Baptism of the Lord Communion Liturgy

This Great Thanksgiving is written by Shannon Sullivan, 2013, for Baptism of the Lord Sunday at Deer Creek United Methodist Church. It is written using language from The United Methodist Baptismal Covenant, The UM Service of Word and Table, and scripture, particularly Isaiah 43:1-7 and Luke's gospel.

Remembering Our Baptism and Holy Communion

It is a holy day indeed when we celebrate our two sacraments together. This morning we remember the sacrament of our baptism as we partake in the sacrament of communion. One celebrates birth and new life, and the other, our continued nourishment and growth as we live into all Christ calls us to be.

RENUNCIATION OF SIN AND PROFESSION OF FAITH

When we approach the font or the table, we first renounce the power of wickedness in our lives. And so, let us confess together:

Nourishing God, you tell us not to fear for you are with us. But we are so full of fear that we cannot love you with our whole heart. We use the freedom and power you have given us, not to resist evil, injustice, and oppression, but to rebel against your love to hurt our neighbors and ignore the cries of the needy. Cleanse us of our fear. Feed us the courage to put our whole trust in your grace.

ASSURANCE

The Holy Spirit has not abandoned us. We are still God's beloved, and the Holy Spirit continues to work within us.

We remember our baptism are thankful!

And now we come to the table, for God continues calling us each by name to bring us into the fullness of the new life we glimpsed at our baptism.

We offer ourselves anew to God, listening for the guidance of the Spirit!

PASSING OF THE PEACE: Now let us share signs of that peace which we find in Christ with our neighbors!

THE GREAT THANKSGIVING

The Lord be with you.

And also with you.

Lift up your hearts.

We lift them up to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to the Lord Our God.

It is right to give our thanks and praise.

It is right, and a good and joyful thing,

always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Almighty God,

creator of heaven and Earth.

In the beginning, darkness covered the face of the deep, but You swept over the face of the waters and brought forth abundant swarms of life. And you blessed them, seeing that it was good. You watered the face of the ground and formed a human creature from the dust and mud, breathing life into it and leading it to life in a garden. You created a second earth creature so it would not be alone, and man and woman were created. But these earth creatures, these humans turned their backs on you, and were expelled from the lush garden.

Yet you did not abandon them then, and you do not abandon us now. Throughout our history, you have come through the sustenance of water and bread to call us back to paradise. In the days of Noah, you saved those on the ark through water, and after the flood you set in the clouds a rainbow. When you saw your people as slaves in Egypt, you led them to freedom through the sea, and then sustained them with manna, bread that covered the dessert like dew. Their children you brought through the Jordan to a land flowing with milk and honey.

And so, with your people on earth and all the company of heaven, we praise your name and join their unending hymn.

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,

heaven and earth are full of your glory.

Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

Hosanna in the highest.

You told us when we pass through the waters, you will be with us. You told us that you love us so much, because we are precious in your sight, you will redeem us. You saved our biblical ancestors and us through water, but the story never ends there. You continue to nourish us through the fullness of time, sending Jesus, nurtured in the water of a womb.

When he grew up, your Spirit descended on him like a dove, proclaiming his belovedness as he emerged from the water. He began his ministry preaching new life because the time of redemption had come. He healed the sick, fed the hungry, and ate with sinners.

Yet so many feared and still now fear the new birth he offers all of us. We reject the fullness of the feast he give to us. And so we turned our backs on Jesus, on the nourishment he offered. And we gave him up to die, even after sitting at table with him.

On his last night with us, Jesus sat at a table and fed his disciples as he feeds us now. He took bread, blessed it, broke it, and shared it with us, saying “This is my body, which is given for you.”

When supper was over he took the cup, blessed it, and shared it with us, saying, “Take, and drink. As often as you do this, remember me.”

The cup reminds us of the new covenant, a covenant by water and the Spirit in which God reminds us again of our belovedness and calls us to new life.

And so, in remembrance of these, your mighty acts in Jesus Christ, we offer ourselves in praise and thanksgiving as a holy and living sacrifice, in union with Christ's offering for us, as we proclaim the mystery of faith.

Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.

Pour out your Holy Spirit to bless this gift of water and those who receive it. Pour out your Holy Spirit on us gathered here, and on these gifts of bread and wine. May these two gifts, the water and the meal, redeem us again by washing away our sin and filling us with good things.

By your Spirit, incorporate us into God's new creation, making us one with Christ, one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world, until we all come to the table, cleansed of all hatred and sin to welcome all people in joy and thanksgiving as members of the family of Christ. May your spirit work within us, that being born through water and the Spirit, and fed through Christ's body, we may be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ.

And now, with the confidence of the children of God, let us pray for our daily bread, praying the prayer Jesus taught us: THE LORD'S PRAYER

BREAKING THE BREAD

The bread of life.

The cup that saves us, and sets us free.

GIVING THE BREAD AND THE CUP

The table is set and all are invited. In the United Methodist Church, we practice an open table. This means you don't have to be a member, you don't have to be baptized, you don't have to take classes, you don't even have to be in a good mood. You are invited to come and know that no matter who you are and where you are on your journey, you are a beloved child of God and God's grace is sufficient.

As you approach the Table, you will first come to the Font, where you are invited to remember your baptism and be thankful. And, as you remember your birth through water and the Spirit, you will come to the Table, where you will be offered nourishment to sustain you on that journey of new life. You will be offered a piece of bread, which you can take and dip into the cup. Now come with joy to meet God anew.

BLESSING

The God of all grace, who has called us each by name as Beloved, establish and strengthen you by the power of the Holy Spirit, that you may live in grace and peace.

 

Marked by Love

My sermon for Baptism of the Lord Sunday at the Deer Creek Charge United Methodist Churches! I had a woman in her seventies tell me that she had never thought of herself as being Beloved of God before. 

See also my communion liturgy used on this Sunday.

Scripture: Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 (The Message)

The Gospel reading this morning will be from a paraphrase of scripture, Eugene Peterson's The Message. Hear now these words:

The interest of the people by now was building. They were all beginning to wonder, “Could this John be the Messiah?”

But John intervened: “I am baptizing you here in the river. The main character in this drama, to whom I'm a mere stagehand, will ignite the kingdom life, a fire, the Holy Spirit within you, changing you from the inside out. He's going to clean house--- make a clean sweep of your lives. He'll place everything true in its proper place before God; everything false he'll put out in the trash to be burned.”

There was a lot more of this--- words that gave strength to the people, words that put heart in them. The Message!...

After all the people were baptized, Jesus was baptized. As he was praying, the sky opened up and the Holy Spirit, like a dove descending, came down on him. And along with the Spirit, a voice: “You are my Son, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.”

Sermon: Marked by Love

Let us pray:

Patient teacher, we praise you for your warm embrace,

that in the midst of our fear and doubt, still youhope,  remind us

of your most important teaching: love.

May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts,

guide us all to better understand this teaching.

In the name of Jesus, whom you proclaimed your beloved. Amen.

My sister Kate, the blonde one, really changed the way I look at baptism. It was early two summers ago when we were at Norrisville United Methodist Church and there was a baptism. Now, we were preacher's kids, and preacher's kids who went to multiple services on a Sunday, so when the second service rolls around, you pay a little less attention to what's going on. I was goofing off a bit, but when I happened to look at my sister, she was crying. Now Kate did not use to be a very emotional person. For example: when she and I did a presentation on our mission trip to Bosnia, I cried because the trip had been such a powerful experience and I was so in love with the people we had met there. Her reaction to my tears was to tell me in the car on the way to the next service, “I hope you don't cry this time. That was embarrassing to me.” Kate's a real sweet girl.

So when I saw Kate was crying during the service, I thought she was sick or something; I was very concerned and asked her what was wrong. She said through her tears that she just found moments like this baptism so beautiful because they signify our family growing. She was touched by the love in the room, the warmth and the smiles on everyone's faces that just radiated the power of God's love.

