The Messiah is coming. Today is the day you’ve been waiting for. Repent—clear out the internal junk that is getting in the way—and get ready to receive the gift that God is sending you.
text: Matthew 3:1-12
Have you ever made a significant ordered that took a while to be delivered?
I have a few colleagues who will be moving in the next few months, so this week we were talking about things like selling snow blowers, buying refrigerators, and scheduling movers. We talked about the challenge of making large investments of various kinds when the timing related to those investments is uncertain.
Now, it’s probably a bit simplistic to equate the coming of Jesus with the arrival of a new refrigerator. But bear with me for a second. Imagine that you’re anticipating the arrival of a new refrigerator. There is some preparation work to do, right? You may have to clean out the old refrigerator before the new refrigerator arrives. And if you’ve been tracking your order for a while, you may get an email saying “your order will be delivered today!” If you haven’t cleaned out the old refrigerator and created space for the new refrigerator, when the new refrigerator is delivered, the person who’s been sent to install the new refrigerator might get annoyed with you and say, “why aren’t you ready? You knew this was going to happen, but you’re not ready!”
Again—this is an extremely simplistic example. But it gets at what our gospel reading is about today, and it might help us make some connections to our own seasons of waiting and anticipation.
So before we get to the refrigerator, let’s locate ourselves in the biblical story. When I lead workshops with congregations, one of the first things I often do is try to help us connect our story with God’s story. If we want to know where we are being invited to grow, expand or change, it’s important for us to pay attention to what God is doing and how God is inviting us to be part of what God is doing. And when I ask people to summarize for me what God’s story is, I will often get blank stares. But as we think about our hope for our church in the future, it will be more and more important that we can articulate the story of our faith and why it matters to us. And we have a tool that regularly reminds us where we are in God’s story. That tool is the liturgical calendar. The liturgical calendar is a way for us to live the biblical story from year to year. It also gives us rhythms, rituals and practices that help us live out the important pieces of our faith.
So let me breeze through the liturgical seasons, and the way they help me remember the connection between God’s story and my story. Don’t worry—we’ll come back to the refrigerator.
The liturgical year is anchored in the two significant events where God breaks into the world—one is Jesus’ birth, and one is Jesus’ resurrection. Christmas and Easter are the anchor stories of our Christian faith—God comes into the world through the birth of Jesus, and God defeats the power of sin and death through the resurrection of Jesus. So right away we know two key parts of God’s story: God is with us, and death has been defeated. Before each of these anchor seasons there is a season of preparation. The season of preparation for Christmas is the season of Advent. The season of preparation for Easter is the season of Lent. In Advent, we prepare for the coming of Jesus by reflecting on the ways we need God to come into the world. In Lent, we prepare for the resurrection of Jesus by reflecting on the ways we are bound and limited by the powers of sin and death—in our own lives and in the world around us. Then, after each anchor season is a season of expression—where we express the gift that we received from God. So after Christmas we express the gift of Jesus in the season of Epiphany, and after Easter we express the gift of the resurrection in the season of Pentecost. Living into the gift of the resurrection leads us to a deeper awareness of our dependence on God and our need for God in our lives, which leads us back into the season of Advent as we wait and prepare again for God to break into our world with a message of hope and love.
This is the overall arc of the story of our faith that we find in the Bible. We go from anticipating God’s desire to be in relationship with us, to telling the story of how Jesus makes that relationship with God personal, and then go to how the Holy Spirit comes on each one of us as the body of Christ in the world and invites us to share the story of God’s love with those around us. The reason that matters is because John the Baptist’s teachings in our readings today can sound kind of harsh if we don’t keep in mind the whole story. The gospel reading today begins with “In those days,” and then describes John the Baptist in a way that directly connects him with the Old Testament Prophets. The readings during Advent often reference “on that day,” or “the day of the Lord.” Knowing the overall arc of the story helps us locate ourselves in the broader story of what God is doing in the world.
So let’s go back to that new refrigerator that we’re waiting for. Imagine you know a refrigerator will arrive, but you’re not exactly sure when it will be delivered. One day, a technician from the appliance store shows up and says, “today is the day the thing you’ve been waiting for will be here.” You say, “We’ve had refrigerators before. In fact, our ancestors have had refrigerators for as long as we can remember. It’s about time the refrigerator that we deserve is delivered.” So then the technician says, “well, are you ready for it? Have you cleaned out your old refrigerator and created space for the new one?” And you say, “no, we don’t need to do any preparation. We come from a long line of refrigerator-owners. That should be enough.” The technician says, “Just because your ancestors owned refrigerators does not mean you don’t have to do the work to get ready for YOUR refrigerator. The refrigerator is coming, but if you’re not ready to receive it, you’ll miss out on the blessing of having a new refrigerator.”
In some ways, that is what John the Baptist is saying. The Messiah is coming. Today is the day you’ve been waiting for. Repent—clear out the internal junk that is getting in the way—and get ready to receive the gift that God is sending you. And then the religious leaders say, “we don’t have to do the work…our heritage and ancestry is enough.” And John says, “no, your ancestry is not enough. The Messiah is coming, and you need to do the work to be ready to receive him.”
When most of us think about getting ready for Christmas, maybe we think of the lights and joy of celebrations. But there’s another aspect to getting ready that takes some honest reflection. When I was growing up, one of the things my parents had us kids do before Christmas was go through our closets and weed out the clothes and toys that we had outgrown or were no longer using. In order to make space for the gifts that we were about to receive, they wanted us to clear out the stuff that was taking up extra space. We would still receive the gifts, but the work of reflection and repentance—admitting that we had things we needed to get rid of—prepared us to receive those gifts with a different heart.
That is some of what we are encouraged to do during Advent. The gift of Jesus is coming. It’s on its way. As we anticipate receiving that gift, John encourages us to reflect on what might need to be cleared out so that our hearts are ready to receive the good news of great joy that is for all creation. The reminders that we hear today about repenting can sound harsh and somewhat against the season’s wishes of cheer. But I actually think that is the gift of Advent. It’s a reminder to slow down and reflect on what might be getting in the way of receiving the gifts that God has for us. Sometimes we get so used to things the way they are, or things the way they have been, that we don’t really make space for anything new. That’s what John was calling out in his messages to the crowds.
So what might you need to clear out in order to get ready for the new thing that God might have for you? Maybe there’s an attitude, belief, or behaviour that is getting in the way of your openness to new ideas. Maybe there’s an experience in your past that makes it hard for you to show generosity to others? Maybe there’s a subtle expectation of entitlement that makes it hard for you to let go of something.
Friends, today is the day that God wants to come into your life with a word of hope and new life. Today is the day that the story of our faith invites us to clear out whatever it is that’s getting in the way of being open and ready to receive the presence of God in our lives. As we do the stuff that comes with this holiday season, I pray that we will also do the spiritual stuff of reflection, repentance and prayer so that we, along with Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds, can be ready to be part of the story of God’s love and salvation for the world.