December 24, 2023 Advent 4 "Magnify The Lord”

Readings: Psalm 89, 2 Samuel 7:1-11, Romans 16:25-27, Luke 1:46-55
Preached at Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, NY, December 24, 2023

At the heart of the Christmas story is the expectation of the birth of a very special child. Of course, every parent and grandparent know, every child born into their family is a very special child.

But not every child has their birth greeted by angels, shepherds and travelers from the East bringing gifts of Frankincense, Gold and Myrrh. The Christmas child, our Lord Jesus Christ, God incarnate born in Bethlehem’s manger is… if you like… beyond special.

Scripture tells us that Mary, the mother of Jesus will be counted as blessed for generations to come. What I find intriguing about Mary is that she who bore the most special child ever, claimed to be nobody special. Mary is crystal clear that if glory were to be placed anywhere or given to anybody, then glory must be given to God.

Her great song of praise, known as the ‘Magnificat’, begins by proclaiming, "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for He has looked with favor on the lowliness of His servant.”

The Message Bible transliterates those verses.  “I'm bursting with God-news; I'm dancing the song of my Savior God. God took one good look at me and look what happened— I'm the most fortunate woman on earth!” To put it another way; “Look at me! I’m nobody. Yet unbelievably God is doing something wonderful in my ordinary life. Better put on your dancing shoes, God is much greater than we believe!”

To our human way of thinking somebody destined to be a King should be born in noble circumstances. To a throne. To richness. To the proud and significant. Yet the Son of God is born to young girl, struggling to make ends meet, in the middle of nowhere. The angel comes to one who realized that she was an extremely unlikely candidate for God’s favor and can hardly fathom what is taking place.

There is a sense of “Can you believe it?” attached to the wonder in her words. ‘He has shown strength with His arm; He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

This hymn of praise is about a lot more than just Mary and the child she bore. It is a song that is phrased and springs from the rich imagery of the Old Testament. It calls upon the listener to remember the glorious past in such a way as it becomes a present reality. To magnify in our minds the notion that the God who has done wonders in the past has wonders still to do in the future.

We easily forget that between the closing prophecies of the Old Testament and the beginnings of the gospel story many years rolled by. The nation was not what it used to be. God seemed conspicuous by His absence rather than by His Presence. So, we are given these reminders that God hadn’t left the building or given up on His people. Verse 50 “His mercy is for those who fear Him from generation to generation”

The eternal nature of the great promises of covenant and blessings given to the Fathers of the faith are recalled. “He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of His mercy,  according to the promise He made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to His descendants forever." Mary is aware that what is happening to her has a significance for the whole people, not just for herself and her circle of friends and family.

This call to “Magnify the Lord with me” is not just about, “Hey… guess what I’m having a baby” but is telling us that our conception of God has become too small and too limited. Remember what God can do! Remember how God has worked! And as you remember… get ready… because God is about to do something you wouldn’t believe!

What an awesome text this is to be focusing on Christmas Eve. I can’t speak for you but I’m prone to forget. I forget that when God shows up God usually works through the common place and the ordinary to do extraordinary things. I forget that in God’s economy the little things often turn out to be the big things and that the most important thing is showing love through the next thing we do.

I lose sight of the fact that God wants to fulfill Gods purposes through an army of ordinary people. I forget that it’s not about what I can do, but about what the Holy Spirit of God can work through me when in humility I admit I am powerless and weak and lost. I forget that God is still God every day that God creates.

So, I invite us this day to hear Mary’s song. "My soul magnifies the Lord”. To magnify something means you take something small, and you make it bigger.  I ask you to pray that God will take our small smoldering simmering attempts at being faithful and make them grow into something that changes other peoples’ lives.

I pray that God may use the limited expectations we attach to a Christmas holiday and turn them into a true experience of celebrating the glory and majesty of the real message of Christmas – that God is still in the business of redeeming and saving and renewing and creating.

                    Rejoice in God.
                        Rejoice in God.
                            Rejoice in God!

