that one’s ministry began at the altar and flowed from there into the church and the world beyond.
In worship, Archdeacon John leads prayers, he brings the Gospel and he sets the table. The rest of the week, he leads prayers, brings the Gospel into his work and our community and sets the table so to speak for various ministries including the men’s Bible study on Friday mornings.
In worship, I invite everyone in with prayer, proclaim God’s Word in the sermon and bring us all to encounter the Kingdom of God in sharing Christ in Holy Communion. Those elements get played out in appointments, hospital visits, teaching classes and managing personalities and conflicts that spring up all the time, as well as my involvement with the Care Center and Camp Wingmann.
But this isn’t primarily about the clergy. We are here to serve you. What about you? You come and greet each other in fellowship. You encounter God in his Word written, sung and proclaimed. You encounter Christ in the Holy Communion. How do you carry your role in worship from the altar into your car, your home, your work and friendships? How do you receive and share the comfort God extends to you in Jesus?
I’ll close with a prayer Anne Marcure shared with me this week. It’s called A Chorister’s Prayer. It’s meant for the choir but it applies to us all. You should have it in your bulletin. Let’s pray it together:
Bless, O Lord, us Thy servants,
Who minister in Thy temple.
Grant that what we sing with our lips,
We may believe in our hearts,
And what we believe in our hearts,
We may show forth in our lives.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
I hope you’ll put it on your refrigerator or bathroom mirror, or put it wherever you start your day, so that you’ll be comforted and empowered by God’s saving grace to be his light in the world.
AMEN
POWER ON!