Gaudete Sunday, 12/15/2024

Text: Zephaniah 3:14-20, Philippians 4:4-7, Luke 3:7-18
Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
One of my personal heroes is the former Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold. He was not only a prominent peacemaker in a time of crisis, but also a very spiritual man of Lutheran Christian faith, who saw his role in the UN as a calling from God to serve humanity. There are two images that Hammarskjold wrote about in his personal diary, now known as Markings, that really struck me. The first is this image of a committed life, in which he saw his life as an empty chalice. He would say that the honor of the chalice is the drink it holds. And God is the drink that pours Himself and fills the chalice. Hammarskjold saw his life as a constant emptying of his own ego, his own self-interest, so God could fill his life, the empty chalice, so that wherever he needed to work out true goodness in the world, it would be as he declared: “Not I, but God in me”. It is God acting through the human person, reaching out to the world with the only Love that can restore it to wholeness. Which leads to his second statement, this time regarding the meaning of goodness itself: “Goodness is something so simple; always live for others, never to seek one’s own advantage.” So true goodness is “God in me” manifesting Himself. It is loving with God’s love, not seeking to live for others for my own self-gain or aggrandizement, not to heap up an idol of my own self, but rather to let the one who truly loves me and you and everybody purely to manifest Himself through my life. And the simplest way to see this is to live for others freely and purely: what benefits my neighbor? What uplifts him or her? What does my neighbor need? I am only the chalice by which love can be held and given out to others to quench their thirst. This is the true joy of life, a commitment to purely love, not because of me, but because of the God who loves all deeper than I ever could. And this kind of thinking is not to demean our own identity, but it says that the joy of our unique identity, the joy of existing, is to exist in this simple goodness that loves others for the sake of the other. As our empty cups are filled with such life, there is much cause to rejoice!

And thus, in all this talk of being an empty chalice, of decreasing our own ego so that God may increase in us and in others, our advent readings today challenges us with two important ideas that can allow us to reach this state of unity with God that Hammarskjold described: joy and repentance. These two states of being at first might not seem related. Paul in his letter to the Philippians conveys a message of peace and assurance in the face of anxiety. The Lord’s nearness should cause us to rejoice at the incoming restoration of all things to their intended goodness, furthermore, because the Lord’s nearness means we are promised a peace that the world cannot take away. But on the other hand, we have John the Baptist, in a very different tone than Paul, seemingly not very joyful, but rather serious, crying out:
“You brood of vipers!” He reminds his hearers of the coming judgement, the fire that will burn and purify, and the axe that will cut the trees that bring no good fruit. In the face of judgement, it is natural for the crowd to ask: “what shall we do? What can we do so that judgement may be favorable to us?”. How do we become a people that bring good fruit, that is not hypocritical? John gives an unequivocal answer: repent! Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Meaning, change your mind, or change your ways. Take God’s path, take up the mind of God. To have the mind of God, John says, looks like this: “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none, and whoever has food must do likewise”. “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you”, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages”. For John, repentance entails the world oriented towards just practices. Regular people doing right by others in their time and place. God invites us to see the world and society differently in the light of justice and not of profit and self-interest, a folly that so many of our basic institutions fall in. To have the mind of God is to not take advantage of your neighbor; like Hammarskjold described goodness: simply live for your neighbor, seek the gain of all humanity rather than just yourself, because the One who will be born at Christmas, is One who gives Himself for others, for you and me.

And perhaps in this shift of mind towards God and neighbor, we can find the common ground of joy and repentance. We might ask what is there of joy in repenting? Isn’t repenting to weep and sorrow over our failings and sins? Isn’t repentance to be contrite and to be brought low, knowing our failure? Perhaps, in recognition that we do act in ways that fall short of God’s desire, repentance must have this sense of sorrow. It is important to know we ourselves are not perfect moral agents. But precisely in having this knowledge, God can make a change in our lives that actually moves the good life forward. If we did not feel sorrow over the fact we allow evils to happen every day on our society, perhaps we would become indifferent to the cry of our neighbor. If we did not weep over the abuse of our environment, perhaps we would not scramble to change our ways to live a life that reflects our desire for abundant and healthy life for all Creation. The Canadian activist Naomi Klein, for example, when describing the requirements to confront climate change, very much like John the Baptist, she remarked that nothing less of a radical change in our thinking and way of life can put us on the right direction; this requires, she says, for us to not look away at the problem and our contribution to that problem. If we did not weep over the fact that we have migrant families sleeping in our streets with no place to lay their heads, perhaps our spirits would not rise up to the occasion with a hospitality that God invites us to share. If we did not weep and repent, perhaps we would not reach out, we would remain enclosed to ourselves instead of building new life in togetherness with those around us, reshaping the world through a new way. The fact we have this judgement, and this call to repentance, the gospel writer calls “good news”. It is good news, that we are afflicted in this way by God so that we might be provoked to change! Repentance opens up new avenues of action. And even more so, that God’s judgement is always sowed in with the promise of healing: for repentance is the seed for the fruits of goodness. God promises to judge and uplift us: He will show us, as we await for Christmas, the face of Christ. The eyes that looks at us is Jesus. It is the life of Jesus, this One we await, that brings us to repentance, and uplifts us to a life of true goodness. If we are waiting for this One, John the Baptist might say to us: repent, for it is better to be ready for this One who is going to turn the world upside down; He is coming with Holy Spirit and fire, you will not be the same, for you are going to be renewed according to God’s desires of justice, mercy, and radical love.

So in living this faith, we can find the joy of repenting. Repenting is the means by which we empty ourselves, we make space for God to take over, for people to change their ways towards an upbuilding life. We become joyful because our identity becomes one with the God who is Love. And what more can we ask for, that we ourselves become the Love that we were created to be?

So let us repent and be that empty chalice, that chalice that awaits the drink that is being prepared for joy to reign in our midst. Let us pray to be filled with real active goodness, with justice, and peacemaking spirit. For that drink is ready to be poured out for you today. It is thirsty for us to be quenched with a life that is not conformed to the world, but rather it transforms it with God’s desire for us to love one another, to forgive, to reconcile, to share and become a community that cares, that our gentleness might be known to all. So indeed let us rejoice that we have this repentance and this grace. Let us rejoice that God will fill us with a goodness that overflows. Let us rejoice that our hands can be free to receive new life, that we can empty ourselves and be filled with a peace that surpasses understanding, that God is shaping us in the image of Christ so that all life may flourish around us. Let us rejoice in the Lord’s nearness always, that change is just around the corner, and it’s growing in us today. Let us pray: