Advent A1
ColPaul 2025
Isaiah 1:10-28;
Matthew 3:1-12; Psalm 94
November 30, 2025
In chapter
1 of the great prophet Isaiah, God entreats us, “Come now, let us argue it out,” says the Holy One, “though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be
like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. Come now, let us argue it out.” Never has a singular passage made it so clear
that what God wants . . . is relationship with us. Isaiah, the prophet, believes that God has a
case against the people, but enjoining the people, God wants to hear their side
of the story. “Tell me, so I
understand,” God seems to be saying, “help me figure out how you could have
gotten it so wrong. Don’t hold
back. Don’t pull punches. If you have something to say, make your
case.”
Some scholars believe that the first
chapter of Isaiah is the prologue for all of the latter prophets, prophets like
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, all who spoke from the Eighth Century B.C.E.
forward.[1] All of these prophets understood judgment and
hope as the two sides of one coin. This
same understanding is part of the gospel text we have with John the Baptist
preaching repentance to the people in the Jordan River. Repentance is not about hell-fire and
damnation. Repentance is about
purification leading to a different set of values, a different way of being in
the world that shows we have chosen a different path.
There is no hope in the old
path. Reform is impossible. A new way needs to be made.
These prophets hear the same old,
tired message from the people in protest, “But we are the chosen people. We are the people of Judah and
Jerusalem. We are the people who
regularly go to church and do our religious duty. We are the ancestors of Abraham and
Sarah.” To the prophet, these are empty
titles which do not recognize what God truly desires—to protect the weakest in
their communities, the widows and the orphans, by doing justice. And the prophet shrugs as if to say, “Stop
being so defensive, so self-protective and join with me, join the collective
pilgrimage, in creating the new way that transforms.”
You will hear it from me time and again because I
believe it is worth repeating. There are several places in Scripture where God
refuses the people’s worship because they continue to do injustice. But nowhere in the Bible, absolutely nowhere,
does God refuse the people’s justice because of the imperfect way they pray, or
sing hymns, or do worship. It is one of
the most common themes throughout these Latter Prophets: God refuses the people’s worship because of
their unwillingness or inability to do justice.
Isaiah clearly states in this passage that God will
not accept the worship practices, religious observances or festivals, because
of their violence and injustice. Isaiah
literally says, “Their hands are full of blood.”
John the Baptist, much like the Hebrews walking in
the wilderness, does not depend on the Roman meal for his food. He practices repentance. He eats locusts and wild honey as a way of
showing his independence from Rome and dependence on God. John screams along Jordan’s shore, that the
axe is being laid to the root of the tree, because the whole system is sick and
diseased. No good or real fruit can come
from running the world in this way. In
this judgment, asking for people to show their repentance, this is our hope
against hope. We recognize that we
cannot re-make the world without God and God will not re-make the world without
us.
As we begin this Advent season, we remember early
followers of Christ who believed God was acting to continue the story of
salvation during a dreadful time in human history. They created a narrative that ran counter to
the violence and death and injustice and night they found all around them. Dawn was breaking and they knew they were to
pay attention to the breaking of that dawn.
They were practicing repentance.
One of my all-time favorite people to read for
sermon preparation was Rev. Grant Gallup.
Rutgers University gave him a portal, a webspace, to express his
incredible heart and wisdom. He died way
back in 2009 and then Rutgers slowly removed his web presence. I miss his words so much. Rev. Gallup was someone who was a gay
Episcopalean priest who served the poor in Chicago, felt a loneliness and
aimlessness there and so moved to Nicaragua.
Rev. Gallup said of early
Christians:
Our believing ancestors thought of
themselves as the subjects of their own history, for they were The Story and
they were the tellers of the tale. They
were wide awake dreamers of wonderful dreams, in a world of nightmares, and
they were awake to tell the dreams. They
brought light into a world of shadows.
They brought hope into a world that had lost its hope and lost its way. They had been told by the God who visited
them in Jesus that they were Light in the world.
. . . God saves us not as a pinchpenny saves
coins but as a mother saves her child from danger and delivers it to safety and
health and maturity and responsibility . . . [2]
I love that line.