God looks with favor upon our life. God sees our life as fertile ground for His promises to be fulfilled. And it’s not about us. If it were all about us then it would never happen. We are not that significant. But when God breathes life into our daily routines, when God takes our daily lot and it becomes the work of building His Kingdom, then our lives have a significance that is beyond anything we dare imagine.

As we sing during this Christmas season...

Joy to the world, the Lord has come
Let earth receive her King
Let every heart prepare Him room
And Heaven and nature sing
And Heaven and nature sing
And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing

We have lit candles for Hope, Peace, Joy and Love. We have gathered to praise God in Advent anticipation. It's Christmas Eve! We have gathered this morning. We will light candles and sing carols and hear afresh the Christmas story this evening as our Sunday School presents the Nativity.

It’s still not enough. It’s still just a taster. Magnify it. It’s not about what we’re doing, it’s about what God has done, is doing and will do throughout the whole of creation, heaven, and nature now and forever. And rejoice because it is through the faithfulness of ordinary lives that the colors are added to the bigger picture.

Mary declares: "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior” Mary's song was the prelude. Today we rejoice that the promises were fulfilled, the Christ will come, His love will change everything.

The challenge is... how will we be changed? How will Christ be birthed in our hearts and lives in ways that declare to all people the reason for the season? How will our everyday ordinariness be transformed by the glory of the Christmas story?

Will it be a little thing? Or will we allow the message of His coming to be birthed in our hearts so we cannot help but allow God's love to bubble up and overflow. Will we respond to Mary's invitation... “Come and magnify the Lord with me!”

Know that into the darkness of our world a Savior will come. Know that through His life and love God will demonstrate that whatever life may bring, God will travel with us, through the joy and through the darkness. That's huge. We are not alone. God is with us. 

Glory to God. Amen!

Rev Adrian J. Pratt B.D.

 

December 10, 2023 Advent 2 "Make a Straight Path"

Readings: Isaiah 40:1-11, Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13, 2 Peter 3:8-15, Mark 1:1-8
Preached at Bridgehampton  Presbyterian Church , NY, December 10, 2023

I like the way Mark begins his gospel. Mark 1:1 ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’ It raises the question as we read his words, “Well, how do we get started?" If we want to follow Jesus Christ, where can we begin?” And immediately Mark launches into a statement from one of Israel’s greatest prophets, the prophet Isaiah, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make His paths straight.'

In other words, “If you really want to pursue this path, if you really want to take on board and experience some gospel good news, then you are going to have to be serious about straightening your life out.” And to hammer that point home Mark introduces us to one of the most seriously radical characters of the New Testament, the no compromise, get your life straight before it's too late, locust and wild honey eating, leather belted, camel hair clothed, John the Baptist.

When John the Baptist preaches, he isn’t about to invite you to consider joining a discussion group or ask you throw a few dollars in the plate following a minute for mission, he wants to throw you in the river. He is going to put his hand on your neck, push you down under the water and pull you up again looking undignified and possibly gasping for breath if you weren’t ready for the dunking.

Whilst John is doing all this he is proclaiming and preaching; "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of His sandals.  I have baptized you with water; but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

Now John was a person who had a powerful charisma that enabled him to be taken seriously. For him to say, “One is coming after me is more powerful than I,” surely that should make folk sit up and take notice!  Again, the one who is to come won’t baptize in water but will baptize in Holy Spirit. This is taking things to a whole new level.

I guess because we know the rest of the story, the impact of this first chapter is a little lost on us. We know how Jesus came to be baptized by John and that whole account of the dove and the voice from heaven declaring “This is my Son with whom I am well pleased.”

We know from Matthew and Luke about the strange circumstances surrounding the birth of both John and Jesus. We know how another John, in a great theological gospel tells us “The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and we have seen His glory, the glory as of a Father's only Son, full of grace and truth.” All of that is to come. All of that is what in this season of Advent we are preparing ourselves to celebrate. The coming of Christ. The ‘Christ-Mass.’ The Christ event. The Incarnation.

