Sermons

Prophetic Expectation

John Wilkinson                            Third Presbyterian Church
December 17, 2006                  Zephaniah 3:14-20, Luke 3:7-18

Every so often, the calendar plays an interesting game with church scheduling, and such is the case this year. Next Sunday is both the fourth Sunday of Advent, in the morning, and then will quickly become Christmas Eve. Next Sunday morning, and the Sunday following, New Year’s Eve, we will worship once, at 10:45. For Christmas Eve itself, we will offer our traditional three candlelight services: the 4:30 p.m. festival of the Nativity, led by our children and youth; a lovely 8:00 communion service in the Chapel; and the 11:00 p.m. service of lessons and carols. The 11:00 service will be broadcast on WXXI FM, 91.5, thanks to a grant from SeniorsFirst/Valley Manor. If you are away from Rochester, you may listen to the service streamed live at wxxi.org. We hope you will join us over the airwaves, over the Internet, or the old-fashioned way, and do invite a friend.

Also, I am mindful that for many, today will be the last Sunday here before Christmas, as you travel to be with family, or your last Sunday in Rochester for several weeks or months. With temperatures reaching 60 degrees today, I cannot imagine why anybody would not want to stay in this area all winter long. Nonetheless, “blessed be the ties that bind,” the hymn says, and we wish you a blessed Christmas, traveling mercies, and every good wish in the New Year, until we meet again.

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The Mission Yearbook for Prayer and Study is one of the best resources that the Presbyterian Church produces. 365 pages in length, a page a day, the Mission Yearbook includes four daily scripture readings, a list of staff people working in our denominational offices in Louisville, and an entry for a particular mission unit of the Presbyterian church, domestic and international. On May 13, for example, you could read about the Presbytery of Pueblo, in Colorado. On June 23, it is the U.K; on November 28, Kenya.

Tomorrow’s entry focuses on a presbytery in the Synod of the Covenant, which comprises the states of Michigan and Ohio. The Presbytery of Muskingum Valley is named for the Muskingum River that flows through it, essentially the eastern third of the state, from New Philadelphia to Marietta, which no doubt pinpoints it precisely for you.

A Mission Yearbook entry includes a bit of demographic information about the presbytery of the day, in this case the 94 churches in the presbytery and their 13,673 members. That means that the average size of a congregation in Muskingum Valley Presbytery is 145 members, which means that many are much less than 100 but not many are greater than 200. Membership figures are never an indication of faithfulness, but they are certainly an indication of some of the challenges facing our denominational future.

The Mission Yearbook entry then details one or several mission projects happening within the presbytery – a new church development, a homeless shelter, perhaps a youth-outreach program based in a congregation. Most of the stories are intended to be positive and inspiring, and are, though if you read the pages with any regularity, you will note a tendency in the last few years for stories of presbytery re-structuring or transformation, as would be the case for our own presbytery, the Presbytery of Genesee Valley, much of which is based on lessened human and financial resources.

In the interest of full disclosure, I need to say that the Presbytery of Muskingum Valley holds a fond place in my heart and in my vocational journey. My childhood church and college church were both within the bounds of the presbytery – that’s how we say it – and I was a candidate for ministry as a member of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Wooster and under care of that presbytery until I was ordained, though they soon got rid of me.

But that’s not the point. If there is a point that is more than nostalgia, it is the entry for tomorrow, focusing on two outreach programs launched from the congregation called Central Presbyterian Church in Zanesville, through which the Muskingum River runs. Central Presbyterian Church once numbered more than 1000 members; it now registers 199 members. It is an imposing red sandstone edifice that you can see when you drive around Zanesville on Interstate 70. We used to call the church “Big Red” when my father served as pastor there.

Central Church was formative to me in my childhood for many reasons, the least of which is not the fact that it was the first place I witnessed poverty, real poverty, in this case the deep poverty experienced by Appalachian poor, and it was the first place where I learned that the church could do, should do, something about it.

If you read the Mission Yearbook’s entry tomorrow about the Presbytery of Muskingum Valley, you will learn about the Eastside Community Ministry, began in 1958 at that very Central Presbyterian Church. What once started as a kind of random and reactive effort to address the needs of those showing up at the church is now a multi-dimensional social service center, housed in its own building, providing food, clothing, relief funds, after-school care, elder care.

In that same entry, you will also learn about the Fellowship of Christ’s Community. Every Sunday night, in the red sandstone confines of Central Presbyterian Church, more than 100 poor people from the community gather for a meal. And when the meal is done, they stay for worship and education, typically Bible study, for children and adults. The fellowship has recently celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, and has evolved into a kind of real-live congregation. A dear family friend, now a retired minister in the presbytery, serves as the chaplain for the program.

