The Rev. Carol S. Wedell
December 7, 2008

Headlines from the past week: 

Cholera Crisis Compounds Zimbabwe's Woes.  The government appealed for outside help this week in combating a cholera outbreak that has claimed close to 600 lives since August.

In a sure sign the recession is getting worse, the Labor Dept. says the US lost 533,000 jobs last month....the ugliest months since 1974.  Likely means we're heading into the worst recession in 30 years.

For the United Nation's World Food Program it's never easy trying to feed the world's hungry.  But in times of soaring prices and global financial crisis, the business of getting food to those in need it becomes an ever more daunting task.

Dow plunges almost 700.

Terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Landslide kills Malaysians.

Congress works weekend on 15 billion Auto Deal.

Or closer to home:

Ohio budget deficit: $640 million

No way to halt National City deal.

Heard personally:

Local Fortune 500 company freezes all salaries for the coming year.

Young, disabled 25 year old looses his job to "those who really count on this income."

Heard in the church office repeatedly this week:  "I'm really scared.  I don't know what's going to happen.  I'm so anxious about the economy and what it means for me."

How does a sermon series on Making Room for Jesus... speak to such realities as these?  Last week we looked at making room in our lives.  As I was working this week, I found today's topic much more difficult:  Making Room in our World.

I knew that for me, making room in the world for Jesus wasn't about making sure the 10 commandments were placed in every courtroom, or that prayer began every classroom's day.  It wasn't about insuring the doctrinal purity of any political candidate. It wasn't even a return to the time when one could safely assume that the values held by your family were pretty much the same values held by your neighbors.  The world we used to know simply doesn't exist anymore.  People don't come to church because "that's what we're supposed to do."  The old social fabrics are fraying.

In an odd way, I even suspected that "making room in the world for Jesus" wasn't yet another attack on the materialism and excess of the way we in the United States celebrate a secular Christmas.  You really don't need me to point that out to you, when retailers begin the "Christmas Season" before Halloween. I've come to the point where it seems to make sense to virtually divide the secular Christmas from the sacred. 

We are correct in seeing a challenge in the collision of faith and popular culture.  In reality though, the challenge is greater than we might think.  We are not in the "Christmas season."  That is absolutely a secular idea for this time of year - one that encourages us to get busy with our gifts and celebration time, and bears little resemblance to the season of Advent.  We don't need to rescue "the Christmas season" so much as we need to speak faithfully about what it means to make room for Jesus in our world.

So given the harsh realities of our world at this time, how does the world make room for Jesus?  Advent, is the beginning of the church year when we closely examine our lives - corporately as well as individually, to see if we are ready for the coming of Jesus, to figure out what we need to do to prepare - to make room for the Holy One in all aspects of our life and world.

After spending some time with our gospel lesson this week, some thoughts began to come together.  Think if you will, about the decorations that we put up - including those that are explicitly Christian. Think about the nativity scenes that appear on some lawns, or in homes and churches. Think about the cards we send out, or even the Advent calendars we may use.  Undoubtedly there will be pictures of Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus.  There may well be pictures of angels, of shepherds, of wise ones from the east.  There will probably be pictures of sheep and of animals that may have gathered around the manger, and maybe even the donkey on which Mary supposedly rode, heavy with child (doesn't that sound like fun????).  Perhaps a dove, or the star, or the innkeeper who isn't even in scripture.

But have any of you ever, even once, seen a picture of John the Baptist on a Christmas card or Advent calendar or Nativity scene?  I haven't.  The gentleness and tenderness of the birth of Jesus somehow doesn't seem to fit with a picture of a large, bug-eating, messy sort of guy, dressed in bizarre clothing, walking around shouting, "Repent!"  John the Baptist isn't appropriate for the way we celebrate Christmas.  Christmas is about Jesus' birth, as Matthew and Luke tell us. It's about the coming of a vulnerable infant, the beauty of candlelight, Glory to God in the highest and peace to all people on earth. Yet every gospel includes this wild, crazy guy with a strange diet. What we have this morning is not Christmas for children, but Advent for Adults.  What does John the Baptist have to do with Christmas?

For Mark, everything.  I hope you noticed the rather abrupt beginning of Mark's gospel.  The very first sentence doesn't even contain a verb - it reads more like a title:  The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  In these very first words, Mark is giving us a clue as to the impact Jesus Christ will make on the world:  Son of God, were words used to describe emperors.  They were, as we sometimes say, "fighting words."  They were a declaration of who this Jesus was - God's son.  From the very first sentence - or more accurately, title of the story, Mark wants to make this crystal clear.

Yet in the second sentence, instead of Bethlehem and choirs of angels, Mark begins the story of Jesus with a prophet in the wilderness, John the Baptist - a countercultural figure if there ever was one!   Throughout the centuries the church has recognized Mark's unique contribution to Advent, with John the Baptist leading the way.

