And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!" Luke 2:15

Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom God favors! That’s what the angels said to the shepherds. That what the angels say to us tonight, we who are gathered here to celebrate the birth of Jesus. God’s usually-unseen messengers are all around us, and we hear in their ancient words, the announcement of truly good and astonishing news: the Creator and sustainer of the universe, the God of all time and the stars, the God of molecular biology and the human heart, has come among us, has entered fully into our human existence in the life of Jesus. Not that God, the divine, was absent from human life before this, but that in this birth in Bethlehem, God’s purposes for the world were coming clear, concentrated, boiled down, clarified in a way that could not be ignored.

But we need to step back a moment. We know the beautiful, serene Christmas card pictures of the manger; they capture the loveliness of birth, of new life. Certainly for any family, the birth of a baby is a time for joy. We all offer our congratulations and wish the child well, and the family happiness. The news of a baby’s birth puts a little extra spring in our step, touches a tender place inside us, maybe reminds us there is hope for the future. We bask in the family’s good news.

The birth of Jesus, Emmanuel, God-with-us, however, is about much more than the perennial joy of new life. The angels’ message to the shepherds proclaimed the great good news that God had - at last – begun the work God had intended from the very beginning: “to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Christ, the Lord.” God’s plan from the start was that earth, humanity, and all creation should reflect the goodness, and love, and peace that exists in God’s realm and reality that we call heaven. But human free will took a different path and wandered into difficulty, danger, and sin. So the birth and life and crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus began a new chapter, opened for humankind a new pathway to participate in God’s plan, to walk in God’s ways. “God became man that man might become God,” said St.  Athanasius of Alexandria way back in the fourth century; a little shocking to our Western ears, perhaps, but true, nevertheless. God always intended that we humans should be filled with God’s goodness and love and peace, and play our part in the divine plan for creation. It is no surprise that the first Christians ascribed to Jesus these words from Isaiah in the Hebrew scriptures: “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Prince of Peace. We here at All Saints’ have been blessed this Advent to have with us the Bethlehem Peace Light, the flame in the lantern sitting on the Crèche table. It comes from the eternal flame that burns in the Church of the Nativity, the traditional site of Jesus’ birth. This flame has been shared throughout Europe and North America as a sign and expression of God’s Peace. It has passed from nation to nation, and from neighbor to neighbor. It came to us on December 12, brought by oil lantern by a friend in Peapack who received it from the Girl Guide troop at her Latvian church in Rockland County. We shared it with parishioners and neighbors last Sunday afternoon; they took it home, and shared it with their neighbors, friends, and churches. It has been burning in our church office fireplace – a sign of peace, a symbol of the “Light to enlighten the nations,” a real blessing.

Those who follow Christ are called to share in God’s Peace. That sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? After all, who doesn’t want peace – peace of heart, peace of mind, peace in your family, peace in the world? Well, there are people who refuse peace: those who are self-centered and want their own way, those who thrive on chaos and spin – and I’m sure we all know people like that, those who insist on their own ego, their own power, who find their purpose for living in raising themselves up at the expense and well-being of others. Remember, Peace is not just the absence of strife and discord, not just a live-and-let-live attitude. God’s Peace, God’s shalom, God’s salaam, encompasses wholeness, health, justice, the understanding that all whom God has made are in this life together, and that we depend upon one another, and have responsibility for one another as we are all made in the image of God and held by God’s grace and love.

So Peace is not just being quiet and still with God and within ourselves. Peace is not being left alone to do our own thing. True Peace is actively entering into God’s purposes for yourself, your family, your neighbors, your world. As we follow the One born in Bethlehem - day by day, year by year - we become Peace-makers, as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the peacemakers.” We become participants in God’s reality on earth as it is in heaven, for now and for all eternity. In a little while we will light our congregational candles. The flame will come to you from the Peace Light lantern – a sign of the Peace of God which passes all understanding that comes to us in the birth of Jesus.

