The Second Sunday of Advent 2001

A sermon preached on the Second Sunday of Advent, December 9, 2001, by the Revd Canon Daniel S. Weir.

This is a sermon about the Kingdom of God. Kingdom language may not work for many of us, with its reminder of patriarchy or of tabloid coverage of British royals, but in some sense we're stuck with it.

Three stories may help us to get at the importance of Kingdom thinking, Kingdom action and Kingdom praying.

Story number one. One summer not long ago, I had picked up our son Matt at camp in Massachusetts and was driving back to Buffalo. We stopped for lunch near Albany and after lunch we got back on Interstate 90, heading east. When we realized that we were going the wrong way, we got off the highway, turned around and headed west towards home. We repented. If we had thought of repentance in the same way that many Christians do, as feeling awful about our sins but never really changing, we would have ended up in Boston and not at home in Buffalo. Repentance is not a matter of feeling bad about what we've done wrong, but of turning around, changing direction and heading the right way. It is about, in John the Baptist's words, of "bearing fruit worthy of repentance."

On this Second Sunday of Advent, we hear the message of John the Baptist that the Kingdom of God is near, is at hand. And we hear Isaiah's description of the Messiah and of the Kingdom that he will establish: "The Spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. 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....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....They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea."

The Messiah whom Isaiah foresaw was to be One who would not be a slave to appearances or to popular convention. He would not judge by physical sight or hearing, but by that inner sight that looks beyond what is to what is becoming. The Messiah would see all things in their relationship to the pattern of the unfolding Kingdom of God. And that pattern is of a Kingdom in which the needy will find righteousness and the cries of the poor will be answered with justice.

It is, perhaps, difficult for us to see the signs of the Kingdom of God in our midst at times. We don't see righteousness and justice making much headway against the forces that would enslave God's children. And perhaps we don't expect to see that. Perhaps we have settled for an inward kingdom, a narrowly defined personal relationship with Jesus that does not spill over into the world. That divorce of personal faith from public life is common in the western world, a product, I think, of the industrial revolution and its compartmentalizing of life into private and public, secular and sacred spheres. In such a world, the Kingdom of God ceases to be an important element in Christian preaching, with "the disastrous result", in the words of Jim Wallis of the Sojourners Fellowship in Washington, D.C., of "'saved individuals' who comfortably fit into the old order, while the new order goes unannounced. The social meaning of conversion is lost and a privatized gospel supports the status quo."

Story number two. Many of you are familiar with the books on prayer written by Kenneth Leech. Less familiar are his writings on the struggle for social and racial justice in England. When I met Leech ten years ago, he told me that people would often come up to him at conferences and says that it was too bad that people confused him, the writer on the spiritual life, with that other Kenneth Leech. They had not made the connection between praying and working for the Kingdom, anymore than those social activists who dismiss prayer as irrelevant. If we are to be faithful and effective in our work in the world, we must first be faithful in our prayer life. Only as we allow ourselves to be brought into a more intimate relationship with God, only as we are able, in that relationship, to see our sins and repent of them, only as we are led by God to see the specific tasks to which God calls us, and only as we receive the power which we need to minister in the world, only then will we be able to make any real difference in the world. If our attempts to proclaim and establish the Kingdom are not rooted in a life of growing intimacy with and dependence upon God, they will be of no value.

As common as that divorce of personal faith from public life may be, it is not God's will. God's will is that we, following in the way of our Lord, become apostles, proclaimers of the Kingdom. That Kingdom must, of course, first be established in our own hearts and lives, but it must not end there. It must spill over into the world, into the very structures of society, challenging them and transforming them by the power of God's Spirit. As converted people, we are to be about the business of converting the world around us.

Story number three. When I accepted the call to come to Western New York to serve as the Bishop's Deputy for Outreach, a member of the parish I was about to leave told me that the one thing about me that bothered him the most was that I never seemed to accept the parish's efforts to serve the community as enough, that I always pushed for more. He was right. Nothing that we do will ever be enough. There will always be more for us to do.

That is no small task for us, nor is it one, as this third story illustrates, that we can ever expect to complete. Our attempts at establishing a more just society will always be imperfect, but that should not discourage us from keeping at the task. It has been in many ways my role in this diocese over the past thirteen years to remind us of that challenge, to call us all again and again to "seek and serve Christ in all persons" and to "strive for justice and peace" as we have promised to each time we have renewed the Baptismal covenant. It has been my joy during these years to help the people in a number of congregations to discover the unique ways in which they are called to fulfill those promises, knowing that to "serve Christ in all persons" requires that we serve Christ in those specific persons to whom God leads us and that to "strive for justice and peace" requires that we work in those specific places in which God has called us to be His people. It is no good, after all, to be like Lucy in the Peanuts cartoon, who stated that she loved mankind, but couldn't stand people. God calls us to specific ways of living out our baptismal vocation, to specific ways of working to establish the Kingdom. 

This parish and its people have a long and rich tradition of acting and praying for justice, of reaching out to the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the grieving. You have had held before you the challenge of spending as much on ministry to others as we spend on ministry to one another. And you have responded to that challenge, to that call to be generous in thankful response to the incredible generosity of God.

But the work is not over. We are still being called to give and work and pray for the spread of the Kingdom of the One whose name and nature is love. To work and give and pray even when we think we have nothing left to give.

But no matter how hard the challenge, we should not be discouraged, for it is Jesus Christ who leads us into the work of proclaiming the Kingdom, and it is Jesus Christ who will take our efforts, as imperfect as they my be, and finally by his power establish that Kingdom for which we long and for which we pray.