But today I invite us to draw back, to back up to Marks' first chapter. To try and see what there is in these first few verses that can help us truly prepare for what we know by hindsight is to come. What can help us to be embraced by the good news as we travel together through the Advent season? And we need look no further than Isaiah’s words. ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make His paths straight.'

The advantage of a straight path is that it gets you where you want to go in the shortest possible time. If you grew up as a schoolchild in the British Isles one of the things you learned about very early in geography class, was the historic network of Roman Roads that spanned out like a spider web from London. As far as gradients and mountains allowed, the ancient Romans built their roads in perfectly straight lines. It was upon these roads that the Roman Centurions marched, the chariots were hauled, and communications kept flowing.

That network of roads, the ability to get from A to B in the shortest possible time, was nothing short of a revolution that reshaped the way a whole nation moved and traveled. Previously ancient paths would follow rivers and valleys and weave from dwelling to dwelling. The whole idea of connecting a place some 250 miles away with another place by a straight as possible line hadn’t been considered.

The Romans not only had the ingenuity to come up with the plan, but among the conquered masses found the work force to make it happen. Slavery proved to provide an extremely efficient means of achieving otherwise insurmountable tasks. So, a network of roads was built in Roman times across the British Isles that have proved to be the pattern of communications ever since. What is remarkable about some of the roads the Romans built is that 2250 plus years later some are still in existence. Obsolescence was not a word they had in their vocabulary.

How where they built? Construction began by digging a ditch with plough and spades as far down as the firmest ground they could find. Into this ditch was placed layers of rock and stone. On top and around this were dumped further layers of rubble, gravel and small stones, the actual materials depending upon what was available in the area. The most important architectural feature was the use of layers.

When it came to within an inch or two of the surface, these layers were covered with gravel and trampled down, a process called ‘pavimentare’ from where we get the English word ‘pavement’. Finally concrete was poured and paving stones laid, some of which would be shaped for drainage, so the elements would not destroy what had been so carefully laid down.

At the beginning of Marks gospel John, the Baptist challenges the would-be follower of Jesus Christ to get ready, to be prepared and make the paths straight. To do so we need to attempt a number of things. We need a plan to get straightened out. John would call that repentance. We need to dig down deep and build on something solid. Having found something solid we then need to build layers upon that strong foundation.

Repentance isn’t just saying sorry. Repentance is showing genuine remorse for a failure that we have been responsible for and then making plans to see that it doesn’t happen again. Repentance was a turnaround moment, that John symbolized by putting people down in the waters as a public sign they wanted to wash away the old and begin again.

To get our lives straight with God, we must make plans. We must make choices. We must decide how the process of repentance is going to work for us. What do we need to cut out? What do we need to avoid? What changes in direction do we need to take? Like the architect planning a Roman Road, the terrain of our lives must be surveyed. Like the repentant soul going down to the river to pray, this evaluation must be intensely personal and a response to a call of God we feel on our life.

Let’s say we’ve reached that point. We want to change, but we don’t know how. Then we need to start digging. Digging through the false ideology, the consumerism, the hedonism, the feel-good-ism, the shallow messages, and quick fixes that our culture constantly bombards us with, dig deep, dig down, until we hit the solid rock foundation of the love of Jesus Christ. Until we build our lives on the rock of His love, we are the foolish person who builds on the sand. Until we find our security in His grace, we remain insecure. We need a solid foundation and God in Christ is offering us that foundation upon which to build.

Then come the layers. How do we build on the foundation? We are fortunate. We have a whole collection of 66 instructional manuals collected in a manual we call the Bible. Among its pages we will find many suggested layers. The layer of prayer. The layer of worship. The layer of service. The layer of study. The layer of stewardship. The layer of thanksgiving. Layers of hope, joy, perseverance, peace, and truth.

