A Season for Course Correction

Won’t you join me in a word of prayer. Almighty God, we come thanking you for your presence with us and your love towards us. Now we ask that you would cover us, that you would keep us, that you would draw us, but most of all fill us for the places you are preparing to send us.  This we ask in your wonderful name, amen.  You may be seated.

For those that were taking note and listening intently to the gospel reading lifted this morning, what a contrast between the beginning and the ending. Brood of Vipers. Good news.  Brood of vipers.  Good news.  What a contrast. Often there is so much space between how we begin and how we end. There is such a journey oftentimes from one point to arrive at the next point.  Here, while most of us have come this morning where we would really want to start is, perhaps and stay, at the end, because the reading of the gospel of Luke closes with these words.  So many other exhortations he proclaimed the good news to the people. Good news.

That’s what most of us want to hear. In this season of Advent, on our way to Christmas, we are on our way to that day where we will remember and celebrate the birth of our Savior. The season is clearly upon us as we see the moving, the planning, the shopping, the gatherings, all gaining momentum day to day all around us. The symbols are being hung, the songs are being lifted.  Every day we’re in a hurry to get to the celebration. The scriptures in the gospel story fill us week after week with great expectations and anticipation of taking hold of the joy that rises out of the telling and the retelling of the story. For thousands of years, the telling and the retelling of the story has been proclaimed. The telling and the retelling have been proclaimed in order that we might remember and be shaped by the gospel story.

Already I’ve heard conversations and have listened in and been part of those who have shared memories in this time of year. Remembering places and times. I still remember standing in my own living room or in the dining room and having my mother make me say my one Christmas line over before we went to church to make sure that I knew how to tell my part of the story.  Standing with my sister, the two of us, and even in this day, it’s the memory that comes back to me. The story, the friends who were standing next to me, those who were participating in that moment, even as I was remembering and preparing.

It was not long ago I was reading an article on the power of remembering, the power of imagination and the power for it to shape humanity. It was a medical article that someone had recommended to me, but it was an excerpt of it of that article that captured my attention as it stated, “So much of what makes us human is tied with what we remember. You are the person you are today because you’re connected to the person you were in the past. When that connection gets broken, however, a question rises up: ‘who are you?’ When that connection with memory is broken, we ask the question: ‘who are you?’  To make it personal, even for a moment, maybe perhaps if many of us were to separate or have something affect our memory of this moment and this season, we’d have to ask ourself: ‘who am I?’’ The article concluded and simply said, “That when that memory is broken, you are unmoored in some deep way.”

When we become unmoored, we are subject to drifting and subject to the winds of societal, cultural, political, economic and other influences that move us away from really our true foundations. And when these influences are all blowing against us and pushing us and here holding us, for those of us who are those who are claiming to be walking in our faith, those influences can move us fa further away from the love of God. So much so that our witness reflects more chaos than it does community. Certainly, so much of what makes us human is tied to what we remember.

That’s true for humanity, but it’s absolutely true for those of us who call ourselves Christian.  We are people of memory. See what God has done. I could go on and on.  Time and time again, we are telling and retelling the good news of Jesus Christ. We’re telling and retelling in order that the memory of what God has done might influence what we are doing and what we will do. The opening lines of this particular article kept coming back to me as I was preparing, kept disturbing me.  As I had to sit face to face with my memory and invite you to do the same with the reading of Luke’s gospel all around us. When the connection with our memory is broken, who are we?  When we suffer from spiritual amnesia, every form of serious authority for faith is called into question. When we suffer from spiritual amnesia, we live unauthorized lives of faith and practice even unauthorized ministries.

When we think about that on this day, I’m in a hurry to remember all of the joyous moments. Like many of you, I want to get to Christmas. I want the lights to be lifted. I want the candles to be burning. I want to hear the sounds and the proclamation of the season. But in the midst of this I got assigned this particular text. If I had to choose another one, I certainly would have chosen a different one. I had to hit this speed bump in the midst of the Advent season. Perhaps the speed bump, just like in reality, is there to slow us down for a moment, to give us a pause, to have a stop and to think, because many of us are in such a rush to get to the joy that perhaps we’re missing what we really need to see.

We’re in such a hurry, but this particular passage causes us to slow down, to shift gears, to pull over for a second and consider the richness and the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In Luke’s gospel, we remember and we hear the voice of John the Baptizer crying out in the wilderness, hearing him address the crowd, but in this particular moment of reading, we hear him say, ‘You brood of vipers’. Truth is, I did put emphasis on that. ‘You brood of vipers’. What a greeting for those who are seeking to be baptized. ‘You brood of vipers’. Those who were seeking to come out into the wilderness to change their life, who are on the journey, who are making here effort, what would it have been like to be met at the door by the ushers and say, ‘Welcome you brood of vipers’.

