The Third Sunday of Advent-Year C

The Very Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Third Sunday of Advent Year C December 15, 2024 A letter to James Francis McLaurin upon the occasion of his baptism. Dear James, Today is your baptism day. It is the official beginning of your life in the faith, the day when your parents and godparents and all of us are recognizing that God has, even before your birth, claimed you as God’s beloved, and we are all saying “yes” on your behalf. We are all promising that we will help raise you to live your life as God’s beloved, even as we try to live our lives as God’s beloved alongside you. And our baptismal covenant gives us the framework of how to do that. (It’s why we renew it, periodically, throughout the year, when others are baptized and on special Sundays.) On this third Sunday of Advent, our gospel reading gives us a baptism sermon from Jesus’s cousin, John the Baptist. John is out in the wilderness and the people are flocking to him to be baptized. John tells them that in baptism and beyond, they will find themselves converted to living life differently. They should no longer hold fast to the priorities of the world but rather they should seek to live out God’s priorities which are justice, mercy, compassion, and equity for all God’s people, and that when they live out these priorities, they will be revealed in the fruit of their actions. John tells his listeners to repent, and even though it’s strange to think about as we baptize you today, sweet baby James, baptism is a call to both conversion and to repentance. Conversion is setting our feet on the path that Christ has trod before us: a path of humility, a path of compassion and mercy, of healing and reconciliation. Conversion is setting our feet on the path of love and following it through hills and valleys, over mountains and through deserts. It means committing to living and walking the way of Christ in times of hardship and in times of plenty. In your baptism, James, we acknowledge that this path is not always easy. We need each other as fellow travelers on the way to give encouragement, support, and even correction. Because we also acknowledge that each of us will stray from this path, over and over again, throughout our lives. And it’s not just about how we stray individually, either. At times, we will all stray together, as a whole people, and we will step or fall off the path of justice and mercy, equity and compassion. And so, we have the call to repentance, that whenever we “fall into sin” or step off the right path, we will turn away from following our own selfish desires or the demands that the world whispers or shouts in our ears that we should seek, and that we will turn back toward God. Repentance means turning away from all that divides us from each other and from God and turning back again to loving God with our whole heart and mind and strength and loving our neighbors as ourselves as we try to live the way that Christ has showed us. Advent is a time when we recognize the many ways we both inadvertently and purposefully fall into sin, and we heed this call to turn back toward God, to make our hearts ready for God’s return in Jesus. Our whole lives are made up of this dance of falling away from God because we have sought the own devices and desires of our own hearts and repenting and returning to God. And the good news is that no matter how many times and in whatever fashion we fall away, nothing can keep us from being God’s beloved. As we say in your baptism today, we are “marked as Christ’s own forever.” No matter what. And that truth inspires us to live our lives as God’s beloved, to bear fruits worthy of repentance, to show people know that we are God’s beloved by the way that we love. Because that is what it means to live life as God’s beloved. Today, sweet James, is the third Sunday of Advent which is also Gaudete Sunday, and Gaudete means rejoicing! We light the pink candle, which is the church’s color for rejoicing; we hear readings about rejoicing, even as we are called to repentance. It may seem strange, but they are two sides of the same coin, repentance and rejoicing. So today, I will close with a blessing that was written by the writer Kate Bowler and shared in her Advent Devotion titled A Weary World Rejoices. It is both prayer to God and blessing that is especially appropriate for you and us on your this Gaudete Sunday which is also your baptism day. It’s titled A Blessing for Our Part in the Bigger Story. Blessed are we, gathered already into the plot, part of the epic story you, [God,] have been writing from long before we were ever born. Thank you that we are not separated into lives of loneliness but joined together as those who were loved into being. We are made for meaning and a purpose that only our days can breathe into action. Pull us closer to the bigger story that reminds us that our ordinary lives are the stuff of eternity. You fitted each of our days for small efforts and endless attempts to pick ourselves up again. In our triumphs and embarrassments, we need to be told again (sigh) that we are not just everyday problems. We are a story of extraordinary love.” i May you always remember, sweet James, that you are a part of God’s story of extraordinary love. Your sister in Christ, Melanie+ i. https://courses.katebowler.com/courses/advent-devotional-2024/lessons/week-3-2/topics/day-15-2024/