Be aware this is not a process we can do alone. God has provided a personal instructor and enabler known as the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit’s strength, not our own, that will get us straightened out. God has provided a whole construction crew He calls the Church to stand alongside us and work with us. We can’t do it alone.

Keep building these layers. Keep trampling them down. You can even set in place some permanent stones… think of those as moments of commitment. That milestone you reached. That habit that was broken. That relationship that was formed. That new realization you had of just how much your life mattered to God. The moment of baptism or confirmation. That open door of opportunity. That sacred moment of deeper commitment that has stayed with you.

And of course, there must be concrete. To make it smooth. To fill in the gaps. To hold it all together. The concrete that is made of the exact same material as the foundation, namely the binding, unifying, concrete reality of Jesus love.

Making a straight path isn’t easy. But because Christ came and died and God raised Him from the dead, it is possible. It will be a lifelong journey and therefore it is important that we take time out along the way for nurture and fellowship.

‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make His paths straight.' counsels the incomparable John the Baptizer. Today let us recommit ourselves to building our lives on the solid foundation of Jesus Christ that His Holy Spirit may change us and renew us, that in our lives we may witness a new ‘Beginning of the Good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’ AMEN.

The Reverend Adrian J. Pratt B.D.

December 3, 2023, Advent 1 "The Crisis"

 

Reading: Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19, 1 Corinthians 1:3-9, Mark 13:24-37, Isaiah 64:1-9
Preached at Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, NY on December 3, 2023

It’s the first Sunday of Advent – Advent being the season when we start to consider the implications of God revealing God’s self to us through the birth of Jesus long ago in a Bethlehem stable.

Why? Why did God choose to do such a crazy thing as coming to the world as a baby in a manger? Of all the options that God – being God – could have chosen in order to reveal love and righteousness and truth and light to the world, what’s with this “Jesus /Christmas/ Incarnation” thing?

I could stand up in the pulpit for a long, long, time and never even scratch the surface of the “Why” question. ‘Why’ is a tiny little word, but a great big, huge question. ‘Why, Daddy, why?’ ‘Why does this do that?’ ‘Why won’t this work?’ ‘Why do I have to go to church?’ ‘Why can’t I be an astronaut?’ ‘Why does the mailman wear blue?’ ‘Why do fools fall in love?’ ‘Why did God send Jesus?’.

I think that Isaiah 64:1-9, our lectionary passage for this morning, gives us a little insight into the “Why did God send Jesus?” question. You see in that passage Isaiah is going through, what can only be described as… A MAJOR CRISIS!

Isaiah was of course, (by virtue of being an old Testament prophet) writing a long time before Jesus was ever born on earth. What’s more, Isaiah, who as we’ve said was an Old Testament prophet, was an extreme sort of guy, not afraid to speak his mind when he felt called to do so.

And Isaiah, in our reading is hurting. He’s not just having a bad day – he’s having a terrible, horrible, obnoxiously awful time of things. He’s tied up in knots, frustrated and starting to get a little crazy. And most of it is to do with the fact that he is a prophet.

On the one hand, his problem is with God. God seems to be on the run… in hiding... gone missing, gone walkabout, absent without leave. It wasn’t that God had stopped listening... God wasn’t even... as Bette Midler put it, “Watching from a Distance”…God just wasn’t there.  Think about it. If you were a prophet declaring the word of God – the absence of God was a major problem. Isaiah had a problem with God.

He also had a problem with God’s people. Actually, not with God’s people specifically, but just ‘people that God had made’ in general. Isaiah looked around him and looked at the way people were living and the things they were doing and then looks up to heaven and complains to God; (verse 7) “There is nobody who calls on Your name, or attempts to take hold of You.”

Maybe that was exaggerating things a bit, but even those that did bother trying to connect with God, were in an equally bad position, because those who were doing the right things were doing them for the wrong reasons, and even if they did get it right, compared to the righteousness of God, their righteousness was just like dirty old rags or filthy dish-washing cloths. Welcome to the jungle! Every person for themselves and God didn’t even come into the picture.

