Advent IIIA    December 16, 2001    St. Matthew’s
Preached by the Rev Charles H. Huffman

A few of you might still remember the adventure of Douglas "wrong-way" Corrigan back in 1938. Corrigan was a pilot who filed a flight plan from New York to Los Angeles, but, instead, he flew to Ireland in his jerry-rigged, second-hand, uncertified, airplane. One of the modifications he made to his plane was to strap on 5 extra fuel tanks on his cowling which completely blocked his forward view. I never heard why he didn’t look at his compass, or why he didn’t turn around when he saw he was flying over the ocean. Still, It was an amazing thing he did to complete such a journey with such impaired vision, and in an aircraft of such questionable condition to boot.

I was thinking about "Wrong Way" Corrigan when I read the Gospel Lesson because John the Baptist also had limited vision. Like Corrigan, what he could see made perfectly good sense to him. But, obviously, he couldn’t see the whole picture. His message, while accurate as far as it went, was not adequate for the full life God intends.

John was a preacher’s kid--the son of a priest. Growing up around the Temple in Jerusalem, he witnessed the hypocrisy and corrupt politics of the ecclesiastical and political leaders or his religion and his country. There was no Peace Corp to join, so,     when he did leave the comforts of home and family,    he chose to live in the desert, where he became an angry prophet of repentance.

For a time he was merely a popular, religious novelty, like other holy men who wandered about the countryside. But when John publicly denounced Herod’s marriage to his brother’s wife, he stopped preachin and started meddlin. Herod had him arrested and thrown into prison, from where, in the darkness of his dungeon,     John waited for Jesus to retaliate. But nothing happened! With growing despair, he began to question his ministry. What had he missed? What was he not seeing? Why was Jesus, if he was indeed the Messiah, not more militant? Why doesn’t he bring down God’s wrath on the evil-doers? Wasn’t Jesus the axe to cut down the tree of corruption and unrighteousness?

But Jesus seemed to be walking down another road, so John, from prison, sent someone to find out why. Jesus’s response was to affirm John in the highest terms.    Hadn’t he chosen John to baptize him? Hadn’t he called John "the greatest." Jesus never rejected what John said, but, what he did do was to add to John’s message a wider perspective and a broader vision of Reality. Jesus took what John saw and said, "there’s more!"

One of the first study retreats we attended at Laity Lodge was led by one on Billy Graham’s key leaders. He was a great teacher and i still value some of the things he said.    But in those days--in the 60’s--the denominational and theological lines    were drawn much sharper than they are today, and fresh out of seminary I found myself increasingly uncomfortable hearing some of his opinions and innuendos against liturgical and sacramental theology, to which I was committed in my faith journey.
   
Typical of a fundamentalistic point of view, what he taught was exclusive and judgmental with little room for mystery and grace. I remember thinking as I listened to him, "Tom, you’re right! But there’s more! You can’t box God and the Church into our ideas about them--We all see in a glass darkly--there’s always more!

Jesus could have said the same thing to John the Baptist:    "You’re right, but there’s more!" "There’s more" to the Truth about life than the law, more than issues of right and wrong, good and bad; more than justice, as important as those categories are.. In a word, Jesus said and taught that what completes John’s vision is "grace." The full vision of Reality and Truth, revealed to us in Jesus, is that we live in a dichotomy of law and grace.

We need to be rooted and grounded in the law, Justice is essential to our life together here on earth; We must be accountable and hold others accountable; We must accept and let others accept the consequences of our actions. But we can’t stop with the law, with what’s just and what’s unjust..

Take, for example, a healthy marriage. It is, of course, about law--Marriage is certified by the State: And marriage is certainly about justice and fairness, about give and take,    about sharing and negotiating responsibility, about equal access to and power and resources. But, more importantly, marriage is about grace--about love and sacrifice and mercy and forgiveness--about giving 90 or even 110%, even when one partner can give little or nothing, "for better and for worse, in sickness and in health".

As far as understanding the Kingdom is concerned, the Law came with Moses; Grace came with Jesus. Jesus extended the Vision of God’s Kingdom to go way beyond the law, to include those whom the law rejects; to sinners and losers and the marginalized in society: to the blind, the lame, the lepers, the deaf and the poor.

In the Parable of the Laborers, Jesus said, "God will pay the last man the same as the first." The law says that’s unfair!     But God’s Grace is to be extravagantly generous to all.

To the woman taken in adultery, Jesus says, "I do not condemn you--go and sin no more." Jesus doesn’t say forget the law--adultery is a sin--adultery is an act of unfaithfulness, a violation of the Sanctity of marriage. But Jesus dealt with the woman,    as he does with all of us, in the context of the entire vision of the Kingdom, not just a piece of it, not just the legal part of it.

The Law exists to serve Grace, not the other way around. Grace, with its expressions of love and mercy, of sacrifice and forgiveness, are eternal qualities, while the law and its expressions are temporal qualities --important, but limited. to this world.