I don't think before this moment I really thought about or at least felt baptism in this way. I confess that I am, to the chagrin of my mother (who is a pastor), a bit of an anabaptist. Anabaptists believe in re-baptism, that baptism should be something you choose as an adult to signify your commitment to a new way of life. I also like the idea of rebaptism because I always wanted to be baptized in a river but can't because I have already been baptized. Total immersion, the kind of baptism when you are dunked under water, just seems very glamorous to me. Now, though there is merit to anabaptist's focus on a ritual to signify a new commitment, less so to my desire for glamor, I think my understanding of baptism before seeing Kate cry missed the point of baptism. Baptism is less about us and the work that we do to arrive at the point of making that commitment to God and more about those words that were spoken as the Holy Spirit descended like a dove upon Jesus on the day of his baptism: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Or, as we read from The Message this morning, “You are my Son, chosen and marked by my love.”

When we think of baptism, we usually think more of washing away our sin than we think of entering into a family. And of course, baptism does symbolize how God cleanses us of our sin and offers us a new life. And baptism, though we only do it once, symbolizes how God offers us new life again and again throughout our lives. But the power of baptism is that it doesn't just offer us a clean slate--- because, let's face it, in The United Methodist church we often [but not exclusively, as we will see today] baptize infants who do not need a clean slate at that particular moment in their lives. The power of baptism is that it marks us as beloved children of God, enveloping us in a love that will never let us go.

Of course, we are marked by God's love even without being baptized, but baptism, like communion, is a physical reminder of God's claim on our lives. In most Protestant churches, we celebrate two sacraments: baptism and communion. [And today, at Deer Creek, we're celebrating both!] Sacrament is a fancy word that means an “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” And that definition I just gave was a fancy definition that just means that it is a physical mark that reminds us of God's love for us--- a love that has a past, present, and future component to it. The liturgy tells the story of our past, of those biblical moments that God has acted through water or bread. We are anchored in the present by the physicality of the act, the feeling of the water on our head, the bread in our mouths. And in the practice, we are entering into a future moment, that kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven that Jesus talks about.¹

So this mark of love is a powerful thing, roots extending deep into our history, branches touching us now, budding into something new as we speak. But it is also a ridiculous claim, isn't it? Couldn't we just say, “Oh, when we read Luke, God is talking about Jesus not all the rest of us”? I just jumped to a big conclusion when I skipped from the water to God's words as the centerpiece of baptism. But friends, this is what the Gospel writer does. In both Matthew and Mark's gospel, there is a little phrase about Jesus coming up from the water that is completely omitted in Luke's gospel. In fact, in Luke's gospel, it doesn't even say specifically that John the Baptist baptized Jesus. It just says, “Now when all the people were baptized, Jesus was baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.” That's it. One big sentence that reminds us, as Kate's tears reminded me, what baptism is really all about.

And, you may be saying now that neither of these two textual differences, removing John the Baptist from the action and omitting the water, are a huge deal. They certainly don't seem to be a huge deal, except that the effect of them is to remind us that it is not humans who baptize, or humans who choose baptism, but it symbolizes the work God is doing. And it is not the water that is important, but what the symbol ultimately points to: God's love for each and every one of us.

So, yes, though claiming that in saying Jesus was beloved, we all are beloved, seems a bit outrageous, this is what Luke focuses the true meaning of baptism on in his Gospel. And it is this focus on identity proclamation, on naming and claiming that makes all the difference for what we are called to do next. One commentator I read for this week explains:

I am God’s beloved. That’s an outrageous claim. Who am I to deserve God’s love? But that claim, that identity, is what we celebrate with this...story of the baptism of Jesus. We move from Luke’s birth narratives to his account of an adult Jesus in the water of the Jordan, and we hear the words “You are my Son, the Beloved.”

With his identity proclaimed, Luke sets the stage for Jesus’ work in the world. From this identity comes all the rest:

• his audacious claim that God is here, now, within each one of us, if we but have eyes to see, that God claims us all as beloved, if we but have ears to hear;
• his daring promise of justice and compassion, a new way to be found outside the walls of the temple and beyond the influence of empire;
• his healing touch that broke taboos of status and gender and race.

