SERMON PREACHED BY THE REV'D PATRICK GRAY AT THE CHURCH OF THE ADVENT,
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2007, THE SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT

Growing up in my Baptist church, I was always under the impression that I was being watched. And not necessarily being watched by overly zealous congregants, who may be unhappy with me, a little squirmy kid in the pews. No, it was clear from the preaching that God was watching me, and watching me pretty closely. This was confirmed for me in elementary school when I saw a billboard along the highway that said. “I’m watching you. Don’t make me come down there.” – God. So there it was, from God himself, apparently, that he was watching me, and might not be too happy with how things were going. And the last thing you wanted was God to show up, because, well, bad things would happen. Sort of like calling our natural disasters “acts of God,” basically implying the same thing – when God shows up, bad things happen.

Now I don’t think that sentiment is true, but, in fact, God as some sort of divine watcher is true. God saw the blood of the lamb on the doorposts of the houses of the Jews in Egypt, and because of what God saw, the angel of death passed over their houses. The prophets are full of God seeing the affliction, the oppression of his people, and being moved to action because of it. So it’s interesting to me, that God’s chosen one, God’s Messiah, is not going to do a lot of looking, a lot of seeing. In our Old Testament lesson this morning from the book of Isaiah, we hear the prophecy that the one coming into the world shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear, for that matter.

So the Messiah, in a sense, is going to forego the two senses that you think would matter most. We’ve already established the importance of seeing, of God seeing, and hearing certainly is important, St. Paul himself telling us that faith comes by hearing. And where would we be without seeing and hearing? And yet, the one coming into the world, according to Isaiah, will use neither of these. Is it because seeing is not always believing? That in fact seeing can be deceiving, as well? And hearing, could it be we hear what we want to hear, that we listen to what we want to listen to? Perhaps. Perhaps Isaiah is saying that there is an inherent corruption in these two senses that we have that cannot be the means by which the Messiah of God operates, to be the means by which he judges, for that, according to Isaiah, is surely what he is to do. The Messiah will show up the wicked for what they are, and vindicate the righteous.

But how? How is the Messiah to do that? If you can’t see, and you can’t hear, how will you know? How will you be able to differentiate between the wicked and the good, between the meek and the haughty? Justice may be blind, but surely justice can hear. And if the Messiah cannot do, will not do, either, how will this Messiah of God discern?

We don’t have the time like we used to, but I, like Fr. Warren, love going to the movies. It thrills me to no end to think that, sooner rather than later, I’ll be able to spend good “quality time” with my son Ezra by going to the movies. And certainly the quality of filmmaking compared to when I was a kid is simply incredible, what they are able to do on film, what we behold with our eyes, was only a dream years ago. The sound quality, what you hear, is beyond belief. You actually choose nowadays to go and see a film based on whether it has the right sound system or not. The advances made in seeing and hearing films are amazing, and a wonder to behold, and I’m looking forward to beholding more of them, but the smell, the smell is still pretty much the way it’s always been, which is pretty much the smell of buttered popcorn wafting through the air. You can see the most incredibly diverse things, from starships to extreme violence and gore, you can hear rock concerts in THX, but the smell remains the same.

Now of course the movie theaters want you to buy popcorn, and the best way to do it is not for you to see it, or to hear it, but to smell it. Your sense of smell is a powerful motivator to get you to buy that popcorn. But that’s not the only reason not much has changed in terms of smell at the movie theatre. We might go to see a movie that has the most gratuitous violence to behold, and the greatest amount of profanity we’ve ever heard, but not a single one of us wants to smell what’s going on on the screen. Because smell can be overwhelming. Smell makes it real, more real than we want it to be. We can suspend our disbelief with our eyes and our ears, but not with our nose. To coin a phrase, the nose knows. And if theaters filtered smells in that appropriately matched the movie at hand, most theaters would sit empty. Smell is simply too overwhelming, too realistic, too truthful, as it were.

Which is probably why the Messiah is going to use his nose. Isaiah has already established for us a lack of concern about what the Messiah sees, and what he hears, but unfortunately our English translation of this passage misses the olfactory sense that Isaiah is trying to convey. We heard that the Messiah’s “delight” shall be in the fear of the Lord. But the Hebrew word for “delight” actually means “smell.” In other words, the fear of the Lord will give the Messiah a razor-sharp sense of smell, a sense of judgment. And before we completely dismiss this as absurd, we have to remember that to this day in several cultures there are people who stand at the doors of churches and mosques, and refuse people admission on the grounds that they carry with them the scent of evil.(1) Now they might be wrong, that might be a convenient way to exclude people. But animals, of course, do the same thing. They arrive at accurate judgments of people based entirely on their scent.

