Lessons:
Are you basically an optimist or basically a pessimist? Do you tend to see the glass as half
empty or half full? John the Baptist seems to be a bit of both – both optimist and pessimist. I tend to be a worrier myself, so I don’t see the glass as either half full or half empty. Instead I worry about the glass tipping over and spilling whatever water it might have. My tendency is to look at the future and think about the bad things that could happen.
I feel as if there’s a lot to worry about right now in our world. Global warming or global trade wars, the rising costs of healthcare, mass gun violence, the anger and hatred in our national political discourse, the growing divide between the wealthy and the poor. We seem to be going in the wrong direction, and bad things are coming. You probably share at least some of those anxieties.
John the Baptist confronted high anxiety in his own age. The Jewish people could look
ahead and see disaster threatening them. John the Baptist does not try to reassure them;
instead he tells them, “Yes, you’re right, disaster is coming! You better get ready for it!” He uses their anxiety to try to get people to act, to make changes in their lives that will get them back on the path to God. Now is the time to get right with God.
Because the other part of his message is a message of hope. We hear that in the gospel
this morning. God is going to bring salvation to God’s people. There’s a glorious future that lies somewhere ahead of us. This is the vision that’s also laid out so beautifully in this morning’s lesson from the prophet Baruch: God is going to bring all of God’s children home, God is going to bring redemption. Looking at disaster ahead and yet still finding hope – that’s the balance.
In some ways this balance is essential to our spiritual lives. We are always on the knife edge between being anxious about disaster ahead and looking for the small signs of hope in God’s promised salvation.
I had an experience of this last week. I was in Seattle helping an aging family member move – always a difficult process, but made more so by the fact that they are in a relentless decline in physical and cognitive health. This is something that I know some of you have faced with your own family members or friends, and it’s a bleak kind of outlook to have. You know it’s not going to end well, there’s no bright light at the end, and this is so hard, because you feel there’s nothing you can do.
But in fact I did experience moments of hope and moments of light last week. It came in
small, unexpected moments, and it always involved an interaction with someone else. A brief moment of humor, a word of encouragement, acts of kindness and understanding and grace. It was like going outside on a dark night this time of year and looking up at the sky and seeing a few bright stars. Small signs of hope in the darkness, signs of God’s presence. It was enough to sustain me, even knowing the difficult path ahead.
I feel that Advent is a time like that, when we are experiencing darkness, experiencing
maybe fear and anxiety about lots of things. And yet this is also a time when we can be aware of what the late President Bush liked to call the “thousand points of light.” Do you remember how he talked about this? It was about the people around us and their small acts of compassion and generosity that are pointing the way forward.
So that’s what we can do in this dark season. We can look for those points of light, those
points of hope in the people around us, and we, too, can make our effort to be points of light, points of hope for others. We can do that in the acts of kindness we share with others – we become light to them in the acts of grace and of good humor. We become the light in the darkness, that gives us hope and confidence in the redemption and salvation that God is going to bring for all of us.
Amen.