"Where Do You Get That Living Water?"

John 4:5-42

5 So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. 7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)[a] 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” 19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you[b] say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I am he,[c] the one who is speaking to you.” 27 Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” 28 Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, 29 “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah,[d] can he?” 30 They left the city and were on their way to him. 31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” 32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” 33 So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” 34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. 35 Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. 36 The reaper is already receiving[e] wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. 37 For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.” 39 Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

“Where Do You Get That Living Water?”

This story of Jesus and the woman at the well is a beautiful one in so many ways. For so many reasons, it is one of my favorites from the Gospels, if not my favorite. This story says so much to us about how Jesus treats those around him—to him, there are no boundaries when there are people who need to be healed, need to be forgiven, and given living water. Jesus’ interaction with the woman at the well is the longest in the gospels. This is significant because Jesus is meeting with a woman, one who has been battered and torn by life, one who has been judged by the people of her time and the people of ours. She has been married five times, leading folks over time to think that she is sinful and whorish, that she uses men. But Jesus reminds us that we shouldn’t judge because we don’t know anyone’s story until we ask them—perhaps she has lost husbands one at a time to death and obeyed the marriage laws that she marry their brothers. Maybe she has been abused by her husbands or left by them. We don’t know her story, and as much as we would like to know it, what we ultimately need to know is that her brokenness has brought her to the well in the heat of the day, not normally when the women come to draw water. Perhaps she has sensed that something special might happen while she is there, that she might be noticed, that there might some relief and forgiveness and welcome.

That the woman at the well is from Samaria is also a significant part of this story. According to tradition and history, Samaritans and Jews are not to be seen together talking or interacting. This story reminds us of Luke’s story of the man who is beaten and left on the side of the road to die—while the people who we think should be the ones to help him pass by him and do nothing, the Samaritan, the outcast, the person we would never expect to do so is the one who helps him. So, for Jesus to be seen spending time with this woman who is from the wrong side of the tracks, who has been judged for what she has done, for what her circumstances have been, judged simply for where she was born—this is telling. This says something to the people gathered around the well, and it says something to us today as we struggle and discuss and fight about how we treat the refugees in our midst, the people who are born in different places, the people whom we have judged without ever taking the time to listen to their stories or learn about their lives.

The baptismal imagery in the story is stunning. When we baptize a child or an adult in this place, we talk about living water, the living water that comes from God, water that cleanses and refreshes us, water that washes us and makes us ready for a new life as a claimed child of God. Jesus, in our story today, approaches the woman at the well, asking her for a drink, asking for water that that is new, that is refreshing. “Sir, you have no bucket,” she says, “and the well is so deep. Where do you get that living water?”

Jesus offers her living water—the water that can refresh and heal what is broken in her. Jesus offers her new life, proclaiming to all who are there that the woman is claimed by him, loved by him through the gift of living water: “Everyone who drinks of this water [from the well] will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

Her response is simple, and beautiful in its telling: Where do you get that living water? Please give it to me, so that I may never be thirsty again.

In her commentary on this passage. Anna Carter Florence, a preaching professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, writes this:

If I were asked to pick one story that shows us the most about who Jesus is, it would be this one. Here is a passage for a preaching life and a lifetime of preaching. Here too is a text with its own bucket, ready for the filling. Let it down again and again, and each time it comes up with another sermon of living water, another deep drink from the well that will not go dry.

I love Anna’s recognition of how deep and filling this text is. As she goes on to suggest several different ways for us preachers to preach this text, she offers this:

Notice that it is Jesus who is thirsty. The walk through Samaria is long and tiring. Jesus sits down by the well…this is where he and the woman meet. It ought to be easy for a thirsty man to get a drink at a well, but notice that Jesus cannot do this by himself. He asks the woman to give him a drink, gives her the chance to recognize the face of Christ in a stranger. There is something beautifully simple in the staging of this scene as well as its premise: Jesus is thirsty at the well, and we are the ones with the bucket. The deeper metaphorical conversation that follows makes no sense until we really take this in. Can a little thing like a cup of cool water, offered in love, be the beginning of a salvation journey? Yes; and we will never know until we meet the stranger and tend to the human need first.