“God saves us not as a pinchpenny saves coins, but as a mother saves her
child from danger and delivers that child to safety and health and maturity and
responsibility.” God does not save us to
continue the same violence and death and injustice and night. God saves us to be the fruit of a different
tree. God saves us to be people who
bring health and maturity and responsibility to our community and our
world. We are to be the actors not the
acted upon, the subjects of salvation not the objects done-in by the violence,
death, injustice, and night that surrounds us.
We cannot save the world without God, and God will not save the world
without us.
(start
soft and pick up anger as you go) Too often, in the church, we have acted
too courteously when God has asked us to be lovingly confrontational, too
polite when God has asked us to protest in truth, too respectable when God has
asked us to be resolute in seeking out justice for the most vulnerable among
us. “Come, let us argue it out!” God
says, the Holy God who desires not platitudes or a fake politeness, but a real
relationship with us.
The
late Rev. Dr. Peter Gomes, at one time the Plummer Professor of Christian
Morals and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church at Harvard University, spoke
at the United Church of Christ General Synod for our 50th
Anniversary, in Hartford, Connecticut almost 20 years ago. Speaking as an American Baptist in the mist
of New England Congregational heritage, (a heritage that is part of First
Congregational United Church of Christ in Coloma), Rev. Dr. Gomes showed his
appreciation for the United Church of Christ, saying that we have led out on
every important social movement in this republic. But, he said, one of the greatest things we
could do in our own time is “to overturn the climate of low expectations” in
mainline churches. People in communities
like Coloma/Bainbridge and Watervliet have very respectable expectations of
local UCC churches, and it is our job to turn these respectable expectations
upside down.
He
went on. We give the occasional heifer
(referring to the Heifer Project), have the funeral for the respectable person,
every once in while marry the person not so respected. “Here is a chance,” Gomes said with a smile,
“for a great church to behave badly.”
As the
late Congressperson John Lewis said, and I’m sure many of us can quote it,
after his sit-in on the Congressional floor to protest the lack of collegial
courage around gun violence, “Sometimes you have to find a way to get in the
way. Or get in trouble. Good trouble.
Necessary trouble.”[3]
What
do
we think of that wild-eyed prophet calling for repentance out by the
Jordan River, eating bugs and wild honey for lunch? Do we think he cared more about individual
respectability or the world’s salvation?
Is
it possible in a United Church of Christ Church, that our best days are ahead
of us? Many mainline churches have a
habit of acting like their heydays are all in the past. As in, “Oh, you should have been here back
then.”
Gomes
ended his speech by wondering aloud whether all the history of the United
Church of Christ was leading up till now, a time for us to act with conviction
and character . . . with a hope that God is still acting and speaking. What Rev. Dr. Gomes wanted to know is, “Are
we still listening?”
“Dare
it be said,” he challenged, “dare it be said, that the last 50 years (back then
the whole of our life as a denomination), the last 50 years were mere prologue
for what is to happen, for whatever role you were meant to play? Dare it be said that your founders simply
began what it falls to you to carry on and complete?”[4]
Dare
it be said that all of those people who began the First Congregational United
Church of Christ of Coloma/St. Paul’s United Church of Christ, that they simply
began this incredible project that now falls on us to carry on and
complete? As we look at the violence,
injustice, night, and death that surround us in this time, a time not unlike
the time of Christ, we may be the Light of the world, the subjects of our own
history. So here we are, sisters and
brothers, siblings and cousins, members and friends of the First Congregational
United Church of Christ of Coloma/St. Paul’s United Church of Christ. Here we are.
This is our story and we are the tellers of the tale. Amen.
[1] J Clinton McCann,
“Commentary on First Alternate Reading—Lectionary for August 8, 2010” WorkingPreacker.org,
http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=8/8/2010 .
[2] Grant Gallup, “First
Sunday of Advent A,” Homily Grits, http://rci.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits04_05/msg00020.html.
[3] “Interview with
Congressperson John Lewis,” The Late Show
with Stephen Colbert, September 1, 2016.
[4] Rev. Dr. Peter Gomes,
Synod in the City, United Church of Christ General Synod, Hartford, CT, June
26, 2007.
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