As John found out, Jesus doesn’t fit the ordinary expectations of Justice,    of being right and being good, because our ideas about these categories are often given higher value than we give grace.

Being Good, for example, can become such an obsession with us that we condemn anyone not as good as we are, and we devalue ourselves and others who don’t measure up to our standards of goodness. Furthermore, we begin to think that goodness is all God cares about, and that our salvation is determined by, our being good.    From our earliest days, whatever else may motivate us, we feel in our bones that we must be a good child to keep our parent’s love. Long before we might have learned that love is not dependent on our goodness or badness, we have created our pity’less, ego centric egos. "Let me be good," our conscience cries, "that family, society, the Law, and God, will approve." "Let me be good that I need no longer be afraid of being unmasked." "Let me be good that I can live with myself and accept myself."

With such a deep seated attitude, who then do we naturally look for as the Messiah?"    Why one who will bless and reward us for being good!

"So you better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout,
    I’m telling you why, Santa Claus is coming to town."
"He knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you’re awake,
    He knows when you’ve been bad or good,
so be good for goodness sake."

John the Baptist said "Repent ye, for the Kingdom of God is at hand," which means, "clean up you act, or no Christmas Kingdom for you!" Jesus also preached repentance but meant something entirely different about our being good! When he said Repent and get ready of the Kingdom to come, he meant that our being good/bad, right/wrong are not the primary categories in the Kingdom, Grace is!    He even said, "Why do you call me good?"    Only God has that honor!    He also said, "Your heavenly father makes his sun to shine on the good and the bad alike, and sends his rain on the honest and dishonest."

According to Jesus there is no condemnation in the Kingdom, only a welcome to any one who can accept the fact that he or she is accepted. In the Kingdom, being Good demands a whole new strategy.    According to Jesus One should be good gratuitously--that is, with grace--because it is no longer necessary to be good, in order to be accepted by God. One can "sin no more," because it has ceased to matter in the old sense--no longer is there the awful obligation to be good, and the awful consequences of failure that leads us to go on sinning.

But most of us don’t know how to play the game any other way , than by using our ideas of goodness as a yardstick to measure the worth and value of others, and, just as bad, to measure the worth and value of ourselves.

Then there is our compulsion to being right, which, like our compulsion to being good,
is another sub category of Justice and the Law.

Ruel Howe, in his book The Miracle of Dialogue, writes:
"The need of individuals to be right is so great that they are willing to sacrifice themselves, their relationships, and even love for it. This need to be right is also one which produces hostility and cruelty and causes people to say things that cut them off from communications with both God and man."

Theologian Helmut Thielicke concurs: "People often abandon each other to protect their rights, which, in the long run, is far more harmful than losing the rights they cherish. We would all rather feel that we acted "justly" and feel "justified" than to give-in to mercy and forgiveness and love." And he adds:, "In this sense, "Justice does far more harm in our lives than injustice."

It takes courage and maturity to say those simple words of grace: "I’m sorry," or "maybe I was wrong" when we want so desperately to be right, to be justified..

In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the elder brother says to the father: "I never once disobeyed your orders and you never gave me so much as a kid...but now that this son of yours turns up, after running through your money with his women, you kill the fatted calf for him." The elder brother wanted the law without grace, justice without mercy, to be the right and good son even if love for his brother was traded for contempt. When we limit ourselves to the elder brother’s vision, which was John the Baptist’s Vision, we isolate ourselves from Grace, Grace for others and Grace for ourselves.

The Christmas Story is the Paradigm of the full vision of God’s Kingdom. Born under the law--under the laws of nature as well as the laws of men--Jesus is, at the same time, God’s fullest expression of Grace--He is God’s expression of unbounding love,     generosity and mercy toward us, a love that was one day to give 100% on Calvary to our 0% response.

Advent challenges us to ask ourselves, "just how much do we suffer from the tunnel vision John had?" John’s is the vision we all have before we accept the Revelation given to us in Christ Jesus, whose fuller vision of reality leads us to live according to law and grace, not the law alone, to live according to justice with mercy, not with justice alone, to value every human being by God’s standard, not by the yardstick or our own ideas of goodness; and to not let our need to be right prevent us from acting lovingly toward others. Advent is the season when we ask ourselves which will it be for me? Which road will I follow--which way will I go,following which Messiah--Jesus or the one John expected.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote a poem she called: "The Winds of Fate," which makes the point that how we set the sail of our souls is of paramount importance and urgency     in what our destinies will be..

One ship drives east and another drives west
With the self-same winds that blow;
    ‘Tis the set of the sails
    And not the gales
That tells them the way to go.
Like the winds of the sea are the winds of fate
As we voyage along through life;
    ‘Tis the set of the soul
    That decides its goal
And not the calm or the strife

As we approach Christmas let us be clear about who the Messiah is for us and pray that more and more the world will appreciate and follow the One who offers us so much more than the law allows.   

AMEN