All that comes from this first claim, this foundational identity: you are my beloved.²

This is what baptism is all about, for Jesus, for us. It is about naming who we are and whose we are so that we may go out into the world living into that identity. This is why my sister Kate was so touched that Sunday as we welcomed another child into her true identity as Beloved of God. Baptisms, I saw in that moment, are a time to shower one another in love, to claim one another with love, as God has claimed us.

My mom is having her congregation this morning repeat after her: “I am God's beloved child...called and sent to make a difference in the world.” I thought this was a terrific idea. Being marked with God's love doesn't just end with smiles and a warm feeling, it demands action. So we're all going to say this together: “I am God's beloved child...called and sent to make a difference in the world.”³ Get that stuck in your head this week. Pray those words this week, and as we [remember our baptisms]/[baptize Sue and Patty today]. Can you imagine what the world would look like if we were all rooted in our belovedness? If we all recognized how much God loves us? If we went around acting as the beloved children of God we are?

Let us pray:

Spirit, fill us to overflowing with your love today and everyday. And guide us to love others, to widen the embrace of our church family even more every day. Help us to make a difference in the world, God. In the name of Jesus, Your Beloved. Amen.

1The idea behind this paragraph is stolen a little from my mom's baptism sermon, “A Baptism Shaped Life,” preached at Norrisville and St. Paul United Methodist Churches on 5 September 2010.

2Ann Howard, “Beloved Together,” A Word in Time, The Beatitudes Society, 7 January 2013, http://www.beatitudessociety.org/blog/28-beloved_together.

3Melissa McDade, “Who We Are” preached at St. Paul and Norrisville United Methodist Churches on 13 Jnauary 2013.

Christmas Eve Great Thanksgiving

This communion liturgy was written for Christmas Eve at the Deer Creek Charge.

My mother and I celebrated together at Mt. Tabor, and we served my grandfather (her father) communion for what was probably the first time he had ever received it. It was a beautiful night. 

 

Communion:

CONFESSION

God calls us to this table. God calls us to be fed. But too often we are already full, not with an abundance of grace and love, but rather full of clamor and commercialism, full of fear, full of pain we cannot shake. So we confess together:

Nourishing One who fills us with good things, empty us from all that holds us back from saying, “Here I am,” as Mary did. Take from us those places that are too full of ugliness and pain to let Christ enter in. Forgive us for our fear of scarcity that prevents us from coming to the manger with the humble shepherds, offering the only gift we have: ourselves.

ASSURANCE

Open your ears to hear the good news: God loves us so much that God comes to us in the form of a baby wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.

Glory to God in the Highest Heaven and on Earth peace to us all!

PASSING OF THE PEACE: Now let us share signs of that peace which we find in Christ with our neighbors!

THE GREAT THANKSGIVING

The Lord be with you.

And also with you.

Lift up your hearts.

We lift them up to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to the Lord Our God.

It is right to give our thanks and praise.

It is right, and a good and joyful thing,

always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Almighty God,

creator of heaven and Earth.

In the beginning, you spoke, breathing life into all of creation. You fed us in the garden, but we turned from you, eating the one thing you told us not too. Even after sending us out and into the world you did not let us starve. After you freed us from our slavery in Egypt, we cursed you for freeing us, but you did not abandon us. Instead, you fed us, covering the surface of the wilderness with manna like dew.

In famine, you provided for your prophet Elijah through people like us, people living on the edge of hunger with nothing left to eat. But you filled our jar of meal and jug of oil so that they would not fail until you sent rain upon the earth.

So too, when there was a famine in Bethlehem, the House of Bread, people like us sojourned to Moab and lost family. But you came to us through the strength of Ruth who gleaned that we might have bread and life. You gave us enough, filling not only our bellies with food but also our spirits with love and goodness.

And so, with your people on earth and all the company of heaven, we praise your name and join their unending hymn.

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,

heaven and earth are full of your glory.

Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

Hosanna in the highest.

