Advent 1:
Sermon notes
much credit should be given to J Elsworth Kalas and his book Christmas From the Backside
Normally Christmas is bathed in
“loveliness”
- · Baby
- · Star
- · Angels singing
- · Men on a quest
So why start here? Why begin Advent with the story of "the Fall"?
We need to understand
the scandal in order to grasp the full magnitude of the impact of Christmas
It wouldn’t be
Christmas, there wouldn’t even be a need for Christmas if not for OUR scandal.
Adam
and Eve represent all of us. They had
everything going for them. They lived in the garden of exquisite beauty and
perfection and then they made decisions that turned their life to shambles. With that sin enters the scene and the human
race becomes a race of sinners.
The
word “sin” often makes us think of only a certain type of action—pornography,
addiction, murder, adultery. All of
these qualify but they also distract us from “the larger more compelling facts”
Fact:
Sin affects all of us. Our most basic
sin is disobeying God. Whether our sins
are crude or sophisticated, naïve or knowing, the issue is still the same: us being too consumed by us and not consumed
enough by God.
We often like to sugar coat our sins—we justify them
giving all kinds of *good* reasons for doing what we already new was wrong or
hurtful or offensive. And our excuses
and explanations only make it clear how problematic our actions really were.
Now, we may not feel all that scandalous in this
moment, but I bet we could easily take a moment to recall moments we’d rather
leave hidden and forgotten. But it’s not
just the moments that make us want to run and hide that are the problem. It’s
the simple moments in between where we knew better but we did it anyway.
Author and theologian, J Elsworth Kalas, says it this
way, “When we live below our best potential, when we’re mediocre when we out to
be fine, cheap when we ought to be noble, shoddy when we should be upright—this
is sin.” “When we are anything less than godly, it is because we’re involved in
sin.”
Now, back to Adam and Eve, they knew what they were
not supposed to do and they did it anyway, together, both complicit and active
in that sin (let’s not get carried away blaming things on Eve and leaving Adam
blameless, both participated in full knowledge of what was right and what was
wrong). And then when God appeared on
the scene, instead of asking for forgiveness, instead of trying to fix their relationship,
they hid. And then they tried to justify
their actions….”well, we did it because we were naked.” God created them naked, didn’t have any issue
with their nakedness. It was their sin
and their shame that needed hiding, not their nakedness.
And we then follow suit and do the same thing, over
and over again. We know what is wrong,
but we choose to do it anyway. And
whether you start it or I start it, it doesn’t really matter if we both
participate in it. And like Adam and
Eve, when we get caught, our first reaction is not to apologize and set things
right, instead our first course of action is to justify why we had to do what we did and why we
shouldn’t be punished for it. And when
that fails, we point at something else, we blame all the other stuff in our
life avoiding the heart of the matter, which is our disobedience.
And there you have the problem with the human
condition: we are a scandalously sinful bunch and when we get caught, we are
rarely the model of humility and repentance.
But that’s not really what we want to hear now is
it? You probably didn’t come to worship
hoping to hear about what a compulsive sinner you are, we are. But that’s our truth. The fact is we are sinful, not
beyond-redemption-evil (though I’m not sure such a thing actually exists), but
scandalously disobedient and defiant running form God and hiding behind
self-justification and excuses.
And that’s why we need Christmas. Not the holiday, but the incarnation. We need to meet Emmanuel. We need to receive God’s abundant gift of
redemption, forgiveness, and new life through Christ. Those are all desperately needed in our
world. Not just because of Adam and Eve
but because of us. Not just for “those people” in prison but for “these people”
here in these pews.
Our deviance provokes God’s action…an action we see
most clearly through the person of Christ.
J. Elsworth Kalas points out something interesting. He says that secular stories often say it
better than some of the Christian merriment.
Think of “A Christmas Carol”, the story of Scrooge. Charles Dickens wrote that “[Scrooge] was a
tight fisted hand at the grind stone…a squeezing, wrenching, grasping,
scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!”
Did you catch that? A
sinner. Scrooge was a sinner. And at the end of the story, he was converted
(not Dickens term, but relevant nonetheless).
He became a generous, compassionate and benevolent man—that was as much
a conversion as any.
Or we could take the story of the Grinch Who Stole
Christmas by Dr Seuss. Again we
encounter a curmudgeon who embodies the greed and meanness that epitomizes all
that is wrong in the world. And at the
end of the story, again we see a conversion.
(Not Dr Seuss’ term either, but again it’s relevant). At the end Grinch works to insure a merry and
happy Christmas for everyone.
In a way, the secular stories say what the original
Christmas stories always have. We have a problem—Scrouge, Grinch, Adam, Eve,
Bob, or Sally—all need to be converted, all need their hearts transformed from
selfishness and disobedience, to holy humility.
And so God offers that opportunity. God gave us Christmas, not for the sake of
the holiday, but for the Holy-day—so that we might be changed and moved out of
our sinfulness and into God’s wholeness, away from our disobedience and into
awesome relationships with God and with others.
It really is no wonder we look forward to Christmas
and anticipate it for months. Sure, some
of our focus has been co-opted by consumption and materialism—but the heart of
it is, we look forward to the conversion—the good news that we don’t have to be
stuck in the sins of our past or forever labeled a Grinch or a scrooge. Instead, we can be the bearers of joy and
hope. But that doesn’t happen without
the gift of the Christ-child. We need to
meet Emmanuel, God with us, to be transformed.
We must encounter real love in order to share it with others. And God offers that to us through Jesus.