Wow. Every time I’ve preached and read this text, I’ve always been narrow in the approach: Jesus offers the woman and the well the living water, offering to all of us at the same time. But I’ve never stopped to think that maybe he needs living water, too—that he is thirsty for conversation and relief and a different kind of recognition than he is used to receiving. Surely he can draw the water from the well himself, but he opens himself up to this Samaritan, this woman, this sister who is desperate for some healing. We are all on our own journey to salvation, but maybe we need to stop and recognize that Jesus is on his own journey, too. It can’t be easy for him to walk from town to town, place to place, knowing that he is walking toward his death, but he is. Maybe Jesus needs a little bit of living water of his own. Perhaps he needs someone to draw it for him, someone to tend to him, too. This story does tell us so much about Jesus—that he welcomes the stranger and loves her, that he forgives and accepts, that he offers living water. And the story tells us what we either can’t see or tend to forget—that Jesus needs to be welcomed and loved, too. It reminds us that we never know when Jesus will show up in the face of a stranger. The woman doesn’t know who Jesus is. But that doesn’t matter. She talks with him and spends time with him and welcomes him. She is who we all should be—someone who welcomes the refugee, the stranger in our midst—no matter what.

On our UKirk mission trip a few weeks ago, it was a delight to see our crew interact with so many new people, strangers who became friends, friends who will always now hold a place in our hearts. These folks are etched in our memories—people with whom we served at the food bank, folks who came seeking the free food that was donated to anyone who could use it, food that we were fortunate enough to be able to give away. We played with lots of kids—kids who were poor, kids for whom English was not their first language, kids who were food insecure.  We were amazed by a feisty woman who, despite her own health problems, gave every hour she had to make sure these kids had food and a safe place to hang out after school. We were hosted by an amazing man who started the Asheville Youth Mission with his wife who passed away several years later, a man who is now rejoicing that he has found love again and will be married later this month. All of these folks are folks who need to be given the grace of living water, while at the same time giving it to so many others.

On our favorite day, we served lunch at the Haywood Street Congregation to anyone who wanted to come. One of our UKirk alums, Emily Bentley, is the companion coordinator there, and she organizes lunch twice a week for 300 guests. There was a volunteer orientation where the pastor read the story of the woman at the well and we all acknowledged that we are broken in some way and need living water, while being called at the same time to offer it to others. We prayed together and the pastor and Emily offered us living water as we came and washed our hands in a bowl of living water.

During our worship experience with the community after lunch, we cried with a young man who is transitioning into a woman—a woman who had just spent the previous weekend with her family, listening to them say that she wasn’t a child of God, that she was sinful, that she was no longer welcome in their family. And then we listened to her sing praise to Jesus through a church that accepted and loved her and called her to sing. We, along with everyone else gathered in worship, laid hands on her and prayed for her along her journey to find living water. In many ways, we were the ones who gave living water to those who were broken, damaged, and thirsty. We were the ones who went and drew the water for others as we played and sang and sorted and welcomed guests to the table. And in so many other ways, we were the ones who were coming to the well thirsty and in need, coming to the well looking for relief from the ways we have been damaged, and from the ways we have broken the world and ourselves. We needed someone to draw the water for us.

I will let the rest of our group share their own stories because the stories are theirs to tell, but I want to end by sharing my own living water experience from our trip. As we were each serving at different tables to get food and drinks and seconds for the guests who had been welcomed to the table that day, Steve Hickok asked one of our students to come get me so I could talk to a woman he had met. Steve had gently listened to her story, and he knew she needed to hear my story and I needed to hear hers. She was a beautiful woman with gorgeous dark skin and long braids, a little too skinny, very weary looking. We asked each other’s names: “I’m Kim, she said.” “I’m Rachel, I replied.”

