A Home for All

Zephaniah 3: 14 – 20 Luke 3: 7 – 18

 

Before we really dive in today, please remember that there is origami paper and instructions for folding houses on the welcome table in the narthex.  You should feel free to get up and grab supplies, or more supplies…because this is prayerful work as we worship today – trust me.

 

(Thank folks for helping to create our Christmas Close to Home event yesterday – spirit filled fellowship)

 

Can you imagine entering into the sanctuary on a Sunday looking for hope and comfort and assurance and instead hearing this…

 

You…you brood of vipers!

 

To be fair I am occasionally scolded for not being hopeful enough.  But that is part of this job.

 

AND I am pretty sure I have never started right out of the gate that way.

 

In our scripture today from Luke’s gospel, people have gone out into the wilderness to hear John preach.

 

As one commentator noted about our text this week, throughout the scriptures, wilderness is a place where God’s miraculous and grace-filled provision meets people’s greatest needs.

 

Why had this particular group of people left the cities and gone into the wilderness to hear John preach? What was their great need in that moment? And how did John channel God’s miraculous and grace-filled provision?

 

The other reading you heard today was from Zephaniah, who is part of a stream of prophets who are looking toward the day of the Lord, the day when God’s presence, either as a mighty warrior King or as a earth-moving holy presence filling the Temple, looking toward that day as something of a reset, a reset that will judge and sort, gathering a righteous remnant together. And yet, in this particular text, Zephaniah takes all the judgement he’s written about prior and suggests that God will remove judgement from God’s people.  Somehow, in spite of the need to judge, God will gather up the scattered and make the people of God whole.

 

The people who gathered in the wilderness to hear John were steeped in this prophetic tradition – they had heard again and again that God would come and make all things whole. They were steeped in an idea that some would be judged. They were steeped in an idea that enemies would be defeated. They had also heard, time and again, that the descendants of Abraham were God’s chosen people.  That somehow, lineage mattered. And they were expecting a Messiah. 

 

In spite of all the expectations of God’s intercession, the people of Israel were also struggling. They lived in an economic system that kept expanding the distance between the haves and have nots. They lived in a political system marked by foreign rule and occupation. They lived in a religious system where there were lots of rules and lots of expectations about what boxes had to be checked in order to be in good standing with the religious system, but that system did not translate into better lives for those most beaten down by underpaying jobs, substandard housing, a lack of good healthcare, protection for the widow and the orphan and the immigrant. 

 

They also lived among “others,” folks who didn’t necessarily know the God of Israel they way that they did…and those others all shared the same struggles with the economic and political systems around them.  

So as they gathered in the wilderness, these people brought the backdrop of the prophetic tradition and they brought the reality of their daily lives, and John called them out – you brood of vipers! – but he also told them what it means to change their lives, to live into repentance.

 

We’ve talked about repentance before – repentance in this context is from the Greek metanoia, which actually means to change one’s mind or to turn. John doesn’t stop at asking them to change their minds.  He calls them to bear fruit with those changed minds.

Don’t just give it lip service. 

DO SOMETHING. 

Make sure that your turning your life toward God actually causes things to happen in the world. 

Bear fruit.

 

John goes on to suggest that already, the ax is ready for pruning – that fruitless plants can be removed to make way for fruitful ones.

 

And the people, hearing this, ask John what it means for them.

 

What then shall we do, they ask.

 

John breaks it down and makes it pretty easy to understand – if you have two coats, give one away. If your job is to collect taxes, don’t collect more than is required.  If you are paid to serve and protect, let your paycheck be enough – don’t use your power to extort more from the people you serve. 

 

He was speaking into their world, their contexts – naming the places where perhaps their practice of loving neighbor was falling short. Naming places where they could turn, where they could change their ways, change their minds and ACT and LIVE in ways that demonstrate- that make real - love for their neighbor.

 

Here in the middle of the Advent season, in the middle of a few weeks when so much of the messaging around us has us focusing on decorations and gifts and events and food, John enters in with a very down to earth and practical word for us.

 

Pay attention to how you care for everyone. Because what you claim to believe doesn’t matter if it isn’t bearing fruit.

 

During this season of advent, we have been thinking about home as a place we know but don’t yet fully know  – thinking about what it means to receive the gift of God with us in the birth of Jesus and to not yet see the fullness of God’s kin-dom where there are no more tears and sorrow – I ask that we listen deeply to the simplicity of John’s call to action. 

 

Our ancestry doesn’t matter.  Love others. Their ancestry doesn’t matter. Share what we have. Don’t be greedy. Pay attention that our security, comfort and wholeness is not creating suffering or hardship or limitations or oppression for another.

 

This week, John challenges us to make sure there is a home for everyone, not just ourselves, not just our chosen family, not just our denomination, our church, our faith, our political affiliation, our comfort zone…make a home for everyone. Make sure that your love of God and neighbor aren’t empty affirmations but instead bear fruit. Change the world.

And if we take that seriously, it will necessarily change our daily lives. 

 

And it will change our shared lives as a congregation.  It has an impact on the way we spend our money, and the way we structure our work, worship and study, and the way we use our building. Because we are called to bear fruit that is worthy of our claim that Jesus Christ is Lord, that God is love, that the Kin-dom is at hand.

 

Over the past two years, we have done a lot of hard work here at Faith to orient ourselves toward what matters most –turning toward our neighbors, naming places of need and injustice, to designate a larger portion of our tithes and offerings to the needs of those around us.

 

We have named the desire to be anti-racist and to be reconciling.  It hasn’t been easy to get to this place. In fact, it has been pretty painful at times. There have been disagreements, there has been criticism. But we have kept discerning and refining and claiming our identity as followers of Christ.

 

And some days we are not quite sure what it means to live into that claim faithfully.

I wonder if right now we aren’t just a little like those whom John meets in the wilderness…needing some clarification, needing some direction, needing focus, needing metrics …Needing God to call us specifically in a direction.

 

Asking…What then should we do?

 

Asking…What does the season of Advent offer us in terms of clarity?

 

Asking…How is God calling us into the next step?

 

Asking… What is in this word for us today?

 

Today, I hope that you have been keeping your hands busy with home-making…I mean, creating tiny houses.  Now I want us to use our imagination and our prayer as well as our hands.  

 

What does it mean for there to be a “home” for all? 

 

Yes, there are actually people without roofs over their heads at night. 

 

To see that they are housed is one way we can do this work.

 

But there are also people whose heart has no safe home. Whose immigration status, whose race, whose faith, whose gender identity or sexual orientation has no home. Whose hearts have no shelter.

 

What does it mean for us to work for there to be home for all?

 

Today, I am asking us to prayerfully consider John’s call to action as we fold these tiny houses.  At the end of the service, we’d like for you to decorate our tree up here with all of your tiny houses.  

 

My prayer is that these tiny houses represent our desire to bear fruit worthy of repentance – fruit that brings about safe places for hearts of all kinds, food for the hungry, shelter (physical, spiritual, social and emotional) for the thriving of all of our neighbors.  

 

We want these tiny houses to be commitments to how we will bear fruit.  We want them to symbolize actions we intend to take in the year to come –in order to be a community of love and justice, welcome and fellowship, transformation and growth.

We want this tree to remind us of what abundant fruit can look like – love in action. So may our busy hands and our praying hearts commit and bear fruit worthy of our claims.

 

May it be so.
Amen.