Still we turned away, forgetting how you have nourished us through the ages. You sent us messengers in the form of angels and prophets, and finally you came to us to live among us, not as a king who sits before an elaborate banquet, but in the form of a child, born in a manger, a trough for feeding animals. Already, here, on that long ago Christmas, you were calling us together to be fed.

When he was in the womb, Jesus' mother sang of the hope he would bring: scattering the proud, lifting the lowly, and filling the hungry with good things. When he grew up, he fed five thousand of us with five loaves and two fish in a deserted place, blessing and breaking the bread before sharing it with us. And all ate and were filled. He was already fulfilling the words his mother sang.

Yet there were those of us who sneered at him for not following the rules about eating. We chastised him for eating with those we named sinners. We turned our backs on Jesus, on the nourishment he offered. And we gave him up to die, even after sitting at table with him.

On his last night with us, Jesus sat at a table and fed us, as he promised to on that Christmas night long ago, lying in a manger. He took bread, blessed it, broke it, and shared it with us, saying “This is my body, which is given for you.”

When supper was over he took the cup, blessed it, and shared it with us, saying, “Take, and drink. As often as you do this, remember me.”

And so, in remembrance of these, your mighty acts in Jesus Christ, we offer ourselves in praise and thanksgiving as a holy and living sacrifice, in union with Christ's offering for us, as we proclaim the mystery of faith.

Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.

Pour out your Holy Spirit on us gathered here, and on these gifts of bread and wine. Stay with us Spirit, open our eyes as you did at the meal Jesus shared with his friends after the resurrection on that road to Emmaus. Make us one bread, one body: nourishment to the world until we all feast together at Christ's heavenly table. May you work through us, God, that all might be fed. Be made known to us here, now, in the breaking of this bread, Living, Life-Giving God.

And now, with the confidence of the children of God, let us pray for our daily bread, praying the prayer Jesus taught us: THE LORD'S PRAYER

BREAKING THE BREAD

The bread of life.

The cup that saves us, and sets us free.

GIVING THE BREAD AND THE CUP

The table is set and all are invited. In the United Methodist Church, we practice an open table. This means you don't have to be a member, you don't have to be baptized, you don't have to take classes, you don't even have to be in a good mood. You are invited to come and know that no matter who you are and where you are on your journey, you are a beloved child of God and God's grace is sufficient.

We will be taking communion by intinction, meaning I will give you a piece of bread and you can dip it in the cup. Now, let us come to the table to see this thing that has taken place, that the Lord has made known to us in the choirs of angels.

PRAYER

Let us pray:

In the Psalms we read, “Taste and See that the Lord is Good.” God, as we go forth from this table to celebrate a baby, a king born in a feeding trough, help us to remember this meal, remember what it is to taste and see your goodness and mercy. Now may we go and feed others. Amen.

The Voice from the Wilderness

This sermon was my second during the Advent season at the Deer Creek Charge.

Scripture: Luke 3:1-6 (NRSV)

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.

He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

'Prepare the way of the Lord,

make his paths straight.

Every valley shall be filled,

and every mountain and hill shall be made low,

and the crooked shall be made straight,

and the rough ways made smooth;

and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'”

Sermon:

I must confess to all of you this morning that I spent most of my sermon preparation this week dancing around to the soundtrack of the musical Godspell. It is one of my favorite musicals (I prefer hippie musicals). The song “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord” is sung by John the Baptist, calling people to repent. If you have seen the musical live, you may associate the rushing forward in the song--- which, if the production you see includes a huge cast, sounds like a herd of elephants--- with the forward motions of the crowd, proclaiming as loudly and joyously as you have to do to sing “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.” So to me, John the Baptist's words in our scripture this morning take on a musical and physical quality to them, bringing them up off the pages to lead me in a dance toward repentance. Not to worry--- I will not demonstrate this dance. I think our dancers this morning did much better demonstrating this than I could.

So let's tap our feet a little as we pray together:

Patient Teacher, we give you thanks for the voices out of the wilderness

toe-tapping voices, at times, but voices that call us to repentance.