I told her that she was beautiful, but that also looked sad and tired. I asked her what was happening. As tears started to stream down her cheeks, she said, “I’m married, but my husband is not kind, so I’m living off and on with my daughters and other friends. In the last few months, I’ve had several seizures and have been in the hospital several times. I’m 41 and have never had seizures. Since I’m close to being homeless, people don’t believe that I’m having seizures. They think it’s because I’m on drugs and I’m not. I’ve woken up not knowing what has happened to me. I’ve woken up in the hospital not knowing how I got there. I have a black eye since I fell when I had one last week. I’m scared about what’s going to happen every day, and I’m scared about how my medicine makes me feel. I’m scared to keep my grandchildren alone because I don’t want to hurt one of them if I’m holding them and they fall. My brain doesn’t work well and I don’t know why and it scares me.” And then she said, “No one understands what I’m going through.”

I put my hand on her knee and said, “Oh, Kim, I actually do understand, at least most of what’s happening, anyway. I had my first seizure at 40 and have had 5 more since. I have woken up with paramedics standing above me, and woken up in an ambulance.” I showed her the scar on my forehead and the ones on my hands from falling and hurting myself. Even though I cannot imagine being close to homeless as I’ve experienced this and acknowledged that to her, I said to her, “I know what it’s like to be scared every day. To not know if your brain is going to go insane. I’m scared that something is going to happen while I’m alone with my niece and nephew. I know what it’s like to feel alone when you are scared, to not know what will happen the next minute.”

We both knew that I had more advantages than she did because of a steady job, good health insurance, and a home to live in, but those things didn’t matter then. What mattered is that we both understood each other, understood what not many others could. In that moment, Kim and I became living water for each other. We held hands and hugged each other. We both said to each other that is was so life-giving to hear from someone who understood what it was like to be scared each day, what it was like to wonder where God was in the midst of this. As she left to go home, we hugged each other. I said, “Kim, I say a little prayer every morning and I will include you in it from here on out.” We hugged and I told her I loved her. She kissed me on the cheek and gently said to me, “I love you more.”

Friends, Jesus Christ meets us at the well in the face of strangers, meets us in our brokenness, and gives us the living water that will last. But in asking for it himself, he reminds us that all of us—even he, himself, needs living water, too. Christ reminds us that we all have living water to give, living water with which to forgive, no matter if we know it or not. Thanks be to God.

"But I Say to You"

38 ‘You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” ³⁹But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; ⁴⁰and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; ⁴¹and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. ⁴²Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

43 ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” ⁴⁴But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. ⁴⁶For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? ⁴⁷And if you greet only your brothers and sisters,^* what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? ⁴⁸Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Matthew 5:38-48

“But I Say to You”

In our Sunday night Bible studies this semester, our UKirk group is focusing on different questions about faith—and if you know this group and how smart and curious they are, it should come as no surprise that their first question about faith is one of the big ones—predestination. We spent this past Sunday night reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapters 8-11. Paul’s words in these letters are fascinating, challenging us to understand that God is the one who chooses us from the beginning before we can ever know it, sending a Son to be with us and instill faith in us and bring us to salvation—and that our faith means nothing if we just say fancy words about Christ without doing whatever we can to show Christ’s love to the neighbors and strangers in our midst. Paul’s words in Romans are deep and challenging, inspiring, but sometimes seemingly contradictory to each other. We discussed what we do when we read things in the Bible that contradict each other, talked about how we go about interpreting the Bible for ourselves and our communities. One of our students said, that when the Bible seems to contradict itself, she turns to the words of Christ in the gospels to discern the answer, to the sermons he preaches, the commands he gives to his followers, discovers how he lives his words out as he heals and listens and calls—all of the ways he shows God’s great love to each of us.

