“The Present Predicament”
Third Sunday in Advent
December 15, 2024
Burnt Hills United Methodist Church
[Note: Due to personal illness, I was not able to deliver this sermon as I had hoped, so there is no live-stream footage to watch]
I really love this time of year in the life of the church.
My first year working in campus ministry at Shenandoah University, I was having a conversation with my boss—our Dean of Spiritual Life who was, himself, a former local church pastor—about ministry and church work, and he commented something along the lines of “Yeah, Ian, we’re not going to have five services to manage on Christmas Eve or pageants to rehearse or family winter wonder nights to put on here at college. Enjoy it while you can.”
But, truth be told, as Advent and Christmas would come and go each year I was at SU, I found myself missing…well all of it.
Advent has long been my favorite of our liturgical seasons. I have fond memories of gathering every Sunday evening with my family and lighting our makeshift Advent wreath, reading a different part of the story, and singing Advent and Christmas hymns together. I remember our family being asked to light the Advent wreath at church one year and how big of a deal that felt as a kid. I have always loved Advent, and I’ve missed being able to celebrate it fully with a congregation the past five years.
I love the message of Advent, and how it gives me a reason to use phrases like “the in-breaking of the divine reality into our own”. A message that, though Advent puts us into a posture of waiting, there’s nevertheless an urgency to our waiting. A message that can best be summed up in the following slide…
Author and essayist John Michael Greer has this lovely distinction between problems and predicaments. Problems, as Greer understand it, have solutions. Solve for x. Find the limit. Implement the right Congressional Budget Office-tested policy proposal. Come up with and execute the right strategic plan and all will be well.
Problems have solutions.
Predicaments, on the other hand, have outcomes.
Predicaments can be managed or mitigated. Predicaments can call for responses or adaptations, but the outcome in the end is fixed.
After a problem is solved, the world returns to the way it was before.
Not so with predicaments. There’s no return to the world as it was before you you’re confronted with a predicament. Predicaments are things that we must live with.
I like Advent so much, I think, because it forces us to reckon with the fact that the baby born in Bethlehem—this Christmas story we're all preparing for—poses a predicament for our social order and way of life.
Christ is coming. Are we ready? What fruit are we bearing to show that we’re ready? What chaff are we holding onto that will not be able to stand the refiner’s fire?
Advent is not just a season of waiting—it’s a season of preparing. John’s words to the crowd are sharp and clear: “Bear fruits worthy of repentance.” We can’t simply show up and claim heritage, tradition, or identity as our ticket to the kingdom, saying, “We have Abraham as our ancestor.”
Virtue signaling, friends, is not a modern phenomenon. It’s not enough to claim righteousness; we must live it.
Put another way, the in-breaking of Christ is not a problem to be solved.
Throughout the entirety of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life, we are confronted time and time again with one plain and simple fact: Wherever we think the God of the universe is and ought to be positioned, we are wrong.
Wherever we think our Creator and Sustainer, enrobed and enthroned in eternal majesty, is and ought to be positioned, we are wrong.
Wherever it is we think the very ground of being and animator of our souls is and ought to be positioned, we are wrong.
We are dead wrong.
Because God isn’t positioned forever outside our reach in sublime transcendence and beyond our shared reality. The divine community isn’t positioned far away up on some mountain, nor is the divine drama played out in the motion of celestial bodies day in and day out.
Instead, our God—true God of true God and Light from Light eternal—bursts in and breaks through time and space and makes this pale blue dot that we call our home God’s home, shaking the very foundations of earth itself.
Born not of noble blood but of an unwed teenage mother. Lay not in a throne room, but in a feeding trough. Commanding no armies but fleeing persecution to a foreign land. Not hoarding wealth and resources for himself but using meager resources at his disposal to feed thousands. Having no court but betrayed and denied by those who loved him. Condemning no one to die but being nailed to and hanged from a cross to die himself.
Mild he lays his glory by, born that we no more may die.
Time and time again, we see that Christ overturns every expectation— choosing weakness over strength, humility over pride, and sacrifice over domination.