So there’s no pretending around God’s Messiah, there’s no escaping his finely-honed judgment. We can look good, we can sound great, but our scent, our nature, will eventually give us away. Wolves in sheep’s clothing will be shown for what they are. No more pretending, no more posturing, no more hiding. The Messiah of God will reveal who we are, and chances are it won’t be pretty, it won’t have a nice scent.

And then Isaiah does something very interesting. Sure, the Messiah’s sense of justice is prevalent – “he will smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, he will slay the wicked with the breath of his lips.” The putting to rights of all the evils of the world is clearly what the Messiah will come to do. But here’s the really interesting bit – It seems that the Messiah will come into the world, and bring justice, a fine sense of smell, to identify the wicked and the righteous. And then, all of a sudden, it would seem that the wicked and the righteous are to exist in harmony together. “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The sucking child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den.” The coming of the Messiah is to bring justice, and peace. A peace that the world surely cannot give. Because the lamb knows when danger is near, the cow and the ox know when the predators are about, and it’s mainly due to their sense of smell. The same sense that helps the Messiah rightly divide between the wicked and the righteous becomes, apparently, the one sense all of God’s creatures – us – are to forego, precisely because of the kingdom the Messiah establishes, a kingdom of peace, the peaceable kingdom.

It seems a little backwards, or at least a little problematic. Wolves and lambs together. Lions and oxen together. Children and snakes together. What happened here? How does Isaiah make this jump, this jump from justice to peace? Usually, in our own moral calculus, we identify people as a certain type, a certain animal, as it were, for a number of reasons, but usually the last reason being one of togetherness, of peace. If you’re a sheep, you identify a wolf in order to survive, not reconcile, not dwell with the one who is bound to eat you.

So something happens, apparently, when you find out who you are. Something happens, when God’s judgment reveals who you are. Or at least, you’re given an opportunity to think about who you are, about what you’ve become. We’re given an opportunity to change, to turn, to do something we never imagined ourselves doing before, if we’re a lion, like eating straw like an ox, and not only eating straw like an ox, but actually eating with an ox, instead of eating the ox. And the ox must sense that the lion has changed, the lion has transformed, the lion doesn’t smell like a lion anymore. And although it may look like a lion, and it may sound like a lion, something’s different, something has changed.

John the Baptist makes me nervous. It’s not his appearance in and of itself, it’s not his words in and of itself. No, it has to do with his family. Because John the Baptist is a PK, a pastor’s kid, a priest’s kid. If you will remember, his father was Zechariah, a priest who had a vision in the temple, Zechariah having been chosen by the luck of the draw to enter into the holy of holies and offer incense. And you know the story, the angel Gabriel declared that Zechariah’s barren wife, Elizabeth, would have a son, this John the Baptist that we heard about this morning. And you know, I bet you Zechariah and Elizabeth did a great job trying to raise John. They knew he was special, the angel Gabriel had said so, his nature was to be a certain thing, but no doubt his nurture helped. But of course, there’s only so much parents can do.

When I was at Gordon College as an undergrad, the most rebellious kids on campus were PKs, pastor’s kids. Some of them were certainly in rebellion against their parents, or more pointedly, their parent who happened to be a pastor or a priest. They saw their parent give everything they had to their congregation, with nothing left for them at the end of the day. That’s common amongst overworked parents, but it’s doubly bad if the perception is that God is the one who keeps your parent away from you. So that was a lesson learned long before I thought about the priesthood. Don’t neglect your family. Save something for them. And my guess is, Zechariah did this for John. He had something left in the tank when he got home.

But there are other things at work in the life of a PK. And it can be defined in one word – hypocrisy. For so many of the PKs that I knew, who saw the life of the pastor, saw what this life did to his or her father or mother, saw what people did to one another who called themselves Christian, saw what the church did to people, to his or her family and friends, it was the last thing in the world that they wanted to be a part of. Nothing life the church to keep you away from the church.