As we come together this morning, help us to better hear the voices of the prophets. May these voices guide us in this Advent season. Amen.

So our timeline is a bit off this morning. We expect to read stories of angels appearing to Mary and Joseph. At the very least, we expect that the prophecies we read to be the ones about the prince of peace, the little child leading them. We don't expect a hairy, camel-hair wearing, locust-eating guy on the edge of the wilderness. (Sidebar: Luke doesn't talk about John the Baptist's diet or clothing like Matthew and Mark do, but still, that is our image when we think of him, no matter what Gospel we're reading.) And besides, aren't John and Jesus supposed to be about the same age? So how come we are talking about John's ministry before we get to the baby in the manger? Just last week we were reading Zechariah's prophecy about John a prophecy showing a joyful expectancy much like what we hear in that Godspell song, and now John is all grown up preaching in the wilderness.

But this is the thing about Advent. We aren't just preparing for the birth of a baby. We are preparing for all that Jesus' life and ministry meant. We are preparing the way of the Lord.

But Ann Howard, a pastor and director of an organization called the Beatitudes Society, makes an important point. She writes, “I can’t hear the Baptist’s call to prepare until I get out there to the wilderness, out beyond the edge, beyond the usual, the conventional, the expected. So where’s my wilderness in this moment in time? Where am I being called beyond my comfort zone? What might I leave behind? When do I choose safety over risk? What new questions could I be asking? What old answers do I settle for? What fears hold me back? What encounters await?”¹

This is what draws me to the song from Godspell, I think. Why I can't get it out of my head. Music has a way of pushing us beyond the edge--- particularly dance. It forces us to relax and open up and risk. The uninhibited nature of all those people rushing to be baptized in Godspell, dropping everything to start a new life, that is what we are moving towards. But first, we have to stop. Listen. Get out there to the wilderness.

Most of us are not currently living in ways that we can stop and listen. I am one of those people, going going going all the time until I think Aaron considers hiding my computer and my car keys from me. And part of that, for me, comes from being in school for so long. In school, there is always something you could be doing: a paper to write, another essay to read--- and you aren't finished when it is five o'clock. Of course, ministry is the same way, housework and yardwork are the same way, taking care of kids is the same way: many of us are very good at finding excuses to be busy all the time.

In seminary, though, I read one of those books that smacks you upside the head. It was called The Circumference of Home by Kurt Hoelting, a seminary graduate who ended up becoming a commercial fisherman in Alaska. It is a beautiful book about his decision to live within a one-hundred mile radius of his home. He did not drive within that year, only took public transportation, biked, kayaked, and went on hiking trips. In the book he talks about what he calls the three-day rule. He says that he noticed it takes three days on a retreat to “dispel the clutter in our minds and settle the scattered energy in our bodies.” He says that “it simply takes this long for the soul to catch up with the body.”² How can we hear John the Baptist's words to prepare if our souls have so much work to do to catch up to our bodies?

Do you feel like your soul is out of sync with your body? I know I am one of those people who is constantly making lists in my head, constantly thinking about what else I need to do, what can I check off the list next. So three days for our souls to catch up with our bodies? I don't have that kind of time! Our souls really need to learn to move a little faster. So are we just stuck hoping that voices from the wilderness like John the Baptist's will just be loud enough to break us out of the busyness for a moment. Can we find a way to skip the stopping and listening part?

Besides that, we are moving too fast to even know what to listen to, where it is we ought to be listening. We don't know where the edge is. I really love how Ann Howard links the wilderness to the place outside our comfort zone. It really brings the place to life for me. We aren't just talking about a desert out in the Middle East somewhere. The thing about the bible is that though it is describing particular events in particular times, those particularities seep into our own lives. So when we talk about John the Baptist speaking from the wilderness in the first century, we are also talking about prophets today speaking to us from different kinds of wilderness. Where are those wild places we tend to ignore or avoid, those places outside our comfort zones?

So many big questions this week and we haven't even gotten to repentance! First, stopping and listening, then seeking someplace outside our comfort zones in which to listen--- these are the first steps in preparing the way of the Lord.

