2 Advent B 2023
Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8
In the twelve-step fellowships, every first-time newcomer has to have the strength to say, I’m Mike, and I’m an alcoholic, and what will greet him is not judgment and humiliation, but a simple greeting. “Hi, Mike.”
Forgiveness, that’s what it looks like.
It doesn’t matter how selfish I’d been, how unthinking, how unkind, how grandiose and egotistical, now neglectful of my responsibilities, or even how criminal my behavior. All they say is, “Hi, Mike.”
A greeting that says, “you’re welcome here, because you have confessed.”
The first step, always, with relating to God, or to restoring a lost relationship with God, a real and living relationship, in which you can truly receive God’s Holy Spirit and have all the strength and insight and wisdom and power and joy, and above all that great peace that passeth all understanding, that such a gift grants, is to confess your sins and receive forgiveness.
And really, before you can begin, or resume, a sincere and therefore God-empowered ministry at Philippi Christian Church, you will have to start with confessing your sins. Because you have confessed your great need of God’s correcting power, you will be able to greet your fellow sinner with genuine compassion behind the words “Peace be with you.”
Peace is the absence of conflict. I remember one of my first meetings with my spiritual advisor way back when I was trying to conquer my problems with nothing but my unaided will. I was essentially at war with myself. My advisor, a tall old Irishman named Bill, quietly asking, “wouldn’t you like to stop fighting?”
At that moment I felt years of agitation and disturbance melt away like snow in spring. I realized I was completely defeated, and it was okay, because God cannot be defeated, and I was ready to put my life in his hands.
The path to peace begins with this confession: I cannot fix what is wrong with me. In a war with myself, I am a double loser. We have no problem asking for help from a doctor when we’re physically or even mentally sick, but we seem to have a terrible time admitting that we are spiritually sick, much less to ask God to heal us.
But no living relationship with God can begin until we make this admission. Santa has the nice and naughty list, and so does God. But when we go before him, we tend to only show him the nice stuff, never the naughty. As if he didn’t know. Don’t worry about that stuff, God, I can handle it.
But the truth is, we can’t.
It reads in psalm 32:
When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.
Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.” And you forgave the guilt of my sin.
The root of all my anger and resentment was my own self-centered fear, which is a very good phrase to describe sin. Sin is self-centered fear, the fear that I will not get what I want or that what I have will be taken from me. It’s my self-centered fear that drives me to anger and grievance, and not anything anyone does to me. It’s my fear that puts me at odds with myself and other people.
Church, human beings cannot conquer their own instincts when they are inflamed with self-centered fear. It swells our instincts out of balance. Our natural God-given desires for food and safety and economic security and freedom and love blow up into addictions to drugs or food or sex, into anger, greed, lawlessness and neediness, and when they become so infected, it is virtually impossible to fix them without the help of someone or something else powerful enough to reach inside our bodies and minds and hearts and cool that terrible fever.
Confession to God and the forgiveness of sin doesn’t make our instinctual desires go away. We are not Buddhists. We don’t deny God-given desire. The practice of confession and the faith in God’s forgiveness simply redirects our desires toward the kingdom of heaven, and not toward those disasters our self-centered and willful desires were taking us.
This is peace: the desire for the kingdom of God, and the end of war with ourselves or anyone else. Such a state is impossible for any human being to attain by themselves. But with God, as the scripture says, all things are possible.
The world seems poised to plunge once again into widespread violent conflict, even here at home. Many Christians are unaccountably eager for this to happen. Every veteran in this room knows the truth about violent conflict, but few of the rest of us do. As we have seen with the first Civil War, while it made some significant changes to the legal state of our nation, it has never really ended. Such is war. It only leads to more war. Whatever gains it may provide us are far out of proportion to the pain and loss it costs.
The beginning of peace on earth is my peace with God, and yours. The beginning of peace in our church is my peace with God, and yours. We face a year when the rest of the country might just go nuts. Who will we be in the midst? Will we find ourselves battling and fighting and hating? Or will we be as we are called to be by our Savior, blessed peacemakers?
Peace be with you,
Amen.
