Reverend Ref +

ADVENT II - YEAR A

Last week we rang in the New Year in grand style. Well, maybe not GRAND style; afterall, there was no champagne or dropping apple, but we did have party hats and noisemakers. For those who missed it, we also looked at New Year’s resolutions and I talked about trying to keep those fresh while staying awake and being watchful.

Today I want to talk a little bit about the up coming year and the gospel from which we will get most of our lessons. If you are following along at home, this is Year A of the Sunday lectionary, and Year 1 of the Daily lectionary. Year A is Matthew’s year.

What do we know about Matthew? Well, like most people of history, a little more than most but less than we would like. Tradition holds that he was a tax collector and one of the twelve disciples/apostles. His gospel was likely written about 10 - 15 years after the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. Matthew shares several things with Mark & Luke, but some things are distinctly his. Kind of like three witnesses to an accident. So, what is Matthew’s take on Jesus?
For Matthew, Jesus is the promised king who would deliver Israel. He uses a royal genealogy, different from Luke, that goes back to Abraham through David. This is shown when the wise men come to pay homage to Jesus, and it is shown when the Judean king, Herod, feels threatened by him.

This feeling of being threatened, however, doesn’t only apply to Herod. It applies to all of Israel and the religious leaders as well. Matthew is writing about change. The old ways of doing things and how we think about God are giving way to new ways. This is not easy. In fact, it’s downright threatening.

The Jews, like us, wanted to be comfortable in their beliefs and practices. They wanted to maintain the status quo. During Matthew’s time, the church and synagogues were in a struggle; a struggle over what constituted truth. Was Jesus God incarnate who came to give a new insight into our relationship with God and who welcomed outsiders? Or was Jesus a rabbi gone bad who threatened the purity of Israel by challenging and changing the rules?

This seems to be at the heart of Matthew - the tension between a new vision of God’s kingdom and the desire to maintain the current understanding of what we think God demands from us. Kind of sounds like today, doesn’t it? There’s one group who see God doing a new thing and opening the borders to outsiders and those we thought to be excluded, and there’s another group who are determined to keep the church holy and pure and free from contamination. In the Episcopal Church, this is known as the Canon 40/41 argument: 'We've never done it that way before', and 'We've always done it that way'. Who says the gospel isn’t relevant today?

In Matthew, the gospel is preached to the Jews AND the Gentiles; however, it is the Gentiles who are open to receiving the gospel. In Matthew, the Jews are mired in the old ways, unable to change. This is one of the reasons that Christians persecuted the Jews over the ages. The tension between new and old became magnified in a way that laid the blame for the crucifixion of Jesus squarely on the Jews.

So there’s a little background on Matthew before we get going. And how does all of this tension between the new and the old play out today? Well, you can’t get more tension filled than John the Baptist. Here’s a guy, living in the desert, eating honey-covered grasshoppers, screaming, "REPENT!!" and calling the religious leaders a brood of vipers.

Matthew sees him as fulfilling Isaiah's prophecy about one crying out in the wilderness to "Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight." Make his paths straight. I’ve been thinking a lot about that this past week. What are John and Isaiah saying here? How can we make straight the paths of God? One way is to look at the gospel from a social justice issue. Think about a landscape – mountains and valleys – and the road that goes up and down through those. If the mountains are the wealthy, and the valleys are the poor, how can we make the path straight? We can work to reduce the elevation difference. We can work to raise up the lowly and educate the wealthy that those who live in the valleys are just as valuable as those who live on the mountain tops.

Or, we can look at it from a personal issue. What do we do, personally, that keeps God from being part of our lives? Or gets us off the "straight and narrow"? Deals, conditions, expectations, rules and regulations. Sometimes this is so simple – feed, clothe, shelter. But we get so caught up in other stuff that it doesn’t allow for God to have a straight path into our lives, let alone into the lives of those who need to hear and experience the gospel.

In this Advent season, let’s try to find a way to bear fruit worthy of repentance. Before the coming of the Lord, let’s work on making his path straight. Let’s find a way that allows God to have a straight path into our lives.