My first challenge to you this Advent, then, is to try being still. There are other ways we can slow our bodies down, I think, besides dropping everything and going on a retreat longer than three days right before Christmas. During Lent, the season before Easter, we talk a lot about spiritual disciplines--- and we ought to be talking about them in Advent too. Instead of starting with three days, try three minutes, then thirty, then maybe even three hours. Pray, read the bible or a devotion like the Upper Room, journal, just be still. Listen for the prophet's voice. We cannot prepare unless we can first listen and slow down.

But we can't just listen. John the Baptist's ministry shows us that risk is involved, that going beyond our comfort zones are involved. Don't just sit and listen, but go and listen. John the Baptists can't always comes to us anymore, as walled in as we are by our busy schedules. But we can go, opening ourselves to hear those messengers, knowing they come from the wild places outside our comfort zones. Come with us to serve at the Day Shelter in Edgewood on Christmas Eve. Come to me for the address and phone numbers of our homebound folks so you can call or visit them this Christmas. There are many ways you can step outside your comfort zone, change things up a bit, to place yourself in that place of wildness and possibility from which God's prophets like John the Baptist seem so often to speak.

As many of you know, I served as a chaplain last year in a hospital in New Jersey, both on a regular medical/surgery floor as well as on the behavioral health unit (psych ward). My experience there, more than anything else had in the past or has since, taught me these first steps of Advent preparation. See, the hospital was a wilderness place for me. You face your worst fears of illness and death and loneliness every day in a hospital. And besides that, we didn't start our work by shadowing the regular chaplains or anything like that. We were just thrown into the midst of it without a clue how to begin.

Well, maybe we had a little clue. Pray. That is always the best place to begin. Every morning I entered the hospital, I did not do anything until after I had gotten what we call a census, the list of names and room numbers, and prayed over each and every name, asking both that I could be the presence of God for each person I encountered and that I could see the presence of God in each person I encountered. Then, before I left for the day I would pray again over the names, including any prayer requests I had from patients or nurses I had talked to.

This time in prayer opened me to go into the wilderness that to me was the hospital. Every day on my way to the hospital, I had these horrible knots in my stomach, and I was so fearful. But after I prayed, I felt this strength guiding me.

So the practice of prayer guided me to the wilderness, and it opened me up to hear God's voice in those I met. In the voice of the man younger than I was suffering from alcoholism telling me he would keep me in prayer: this was a prophet showing me that God was always with me. In the voice of the woman suffering from psychotic episodes trying to learn to pray: this was a prophet teaching me of God's healing power, renewing power. In the voice of a man with a strange head injury who called me pastora, Spanish for woman pastor: this was a prophet reminding me of God's call on my life. And in the voice of the young woman as she tenderly held the hand of her husband in a coma: this was a prophet saying nothing can separate us from the love of God.

These were Advent moments for me, moments of God breaking in on me to show me new life. They were moments in which I was opened up to hear that song, Prepare ye...

Next week we'll talk more about John the Baptist, about that dance of repentance, but this week, I want you to go into the wilderness. Listen to those voices on the edge, to discover what, in this new year, you are being called out for.

In the scene in the movie Godspell in which John the Baptist sings “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord,” people hear his words echoing as they go about their daily lives, driving cabs, waiting tables. Their feet tap to his message of repentance. And I don't think their feet get tapping because it is an easy message. Instead, it is a message that gets under their skin, a message they can't get out of their heads. May this message of preparation get stuck in you my friends. May the voice crying out from the wilderness move you to action in this our Christian new year. And, as the scripture says all flesh will eventually see, may you see the salvation of God. 

 

1Ann Howard, “Advent 2: Into the wilderness,” A Word in Time, The Beatitudes Society, 3 December 2012, http://www.beatitudessociety.org/blog/14-advent_2_into_the_wilderness.

2Kurt Hoelting, The Circumference of Home: One Man's Yearlong Quest for a Radically Local Life, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: De Capo Press, 2010) 205-206.