For Nine Straight Years, I have been on a college campus. This is my 10th year to celebrate a final fall worship of the semester. In all that time, I have never reached Advent IV. I have never moved beyond lighting 3 candles of the advent wreath. I’ve never had a chance to share the gospel of peace with a group of college students. But Peace is what we’ve come to today. And I’m here to tell you, peace is what you have come to receive tonight.
We’re in the middle of finals, and peace seems to be the perfect thing you need to hear. Because some of the people who are normally here are already gone. It’s certainly nice for them to have peace. We’re still toiling away. It’s great that Christmas is next weekend…Joy. Let’s get me through these finals first. Then we’ll go forward from there. Ah but Peace is built when we come to discover that in releasing God, we can find Peace in anything.
Every year, the Advent season is a season of preparation. It’s a season that reminds us of what is means to have the Emmanuel (the God with us) in the world. And it is important because it changes many of the notions that people carried for a long time about faith. Now for most of us, these ideas are not new, but they were for a long to people who lived a long time before us.
In the beginning of this faith tradition, which really is Judaism, there was a belief that God dwelled with the people in a tent. This was called the tent of meeting. As the Israelites were escaping Egypt and working their way through the wilderness, they had with them the tabernacle, of the footstool of God as it has been described so well in the Hebrew Canon, and this is where God would dwell. Later, as we see from this passage in Samuel, David thinks it’s time to build God a place to live, and God rebukes him. But after that, David’s son Solomon builds him a house. That’s the first temple, which is later destroyed when the Babylonians come in and take the people in exile from Israel. When they come back about 60 years later, they build a second temple for God to live in.
After that things get a little confusing. About 450 years after the second temple appears, this guy named Jesus shows up, we declare him the God with Us, the Son of God, the Prince of Peace, etc and he becomes for us the Emmanuel (which means God with us) and then after he dies the second temple is burned in 70 A.D. and what we have left today is the Western Wall of that temple and standing on its foundation is the Dome of the Rock, the single most famous building in the world today and the reason why most of the contention over Jerusalem is currently in play.
For thousands of years people saw God as being in one location, in a box that says this is where you worship. But then we had this God with us character of Jesus. but recently, I would say anywhere in the last 1600 years, we’ve started once again to compartmentalize God. We’ve come up with ideas of who Jesus is in comparison with God. We’ve come up with ways to identify who is a Christian. We’ve come up with ways to tell the story of Christmas, a holiday that is really a pagan holiday associated with a Roman God. We’ve taken somebody’s birthday (which of course we don’t know) and we’ve placed it within the idea that it was a cold winter night and the barn was perfect and there was a star and that all of that is literal and there really has to have been a virgin birth for it to be powerful and authentic and worth hearing. It has to be during Christmas that we hear of birth, it has to be during easter that we hear of resurrection, it has to be this creed that we say and it has to be this doctrine of belief that we believe or we’re not Christian… or better yet, that we’re going to hell.
But what kind of Peace does that bring? What kind of Peace did it bring the Israelites to have to travel to the temple to make their ritual sacrifice. What kind of peace did it bring to them to have to think when they went into exile that their God was dead and couldn’t help them because they were in exile away from the place where God lived. What kind of Peace does it bring us to say that God is this way or that way and that you have to get behind it. What kind of Peace would it bring us to say that there was one absolute truth and that if you didn’t have it in your heart, soul and mind, you couldn’t belong?
Instead, perhaps it’s time to release ourselves from all of these things. The passage from Luke is called the Magnificat. It’s one of the most powerful pieces of the entire new testament and most consider it a song of Mary. Now we can’t be sure that Mary ever really said these words, but we can be sure that when any mother who is choosing to have a child receives the news that they are pregnant, the excitement can be almost overwhelming. Mary’s song is the pure and authentic song of expectation of any mother. She sees in her child a voice and a presence of someone who might radically change lives around them.
Christmas is when we’ve traditionally come to give and be given in abundance. It’s the reason why during the holiday season, food banks get lots of food and an overwhelming number of people volunteer. But in the midst of this time that is specified for doing things that are good for others, the realization sets in that we have been trained by society to do these things because if we don’t do them now, we get looked at poorly. I mean, if you don’t volunteer or give money at this time of the year, then you’re quite a scrooge aren’t you? But what happens is that we put our giving and volunteering time in a neatly wrapped package for a neatly wrapped time of the year so that we can feel good about ourselves along with everyone else.
The time of the year when food banks are most in need is not now, but in June and July, when everyone is on vacation and enjoying the nice weather and isn’t paying attetion to the population who are poor. In February and March, shelters struggle to get volunteers because either the weather is too cold for them to go out or the weather is getting nice enough that we stop thinking that people need to have a warm bed to sleep in at night.
We have put God into a box, we have put the expecations of being a Christian in a box and we have said that on Jesus’ birthday, we better follow what Jesus has to say. We had better do what Jesus might do because “it’s the holiday season.” But the kingdom of God reverts on January 1 to the same old world with the same old hostility toward one another and the same old lack of care. Why should now be any different. Are we playing along.
I’ll be honest, I don’t like Christmas. Not because I don’t think I have something to learn about giving to others, I DO! What I don’t like about Christmas is that we’re faking it. We’re buying presents and we’re giving not because we want to, but because we’re obligated to. And everyone feels obligated to spend money on others because society has built up the image. We go black Friday shopping for ourselves and then we go Christmas shopping afterwards because we want to get good deals but we also HAVE to buy as many people as we know gifts. Gifts that are crappy, gifts that will get used for 30 days or less and then sit on a shelf. We’ve gotten Good at following the golden rule, the sharing is caring slogans and the Jesus is my boyfriend and it’s birthday season kind of feeling. We don’t really care about each other though because if we did, we wouldn’t only give to people when society says it’s supposed to be done.
So this year, I encourage us to take God out of the seasonal box we have placed around God. The kingdom doesn’t just have to show up, we don’t have to live radically different and for others right now, but we’ve got to make this world a better place from this day forward. If it is a birthday, then it has to be the marker of new beginning wherein we don’t come back next Christmas and do the same giving. Black Friday doesn’t have to come the day after thanksgiving. We can give to others and care about others all the year, every day, for the rest of our lives. Otherwise, it’s just birthday’s that are important, and it’s just the reality that we aren’t really trying to bring the kingdom of God into this world. Amen.
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