2 Advent, Year C
Sunday, December 9, 2012
St. Mark’s, Bay City
Malachi 3:1-4
Canticle 4 / 16
Philippians 1:3-11
Luke 3:1-6
“Will you by your prayers and witness help
this child to grow into the full stature of Christ?” I’m about to ask that question to the parents
and godparents of Holly Davant who is being baptized today. “Will you by your prayers and witness help
this child grow into the full stature of Christ?” As I was thinking about the readings for this
week, that question kept popping into my head, and looked in the prayer book so
I could get the exact quote for the sermon, and I couldn’t find it. That’s because I was looking in the
ordination service rather than the baptismal service.
It seemed to me like a priestly
kind of question, and I realized that is really is. “Will you by your prayers and witness help
this child grow into the full stature of Christ?” That’s what priests do isn’t it? We pray for folks and on behalf of folks, and
we try to be a witness to people through our life and ministry to help folks
grow into the full stature of Christ, to help folks become disciples of
Jesus. So in the baptismal promises, we
make a priestly promise.
In his first letter, St. Peter
calls all of us priests: “like living stones, let
yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer
spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter
2:5) What does Peter mean that we are to
offer spiritual sacrifices to God as a holy priesthood?
In ancient Israel, the priests
literally offered sacrifices to God on behalf of the people of Israel, offering
burnt offerings of animals and grain on the altar. This was the way priests interceded for
people. If you needed to give thanks to
God or say you’re sorry to God, you would pray on your own, but you would also
bring sacrifices for the priests to offer on your behalf. Before they could offer these sacrifices, the
priests had to be made holy, to be set apart from the people and have various
ritual cleansings.
This brings us to our first reading
today from Malachi. God was sending his
messenger to prepare the way before him, and he was going to purify the priests
so they could present offerings to the Lord on behalf of the people. Israel had been in captivity and was
returning to God, becoming his people again, and they needed to be reformed as
his people. So, God was sending his
messenger and purifying the priests in order to prepare his way into the midst of
the people of Israel.
Then, centuries later, John the
Baptist came, who was also preparing the way of the Lord, except John wasn’t
purifying priests. He was purifying
anyone and everyone. John proclaimed a
baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. If you want to be forgiven, change your ways,
wash, and be made clean. John wasn’t
purifying the priests so that they would make Israel holy. John was purifying the people of Israel so
that they would, by how they lived their lives, be made holy.
How is it, then, that we are considered
a holy priesthood? Through Baptism and
amendment of life, God makes us holy, but what sacrifices do we offer a holy
priesthood? In the beginning of Isaiah,
the prophet is speaking for God, telling Israel exactly what kind of sacrifices
he wants.
What to me is the multitude of your
sacrifices? Says the Lord; I have had
enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts…Wash yourselves;
make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;
cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend
the orphan, plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:11, 16-17)
That sounds a lot like what John
was saying. Wash yourselves and amend
your lives, because what are the sacrifices God wants from us? Our lives, well lived. Our lives themselves are our sacrifices to
God. Our deeds, the way we treat
ourselves and each other are our sacrifices to God. As we state in the Eucharistic prayers in
Rite One, “and here we offer unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies,
to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee”. We all serve God as priests, offering our
daily lives to him, our lives well lived.
We serve as priests by praying for and on behalf of others, and we serve
God as priests by helping others to be disciples of Jesus, to grow into the
full stature of Christ.
So then, how do we prepare for this
priestly ministry? How do we prepare the
way of the Lord and make his paths straight?
I’d say we prepare ourselves in about the same way we prepare for a
party. There are a lot of parties going
on this time of year: church Christmas
parties, work Christmas parties, school Christmas parties, and when we prepare
for a party, we often start by cleaning up a bit.
At least with two small boys,
that’s what we do in my house. Things
get a bit messy, so we need to clean up a bit.
In our lives as well, we tend to get messy. We live in ways we know aren’t quite how God
intends for us to live. We do things
that, in the long run, make life harder on us but that seem like a good idea at
the time. So our lives get messy, and we
tend to get comfortable with a certain amount of mess. When God is coming, however, we might want to
clean up some of that mess so that we might enjoy his company even more when
the party starts.
Does this mean we’re trying to hide
our mess from God or be fake with God?
Not at all. It’s not as though
we’re trying to clean up the mess so God doesn’t know there ever was a
mess. God already knows. God knows better that we do what kind of
messes we make. So, when we’re preparing
our lives for God to be with us, step one is to ask God to help us clean up our
mess.
We ask God to help us align our
lives with the way of live he has given us.
We ask God to help us align our lives with God’s life of love. We ask God to help us follow his commandments
and his way, that we might love others more fully and do less harm that we
would not following in God’s way.
We’re wanting to get our paths to
line up with God’s path, to be in sync with God, smoothing out the paths of our
lives so we’re not constantly bumping up against each other, but walking in
step together. When we do that, when
we’re walking in step and in sync with God, then living our lives as priests is
easy. When we’re in sync with God, our
prayers and witness will certainly help others grow into the full stature of
Christ as disciples of Jesus.
So now in our season of
preparation, and really throughout our lives, we’re reminded to clean up some
of the mess of our lives. We’re reminded
to ask God to help us to clean up the mess in our lives, so that we may walk in
step with God, making his paths straight, and living as a holy priesthood,
helping each other, by our prayers and witness grow into the full stature of
Christ. Amen.
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