The Second Sunday of Advent Year C

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Second Sunday of Advent-Year C December 8, 2024 We don’t really get to see Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, in today’s readings. But we do get to hear from him; and that’s pretty extraordinary given his story. Zechariah is a small-town priest. He’s at work, in the holy of holies, offering prayers and incense on behalf of the gathered people. Maybe he’s praying for himself, for his wife Elizabeth, for God’s people Israel? Or maybe he’s preoccupied—wondering what Elizabeth is making him for dinner that night? Suddenly, unexpectedly, an angel appears and tells Zechariah not to be afraid. The angel assures Zechariah that God is going to give Zechariah and Elizabeth a son who God will raise up to be a prophet like Elijah, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit. And his job will be to “make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” But Zechariah scoffs and questions Gabriel saying, “‘How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.’ (Don’t you appreciate how he shows a little diplomacy for his wife’s age? You can tell he’s been married a while.) And the angel, who seems to get his feathers ruffled a bit with Zechariah’s scoffing replies, um, excuse me! “‘I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.’” So Zechariah is silenced for at least nine months, and in that silence and space, something changes in Zechariah. Because when John is born nine months later, Zechariah is suddenly able to speak again, and the first thing he does is to sing a song that is overflowing with joy. Just as John grows inside Elizabeth, being nurtured by her while waiting to be born, joy grows in Zechariah in his season of enforced silence. And he gives birth to joy in his song that we all read together this morning. This past week, I read a meditation on Advent 1 by the biblical scholar Diana Butler Bass. She was writing about how Advent is a season that focuses on both justice and joy, and here’s what she writes about joy: “Joy is not happiness, even though the two are related. Joy is delight, gladness, and pleasure — a deep inner wellspring of contentment and comfort. It is a disposition, an outlook, and maybe even a purposeful practice. Happiness is what we feel in relation to external conditions; joy is experienced regardless of circumstances. A wise maxim says, ‘We pursue happiness, we choose joy.’” She continues, “Neither justice nor joy are easy. Indeed, they can be elusive. We need new eyes to see them, renewed hearts to experience them, and willing hands to act on them in the world.” i. Perhaps the silence gives Zechariah the space to see, experience, and act on joy in new and different ways, giving him the opportunity to see where he can choose joy in his own life and recognize the presence of God’s joy in God’s people Israel. Because Zechariah’s song isn’t just about the wonderful gift that has been given to him and Elizabeth; it also is recognizing how God’s work, God’s dream is being brought to fulfillment in a way that will benefit all people. There’s simultaneously an individual and a cosmic scope to Zechariah’s song and to his joy. In our epistle reading for today, the apostle Paul also knows something about choosing joy, and he does this in less than ideal circumstances. When Paul is writing his letter to the Philippians which is overflowing with joy, he is actually imprisoned, which shows us that we don’t have to be happy or even comfortable to choose joy. In fact, Paul’s joy seems to find its roots in gratitude, in remembrance, and in reflecting on his intimate relationship with the people in the church of Philippi along with a commitment to his work in spreading the good news of Jesus Christ while he tries to give them the tools they will need once he is gone. So, how do we choose joy this Advent? First, we have to be able to recognize joy in our lives, to name it when it shows up, and to embrace it. For each of us, joy will look and feel and taste differently. But ultimately, joy is “an intense feeling of deep spiritual connection, pleasure, and appreciation.” ii Joy is often something unexpected, often a surprise. Joy is a sense of well-being, and sense that things are as they should be. In his poem “Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves,” poet J. Drew Lanham writes, …Joy is being loved up close for who we are. …Joy is the day off, just because. Joy is the kiss of that one, or the just verdict delivered by twelve. Joy is the everything, the nothing. The simple, the complex. Joy is the silly, the serious, the trivial. The whale enormous, the shrew’s small. Joy is the murmuration, then the stillness. Joy is the inexplicable coincidence. Joy is what was meant to be. The mystery of impossibility happening. The assurance of uncertainty. Joy is my seeking. Your being. It is mine for the taking. Ours to share. More than enough to go around, when it seems nowhere to be found. iii As one of our Wednesday healing service community shared, joy is the current that runs underneath and through our lives, like Nat King Cole’s Joy to the World playing in the background while she was doing her dishes. One of the spiritual practices proposed by Kate Bowler in her Advent Devotion A Weary World Rejoices this week is that when we discover joy in our lives, then to give ourselves permission to hum Joy to the World in acknowledgement.iv Once we start to see and acknowledge joy in our lives and the world around us, then, we are called to seek, to choose joy. We do this through nurturing connections with others; through time in silence and with God; through spending time in nature which can nurture and feed our joy; through expressing gratitude, even in the midst of hardship; through God’s reorienting of us after things don’t go as we had planned. Joy is a sense of connection with a story that is so much bigger than our small selves. Joy is the current that runs throughout our lives. This week, may you have new eyes to see it, renewed hearts to experience it, and willing hands to act on it in the world. i.From Diana Butler Bass’s Substack page, The Cottage: Sunday Musings: Advent 1 - by Diana Butler Bass ii.Brown, Brene. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and The Language of Human Experience. Random House: New York, 2021, p 205. iii.Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves – J. Drew Lanham iv.The Weary World Rejoices Individual Download - Kate Bowler p 23