All Saints by the Lake, Dorval
December 4, 2022
At Messy Church on Friday, I told the story titled “Jerusalem” – the story of God’s people roughly from the time of King David to the return from exile in Babylon. It’s a story that is usually given very short shrift by our children’s curricula, but which is absolutely essential to our traditions, our hymnody and spirituality, and especially to our observance of Advent. This is how the story script ends:
And the people were not always faithful.
But they remembered all that God had done, and all that God had promised.
They told the stories to their children,
and to their children’s children.
They wrote them in a book,
and kept them safe,
and read them again and again.
And they waited and hoped for God to do something new.
And that’s our story.
The story covers more than a thousand years – from the Exodus to the time just before the birth of Jesus. And just about exactly in the middle of this time period, around 700 BCE, we find the beloved passage from Isaiah – “there shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse”. The promised shoot from Jesse’s tree, traditionally interpreted by Christians to refer to Jesus, the Messiah, referred in its original to King Hezekiah of Judah, on whom the people pinned great hopes for reform and for defense from their enemies.
But despite Hezekiah’s efforts, nevertheless, eventually, the northern kingdom and then the southern kingdom fell, the people were driven into exile, and they had nothing to lean on during their seventy years in Babylon but God’s story and God’s promises.
This push and pull between exile and return, between the city and the wilderness, between despair and hope, between distant promise and joyful fulfillment – these contrasting themes are absolutely foundational to Advent, and to our lives of faith, and to the experience of God’s people throughout history. They appears in the Gospel passage, in which John the Baptist claims the legacy of the wilderness prophets, and the people of the city, both rich and poor, powerless and powerful, go out to see him, to discover what God is doing on the margins, out there in the desert beyond the Jordan
John also takes his place firmly within the story: the story of the people who read their scriptures over and over, and the prophets who reminded the people of God’s promises and called them back to God’s ways, as together they waited and hoped for God to do something new. And after the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus, Paul takes his place in the same story, as he writes in the letter to the Romans:
For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
A prayer which still holds as true for us, in Dorval in 2022, as it did for Prisca and Aquila and the church in their house in Rome in AD 60. The scriptures – our story – give us steadfastness and encouragement, so that we might have hope, live in harmony with one another, and glorify God.
The people of All Saints’ have been doing a lot, lately, to try to figure out exactly how we live God’s story here in this time and place. What is our strategic plan? What ministries should we foster, encourage, initiate? What gifts and strengths do we have that are perhaps not being used to their fullest?
But it behooves us occasionally to remind ourselves that we are not doing this just to have something to do, or even just to be the best people and community we can be. We are doing it because we are part of the same story as the shoot from the stump of Jesse, as John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness, as the people of the church in Rome receiving instruction from the Apostle. This is our story – and what would happen if we really believed, and lived, that claim?
As we consider how to bring more people in to the life of this congregation and its story, it is easy to fall into one or both of two misconceptions about the people “out there” whom we would like to make contact with as a church. We see them either as potential recipients of “outreach” – people with problems that the church is supposed to feel a sense of responsibility for addressing – or as targets of something we might call “evangelism”, which is really about finding people, preferably with some free time and discretionary income, who can help us pay the bills and keep our programs going.
I wouldn’t call that “evangelism”, though. Real evangelism is inviting people into the story – and then seeing what happens, which may be very surprising. And it falsifies the story to make a distinction between “us” and “them,” between the recipients of charity and the people worthy of being invited in. The story includes us all.
I grew up in an Episcopal church in New Haven that was weird, chaotic and dysfunctional in many ways, but one of the things that it got dead right was this. Yale professors sat in the pews on Sunday morning next to Vietnam veterans who were living on the street and addicted to drugs. And at the weekly food pantry, there was no clear distinction between volunteers and guests – many of the people packing and handing out the bags of groceries would take one home with them at the end of the morning, because they needed the food too.
We don’t have the same divisions between Jews and Gentiles that were present in the society in which Paul wrote the letter to the Romans. But there are other divisions which are equally strong, and it is the church’s business to work as honestly as we can on overcoming those divisions. “Welcome one another, therefore,” writes Paul, “just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” And All Saints’ has committed to going one step beyond welcome, to affirming, not just bringing people in to make them like us, but to celebrate who they, and we, authentically are together, not despite our differences, but because of them.
All of us have needs, and all of us have gifts. All of us go through the cycle of exile and return, of wilderness and homecoming, of faithlessness and faithfulness, that are described in God’s great story, that belongs to all of us. All of us are in need of the “steadfastness and encouragement” of the story, to cope with the things life throws at us.
So, friends, in this Advent season, as we await the coming of a Messiah who showed up in the world as the recipient of the charity of strangers, let us heed John the Baptist’s call to repentance, and cease to draw lines between groups of people where God sees no distinction. Let us come together and seek steadfastness and encouragement in the story of God’s people throughout the ages. And let us tell that story and invite others into it, until the earth is full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
Amen.
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