I’ve been thinking about that so much this week as I’ve studied today’s lectionary texts, thinking about Jesus’ words to all of us, thinking about how we turn to what Jesus said and what he did as we search for answers in the midst of today’s world. For the past several weeks, we have been reading from Matthew’s Gospel in our lectionary, specifically Jesus’ sermon on the mount. This sermon is so beautiful, so challenging, so revolutionary—both in its time and in ours. As the fifth chapter of Matthew begins, Jesus reaches out to his followers and all who are gathered there, reaching out to all of us, to share about God’s great love with us, to nurture us, to challenge us. He sits down and begins teaching, saying that God’s blessing of love comes to us when we are poor in spirit, when we are mourning, when we are meek and humble. He says that God’s great love for us comes as we are searching for ways to heal through righteousness, to love with mercy, when we seek to be pure in heart as peacemakers in the world, and especially when we suffer because of it. Jesus tells us about God’s love in this part of his sermon, calling us to rejoice and be glad.

Jesus teaches us about how greatly God loves us and then calls us to go out into the world and show God’s love to others. “You are the salt of the earth,” he tells those gathered there, says to us. “You are the light of the world, so let your light shine before others and before your God in heaven.” Jesus teaches and reminds us that we are called to be salt to the earth, to give the world preservation, to give it the flavor of life; he teaches and reminds us that we are light, called to be light to each other, called to give light to the world.

Through Jesus’ words on the mountain, we are reminded that God loves us no matter what is happening, no matter what we are going through. Because we have been given God’s amazing love, Jesus calls us to shine our light before others. And in this last part of Matthew’s 5^th chapter, we are called and shown how to go out into the world, what to do—we are shown how to treat others, how to live in community together. We are told how to interpret some of the toughest questions, told how to act in love when the world, especially when the world feels like it is full of questions and contradictions.

Jesus pretty much lays it out for us, not leaving much doubt:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, ‘Do not resist and evildoer…if anyone strikes you on the cheek, turn the other also.’”

“…if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.”

“…if anyone forces you to go one mile, go for the second mile.”

“Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”

Love your enemy. Pray for those who persecute you. Love those who love you—and those who don’t. Greet your brothers and sisters, but don’t just stop there. Love the stranger, the alien, the refugee in your midst.

“You have heard that it was said, but I say to you.” Jesus preaches an amazing sermon here, calling us to act, calling us to reach out to friends and strangers—and enemies—alike, calling us to turn the other cheek and give what we have. Jesus shows us a portrait of God and God’s great love for us, teaching us what it is like to live in God’s kingdom, God’s community. When we live as people who have been created and called and saved, we love without reservation and we think of others first before we ever consider ourselves.

“You have heard that it was said, but I say to you.” In God’s kingdom, we act out love and welcome everyone, friend, stranger, or enemy, as a sister or brother in Christ. In God’s kingdom, we have a great capacity for love, empowered by God’s love for us, love that in unselfish and kind and giving. In God’s community, we can forgive those who have hurt us or persecuted us or broken us.

“You have heard that it was said, but I say to you.” In God’s kingdom, we are called to give what we have to those who have little or nothing. In Jesus’ sermon to us, he shows us his ultimate hope for us—that we will live in God’s community together, and that because of God’s love, we will love each other without even giving it a second thought—that it will become our way of life.

When I took a week of study leave last month, I took two books with me I have been intending to read for a while. One was Just Mercy, Auburn University’s common book about racial injustice and the death penalty. It is both fascinating and very hard to read, and I hope you will all pick up a copy and read it. The second book is called The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World’s Largest Religion is Seeking a Better Way to be a Christian. It is written by a minister and author named Brian McLaren. In the book, he talks about how people, particularly younger folks, are leaving the Christian faith in great numbers because, simply put, they do not feel that Christians are modeling their Christ and living out his love in the world. In the book, McLaren talks about Jesus’ sermon on the mount, reminding us that Jesus’ emphasis has always been the ethic of love, reminding us that, no matter what, in every situation, Jesus calls us to love. He writes:

Of the many radical things said and done by Jesus, his unflinching emphasis on love was most radical of all. Love was the greatest commandment, he said. It was his new commandment, his prime directive—love for God, love for self, for neighbor, for stranger, for alien, for outsider, for outcast, and even for enemy, as he himself modeled. The new commandment of love meant that neither beliefs nor words, neither taboos, systems, structures nor the labels that enshrined them mattered most. Love decentered everything else; love relativized everything else; love took priority over everything else—everything. In the Sermon on the Mount…Jesus makes this audacious statement: God generously showers both the good and the evil with rain and sun. In other words, God love is completely nondiscriminatory: God loves us not because we are so deserving and lovable, but because God is so loving, without limitation or discrimination. This nondiscriminatory love, Jesus says, is the true perfection, the true maturity toward which we should aspire: to be perfect as God is perfect is to love without discrimination because that is how God loves.