John the Baptist calls us into the wilderness to hear a message. It is a message that is best heard in the wilderness. The people are called to a barren wasteland so that the distractions of the world will not get in the way.  Sometimes we are hesitant to head to the wilderness.  Sometimes we are taken there by factors beyond our control - a death, a divorce, a change in financial stability.  But it is in the wilderness that we are most likely to see ourselves with clear eyes.

John preaches a message of repentance.  And the wilderness is the place where one can most easily see the need for confession and for repentance. Now admittedly, repentance isn't the first word that comes to mind when we think about Christmas!   We love to talk about hope and love and joy and peace - all of those "feel good" words.

The one who "makes way for Jesus" isn't in the middle of the religious action, not at the temple.  John the Baptist invites us into the wilderness to consider a message of repentance. It is a message at the heart of what it means to receive the coming Christ, who has come, and is coming, and will come again. It is a message central to how we move from hopelessness to hope. There can be no good news about Jesus Christ for us apart from the message of repentance.

The word repentance gets kind of a bad rap these days. It sounds so negative.  Yet if you have ever been in the wilderness, the word repentance is actually good news.  For it means to turn right around and head a totally new direction. It is not slightly changing course.  It is turning away from behaviors that deny God, or keep us from God, and embracing the kinds of practices that allow God to come close.

An important note here is that the Hebrew people thought corporately.  They would not have the individualistic view of themselves and the world that we do.  The sense of "self" was always in connection with family and community.  So confession and repentance was never about a single person, but always about a community.

If there has ever been a time that needs to hear and respond to John the Baptist's call in the wilderness it is now, isn't it?  We run here and there, conforming to pressures, lacking the purpose to rise above the rat race. Somehow we have become convinced that abundant living can be measured by how many presents are under the tree or how big the light display is outside the window.

A cartoon in The New Yorker magazine shows a business person talking with a banker about a loan, saying "Hi, I'm Harry Davenport, rising young executive recently transferred here from Birmingham, Michigan, seeking mortgage money for a small place near the country club where we can resume living way beyond our means while attempting to keep up with the Joneses."  Given where the credit choices made by banks and individuals have taken us, it's not quite as humorous any more, is it?

We compromise with culture, and chase after every voice that offers us the promise of a better tomorrow. If we have any doubts about the diagnosis, all we have to do is observe the way we celebrate Christmas these days, with plenty of distractions, misplaced priorities, meaningless pursuits, and very little Christ.

Friends, we all have wilderness moments. Individually, some of us are there right now.  Many of us have lived through times of community wilderness.  I would suggest that as a world we are all in a time and place of wilderness: with economies shaky, nuclear potential far too available, terrorists arising everywhere, unstable governments abounding, hunger far ranging and unchecked health epidemics spirally out of control.  In this wilderness time and place, how can we, together turn around and begin to move in a direction more in line with the kind of world that Jesus sought to bring?

The possibilities I would suggest are, for the most part, not original.  It is hard enough for many of us to admit our own shortcomings, and our personal need for confession and repentance.  Yet if we hold up the mirror, few of us see perfection, and are simply grateful that God continues to give us chances to try again.

However, we are often more hesitant to suggest that a broader group may need to repent - a church, a community, a nation.  Calling on larger institutions to repent can sound as if it is ignoring all of the good those institutions may do.  But think about it.  Just as you and I know that we aren't perfect, in the same way, the institutions and groups comprised of human beings, by their very nature are not perfect either. We are actually displaying more loyalty and faithfulness to that institution when we are willing to point out the flaws that may keep it from being the best it can be. When any group - from the Presbyterian Church to General Motors to Citibank to the government of any country finds itself in the wilderness, we, as Christians believe that repentance may offer the way out.  That admitting our downfalls and liabilities may help us discern what direction is best.

As we participate in those various groups, we can speak out against everything that Jesus spoke against - hypocrisy, greed, thinking too highly of self.  We can corporately repent about all of the things which contradict the way that Jesus lived - which often included the social and religious norms of his day.  The way to make room in the world for Jesus is, not surprisingly, by taking our Christian selves and values into the world. 

I want to be very clear that this isn't always obvious.  And we know well that Christians - even members of the same church - may disagree about what a Christian response might be in a given situation.  And I think that's where the critical dialogue begins.  That's a reason I'm hoping to get a Faith and Work group off the ground, because to make room for Jesus in our world is to realize that our faith can't be cornered off by itself if it is to be real.  Disciples of Jesus seek to follow him 24/7.  It's important for our youth to have places of open and honest conversation about the places where their faith seems to be in conflict with their worlds - social, family and school. 

We are members of the body of Christ, and we absolutely need each other to figure out together how we make room for Jesus in the world, how we let our living witness point others to the love of Christ.  Will we make room for Jesus in our world?

Brian Wren concludes his poem How Can a Baby Change the World: 

            Then how can a baby not change the world?

            Who know what a child will become?

            For when, in a home or a nation

           new life surges, strong as the incoming tide,

           it changes the shape of the shoreline

           so that even the castles of power are like sand.

(Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, p. 65).