Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent
Zephaniah 3:14-20
December 13, 2009
It’s a stretch here. Sing aloud O daughter Zion. Rejoice and exult with your heart O daughter Jerusalem, the Lord has taken away the judgements against you, he has turned away your enemies. From this I get to Jerusalem as the bride of the God who is coming among us? You see, the fact is I have an agenda today and the readings aren’t lining up the way I would like. My real text for today’s sermon is a line from a hymn that isn’t even an Advent hymn. The great hymn, “the Church’s One Foundation, contains the line, “from heaven he came and sought her to be his holy bride.” In this season of anticipation, I think it might be helpful to consider some of the ways in which we prepare when we are about to begin sharing our lives with someone else. Now there is ample scriptural support for the idea of the marriage of heaven and earth--of God and humanity. In passages we don’t hear today the writer of the letter to the Ephesians says quite plainly to his hearers that he applies the concepts of mutual respect and support from marriage when he speaks about the relationship between Christians and Christ. The writer of Revelation sees the same daughter Jerusalem, the one we heard about a few minutes ago in the first lesson, as the bride of the Lamb.
I looked at the letter to the Philippians that we do have today and found no help there in trying to bring in the idea of marriage except maybe the part about lots of prayer and supplication. And the gospel is no help either, though when I mentioned my dilemma to one colleague she kind of lit up and said well there is that line about the brood of vipers. I was afraid to ask for details.
Present in today’s lections or not, I will stick with this theme of marriage because it allows me to talk about preparation, which is the theme of Advent, in a way not already covered by Rebecca or Elizabeth in the last two weeks. And, you have probably all figured out by now that relationship with God, through Jesus, is what I believe Christianity to be all about. So marriage it is.
I met with a young couple yesterday to go over the plans for their upcoming wedding. This was the “which lessons and how many bridesmaids” meeting. That meeting comes after several hours of other meetings in which the couple examine who they each are as individuals and what they are bringing into the new relationship. I settled long ago on a couple of tools for these meetings that seem to lead to good discussions.
After an initial meeting in which which they talk about how they met, what they do, what they see in each other, religious background and all that, we move on to personality type and family history. I have them do a Myers Briggs test and then look at the results to see how they each might be expected to approach life and work and relationship. You probably know about the test. It sorts people into general categories according to preferences and strengths like whether we are more introverted or extraverted, like ticking tasks off a list or just kind of going at everything all at once, whether we put more stock in what we have been taught or what we feel in the moment. I tell them-promise them--that there will be times when they will look at their partner and wonder how in the world anyone can act like that or think like that or function in that way. In those moments, I tell them, it might be helpful to remember that we are each “wired” in different ways.
It will be like that with this Jesus who is even now coming to share a life with you. Some of what you hear and experience around Jesus, in the Church--in its liturgy, scriptures and preaching, in your caring for others--some of what you experience in your life together with Jesus may not always seem to fit you. That’s ok. Some of us are wired with a passion for social justice, some of us are on a life-long quest to learn to hear a small still voice speaking deep within. Some will resonate with the word “law” every time it is mentioned because they know deep in their gut that there is a right way to do things. Others will hear only the message of divine love that promises to deal with any kind of mess we can make. What I tell couples in pre-marital counseling when their Myers Briggs tests show them to be very different from each other is that it will take some conscious effort to understand each other. And….that between them, they can handle just about anything. The differences between them amount to a broader array of strengths they possess for dealing with the world around them.
I thought at this point about trying to figure out where Jesus might fall on the Myers Briggs, but it became obvious very quickly that he would be an anomaly. He loved being with people, he loved his time alone. He knew and worked from the law, and he felt deeply and responded intuitively from his spiritual center. And he knows himself pretty well. It is the rest of us who need to spend some time reflecting on who we are and what we bring to the relationship.
Couples often laugh and enjoy their growing understanding of each other as they hear revealed in the test truths they had already begun to figure out about this other person. The other big discovery meeting I have with couples involves their family of origin. I have them do a genogram, a family tree that expands on simple genetics and asks questions about the individuals and the relationships they developed. This is where we ask about divorces, strained relationships, who were the strong leaders, who told the best stories, who were the black sheep and why, that sort of thing. The genogram is another way of looking at what each individual is bringing into the new relationship. So much of what we learn about how to do life-- how to understand the people around us, how to interact with others, what to believe is happening when things go wrong--much of that we learn from the family in which we grow up. Our parents who teach us so much learned from their parents who learned from theirs.
Sometimes a couple will look at a family tree and notice a pattern, something like for four generations mom was the strong rock who held the family together in tough times. That’s an important kind of thing for the prospective bride to know if it is true about the guy’s family. It tells her something about what may be expected from her in her new role, even if the groom swears he would never expect her to shoulder more than her share of the load. What we expect from the people around us has a lot to do with our experience, especially our early experience. And though such expectations play a huge role in our interactions with others, we often don’t name them or ask where we formed them unless we find ourselves having trouble in a relationship. That is why I ask couples to spend some time looking at the messages that guide them before they get married.
It is the same with Jesus. I hear from people all the time who see Jesus as disciplinarian or judge. I know people who were guided by parents who wanted them to excel in life, people who hear Jesus pushing them, admonishing them to do more. Who Jesus is in relationship with each of us will be colored by our experience of others. Jesus is seen and spoken of by the Church as authority figure, teacher, exposer of hidden truths, God, victim. Any of those roles might connect in good or troubled ways with our upbringing. One way of preparing in Advent might be to ask ourselves about our expectations of Jesus--who he is or might be in our lives--and then ask how we came by those expectations and whether they still apply. New beginnings deserve a fresh look with as much wisdom and insight into ourselves as possible.
I really only have a couple of wedding sermons. By the time we get to the big day there isn’t a whole lot left for me to say to the couple. One thing I do say and I say it to you on this third Sunday in Advent, is that you are about to become a part of a new creation. What is being put together here is something that has never been seen in the world before. You may think a lot of people have forged a new relationship with Jesus, but no other has been exactly what yours will be. The two of you will call new gifts from each other, and you will each become more in relationship with this other one than you could ever have been on your own.
Jesus is coming. God is jumping into the messy business of being human in order to be related to us in a new way. What do you bring to that new relationship? What have you learned? How have your expectations been shaped. Can Jesus be a friend and companion? Teacher and guide? Trusted? Loved? As I read the stories, that seems to be what is being invited in the advent and birth of Emanuel, God with us.
