If We Choose To #Care

*This entry was taken from my sermon on the Second Sunday of Advent.  The #AdventWord of the day, of course, has changed since then.*

"The word of the Lord came to John son of Zechariah in the wildnerness.  He went into the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentence for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the words of the book of the prophet Isaiah:  'The voice of one crying in the wildneress, "Prepare the way of the Lord.  Make his paths straight."'"

--Luke 3: 2b-4

"I thank my God ever time I remember you...because of your sharing in the gospel ...for all of you share in God's grace with me."

--Philippians 1: 3a, 5, 7

There is a social media campaign happening right now called #AdventWord.  The idea behind it is that folks are invited to take pictures each day during the Advent season and post them to social media—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—along with #AdventWord and then # whatever word there is for that day.  The pictures posted reflect the word of the day, so when it is all said and done these social media platforms would have created a virtual Advent calendar with pictures from around the world.  Some of the words of the day this past week included proclaim, repent,  worship and give.  The word of the day for the Second Sunday of Advent is 'care.'  So as you post your pictures to social media today, be sure to include #AdventWord and #care.  You can then go online and see what images of ‘care’ others have posted.  

This week I’ve been thinking about what it means to care.  I see it all around us here at Good Shepherd.  I saw it last week when our youth collectively shopped for presents for Operation Red Sleigh to be given to other kids who are having a tough time this holiday season.  I saw it this morning in the loving work provided by the Fellowship and Parish Life Committees, who set everything up and served breakfast during our annual meeting.  I see it in our Mission Outreach team, getting ready to prepare dinner for the inmates at Randolph Correctional so that they can have a Christmas meal. I see Good Shepherd caring for one another in this community, and in Asheboro and Randolph County on a regular basis, and it fills me with great joy.

But I’ve also been wondering about what it means to care in the wake of the events of the past week or so.  Three mass shootings, candidates for public office throwing anyone and everyone under the bus and disrespecting basic dignities of their fellow human beings, and a world still living in fear in the wake of the events in Paris and the ongoing questions around how we deal with folks fleeing violence in the Middle East.  I’ll admit that sometimes it feels so much easier not to care.  Just turn off my phone, never go online, ignore the bad stuff going on in the world, and just go on with my life.  It’s enough to break a person’s spirit, make them question whether God is even real.  I look around and I wonder if maybe it would not be better for my own emotional health if I didn’t care.

But then I come to here.  I come and listen to your voices singing God’s praise.  I see such love and joy and hope in the eyes of our children, especially when they come up here to receive Holy Communion.  I spend time talking to y’all, and I am reminded once again of the greatness and the goodness of God.  And I am reminded that, as a baptized member of the Body of Christ, it is my obligation--my solemn vow--to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to love my neighbor as myself, and to respect the dignity of every human being.  That’s pretty hard sometimes though.  It’s pretty hard to truly love our neighbor when he or she spews rhetoric that we find abhorrent.  It’s hard to respect the dignity of someone who kills without any remorse.  But the more time I spend with you, and the more I see you caring for each other, the more I am reminded that that is what I am supposed to do—what all of us are supposed to do.

This is the time in our Advent season when we are introduced to crazy John the Baptizer.  Luke tells us that the world of God came to John, son of Zechariah, who went out into the wilderness, apart from the hustle and bustle of the big cities like Jerusalem, and proclaimed to all:  prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.  Prepare the way.  How do we do that?  We asked ourselves that question last week when we started this journey.  How do we prepare?  I think one way we prepare for the Lord’s coming is to try and make this world a better place than he left it; and doing that starts with caring for one another.  In his Letter to the Philippians, Paul commends that community for sharing in the Gospel and sharing in God’s grace.  The word used for share is koinonia, and Paul uses it a lot.  The word appears 20 times in the New Testament—13 times in Paul’s letters—and it means to share in the sense of bearing one another’s burdens, a joint participation. Literally, for Paul, to care is to share. He uses that word to emphasize a truth that the early church knew—a truth we can all stand to be reminded of today—that we are in this thing together.

This faith journey, yes, but also this life. We are in this life with folks that, sometimes, it is just plain hard to care about. Regardless of the labels we give ourselves—Christian, Muslim, Conservative, Liberal, us, them—we must care for one another, we must share the burdens with one another, if we are to make this world a better place and truly prepare it for the Lord’s coming.  One of the best ways to do this, of course, is through prayer.  In all things we are meant to come to God in prayer.  But I fear that sometimes we forget how prayer works.  Pope Francis , when asked how prayer works said, “You pray for an end to world hunger, and then you go out and feed someone.”  That’s how prayer works.  Rabbi Jack Moline put it another way when he said:  “Prayer without action is just noise.”  For those who have already been affected by evils of this world—poverty, violence, discrimination—prayers can seem pretty hollow when done after the fact.  But action that is inspirited by prayer?  Now that gets things done!  When our whole lives are rooted in prayer, in conversation with God, we can be inspired to change the narrative, change the world for the better, and truly prepare the way of the Lord.  We can move beyond our labels to share the load with our brothers and sisters.  We can with all our hearts, souls, bodies, and spirits, care for each other.  But we must be willing to put that faith and prayer into action. 

The recent back cover to the New York Daily News in response to the recent mass shootings.

Some of you may have seen the backpage of the New York Daily News earlier this week, which said in large type:  God’s Isn't Fixing This—a reference to all of the violence in the past few days.  That headline isn’t necessarily wrong.  If we sit on our hands and do nothing, if we decide not to care about what’s going on around us, and if we wait for God to do it all, nothing will get fixed. But if we let our lives of faith inspire us to work together, to cross boundaries and put aside differences so that we can leave this world in better shape then we found it, then there is hope for a world that can be transformed.  Advent , after all, is the season when we hope for God to break in and transform our world.  It can happen.  It will happen.  If only we can, as St. Augustine said, ‘pray as though everything depended upon God, and work as though everything depended upon us.’. We have that choice.  My prayer is that we all—not just those of us here today, not just Christians, but all of us in this country and in this world—will choose to care, will choose to put our faith into action and allow God to work through us to make significant change for a world of good.  We can do it.  We will do it. If we choose to care.