December 5, 2021 – Baruch 5:1-9; Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6
Baruch 5:1-9; Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6
Longing for Change
Second Sunday of Advent – December 5, 2021
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Advent is the season of longing.
It is the season in which you are waiting for the sun to come up.
The season in which you long for what could be –
for yourself, for your neighbours, for our world.
In Advent, we long.
The stories in the readings today all have a deep element of longing –
they fit the Advent mood well.
The Book of Baruch is set during the time of the Babylonian exile.
The writer imagines the city of Jerusalem longing for the return of the exiles.
The writer says to the city, They went out from you on foot, led away by their enemies;
but God will bring them back to you.
But he acknowledges that there are obstacles to their return – the way home is not easy.
Yet God will remove the obstacles and bring the people home:
God has ordered that every high mountain and the everlasting hills be made low and
the valleys filled up, to make level ground, so that Israel may walk safely. . . .
This expresses so well the beautiful longing for home, for safety,
for peace that we all carry somewhere deep inside us.
Paul longs for a beautiful community of people he is separated from this morning.
He longs to be united with them again.
Across the distance he writes them a letter and begins it this way:
I thank my God every time I remember you,
constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you.
For God is my witness how I long for all of you with the love of Christ Jesus.
He expresses so well how we long for those we love from whom we are separated,
a longing for home we all carry somewhere deep inside us.
And John the Baptist?
Okay: John the Baptist is crazy, but what is not crazy about John the Baptist is his longing.
What John longs for is a whole new world – you have to just love John for that!
John knows the world is not right.
John knows the world is not as it should be.
Jerusalem’s exiles returned, but now the city is run by Roman military elites and their lackeys,
the Jewish religious elites.
Poverty is rampant, hunger is a daily reality, violence is commonplace, justice has hid its face.
Things are not as they could be – things are not as they should be.
And so John comes on the scene and distills all his longing into one single word –
and that word is “repentance.”
Repentance is a desire for change, it means to have a change of heart,
to turn around, change what you care about.
In his ministry, John tapped into a deep longing for change in his world, personal and societal,
from Jewish peasants to Roman soldiers to unscrupulous tax collectors.
All of them could see that all was not right with the world.
All of them longed for the new world.
And so John will point them to Jesus – the one who will make things right.
The one who will bring us home –
home to love, home to community, home to peace, home to justice.
This longing for change and this longing for a new world is a longing we all carry, I think,
somewhere deep inside of us.
Advent is such a beautiful season because it taps into these longings.
These longings for home, for community, for love, for friendship, and for justice.
For a world free from racism and homophobia and transphobia.
For a world free from cruelty and poverty and want.
We want the sun to come up so badly – and so we wait.
But we wait together – as those who go and join John by the river.
We wait as those who get into the water as an expression of our longing to
cross the river and find the new world on the other side.
We wait as those who care enough to do something
to bring this new world just a little bit closer.
We welcome strangers.
We work together as immigrants and as those whose families have been here for generations.
We feed the hungry.
We delight in children and teenagers.
We treasure one another.
We work for justice.
We love one another and we serve all people, following the example of Jesus.
And once a week, we gather together around this dinner table,
we share what we have gathered, and we give the rest away.
And in doing that, we find our longing for home satisfied.
Home is found when we gather around this table, share some bread, share some wine.
And for a little while at least, we glimpse the new world and find our longing fulfilled.
So together, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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