That is great, glad, good news, indeed! The world may not receive it; the world may question it, reject it, despise it, but it is still Good News. And we who follow Jesus our Lord, our Light, our Salvation, our Hope, our Joy are called to live and share God’s Peace at Christmas and each day, for Christ’s sake, for our sake, and for the sake of God’s world.

Let us pray.
Eternal God, in whose perfect kingdom no sword is drawn but the sword of righteousness, no strength known but the strength of love: So mightily spread abroad your Spirit, that all peoples may be gathered under the banner of the Prince of Peace, as children of one Father; to whom be dominion and glory, now and for ever. Amen. ~Book of Common Prayer

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Christmas Eve 2016

But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” Matthew 1:20

We use the word “dream” in many different ways. Certainly at this time of year we think of this song, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.” We might think of a goal or a hope we have for ourselves or our family; perhaps something on our bucket list, perhaps something important and down-to-earth. We all know about Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech about his hope and vision for justice and equality in American society. Maybe we think of our own dreams as being confusing, jumbled, scary bits of our psyche.

But we probably don’t think about dreams the way we hear about them in today’s Gospel, and in many other parts of the Bible – or at least we don’t do so often. Dreams in the Bible are all about receiving information, insight, and wisdom from God – with the intention that the dreamer will take action or make an important decision. Dreams are a sleeping vision, akin to a waking one.

The dream that Joseph has is incredibly important, because it is the way he comes to understand Mary’s pregnancy – which he assumed was someone else’s child. We might call this the Annunciation to Joseph, a parallel to the Annunciation to Mary, and then to the shepherds.

We are probably less familiar with this story; it only appears in Matthew’s Gospel – just like the passages about the Magi, and King Herod searching for the new-born Christ Child are only in Matthew - and we only hear it in worship once every three years. But hearing it reminds us that Joseph had an active and important role to play in Jesus’ birth. If he had angrily and publicly broken off his engagement to Mary, she could have been convicted and stoned to death; it’s what the law allowed. Even divorcing her quietly would have consigned Mary and her child to a life of shame and poverty. Instead, the dream impels Joseph to give them a home, a family, and a name – Jesus; in Hebrew it’s Joshua/Yeshua: God saves.

And Matthew intends us to hear all of this against the backdrop of another dreamer in Scripture – Joseph, way back in the book of Genesis. Joseph, son of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham; the eleventh by in his family, the one his parents favored and pampered (remember that coat of many colors?), the one his elder brothers considered too big for his britches because of his dreams and so beat him up and leave him for dead and then sell him off to be a slave in Egypt. After much time and many twists to his story, Joseph’s ability to understand dreams cause the Pharoah to appoint him prime minister, in charge of preparing Egypt for the famine that is to come. It is that famine that brings Joseph’s long-lost brothers to Egypt, seeking grain and hunger relief, and eventually brings a reconciliation with Joseph, as their extended family moved to Egypt. Joseph, then, becomes the vehicle for the survival and salvation of his family. As he said to his brothers about their treatment of him as a teenager: You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.

So we are to hear in this dream of Joseph the carpenter, fiancé of Mary, traditionally named by the Church foster father of Jesus, the power of God to speak and guide through dreams for the good of the people involved, and for the unfolding of God’s purposes. Hearing this story reminds us, also, that there is rarely one straight line that moves us in God’s direction. We know from Luke’s Gospel all about the angel speaking to Mary, Mary visiting Elizabeth and the birth of John the Baptist, the journey to Bethlehem, Jesus’ birth in a stable, the angels’ message to the shepherds. But from Matthew we learn of how God worked with Joseph, the story of how the Magi were led – including their meeting with Herod and his order to kill innocent children, and then another dream in which Joseph is warned to take Mary and the Baby to Egypt for safety. God was at work in many different ways and through different people to ensure the birth of the One Isaiah called Emmanuel: God with us.

So as we consider Joseph’s dream, consider how God might be speaking to you through your dreams – actual, night-time, sleep-time dreams. Or those day-time visions: sudden flashes of insight, a deep certainty in your gut, and idea that seems to appear out of nowhere and keeps gnawing at your brain. God speaks to us far more often in these ways than I think our modern, skeptical age will acknowledge. Of course, that doesn’t mean every dream we have is an important message from God; or perhaps it is important, but it has more to do with something God wants us to understand or resolve about our inner life, than it has to do with making a decision that affects others, or taking some sort of action.

But God does, indeed, speak to us in our dreams and day-dreams and intuition. And sometimes its very much about the unfolding of God’s purpose for those around you – whether your family or the world at large. Woah, that may feel a little daunting, overwhelming – particularly because dreams are notoriously difficult to sort out and understand. And yet, we need to try.

Making a practice of remembering your dreams – maybe writing down a few words about them, or telling your spouse over breakfast – is a good way to start. If there seem to be puzzling or important images in your dream, use those as an object of meditation in your prayer. Ask God for guidance in understanding. It won’t be that every dream will be important; in fact most dreams probably are not. But do pay attention, listen, leave the door open for what God might be wanting to show you or tell you.

We celebrate Christmas, in part, because Joseph listened to his dreams. There is no telling how God might be nudging, pushing, challenging you to act on his behalf and for the good of others through your dreams – especially when those dreams come in response to sadness, fear, pain or difficulty that you encounter, or that you carry in your heart for God’s world.

As we begin this last week of Advent, let us remember that we are preparing to celebrate the Incarnation – God coming into human life and experience. God is always breaking through into human life – supremely in Jesus, but in our lives as well. Attending to our dreams will help us keep room in our hearts and lives and in the world for God’s presence, and purpose, and action.

Let us pray.
O Lord, you have set before us the great hope that your kingdom shall come on earth, and have taught us to pray for its coming; give us grace to discern the signs of its dawning – in our dreaming and in our waking, and to work for the perfect day when your will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (Percy Dearmer, adpt.)

"I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Matthew 3:11

Last week I gave you an Advent vocabulary word; it was “apocalyptic.” Does anyone remember what it means? Its definition is: “to uncover, or reveal,” in the sense of all the curtains being pulled back from a stage, so you can see all the behind-the-scenes workings. And sometimes that behind-the-scenes work also reveals multiple realities going on at the same time. This is especially true in this season of Advent, when apocalyptic is one of the themes running through Advent.

In the reading from Isaiah we get the image of what’s called the Peaceable Kingdom, very similar to what we heard in the Old Testament last week. It paints a picture of God’s desire, God purpose for the world – which includes God judging on behalf of the poor, God exercising justice and equity on behalf of the down-trodden, the excluded, the oppressed. God’s hope for the world also encompasses those who are enemies to one another, offering a vision for peaceable relations between them and living side by side with balance, harmony, and trust. This vision appears like a banner in the upper part of our stage, or like a film that is playing out in the top part of the screen, in the realm of eternity. We are not there yet, but that’s the plan, and the goal that God has for us.

And down below, still with the curtains drawn all the way back, we see in time, and space, and history John the Baptist walking onto the stage of human affairs – right on cue, according to God’s timing. And what does John do, this cousin of Jesus and son of Elizabeth, Mary’s kinswoman? John calls the people to repentence and preparation for the Lord’s coming.

Now let’s be honest: John is pretty dramatic. His clothing and his diet are decidedly off-the-grid. He doesn’t go to the Jerusalem, to the city to do his work, but stays twenty-plus miles to the east, at the Jordan River, an unpopulated area. He’s announcing the coming of the Messiah, and urging people to prepare themselves by turning away from habits of mind and life that do not align with what they know to be God’s best intentions for them (aka their sinful ways). And with that repentence comes a ritual, a mark of cleansing, of a new start in order to be ready for the Messiah’s arrival: baptism. While the people seem to flock to him, John does not welcome all comers; he’s down-right hostile to people from two different sects of Judaism: the Saducees, who were aligned with the Jewish royal family and the institutional structure of the Temple – what you might call the Establishment; and the Pharisees, who sought to live good and religiously upright lives but often went overboard in their scrupulosity and lost their sense of humanity, mercy, and human frailty. So when people who were Saducees and Phariess come out to the river to see what is going on, to investigate the commotion, John pulls no punches: “You brood of vipers” he calls them - a mess of slithering snakes. Yikes! That would want me turn and run away.