McLaren speaks beautifully about Christ’s ethic of love. “You have heard that it was said, but I say to you”: Love is the prime directive, the most important concept in the world. Christ’s commandment for us to love takes precedent over any ethic we practice, any questions we ask, any contradictions we might see. God’s love is complete and nondiscriminatory, so our love must be as well. This is the news we need to hear in this sanctuary today, in our homes today, in our country today. We are called to love without discrimination because that is how God loves. We are called to aspire to this perfection of love because God’s love is perfect. And the best news of all is that God is with us, with us in the flesh in Jesus Christ—God is loving us all along the way. So, what are we going to about it? How are we going to shine Christ’s light, the light given to us, in the world? Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Coming of Christ

Isaiah 2:1-5

The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!

Matthew 24:36-44

“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

Here we are this beautiful morning, gathered together as people whose stomachs are a bit bigger due to Thanksgiving and Iron Bowl food and Advent breakfast food, as thankful people who have spent the last few days surrounded by family and friends and loved ones, as people who love the beauty of this sanctuary decorated so tenderly for the Advent and Christmas season, as people ready to hear the stories and sing the carols of our Christ coming into the world as a child bundled up in the warmth of swaddled clothes. But we are greeted instead with these words from Matthew’s gospel, strange upon their first hearing, these words of Biblical apocalyptic literature where we are not reminded of a baby being born into a stable in Bethlehem, but instead given the image of a grown Christ coming back into the world to judge, to take, to steal, to break in.

We are given the images of Christ’s second coming into the world, a Christ who is coming back to “judge the quick and the dead,” as we will soon remember and proclaim again as we recite the Apostles’ Creed together. These images of Christ are not quiet and peaceful as we commonly expect and hope our Advent images to be, but they are instead harsh and scary, hard for us to hear and understand. Jesus says that the promised day of the Lord, the cataclysmic ending of the old world and the beginning of a new one, will steal in among and through us like a kidnapper in the day and a thief by night. Jesus begins these images by sharing an Old Testament reference to Noah’s story, not just the part of the story we like to talk about with cute animals coming in two by two, the story that ends with a covenant rainbow, but a story of death where a flood comes in to wash away the lives of people who are celebrating, going about their everyday existence, but people who are not taking care of each other or their world. Noah and his family are spared, but God comes in in the midst of the rain and floods and steals everyone else away like a thief, without even giving them an opportunity to repent and seek forgiveness. And then we hear about two people going about their lives and working hard in a field; about two women grinding their meal together. Jesus says that God will come in and take one life away, leaving the other worker wondering what in the world happened to her friend, wondering why she is the one left standing. Finally, Jesus talks about God breaking into a home into the middle of the night, prompting us to think about our own homes, our own safe havens, where most of us are sleeping peacefully and not expecting anything bad to happen—but like a thief, Christ breaks in and takes livelihoods away, our peace away, leaving us scared and insecure and feeling violated as our most personal space has been invaded.

“Keep awake,” Jesus warns, for none of us knows on what day or in what hour our Lord will be coming. We must stay awake and always be ready for the Son of God will always come in an unexpected way, in a way we could never imagine, at an unexpected hour we could never set our alarms on our phones for. We are not given the image here of God as a prodigal parent running to welcome us home, not given the image of Jesus opening his arms wide to welcome the little children and bless them. We are not given the image of Jesus eating at the table with a sinner or healing a person who has been bleeding for years with no relief, and we are not given the image of a God who lovingly and painstakingly creates the world. Matthew has Jesus saying that, like it or not, we should be prepared to meet a kidnapping, thieving God, a God who has little regard for the feelings or fears of the ones left behind. No doubt about it—this is a shocking and disturbing call for us to be ready, to be watchful, to be alert for Jesus’ return and the inbreaking of the kingdom.

