Knitting needles and garden tools...

A sermon preached at St James Episcopal Church, St James, NY

(Because of the presence of children in the congregation, some of whom are not aware of the deaths at Sandy Hook Elementary, and others who are very upset, I have avoided explicit mention of them)

When I was a child,

one of the highlights of the lead up to Christmas

was opening the doors of my Advent calendar, one by one.

The anticipation grew daily

until that final day, when I could open the double doors

and see the picture

of the baby in the manger.

It’s not a whole lot different now.  I might have switched from a cardboard Advent calendar

to the Jacquie Lawson one on my computer that my mother sent me

but still I count down the days.

The tree is up,

and it’s almost time

to start decorating the church.

Christmas

is almost here.

But this Advent, this season of anticipation,

has been marred for many of us

by the events in Newtown

just over a week ago.

This is supposed to be a season of joy;

instead, it has become a season of sorrow.

We don’t know what to say;

we feel slightly guilty

as we continue with our holiday preparations.

It feels like the spirit of the season

has somehow been broken.

Which is why

when I turned to our New Testament reading today

it felt kind of right.

At first glance, we wonder,

what is it doing here?

Here, the fourth Sunday of Advent,

when with the story of Mary visiting Elizabeth, and her song, the Magnificat,

we are launched into the joyful expectancy that will come to fruition tomorrow night,

why are we reading 

about sin and sacrifice and the will of God?

It feels more like Lent.

But Lent

is where many of us have found ourselves, this last week,

facing the reality of sin and death,

and longing for the coming of a Messiah who will bring light and life.

And it is that experience of the power of sin and evil among us

that the writer of the letter to the Hebrews

is naming,

that experience

and the desire to do something about it.

Our reading this morning

was part of a much longer argument

about the nature of law and sin

and sacrifice.

And of course it comes from a time and culture

when those things defined how religion

and life in general

was practiced.

Jewish belief followed a system of ritual law:

obey them

and you were right with God;

disobey them

and you were in trouble.

The laws weren’t so much about safety

or rights, or limits,

as about defining your actions

so that you would know how to live,

so that you would know how to live a life of

purity, integrity, honesty, reverence.

The laws laid out what an ideal life looked like.

But because pretty much no one could obey them all,

there was a system to ensure forgiveness,

a system of sacrifice.

Bulls, sheep, goats, doves, pigeons,

offered

so that transgressions of the law

might be forgiven.

And the idea was

that after the sacrifice,

you began again with a clean record,

and ideally

next time round

got it right.

But, says the letter to the Hebrews, it didn’t work.

Year after year

the sacrifices were made

and year after year

people returned to their old habits of sin.

So what was the point?

When I was in Israel in September

we went camel riding.

I wanted a photo of myself on the camel.  But unfortunately,

I was riding, and so was everyone else,

and it was too difficult to pass over my camera.

So what I did, was take a photo of my shadow.

You can clearly see the camel, and can kind of tell it’s me,

if you know the type of hat I’m wearing.

But that’s about all.

The system of law and sacrifice in the Old Testament

is, says, Hebrews, like a shadow,

a shadow of what is to come.  You can kind of see

what God intended,

but only a vague outline.

The reality

will be so much clearer, so much more beautiful, so much more full of life. 

The system of law and sacrifice

is a shadow of what will come

when Christ, who was the one sacrifice for all time, comes to reign in all his glory

and evil is destroyed

and all things are brought into the new creation

where everything

is good.

But now we live somewhere in between.

To continue the metaphor,

if the old system of law and sacrifice

is a shadow,

and the coming of Christ in glory at the end of time

is the reality,

what we have

is a photograph.

We can see what it will be like,

but it’s only two dimensional.

We don’t get

the full three dimensional

reality.

So here we are, living in the in between times.

we know that Christ died for us,

we know that his sacrifice is one

that brings us forgiveness,

one that is effective for all time.

Jesus has come

“to mend what was broken, 

to rebuild what had been destroyed, 

to bury the hatchet, 

to recover what was lost, 

and to make peace between God and us.”

Christ has entered humanity 

and given us new access to the mercy, grace, steadfastness, faithfulness and love of God.

And in Christ, God has inaugurated a new covenant

one written on our hearts

that would give us

the knowledge and desire

to do the will of God.

But 

the reality is 

that we still have

free will.

We still get to choose

what we do,

whether to do the will of God,

whether to live our lives as echoes of God’s mercy, grace, steadfastness, faithfulness and love.

To do the will of God

with all the strength that God’s Spirit provides.

Or to do otherwise.

And that’s where sin and evil

have their insidious tentacles in our lives.

We know what is right.

But we don’t always do it.

And that’s hard to admit.

What happened in Newtown last week

was not an isolated event.

The horror of it was extreme,

but it’s just one of many similar events

that happen each year in our country.

Violence is systemic in our culture

and in our world

and we are part of it.

So how do we respond, as Christians

who particularly at this time of year

proclaim our faith

in the Prince of Peace?

I think

that we have to fight against violence

in any

and every form.

And that includes

dealing with the problem of gun violence.

It you go back to the stories of the Old Testament,

the stories that cemented the identity of the people of God in ancient Israel,

they were stories of war.

The books of Joshua and judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Chronicles

are littered with accounts of battles.

The people of God

were a warrior people

who took their promised land by force

and defended it 

with military might.

But over time, things changed.

They were conquered by foreign powers.

Some were taken into exile.

Some returned.

And Isaiah, perhaps the greatest prophet, 

shared a new vision with them.

A vision that was not simply a return to what they had in the past,

but something entirely new:

The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
In days to come
   the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
   and shall be raised above the hills;
all the nations shall stream to it.
Many peoples shall come and say,
‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
   to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
   and that we may walk in his paths.’
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
   and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
   and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
   and their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
   neither shall they learn war any more. 

         O house of Jacob,
            come, let us walk
            in the light of the Lord! 

God promised a new covenant,

and with it

the vision 

of a new reign of peace.

That new covenant

was inaugurated

in Christ.

That’s the whole point of our reading from Hebrews.

We live in a new 

and different world,

and that means

living differently.

We, as Americans, live in a culture 

that is in some ways

not a whole lot different

from that of ancient Israel.

Our nation has, in the past,

used military might and force

to establish and protect itself.

It is part of our identity.

But God challenges us.

God challenges us

with the coming of the Prince of Peace

to let go of that violent past,

to allow our identity

to be reshaped 

into something that echoes

the mercy, grace, steadfastness, faithfulness and love of God.

To update the metaphor of Isaiah,

to turn our semi-automatics into knitting needles,

our guns into gardening tools.

You may think this sermon was too political,

that I’ve gone from preaching to meddling.

But if our faith has any validity

it has to shape how we actually live, in tangible ways.

This is where the rubber hits the road.

We follow the Prince of Peace.

And if our words proclaimed in baptism and reaffirmed in confirmation

are not empty,

if when we say “I turn to Christ”, and 

“I renounce evil”

we really mean it

then we have to act, we have to act

regardless of the cost.

As we move into the celebration of Christmas

as the angels sing, “Peace on earth,”

may the Christ Child, the Prince of Peace, be born in us 

and through us, in our world,

today.