Advent 3 Year C 2025

I saw a satirical headline from The Onion this week which read, “Nation Just Wants To Be Safe, Happy, Rich, Comfortable, Entertained At All Times”. Like all good satire, it works because of that kernel of truth. This “headline” speaks to how we want to be all good things all the time, and the “just” in there speaks to how impatient we get when things aren’t going 100% our way. When I struggle with feeling the way that headline suggests, I remember some words of wisdom from my mom when I was struggling as a new mom with having to send my daughter to day care: you can have it all, just not at the same time. Which reminds me that life is a balance, and to live in the joys of each moment. To have gratitude that there are folks whose callings are to care for children, because my calling is not to be a stay-at-home parent. And to have patience in my times of waiting. My oldest was a terrible sleeper, and as I walked around and around her room, trying to get her to go to sleep, my mantra was, “sleeping through the night is a developmental milestone.” And it was. She’s six now and sleeps through most nights - which is great, because she’s far too big for me to carry and rock.

The people in all of our texts today are waiting, and for much longer than it took for my daughter to sleep through the night. The text from Malachi that Jesus is paraphrasing, “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight - indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.” (Mal. 3:1) is promising that before the Lord suddenly comes to his temple, the messenger of the covenant will fully cleanse the levitical priests so that they will at last be able to perform the priestly office in righteousness. This will open the way for blessings to flow, just as was promised by Haggai at the time of the reconstruction of the temple (Hag 2.19) where Haggai promised a new era. Malachi was written sometime between 500 and 450 BCE, around 400 years after some of the earliest of the prophets like Amos, Micah, and Hosea.

Today’s text from Matthew is the second time we hear about John the Baptist. Back in Chapter 3, Jesus received that “cleansing” in his own baptism. The baptism given by John is different from what Christian baptism would become - John’s baptism was for repentance and the forgiveness of sins. While ours is about those things as well, in Christian baptism we receive union with Christ in his death and resurrection, birth into God’s family the Church, and new life in the Holy Spirit. Not taking any of those older prophets into consideration, the hope that Malachi articulated in his prophecy, we see realized in the cleansing baptism of John and in the person of Jesus. Jesus signaled that all of the waiting has not been in vain. Jesus did what Jesus was constantly doing in his earthly ministry: fulfilling what was promised by the prophets, and bending Israel’s scriptures and practices to a new purpose; a new end.

All of our texts today are about waiting. But what has stuck with me is that our collect doesn't seem to be. And our collect is supposed to collect our thoughts for the day. Our collect is about sin and grace - but also about how much we don’t want to wait. We ask the Lord to for His mercy and grace speedily help and deliver us. But I think the timeline is more about us than it is about God. Because God’s mercy and grace are always available. But oftentimes, our sin hinders us from accepting that mercy and grace. So speedily is not about how quickly we want God to send us grace, but about how speedily we accept it and begin the work of confessing and repenting for our sins.

In the Rite I service, there are two options for the General Confession. There is one that is essentially the same as the Rite II confession, simply with “thee”s and “thy”s instead of “your”s and “yours”es. But, I like the stark, no-nonsense approach this other confession takes:

Almighty God,
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
maker of all things, judge of all men:
We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness,
which we from time to time most grievously have committed,
by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty,
provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.
We do earnestly repent,
and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings;
the remembrance of them is grievous unto us,
the burden of them is intolerable.
Have mercy upon us,
have mercy upon us, most merciful Father;
for thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake,
forgive us all that is past;
and grant that we may ever hereafter
serve and please thee in newness of life,
to the honor and glory of thy Name;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

When I pray this confession, the most meaningful part is, “the remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable.” Because, quite often, I don’t think that’s the truth. But when I vocalize it, I do feel that burden. And that’s good. We shouldn’t just brush off our sins. Grace should do more than give us free reign to do whatever we feel like, because we’re all set. Grace leads to gratitude and gratitude leads to responsibility, which is where we see grace lived out. So as part of that gratitude, as that recognition for all that we have received and continue to receive from the Lord, we confess our sins as a people.

A confession of sin on the part of the whole congregation was new to the liturgies of the Reformation period. In the early church, Christians acknowledged our sinfulness by giving thanks to God, in the eucharistic prayer, for having redeemed us. Once the litany form of prayer was introduced, the prayers of the people normally contained the kyrie eleison - Lord, have mercy - as a response; the Lord’s Prayer which eventually became a regular part of the rite contained the petition “forgive us as we forgive”. No absolution was included, for one of the benefits of communion was understood to be the forgiveness of sins. (Hatchett, 341) Part of why we use a general confession is that it reminds us that the basic problem of the human race and of each individual human being is not so much the particular ‘sins’ (plural) that an individual has committed but ‘sin’ (singular), the universal alienation from God and from one another that runs through the entire human race. (Macquarrie, 96)

We misunderstand sin to our own detriment. People are, in general, overreactors. Therefore, we wildly swing back and forth between overdoing and under-doing all kinds of things. That includes our way of dealing with sin. The church, for a long time, did not handle sin well. It was often used as a weapon to guilt churchgoers into submission to the church - or to the pastor or Sunday School teacher or whoever desired power, control, or superiority. Nowadays, for many American mainline Protestants, when they do not dispense with sin completely, they privatize and trivialize sins. Far too often in the popular mind sins are acts such as smoking, drinking, gambling, swearing, or the like. We focus on things like that which are easily measurable, easily tallyable. But, as Jesus is constantly reminding us, the weightier matters of the law are justice and mercy. (What is Baptism?, 82)

So, after focusing on individual sins, we have now swung in the opposite direction. We have dropped much of our focus on individual sins, and the associated risk of feeling guilty, and now focus on institutional sins. That is, the system that is out of order and its institutions that are corrupt, but ignore that we ourselves are part of the system and share responsibility for its ills. For example, we pay taxes and thereby contribute to wars. By living in society, we tacitly agree to sins committed on our behalf. We think too communally and without enough personal responsibility. This leads to a view that some of our societal or civic actions, such as voting, are how we absolve ourselves and in so doing over-spiritualize those civic acts. We do not satisfy our spiritual callings by simply voting one way or another.

In Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation, she notes that individual disobedience is only one facet of sin in the Hebrew Bible, which uses three different words for the act of separation from God, which translate to “to miss a mark”, “to act wrongly”, or “to rebel”. She explains, “What links all three of these Hebrew words together is their common theme of going against God’s will. Whether people are missing a mark, acting wrongly, or engaging in outright rebellion, they are out of sync with God. They have wandered far in a land that is waste, and God’s judgment is not so much some kind of extra punishment God dumps on them as it is God’s announcement that they have abandoned the way of life. Like some divine jiu-jitsu master, God does not set out to hurt them. God simply spins their rejection of life around so that they can feel the full force of it themselves.” (35)

The good news is that, in the midst of our sinfulness, God has decided that we are worth saving; worth redeeming. As Psalm 139 proclaims: 

For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;

God has already forgiven us for sins we haven’t committed yet. But with that freedom, with that gift, comes responsibility. In the words of the Rt. Rev. Marianne Budde, “God is not impressed when we pray for something that we have no intention of working toward ourselves.” In our baptismal covenant, we didn’t promise not to sin. That’s not a promise we can keep. We did promise to persevere in resisting evil, and when we fall into sin, to repent and return to the Lord. And we promised to do so, as with all things, not on our own, but with God’s help. Amen.