Jesus’ words and images here are strange for us to hear, shocking to hear, but perhaps they need to be that way in this season. During these days, we so often find ourselves so busy running around and scurrying, making sure our children are ready for their Christmas plays, making sure that we have the perfect gifts for the people in our lives, making sure our tables and hearths and homes are decorated perfectly. We are so busy, too busy, that we so often get lost in all of the hurrying and we forget, or ignore even, who we are to be and who we are to be about—the Christ child who is being born into our world again. Perhaps we need these words and images Matthew gives us to shock us out of the normalness of our routines and the busyness of what we think we need to be ready for, to remind us that the only thing we truly need to ready for is Christ’s birth in the Bethlehem stable.

You know, it can be dangerous thing for two preachers to be in the same house for several days over Thanksgiving because we share our words and ideas and sermons, driving everyone else around us nuts—if we try hard enough we can even make someone else roll their eyes and find an excuse to get our of the house like my mom is so tempted to do. As we were sharing ideas this week, my dad shared one of his sermons on this passage with me. I love one of the things he says:

Advent is…a time of staying alert for something that has yet to happen, something totally new and different, something that will only happen in the fullness of God’s time. It will be a time like no other, and the images used to describe it are not [truly] troublesome at all. On the contrary, they are full of hope for something that threatens like a storm brewing on the horizon but that somehow brings peace, justice, and security to this world of war, earthquakes, famine, and disease.

I love how my dad says that—that the return of Christ has to be clothed in shocking words and images because we need shocked in order to truly open our eyes, awake to what is happening in our world. Look around us—in our world there is a long raging war in Syria where the last hospital is being bombed and nurses are being forced to make the decision whether to take babies off of breathing machines to search for cover or leave them where they are, breathing until they get bombed, still uncovered; in our world, there are families just 3 hours away from us who are mourning the loss of their babies in a horrific school bus accident; in our world, we are trying to understand the implications of our recent election and the words we have said to each other, the things we have done to each other; in our world, there are so many people who are mourning and lonely and sad, so many people suffering from depression, especially as we journey through this long holiday season. But in the midst of all of this chaos and confusion in this world, God promises a Son who will break into the darkness and chaos, a Son who will be born to us once again, who will come into our world to make things different, to make things new again.

Advent is a reminder that Christ comes into our world again, and this Advent season teems with the promise that the world will be renewed and made whole again. As the prophet Isaiah shares with us: “In the days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and the nations shall stream to it.” Advent will dawn and Christ will come and the people “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” Christ will return and we will walk and live and love in his light. Maybe we need shocking words to shock us out of our world and to shock us into a world where Christ breaks in with no notice so that we can revel in his life and in his light, revel in the new world he is creating for us and calling us to. We need to stay awake, to be ready, to be hopeful, to be watchful.

During each Advent season, I turn to the beautiful poetry of the writer Ann Weems during my devotional time. Her very first devotional poemi is called “The Coming of God.” Let us listen to her words:

            Our God is the one who comes to us in a burning bush, in an angel’s song, in a newborn child.

            Our God is the One who cannot be found locked in the church, not even in the sanctuary.

            Our God will be where God will be with no constraints, no predictability.

            Our God lives where our God lives, and destruction has no power and even death cannot stop the living.

            Our God will be born where God will be born, but there is no place to look for the One who comes to us.

            When God is ready God will come even to a godforsaken place like a stable in Bethlehem.

            Watch…for you know not when God comes.

            Watch, that you might be found whenever, wherever God comes.

Amen. Advent is a reminder that we don’t need to know when Christ will come into our world again, but that we need watch. Advent is a reminder that we are called to revel in the promise that Christ will come again to change the world and make all things new. Let that be our hope. Let that be our light. Thanks be to God. Amen.