Tuesday, December 10, 2013

The Music of the Prophets: A Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 11.1-10

Matthew 3.1-12

Church of St Mary the Virgin and St Nicholas
Littlemore, Oxfordshire


Second Sunday of Advent

“Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

May I speak to you in the name of the true and living God +Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Last Thursday night, Nelson Mandela passed away at the age of 95.  This is a great loss for the entire world as Nelson Mandela was a leader who strove for peace and reconciliation in South Africa after forty-six years of Apartheid.

We should not pretend that Apartheid, the systematic stripping of rights and segregation of the South African people by its white, settler minority, was this nebulous evil that affected South Africa in the past and is now gone forever.  Nor should we reduce Nelson Mandela’s legacy to a mere sense of good feeling about peace.  Both were more than that.  The evil of Apartheid, where people were categorized by ethnicity based upon the presumption that white skin and European ancestry was a sign of genetic superiority and then segregated from one another in public facilities, and where the native African population was forcibly enclosed in so-called ‘homelands’ and stripped of their rights and humanity, was the natural conclusion to centuries of Dutch and British colonialism that subjugated, enslaved, and dehumanized the African majority of South Africa.

Nelson Mandela spent much of his adult life fighting against Apartheid, both through non-violent and violent resistance against the Apartheid government.  His association with communist groups and his attempts to overthrow the South African government in 1962 had him sent off to prison for 27 years where he endured brutal conditions and treatment.  It was only after intense international political pressure that he was released in 1990 and Apartheid came to an end in 1994 with the first free, general, and open elections in South African history, which he helped to negotiate and instigate.

In Nelson Mandela’s presidency of South Africa we find something extraordinary.  His presidency was one of national reconciliation.  A truth and reconciliation committee was created to serve as a forum for people, both victim and perpetrator, to speak of their experiences and actions during apartheid.  People who worked in the apartheid system such as law enforcement officers and government officials were pardoned; national programs were set up to attempt to redistribute the wealth that had become concentrated in the white population to the now enfranchised African majority.  These programs were not initially popular, but it was necessary to heal the wounds of a nation scarred by the great sin of apartheid.  As Nelson Mandela said “courageous people do not fear forgiving.”  There could not be justice or peace without forgiveness.  Nelson Mandela gives hope that indeed someday there can be true justice in this world.  And though racism, other systems of apartheid in other parts of the world, and sin still exist, Nelson Mandela throughout his life fought to ensure that justice could be realized.

Like Nelson Mandela, there are people who have lived, and who live among us now, who somehow are more than they seem. They say and do things that sometimes may be considered strange, or dangerous, and yet they somehow are the most attuned to society around them. They can challenge the most powerful people in the world, and even the powerful can live in fear of them (indeed Mandela was labelled as a terrorist by the United States even as late as 2008).  They sometimes march to the beat of their own drum; in tune with something we cannot perceive.  The Bible refers to these kinds of people as prophets.

We often associate prophets with predicting the future, and though they serve that purpose to some extent, they speak as much about the present as they do the future.  There are many prophets in the Bible: Moses who openly confronts the Pharaoh of Egypt to free the Hebrew people from slavery, Deborah who liberates Israel from the Canaanite King Jabin, Elijah who challenges Ahab and Jezebel’s priest of Ba’al to a contest on Mt. Carmel to demonstrate the power of God, and Jeremiah who laments the destruction of Jerusalem caused by their apathy towards the poor and suffering in their midst.  Today, we hear from two very important prophets, Isaiah and John the Baptist. 

It is interesting to compare Isaiah to Nelson Mandela as they are very unlike one another.  Nelson Mandela was a political revolutionary who spent a third of his life in prison before working to transform South Africa as its first post-Apartheid president.  Isaiah by comparison, was probably in the upper echelons of the Kingdom of Judah, and had the ear of the royal court and king.  He too was willing to challenge and condemn the sins of the Kingdom of Judah such as ignoring the plight of the poor and the destitute among them.  But even when the Assyrian Empire was about to overtake the Kingdom, and all hope was lost, he delivered a message of hope to the people:

A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots…
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide by what his ears hear;
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;

This person is the hope that God will not abandon those who are in need.  The poor and defenceless will find equality and hope in the world.  And this hope isn’t a temporary salve or release from the bondage of this world in the next life, but the transformation of the very order of the world itself.

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.

These things should not happen, and yet this vision of a world contrasts with our own where the wealthy take from the poor, where the strong oppress the weak, and where greed and power are celebrated as virtues.  What Isaiah gives us is a song of a world as it should be.  But we shouldn’t just listen to the words, but to the melody as well—the coming of the root of Jesse upends the world and creates a new Kingdom where the oppressed and the oppressor find peace with one another. 

What hope then might an encircled Judah find from Isaiah?  What hope might we find from Isaiah?  To know that hope, we need to turn to John the Baptist.

John the Baptist is a rather iconic person.  He is a bit of a recluse, living out in the desert, wearing itchy camel’s hair, eating a protein rich diet of locusts and honey, and baptising people who probably walked for many miles in the river Jordan.  He calls out to the religious leaders of his time and refers to them as a ‘brood of vipers’ because he perceives them to be self-righteous hypocrites who seem to follow the Law of Moses in exactitude whilst ignoring the hardships and burdens of people around them.  He too speaks of one who is coming, and that time is drawing near as ‘even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees’.  The world is about to be deeply, deeply, changed. 

If we were to sum up the work of all of the prophets, all that they said and did, it comes together in what John the Baptist cried out “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight!”  The prophets call out to their time to remind us that God is active and in the midst of our world, and he is about to do something in it.  The implications of this though need to be considered.

In the opening number to the musical Godspell, we are introduced to various intellectual figures throughout history: Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Galileo, and Jean-Paul Sartre to name a few.  These philosophers, theologians, historians, and scientists all present their views on the nature of God, the nature of truth, and the nature of human reason.  Their messages begin to overlap with one another until you can no longer make them out, and they begin to fight with one another as climb a ladder to reach out to a light.  They can never reach the light though, no matter how far they climb.

However, the light does give a response, and it sings out ‘prepare ye the way of the Lord.’  Nothing else.

In our time, how many philosophers, theologians, historians, and scientists continue to reach towards that light?  So many seem to claim to have the answer, the right interpretation, the right insight, and the response that comes back is ‘prepare ye the way of the Lord.’  The prophets remind us that God is the one who crosses that threshold as Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God, Emmanuel, the shoot of Jesse, and the coming dawn upon a world covered in darkness.  The words and deeds of the prophets are the music that overwhelms the cacophony of our lives that draws us closer to God’s Kingdom.

We are not isolated from the music of the prophets.  When we share what we have with others, particularly the poor; when we show kindness to one another, particularly the lonely; when we welcome the stranger into our midst, particularly the foreigner or one who is different; and when we stand up for the oppressed, particularly those whom we might have a difficult time accepting; we become attuned to that music and can say like the prophets ‘prepare ye the way of the Lord’.  And when we accept the gifts from others, when we receive kindness, when we are welcomed, and when we are protected, we find the very kingdom the prophets spoke of in our midst.

In this Advent Season, let us join with Isaiah, John the Baptist, Nelson Mandela, and all the prophets as we let the music overtake our busy preparations for Christmas.

Let us prepare the way of the Lord.
Amen.


No comments:

Post a Comment