And my guess is, John the Baptist saw this, too. Now Zechariah got lucky once when he was selected to enter into the holy of holies, but chances are that never happened again. He wasn’t an insider; he was more or less your basic parish priest, a grunt doing his job the best he knew how. Trying to enact this vision of Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom as best he knew how. But John saw what the true insiders were up to. No doubt Zechariah saw it, too, but John was the one who said, “Enough is enough!” Zechariah did his best to model the peaceable kingdom for his son, but the one place that should have not only modeled it, but been the peaceable kingdom, was anything but. The leaders of the people, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, were wolves, and acted like wolves, even if they tried to cover themselves up in sheep’s clothing, as it were, to give off a scent of peace. They were lions in the midst of a bunch of oxen, and the last thing they were going to do was eat straw. They were snakes, and the last thing they would allow would be for a child to put his hand in their den. They would bite, and bite hard. The very people who should be working towards the peaceable kingdom of God were doing anything but.

This does something to a PK when you see this more often than not. And it did something to John the Baptist. I bet you it helped him develop a very fine sense of smell, of sniffing out hypocrisy. Our Gospel lesson this morning says that John saw the Pharisees and the Sadducees coming down to see him baptizing people, the very same people they should have been concerned about, the very same lambs that they should have been protecting rather than devouring. And of course, the Pharisees and Sadducees looked great, they sounded erudite, but the smell gave them away. And John smelled a rat, or a snake, should I say, and called them such, he called them the illegitimate children of snakes, if you catch my drift. He revealed who they were, which is probably not what they wanted to hear. But may I suggest that it was done for a reason. It was done for the sake of Isaiah’s dream, for the sake of the peaceable kingdom. Because John, as much as he may have loathed the Pharisees and the Sadducees, as much as he despised what they had done to the ones they should have cared for, or what their indifference did to those they should have cared for, no matter what he thought about these things, there was a place for the snake in God’s peaceable kingdom, even for the illegitimate children of snakes. Even the Pharisees, even the Sadducees, and I would say that includes most of us, can be transformed into something new, something that makes us serpents less serpent-like.

And the means by which this is possible, according to John, the means by which we move from God’s justice to God’s peace is repentance, a turning away from division, from indifference, whatever it is that keeps us from loving God and one another. But it’s not just repentance, according to John. Our repentance clears out a space, it opens up new possibilities, new possibilities to bear fruit worthy of our repentance. And that fruit looks mighty odd to the rest of the world. It looks like a peace that the world cannot give. If we not only turn away from the things that draw us from God, but actually step into God’s peaceable kingdom, we will see a snake forget to bite, and rather learn how to play with a child. In God’s peaceable kingdom, all the animals that should be at each other’s throats, because they know that this is an enemy, this is someone I should keep down, or eat up, all the animals smell something different. A scent that no longer divides or nauseates, but unites and reconciles.

If you’re new to the Advent, my bet is that one of the first things you noticed was how this place smells. It’s smoky, and it’s smelly. And thankfully for me, considering I work here, I like the incense we burn. But the smell sticks to you if you stay in it long enough. So that when I go home, my wife says “you smell like church.” And most of the time, she says that in a positive way. But I have a favor to ask you. I need your help in making this scent the scent that my children think of, that they smell, when they think of the scent of God’s peaceable kingdom. Help me show my kids, my PKs, what John the Baptist, what John the PK, so clearly knew was the shape of God’s peaceable kingdom – repentance and bearing fruit. Very little in this world has that opportunity, has that ability, like the church. There may be nothing like the church to keep you from church, but for those places that live into God’s peaceable kingdom, those places that live a life of repentance and fruit-bearing, it is then that the church becomes what it should be, and all of a sudden, there’s nothing like the church to draw people into God’s kingdom. Isaiah yearned for such a community, John the Baptist hoped that such a thing would be possible, and, my brothers and sisters, it is possible, it is possible through Jesus Christ, the one who has come into the world, the Messiah of God, the one who has been offered for us as a sweet-smelling sacrifice for the forgiveness of our sins. Let us take hold of God’s sacrifice by repenting, and let us continue to cover ourselves with the very scent of God by bearing fruit worthy of our repentance, worthy of the one who gave his very life for us. Help me do that, help me do that, and my guess is, it won’t only be my family who says with a smile on their faces, “You smell like church.” Amen.

Tom Wright, Twelve Months of Sundays: Reflections on Bible Readings, Year A ( London: SPCK, 2001), 4.