Sunday, December 7, 2008

2 Advent B - 7 December 2008

2 Advent B - 7 December 2008
Isaiah 40:1-11; 2Peter 3:8-15a, 18; Mark 1:1-8
James V. Stockton

The hard times are over. I know it’s difficult to believe. The daily news cycle reminds us that the jobless rate in our nation is the highest it’s been in over thirty years. The stock markets nationally and globally continue to cost millions of people millions of dollars. Major industries, major state governments, scores of large city governments, and hundred of banks and financial institutions are forming a line to the Capital Building in Washington D.C. to plead for government bail out money.

Some people will suggest that we all relax because the economy is correcting itself in ways that have been foreseeable and are unavoidable due to the effects or the failures of certain government policies. Others will suggest that this is exactly the time to bring the panic and some accountability to those who indulged regulations and loopholes for quick profit and gain with little regard for the longer-range consequences to the people of this nation and this world as a whole. Some will say that both are true. Few, though, if any, are saying that the time of hardship is coming to a close. I would like the Church to take the lead in declaring that the Good News that the hard times are ending, that amazing and wonderful things lie ahead for us all.


"When you are face to face with a difficulty, you are up against a discovery." It was said by 19th century physicist William Thomson, also known as Baron or Lord Kelvin. He is remembered today most popularly through the temperature scale that bears his name. "When you are face to face with a difficulty,” he said, “you are up against a discovery." People all around us, people we love and who love us, and people whom we don’t even know, are, like you and me, up against the hardships and difficulties of this present time. I pray that along with the difficulties that you and I may be experiencing these days, we can also experience the blessing of discovery. If we can do this within ourselves and for one another, then we can also, in Christ’s Name, offer this perspective to the world around us, those known to us and unknown who are also facing the economic and social hardships of our day.

‘Comfort, O comfort my people,’ says God to the prophet Isaiah. ‘Tell my people,’ God says, ‘encouraging words about the future dawning on them now.’ ‘In accordance with God’s promise,’ writes the Apostle Peter, ‘we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness truly is at home.’ And ‘God’s promise is coming,’ Peter writes, ‘and when it is coming is not the issue. What is the issue is that it is coming and that of this we may be certain. Likewise, John the Baptist says, ‘The One who is more powerful than is coming after me.’ Out in the wilderness, baptizing the people and prophesying to them about the Savior who is coming, John, like Isaiah, offers the people hopeful visions and encouraging words about the dawning of a better, brighter day.

“They say misery loves company,” the article begins; “but the same may be even more true of happiness.” It is by Karen Kaplan of the Los Angeles Times, and she is reporting on a recent study published in the British Medical Journal. Given the hardships that we share these days, I’m guessing that this article has gained a lot of attention. Maybe many of us here have heard about or read this article. Scientists from Harvard University and UC San Diego have discovered that “Knowing someone who is happy makes you 15.3% more likely to be happy yourself.”

Furthermore, the study shows that a “happy friend-of-a-friend increases your odds of happiness by 9.8%,” and that “even your neighbor's sister's friend can give you a 5.6% boost” in your likelihood to be happy. Says Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and medical sociologist at Harvard who co-wrote the study: "Your emotional state depends not just on actions and choices that you make, but also on [the] actions and choices of other people, many of which you don't even know.” Does misery love company, as the old saying goes? Maybe, but if so, isn’t it so only because company makes misery more bearable and happiness more likely?

In the times during which Isaiah, Peter, and John, respectively, either wrote or ministered, many people were suffering great hardship. They were in misery. Isaiah and his people are the captives of hostile enemies, denied basic rights that you and I take for granted, living with a day-to-day uncertainty that rivals anything that you or I, God willing, have likely ever known. In his day, Peter’s listeners are enduring everything from ridicule to persecution for simply trusting that God came in person in the one called Jesus of Nazareth and, of course, acting upon that trust. Many of their neighbors and relatives regard them suspiciously. The local authorities look upon them as trouble-makers who are practicing some strange and foreign religion. John the Baptist is himself is viewed very skeptically by some, especially by those whose authority John’s message faces and challenges.

And beside his message, John dresses differently from the norm; he eats foods that differ from what most are eating, he tends to his personal hygiene differently from most if at all. To these outward signs add John’s audacious message and the people who in positions of power soon decide that he is so different that they must shut him down. And even if his message is appreciated by many, yet there is just so much about John that is different, that even his friends and fans are at least a little nervous about him. He is different, and there really is no greater sin in society than being different. And so eventually, John, and then Jesus after him, will pay with their lives for being different; both will pay dearly for daring to make a difference.

As is often true in our day, so also in theirs: people in positions of privilege or of official authority are laying a corrupt and oppressive burden upon the general population. John brings a message to shine a light on these ills; he names the evils, he identifies the difficulties. And in so doing, he provides an opportunity for the people to face a discovery. For, to the people who suffer along with John, for those who value what he has to tell them, John’s message and the One whose coming it predicts represent an end to their present hardship and difficulties. Yes, bringing the message means ‘being different,’ ‘even unto death.’ Yet, for John and for Jesus, bringing hope and its fulfillment in peace to people who are without hope, who are seeking peace, who are longing for joy, who are praying for some sign of God’s Love or care or concern, some sign that they are not alone; some sign that God accompanies them in their hardship, and is leading to discover what real happiness is; this, for John, for Jesus, is worth it all.

Because just to bring the hope and the peace and the joy of the promise is already to initiate the beginning of the end of the hard times. God’s reign is coming again to the people of God. The prophet Isaiah, the Apostle Peter, and John, the Holy Outsider, each brings this message to his people. In the midst of this season of hardship, the Church’s season of Advent brings this message to God’s people today. I pray that we, now, God’s people, can bring this message to the people around us. And if it’s hard to believe, then let us discover that, if it’s said of misery, yet, faith loves company even more.

Today let discover our belief with one another: that the injustice of an imbalanced economy shall not escape the balance of the justice of God. Let’s each of us discover tomorrow with someone we know our belief that the wrongs of the greedy will not outlast the righteousness of the good. Let’s each of us discover the next day with someone we love, our belief that the corruption of the powerful will not survive the holiness of the Almighty. The day after that let’s discover with someone we don’t even know our belief that the hardships we endure are not immune from the healing Peace of heaven.

Christ has come and is coming again. God’s Love has risen and rising again. Let us together with God now discover and believe that amazing and wonderful things lie ahead for us all.

Now may the God of steadfast hope and promise of peace so move within us that we may lift our eyes and our hearts to God and ask what we should do, then guide us to all true choices, that we may walk in the Light and warmth of our savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and for ever. Amen.

© 2008, James V. Stockton

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