It is a beautiful thing, and I tell you about it for reasons more than nostalgia, or even as a model from which we might learn something. I tell you, and remind myself about it, as a kind of Christmas card in these last frantic days before the big day.

I am on several sets of e-mail conversations with ministers around the country. A friend posited the question whether things seemed more subdued this time around. Perhaps, several of us replied.

I don’t know how it is for you. It seems as if the whole world is holding its collective breath, not precisely sure of what will happen next.

And so it is Christmas, as John Lennon sang. On one hand, we have fights breaking out over the latest version of X-Box or Game Cube or Play Station. That’s the Christmas spirit, I thought, watching the punching and kicking on TV.

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, started for some at 12:01 this year, one minute past midnight. And not a day goes by when at least a paragraph or two is devoted to how much you and I are spending, and how online shopping and deep discounts and other factors are making all of this very unpredictable, and how our economy hangs in the balance.

Juxtapose that picture with what I believe to be a rather manufactured controversy about nativity sets and menorahs and whether sales people can say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays” or “Have a better than average winter.” We need to remember that for centuries, we Protestants did very little to recognize any of this, Christmas or Easter or any liturgical day at all. That is to say, much of what the culture understands about Christmas is a late addition.

And we need to remember that while it may have been founders with Christian affiliations who got this great American experiment started, we’ve not been a Christian nation, and we are now certainly comprised of more that those who profess to follow the Prince of Peace. I can think of no less a Christian thing to do than not to take an in-your-face Christmas approach. Christ will be in Christmas whether we keep him there or not, and I like to think we do a little better job of that when we, with humility, interact with our Jewish and Muslim neighbors in a different way.

And so it is Christmas, as John Lennon sang. If Christmas is not one of the versions just identified, either a frantic spending frenzy or an overzealous shoehorning onto the cultural scene, what will it be? What will it be?

Expectations for the season run high. We want everything to be perfect, happy, a combination of Norman Rockwell, Currier and Ives and Martha Stewart, or if not Martha Stewart, at least Rachael Ray. Old hurts healed. Old wounds gone. Old sorrows evaporated like so much froth on your gingerbread frappiccino.

But we know better. Churches hold “Blue Christmas” services in December not only to be market savvy. We know the words of the old carol well, about the hopes and fears of all the years. We fear disappointment. We mourn loss. We seek hope.

Hope may be our deepest expectation, and joy, and we turn to unlikely places like Central Presbyterian Church in Zanesville, Ohio to find it, or perhaps even this place, to find the real reason for the season, the real Christmas spirit. God’s love outpouring, as William Young so eloquently reminded us last week. Real hope, real joy, that does not ignore what hurts inside us or what is broken in the world, but seeks to redeem it and transform it by incarnational love.

We encounter two angry men this morning, prophets named Zephaniah and John. For Zephaniah, writing some six centuries before the events we will commemorate in a week, everything was off base – religion, politics, business. God was not happy, and God was coming to make things right.

For John, the point was more personalized, directed to the individuals listening to him and overhearing him. Fly right, he said, so to speak, repent, be baptized.

We read Zephaniah and John and ask ourselves, so this is Christmas??? And in the same breath we respond, absolutely, because neither prophet left the people at that point of despair. Each insisted that God was near, and that such nearness was more than spiritual or metaphysical. I will remove disaster from you, God promises. I will bring you home.

Could we imagine a better homecoming than God welcoming us into God’s love? Home for Christmas, home to Christmas, home to grace, home to love, home to restoration.

And when John is asked what this all will look like, he responds not with doctrine or triumphant words. Give your clothes away. Give your food away, an act we will seek to recount event his day. Don’t cheat. Be fair.

Charles Cousar writes that the theme of the day is “joy over what the Lord has done and will do. But it is not a giddy, senseless type of joy, unaware of the harsh realities of the human situation. Rather it is a joy that is anchored to an acknowledgement of God’s love and presence in human life.” (Texts for Preaching: Year C, page 19)

I must admit that I am a bit weary of words like anticipation, preparation, expectation. But the prophetic words of Advent continue to do what they are intended to do: make me, and perhaps us, feel just a bit off-center. Too much comfort, like too much eggnog, might encourage us to miss the point. But the story, and those who have proclaimed it for centuries, will not allow us to miss the point.

So that when the day comes, and it is coming, when mother and child and shepherd and angel convene on that little town, when silently the wondrous gift is given, we will be ready.

“Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trembling stand. Ponder nothing earthly minded, for with blessing in his hand, Christ our God to earth descended, our full homage to demand.”

And the hope and joy we experience will be greater than anything the world could ever offer, or we could ever imagine. And that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

Amen.