And yet, the people come. They hear in John’s message of preparation and getting their lives in order for God’s Anointed One, a message of hope. We’ve kind of forgotten that. Repentance is not about condemnation; repentance is about hope – about turning one’s life around, with God’s help, making room for hope and healing and joy. And baptism is a sign of that hope and new life.

This morning we will baptize Aaron Matthew Saitta. And while as a four-month old Aaron really has no capacity to repent and to nothing to repent of (other than keeping his parents up at night), the world he has been born into will need him to be ready to embrace and welcome the Messiah, the Christ, into his life.

Now in our mind’s eye we’ve still got that banner with God’s Peaceable Kingdom, as described by Isaiah, up over the human stage, but now the scene below has changed – as it does with every passing age – and we see ourselves facing new challenges, new difficulties, new dangers and opportunities for sin against God and our fellow human beings. In fact, in the last month we’ve seen that the slow, somewhat steady, but far-from-complete progress we have made in this country in civil rights and human rights and extending basic human decency to all people has not progressed as much as we had hoped and we had told ourselves. If anything, the unveiling of the last weeks and months has shown us that there has been a pendulum swing, a system backlash that has been driven (at bottom) by fear and a sense of scarcity.
Fear can be very powerful, but we Christians know that at the end of this Advent season we will hear the Angel Gabriel say to Mary: Fear not! And the heavenly host will say to the shepherds in the field: Fear not! Angels in Scripture almost always tell us not to be afraid. Because if we let ourselves give in to fear, we will not be able to hear and receive God’s message, we will not be able to respond to Jesus’ call to follow him, we will not have the courage and strength to act as Christ’s hands and feet in the world.

Our baptism calls us away from that fear. It sets before us a different reality, and a different picture of what is of worth, value, and importance – even if the world around us cannot see or will not acknowledge it. The reality our baptism ushers us into is the truth that God’s love for us is boundless; it knows no scarcity. God’s love is not dependent on how we look, how much we make, where we come from, who we love, or how often we have failed. God’s love is a gift, given to us supremely in the birth and life and death and resurrection of Jesus. And so if we choose to accept that gift, then we have the responsibility to follow Jesus, to live in his way, to be his agents in the world, offering hope and good news – especially in the places that seem most dark, most fraught, most conflicted, without regard for truth or for the infinite worth and dignity of all human folk.

In baptism we receive the Father’s love; we are joined to Christ; we are signed and sealed by the Holy Spirit. And all of this is not so that we can go to heaven when we die, but it is the launching pad for a life of faithful relationship with God and one another; a life of humble yet daring service in Jesus’ Name and on his behalf. And in some ways we could have no better model than John the Baptist: he spoke God’s truth with boldness and courage when it was called for, and did so publicly when necessary. Yet he also knew that he was not the Messiah, he was not God, this life and ministry was not his own project, but the work of the Lord who had sent him. As John said when asked, “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.” John’s humility before God and his neighbors, combined with his holy boldness, were a powerful force which he harnessed for God’s purposes.

We, too, can act with humility and boldness as we follow Jesus, as we live out our baptism, as we speak and act and pray and love God’s truth and goodness and peace into this world, fully confident that all those things await us in the next.

So in this time of our national life, and in this Advent season, let us remember:
God is good; all the time. All the time; God is good.
God is good; all the time. All the time; God is good.
God is good; all the time. All the time; God is good. Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Second Sunday of Advent
December 4, 2016