Isaiah’s Crisis;
1)    God wasn’t showing up.
2)    Nobody was looking for God.

That’s a problem for a prophet!

It’s a problem for any person of faith. As society becomes increasing secular and God is increasingly portrayed as ‘one of those philosophical conundrums that one can choose either to dismiss or accept only with some caution’, then the only way people can live is by working out what’s right and wrong for themselves.

You can no longer settle an argument by saying, ‘Well, it says in the Bible’. Because somebody is going to turn around and say, ‘I don’t give a fig what it says in the Bible, because it’s an outdated old book that belonged to an ancient time when people still held onto some romantic notion of their actually being a God. There is no God... so why do I have to listen to your idiotic ramblings.’

Taking it one step further, the question, as to if there is or is not a God, is a complete irrelevance to some people, because God or no-God, they are not about to waste any of their valuable time looking for Him, Her or it, because frankly they feel they have better things to do with their lives. Why look for God when you are getting by quite well, thank you very much, without needing any sense of the Divine?

This is where, I believe, the ‘WHY?” of Christmas comes into play. Why did God choose the revelation of a Christmas Jesus to share and show divine love to the world?

Precisely because, as Isaiah discovered, and as people in our world are still telling us, not only did God seem absent, but also, nobody was looking for God. Such is the crisis of belief that Isaiah faced. Such is the crisis of belief that the church today has to speak to.

And the Advent message speaks right into that situation.

1.    It tells us that God is not on holiday, on study leave, missing without a weekend pass, or absent in any way whatsoever, but God in Christ comes to the center of human reality, as a baby, in a manger, subject to all the uncertainty that being human being exposes us to. God – in Christ – shouts out to us with the piercing wail of a baby’s cry – I’m real, I’m really here – right now – and I’m here to be found and known by you.

2.    The Advent message is that not only is God real and really here, but God is out looking for us. If a person is lost without knowing it, the only way they ever become found is if somebody goes out looking for them, finds them where they are, taps them on the shoulder, and says, “Hey, I was looking for you!”

The God of Christmas, God in Christ, is the God whose real presence comes looking for us, the God who in Jesus, gets on our case and under our skin with words that call us to follow and actions that call us to change, whose healing touch becomes the remedy for our sickness and whose salvation gets a hold of us, at times when we don’t even realize we are lost.

This is a God whose Spirit works on our insides and says crazy things to us like, “Hey, listen, I need you. I need you to walk with me. I need you on my side. I need you on my side because you need Me more than I need you.” Did you catch that last bit? “I need you on my side because you need Me more than I need you”

This is God. It would be arrogance indeed to suggest that the God of the universe, the God who flung stars into space and carved atoms out of nothingness, actually can’t get by without us. Yet God chooses for us to know God’s love, not because God can’t live without it, but because God knows our lives are so different when we make room for the love of Jesus Christ in our heart of hearts.

There’s a crisis in our world. Now that’s an understatement. Our world is crisis after crisis after crisis. Seems like there’s always something going wrong, some revelation of something rotten, some bad thing going on here, tragedy there, disaster taking place in this place or that.

Maybe there’s a crisis that you are personally traveling through. Maybe it’s something you’ve got yourself into. Maybe it’s something bad that has come your way, out of nowhere. Maybe it’s just life, getting you down, tugging at you in ways you don’t like or can’t handle. Maybe you’re just not sure anymore. One says this. One says that, I don’t know whom to believe!

So here it is in a nutshell. The Advent message. God is here. Always was here. Always will be here. Christmas tells us that God will go to the limits of human experience to prove God’s love is here for us. Maybe we haven’t been looking? No problem. God’s looking for us!

So, on this first Sunday Advent, I invite you to let yourself be found. Believe the Good News. Christ was born in Bethlehem. May Christ be born in our hearts anew as we travel through this Christmas season! AMEN.

The Reverend Adrian J. Pratt B.D