This God, our God, Son of the Father, begotten not created, is, now and forevermore shall be, a living God whose incarnation reverberates and ripples throughout history and breaks into our lives still today where still we least expect it.
In the impoverished.
In the imprisoned.
In the refugee.
In the sick.
In the unhoused.
In the face and through the voice of every single person who we would be foolish enough to label as “other”, we find the echoes of Bethlehem knocking on our door and waiting for us to answer.
Are we ready to answer it?
I don’t know if we are. Heck, I don’t know if I am.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once preached that “the coming of God is not only a message of joy”—fitting for this, the day we light the candle of joy—“but also fearful news for anyone who has a conscience.”
Are we ready to receive this message, striking like a lightning bolt from the mouth of the angel, that for us—yes, us; you and me and me and you and everyone in here and everyone out there—that for us is born this day—this very day—a savior who is Christ the Lord.
A savior whose power is made perfect in weakness.
A savior whose wisdom is foolish.
A savior in whose life we find our death and in whose death we find our life.
I don’t know if I’m ready for that message.
I don’t know if I’ve born fruits worthy of repentance.
I don’t know if I wouldn’t say “I’m good; I have Abraham as my father”.
The ax is at the root of the trees that are our lives, and I don’t know if I wouldn’t be better off being cut down and thrown into the fire with the rest of the chaff.
This in-breaking of the divine life into our own lives is not a problem; it’s a predicament. There’s no solution for us to find, if only we were just a little more clever or a little more strong. No policy proposal we can enact. No algorithm or code we can write to find the answer. And certainly no silver bullet or magic pill that can be commodified and sold to the highest bidder.
Just outcomes that we must live with.
Christ is coming, both Advent and John the Baptist proclaim. And, like the crowd he was preaching to, I don’t know that we’re ready.
So what then must we do?
That’s the question the crowd asked of John.
What then must we do?
How can we even begin to prepare to live through this present predicament? How can we even begin to prepare to receive the message the angel has for us this day? How can we even begin to prepare for the aftershocks that meet us in our time and in our place and have their epicenter in the manger in Bethlehem?
John doesn’t give us a checklist to solve the predicament of Christ’s coming. Instead, he invites us to respond by living generously, seeking the welfare of our neighbors, and bearing fruit that reflects the grace and justice of God’s kingdom.
Let the one who has two coats give one to the one who has none. Let the one who has extra food share it with the one who has nothing. Don’t bolster your own profits by stealing from your neighbors. Your wages are enough—there’s no need to extort extra from your neighbors through fear and intimidation.
As Christ lay his glory by, John says, so should we.
How do we begin to prepare to manage, adapt and respond to, and live through the predicament that is the revelation of the Christ?
We do it by living in community with one another. We share our burdens and our joys with one another. The Christian witness and the miracle of the incarnation poses a grave threat to the myth of scarcity our entire social order is built upon. The manger in Bethlehem, in which can be found the very true and ultimate ground of our being, smashes that idol and reveals to us that there is, in fact, more than enough to go around. We need not hoard up treasures to secure our own futures for our own people in our own place. We need not sacrifice any more lives to an artificial intelligence that decides the maximally efficient course of treatment, production schedule, and staffing needs, for the sake of squeezing out more profit for our shareholders.
We tear down our walls and care for the needs of each other, trusting that if I’ve got you then you’ve got me and we all have got each other. That is, after all, the greatest gift we will ever be given. We have the gift of each other—Black and white. Gay and straight. Native and newcomer. Rich and poor. Trans and cis and everyone beyond and in between the binary—we have the gift of each other.
Christ is coming, friends, whether we’re ready or not. Christ is coming not to solve our problems and Christ is not a problem that can be solved, but rather a predicament that demands a response.
And, whether we’re ready or not, our Advent joy comes from the fact when any one of us hears the echoes of the Angel’s message in our own lives, we already have all that we need. Joy springs from the knowledge that, by the grace of God, this is enough.
May the one who began a good work be faithful to complete it in us.
The work continues.
Amen.
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