Testifying to the Light, Life, and Love of God

Third Sunday of Advent, December 17, 2023

We’ve been given several readings today that, at first glance, don’t necessarily seem to have much to do with each other. And yet I find key phrases or ideas in them that seem to rise to the surface with a little bit of extra sparkle or energy and that draw my attention. When I look more closely, I find that they can be threaded together like pearls in a necklace and give us a beautiful story of the life of Christian faith.

First, Isaiah writes that “the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners.” What we learn here is that God sees our suffering and responds. God sees that we are brokenhearted, that we are in bondage and need to be released from our ways of living that keep us digging graves for ourselves and others.

The theology that I studied most deeply when I was a doctoral student – process theology – tells us that not only does God see and know about our suffering, but that God actually suffers every moment with us. God brings every new moment of the world into being, giving us all the freedom to choose what we will do with that new moment, and then God takes up everything the world does into God’s self. In this way of seeing things, God is the “fellow sufferer who understands.” God doesn’t dictate everything that will happen in the world, but God feels everything the world does and then seeks to move us toward something better.

I’ve heard Father Richard Rohr say that the incarnation of God in the world shows God’s radical solidarity with the world and God’s love for the world. So the first chapter in this story of the life of Christian faith is that God knows what we are going through as humans and responds by coming into the world to suffer it with us and lead us through Christ toward wholeness, redemption, and restoration.

Then in the Psalm we see that God’s restoration fills us with laughter and joy. God’s work in our lives through the Spirit restores us to wholeness and frees us to be able to dream once more, to imagine new futures, new possibilities. This second chapter in our story of Christian faith tells us that God’s restoration brings us to joy and hope no matter what our past or present situation is. Because in every moment, God’s vision for our next moment is given us as a possibility for realization. We are never a lost cause.

Paul then tells us what to do with the ups and downs of our human lives. He tells us to pray without ceasing, to give thanks in all circumstances, and not to quench the Spirit. What does it mean to pray without ceasing? Well, I don’t think it means spending the day on our knees with our hands folded, muttering various prayers to ourselves. For me, praying without ceasing means having an open orientation toward the voice of God. It means being willing to listen for God’s guidance in every moment, to see God in the faces of the other people and other beings we meet, seeing what they might teach us, and it means being willing to be led in new directions when needed.

Now what about not quenching the Spirit? How can we understand this in our lives today? The way I interpret this is influenced by a book I read when I was in school by a man named Paul Knitter called Without Buddha, I Could Not be a Christian. Reading that book helped me to better understand the Buddhist idea of acceptance. A Buddhist psychotherapist named Rachel Gorden describes Buddhist acceptance this way:

Acceptance, in Buddhist terms, refers to our ability to stay present. When life presents us with something the ego finds painful and not pleasurable, the mind’s tendency is to resist, avoid, change, or generally push against. If we don’t like feeling depressed (and who does?), rather than accepting that this is what’s here, we engage in various strategies to try and change our feelings. Ironically, resisting a thought or feeling only makes it worse. So, in order to experience (and potentially change) anything, we are instructed to first “say yes”, lean in and simply let go of the effort and energy we invest in resisting reality.

Many Christians and Western people in general, often misunderstand Buddhist acceptance as giving up in the face of injustice and not working toward change. But when I read Knitter’s book I began to see that when we judge the present moment as either bad or good, trying either to fight against that reality or to hold onto it forever, we shut down the flow of the Holy Spirit. We’ve locked our minds and our hearts in a certain way of judging what’s happening rather than remaining open minded and open hearted. That’s how we quench the Spirit. And when we quench the Spirit, we’re basically telling God that we’ve already made up our minds and we don’t need God’s guidance or power to help us respond appropriately. This is the third chapter in our story of the Christian life – that no matter what our circumstances, we should remain oriented toward God’s life, give thanks for the flow of the Spirit that we can trust will guide us, and not quench that flow by closing our minds and hearts to what’s in front of us.

Next, I want to bring forward the part of Paul’s letter where he says that the God of peace can sanctify us entirely, making sound our spirit, soul, and body. You may not be familiar with the words “sanctify” or “sanctification,” but they have to do with the process of bringing us more closely to the likeness of God. The idea in the Christian tradition has been that the image of God is our inborn God-given identity, but we must grow into the likeness of God.

There’s a famous quote from St. Athanasius of Alexandria, an Egyptian Christian leader and pope of the 4th century who is venerated as a saint even in the Lutheran church. In his book, On the Incarnation, he wrote, “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” What does this mean? It doesn’t mean that we actually become God in all of what God is and does. It refers to this process we call sanctification, deification, or divinization, where through Christ and the Holy Spirit, we are grown into participation in the divine life; we become partakers of God’s life of beauty, goodness, holiness, and love. Paul connects this process of sanctification to being made “sound” or whole in spirit, soul, and body. So, the fourth chapter of our story is that when we allow God to sanctify us, we are made whole; we become less fragmented within ourselves and are held together in the peace of God so that we may experience the abundant life that Jesus promised.

Finally, we read in John that John the Baptist came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. It’s this light that earlier in John is described as the basis of the very life of the world. Nothing came into being without this light, this life of God. Or worded another way, everything that came into being in this world, was born from the light and life of God. But we need witnesses to remind us of this. We need testimonies of when God’s light has banished the shadows in our lives. We need testimonies of when God’s life has entered into our dead zones and seeded new life to begin to grow. We need testimonies of when God’s love worked its way into our broken hearts to knit together the pieces we thought could never be healed. And so, the fifth chapter of our story is that we must be witnesses to the light; we must share our stories of God’s work in our lives with each other to lift each other up, to BE the presence of God for each other.

Threaded together, our whole story today is this:

• First, God knows what we are going through as humans and responds by coming into the world to suffer it with us and lead us through Christ toward wholeness, redemption, and restoration.
• Second, God’s restoration brings us to joy and hope no matter what our past or present situation is.
• Third, that no matter what our circumstances, we should remain oriented toward God’s life, give thanks for the flow of the Spirit that we can trust will guide us, and not quench that flow by closing our minds and hearts to what’s in front of us.
• Fourth, when we allow God to sanctify us, we are made whole; we become less fragmented within ourselves and are held together in the peace of God so that we may experience the abundant life that Jesus promised.
• Fifth, we must be witnesses to the light; we must share our stories of God’s work in our lives with each other to lift each other up, to BE the presence of God for each other.

There’s a song I first heard years ago in an episode of “Touched by an Angel” that I believe expresses this perfectly. So, I’m going to sing it for you now.

(you can listen to my rendition in our Facebook live service here or watch it in its original form below)