Matthew 3:1-12
Needing John (and Accountability) for Advent
James Sledge December
8, 2019
Many
of you are aware that the Scripture passages used in worship each week come
from something called a lectionary, in our case the Revised Common Lectionary.
This is a published list of readings for each Sunday, typically with a reading
from the Old Testament, a psalm, a passage from an epistle or letter, and a
gospel reading. We never use all the readings, but on most Sundays, we use some
of them.
The
lectionary follows a three year cycle, imaginatively titled years A, B, and C.
Year A features the Gospel of Matthew, year B, Mark, and year C, Luke. The
Gospel of John doesn’t get a year but gets woven into all three. As we entered
into Advent last Sunday, we transitioned from Year C to A, and so we hear from
Matthew today.
If you looked at all the passages listed
in the lectionary for Advent, you might be surprised to discover that none
sound very Christmassy until the gospel reading on December 22. And John the
Baptist shows up on both the second and third Sunday in Advent. A person
unfamiliar with church who happened to wander into our worship on those Sundays
could be forgiven for suspecting that we didn’t realize what time of year it
was. Do we really need to hear from John
so much and so close to Christmas?
One
of the nice things for me about preaching from lectionary passages is the
wealth of resources that are available to help pastors who are wondering what
they should say. Because I’m a subscriber to the magazine, I get a “Looking
into the Lectionary” email each week from Jill Duffield, editor of The Presbyterian Outlook. The one for
this week alerted me to a research paper by two Harvard Divinity School
students entitled “How We Gather.” This is from its executive summary.
America is
changing.
Millennials are
less religiously affiliated than ever before. Churches are just one of many
institutional casualties of the internet age, in which young people are both
more globally connected and more locally isolated than ever before.
Against this
bleak backdrop, a hopeful landscape is emerging. Millennials are flocking to a
host of new organizations that deepen community in ways that are powerful,
surprising, and perhaps even religious.[1]
The study looked
at a number of these organizations and noticed six themes that showed up in
most all of them. They are: Community,
Personal Transformation, Social Transformation, Purpose Finding, Creativity, and Accountability. These sound like the
sort of things that a church might aspire to provide. We have a Community
Building ministry team here. Our Justice Ministry would seem to be about social
transformation. The Spiritual Growth Team surely hopes to help with both
personal transformation and purpose finding.
Most of the
themes this study identified show up with some regularity in congregations. One
of them, however, is conspicuously absent, at least in most Mainline churches: Accountability, which the study defined
as “holding oneself and others responsible for working toward defined goals.”
I don’t know if
you’ve ever thought about it, but in all the Presbyterian churches I’ve ever
been a part of, there were pretty much zero expectations of members. If you say
you want to join, the church is happy to have you. From that point on, you can
decide what that means to you. You are free to participate as much or as little
as you want.
If you never
once attend a single spiritual growth class or opportunity, that’s fine. If you
never give a single dime to support the ministries of the congregation, no one
will call you wondering where your offering is. If you never once help at a
Welcome Table, teach a class, sing in the choir, serve as an usher, join a
ministry team, or any of the myriad other ways you might share your energy and
talents in the congregation’s work and ministry, no one will ever say to you,
“Hey, do your share.”
That was not always the case in
churches, and certainly is not the case in the organizations profiled in that
“How We Gather” study. One of these is something called CrossFit. I was vaguely
aware of it, but thought of it as just a gym. That’s clearly not the case. The
study said that the most striking things about CrossFit are the evangelical zeal
of members and the way they hold one another to account. CrossFit expects
members to call each other out if they don’t appear at their usual time, and to
let others know if they’re out of town. One member they interviewed said this. (“Box”
is the CrossFit term for one’s particular gym.)
My CrossFit box
is everything to me. I’ve met my boyfriend and some of my very best friends
through CrossFit. When my boyfriend and I started apartment hunting this
spring, we immediately zeroed in on the neighborhood closest to our box—even
though it would increase our commute to work. We did this because we couldn’t bear
to leave our community. At our box, we have babies and little kids crawling
around everywhere, and it has been an amazing experience to watch those little
ones grow up. CrossFit is family, laughter, love, and community. I can’t
imagine my life without the people I’ve met through it.
I have a hard
time imagining anyone deciding to live close to their church even if it makes
their work commute more difficult. I doubt that the lack of accountability is
the sole reason for that, but perhaps it is a part.
In that
lectionary email I received, Jill Duffield suggested that part of what made
John the Baptist pack in the crowds was his insistence on change and accountability. Think about
it. Why would people flock to an oddball like John? If I encounter a street
preacher on the sidewalk, I cross to the other side of the road, but people
were traveling long distances in rough conditions just to get to John.
Could it really
be that John’s call to repent, to change in preparation for God’s new day, was
a big part of his appeal? Could it be that this is exactly what people who fear
they are not enough need to hear, that not only does God love them, but God
knows their capacity for transformation, for discovering deeper meaning and
purpose than they will ever discover chasing the empty consumer promises of our
culture?
If so, then
perhaps John’s voice is the one we most need to hear at Advent, and at
Christmas. We need to hear him remind us that it doesn’t matter if we belong to
the right church or go to the right school or have enough money or any of the
other enoughs our culture tells us to chase. What matters is that we bear
fruit worthy of repentance, that we hold ourselves and each other
accountable to working toward the transformed lives and transformed world that
John and Jesus invite us to become a part of. Or as Jill Duffield puts it,
I
am not fond (not initially anyway) of being called on my viper-ness. It stings.
And yet, I need people in my life who love me enough, who believe in me enough,
who know God's grace and power well enough, to call me to repentance, trusting
that transformation is possible and I am worth the trouble of the work and the
time and the energy it takes to help it come to fruition. John the Baptist, the
gospel and the church offer that kind of accountability and, believe it or not,
others in this world are searching for it, too.
[1] Angie
Thurston and Casper ter Kuile, “How We Gather,” 2017, https://sacred.design/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/How_We_Gather_Digital_4.11.17.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment