New beginnings

Today I began as Interim priest at Calvary Episcopal Church, Underhill, VT. Here's the inaugural sermon:
A Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent, 2009 (Year C)
Inaugural sermon at Calvary Episcopal Church, Underhill, VT

All I really need to do today is read again the word of Paul to the Philippians that we just heard, and sit down. That passage says everything I would want to say about how joyful I am to be among you, and what a bright example you are to the churches. I believe that as we go forward in this interim time your love will indeed “overflow more and more, with knowledge and full insight, to help you to determine what is best . . . to produce the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.” Let that be our mission statement for the time to come! We might want to think of reading it every Sunday and at the beginning of every meeting!
But today let me also say something about the Advent message found in the Gospel and in the words of Baruch, our first reading.
“A baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” What does that mean? John the Baptizer was so called, and even sources outside the gospels remember him by that name, because that was his whole idea, his whole purpose: baptizing people “for repentance.” “Repent and believe the Good News,” Jesus says when he comes on the scene, after he himself has been baptized by John. So what do repentance and forgiveness of sins and Good News all have to do with each other?
What you usually hear about John’s and Jesus’ good news is that they called for repentance as a precondition for forgiveness of sins: if you repent, you’ll be forgiven. And I think that’s wrong. The God whom John is preaching, the God who is laying the axe to the root of the tree, sounds like the Spy in the Sky. This God is gonna getcha if you don’t watch out. And if God doesn’t, then the Messiah will separate the wheat from the chaff, when he comes. (You better watch out; you better not cry; you better not pout, I’m tellin’ you why: Messiah is coming!)
And then along comes Jesus, and he really sounds very different. His message is: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come; repent and believe the Good News!” In other words, God is already in our midst, and our sins are forgiven. There are no preconditions, no hurdles to jump over, no tasks to be completed. No wonder, in another part of the story, John sends his disciples to ask Jesus: "Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for somebody else?"—somebody more like what we were expecting, that is. And once Jesus was off the visible scene, it didn’t take the church so very long to get back to a more “comfortable” religion in which you get what you pay for, so to speak.
“Repentance” is a weak and misleading word for what John was preaching. The Gospel says he preached—and Jesus preached—metavnoia, which means turning your whole life aroundˆ—and as for it being “for the forgiveness of sins,” that preposition, I think, means not “for” but “because of.” The Baptizer is calling all of us to turn our lives around because our sins have been forgiven; in Jesus, the pardon of God is in our midst forever.
Is it fair, this message that Jesus preaches—and John, too, as it turns out? that God doesn’t even wait for us to repent before forgiving us? God sent Jesus to be in our midst, to be one of us, with us forever as God’s living pardon among us. God hopes that we will repent because we have been forgiven, not as a condition of it—as if we could earn salvation by our own doing. As the prophet says, "The Lord has taken away the judgments against you." God has done the atoning for us, so that we can be filled with God’s love and turn away from sin.
The kind of religion where you get what’s coming to you seems so much more satisfying, somehow—unless, of course, you’re one of those sinners that Jesus liked to hang around with. The fundamental problem with the kind of Christianity that calls “repent or else” the Good News—and really, I think this is the religion of America in the 21st century—is that it has no need for that Jesus guy, with his strange ideas and his weird friends.
Of course, the message here is not really that we can be as sinful as we like, that we can say “hallelujah, Jesus done washed my sins away!” and go on doing whatever. God comes to us in Jesus with hands and heart full of love and forgiveness, and if we get close enough to that, we will be swept away and our lives will be changed forever. So we try not to think about it too much; we try not to get too close.
The thing is, God is intent on getting really, really close to us—not in our faces, but in our hearts, up close and personal, skin to skin. God puts on skin so God can be intimate with us. We keep putting on clothes so we can avoid contact.
Sin, I’m saying, is like clothes we put on (at the very worst it’s like body armor). (Remember how, after they sinned, the first thing Adam and Eve did was to put on clothes?) Sometimes we wear scruffy, ragged-looking sins, and sometimes beautiful robes of sin that are just so smooth . . . but always, we do it to keep from getting skin to skin with God. Sin keeps us from God, and keeps us from each other. Sin helps us hide who we really are, hide it from ourselves, from each other, from God (we think—fat chance there!). Repentance, changing our lives, means stripping away sin, going skinny-dipping in the waters of grace.

Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem,
and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God!

And when we do, especially in Vermont in December, it’s so scary, because it feels as if we will freeze to death—and we would, if it weren’t that the flame of God’s love is there, wrapping us in its warmth.
Maybe the reason why Mary is pure, is virginal, is holy is that she is the only one who was absolutely, totally, skin to skin with Jesus. She bore him inside her for nine months; she gave him his human flesh. And then she nursed him at her breast, skin to skin. Let me tell you, until you’ve laid a naked baby in your bosom, you haven’t lived!
There’s some risk involved, even then. There’s a lot of sweet sentimentalism about the Christ Child at Christmas, but you know, naked babies can—well, and they do, too. Getting up close with a baby, or with God, can and will be messy, dangerous to our dignity. Love is always messy. But when you love someone, you want to get rid of everything that keeps you apart, shed your clothes, get close and closer; you’d like to melt inside each other, if you could. Why would you want it to be different between you and God?
One of the saddest things about the H1N1 virus scare has been that precautions, including those observed in our churches (however necessary they may be) push people apart, prevent us from touching one another. We went through all this before with HIV/AIDS. But people who are suffering have the need, above all, to be touched. And here again, we have to distinguish between prudent precautions and the sinful fear that teaches us to draw back and save ourselves, no matter what the cost to someone else.
That’s the kind of thing we need to repent of—our chronic “me first”ness. We need to do it every day, in little ways that gradually lead to bigger ways. We can start small. Just as people in Twelve Step programs take one day at a time, we can nudge our way toward repentance, not try to do it all at once. For example, we might try this: think about clothes, just ordinary clothes, in terms of sin. Every morning, when you are getting dressed, make a point to look at the labels in your clothes. See where they were made. Try to imagine what kind of wages were paid to the people who made them, what kind of conditions they work under. Hold those people in your heart for a few minutes: ask their forgiveness, reach out to them in your heart, hold them before God.
Do the same with your food: try to learn where it comes from, how it was grown, what it really cost. I am trying to do these things, hoping that all that daily repenting will bring me, one day, to give up some of the things that are cheap for me, but that cost other people so much. If you can’t become a total locavore, limiting your diet to food grown in Vermont or nearby, and paying a fair price for everything, you can still take small steps in that direction: look for local products wherever you can; buy fair-traded coffee and tea instead of whatever’s cheapest this week. And/or you can donate to the food bank, or to the Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Vermont, to help build a better farming future for our state and its people.
That’s the real spirit of what John is preaching, and it is a way of putting ourselves on the road to the manger, where Love itself lies naked, waiting to be taken into our arms, into our hearts. "Love came down at Christmas," as the song says. And not in jeweled garments, but, as the Huron Carol tells it, "a ragged robe of rabbit skin enwrapped his beauty round." He comes to us in a manger, a place where animals feed, and again at a table, as our very food, putting his whole self into bread and wine so he can get not just close to us, but inside us, become part of us, and we part of him.
Come. Come as you are: you are invited. Come.

©Linda M. Maloney+
2 Advent, Year C, December 6, 2009