Here the worship service in the wilderness must have been peculiar. The worship service in the wilderness must have been strange to hear them say, ‘You brood of vipers’. Even my repeating of it may cause a disturbance in your spirit to hear it over and over again, but it’s part of the story. It is part of what we need to hear. John has this specific message and his prophetic assignment as he is carrying out and recognizing as he looks at the crowd, as he considers what is coming; something is not quite right.  Something is wrong. I don’t have to really go down the list and I don’t have to work too hard to tell many of us who were gathered on this morning that if you have been reading the papers, listening to all of the societal here issues and all that is going on in our world, how we get along with one another, the divisions that are present, something is not quite right.

Something is wrong. All you have to do is to look and see here, the gap between the haves and the have nots. Look and see how people line up on one side of the extreme issue to the other. All you have to look is to hear the wars and the rumors of wars, the divisions, the dying. All you have to do is to read and to see something is not quite right. If we look at how we treat one another, speak to one another, love one another, something is not quite right. John stands up in the wilderness, knowledgeable of all the influences, and he is influenced by the prophetic tradition to speak to the current generation and to speak to those who claim to be children of God so that they might make room in their hearts and room in their lives for God to do the miraculous and to do what many would call impossible.

Love your neighbor, miraculous.  Be kind to a stranger, almost impossible for some.  To love your neighbor as yourself, seems like it would be a miracle. To speak to someone you don’t know before you leave here today, a miracle. When we think of this and we look here, somehow the people of God in this text and perhaps even today, they had drifted from their foundations of faith.  And I’m sure the drifting took place little by little. It was ever so slight. Perhaps it was even unnoticeable. Sometimes we can move away from our foundations and miss the grounding because we are just drifting away, not even noticing.

And even a while ago, I was reminded this while reading a particular article about how one and a half degrees off of course can make a big difference. In October 31st, 1983, Korean Air Airlines flight 007 departed Anchorage, Alaska. It was headed for Seoul, Korea.  Unknown to the crew, however, the computer engaging the flight navigation system contained a one and a half degree routing error. At that point of departure, the mistake was unnoticeable.  A hundred miles out the deviation was still so small as to be undetectable.  But as that giant 747 continued across there the islands out over the Pacific on its journey, the plane increasingly strayed from its proper course. Eventually, it was flying over Soviet airspace. Russian radar picked up the error. The fighter jets were scrambled. They intercepted flight 007. A short time later, the jet was shot out of the sky over the mainland of Russia and all of the lives on board were lost.  All because of a one and a half degree error.

And I’ve got wonder today, how many of us have a slight error in our navigation system? How many of us will look at here that we may be drifting, we may be off course. We may be headed in the wrong direction, ever so slightly, of not loving our neighbors, not speaking to the stranger, not caring for the widowed and the orphans, not helping those who are in need, not giving our coats, not helping those with all that we have been blessed with to help others.

I’m reminded on this day that in aviation they use a math mathematical rule called the 60-to-1 rule. I am told that if you travel 60 miles an hour, you are traveling one mile a minute. The 60-to-1 rule states that if I’m one degree off the assigned heading, for 60 minutes at 60 miles an hour, I’ll end up one mile off course. If an aircraft is traveling and flying at 240 miles an hour, that would place them four miles off course in the same hour. I’ve gotta wonder today, how many of us are so much of in a hurry that we’re drifting. So many of us are in a hurry to get to a certain destination, to get to the joy, that we forgot to check our navigation system. How many of us are living lives right now where we have drifted from the foundations of Jesus Christ? We have drifted from the foundations of our faith. We are traveling, we’re moving, we’re running in a hurry. We’re moving and advancing quickly and rapidly even as our nation is changing around us and we’re not clear what it will be.

Will it be a nation and a space where the door of opportunity and contribution is open to all? Or will this be a nation and here a world that is limited by the control and voice of a few? Here we are chasing the advancements of technology and eagerly following a culture shaped by materialistic temptations.

I remind you today that something is missing. But perhaps I want to remind you, and I will remind you in this moment, that it was 60 years ago in 1964 that Doctor Martin Luther King delivered his lecture in receipt of the Nobel Prize.  And he put it this way, “Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached a new and astonishing peak of scientific success. He has produced machines that think, instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space’. 60 years ago, he went on and said, ‘He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings that kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, even carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man’s scientific and technological progress’, He said, ‘Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly like the birds in the air, to swim like fish in the sea. But we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.’

Well, the prophet John the Baptist in our reading this morning, he began to address those that were there. And as he was proclaiming, he instructed several individuals and several groups, trying to give them instructions.  As one biblical commentator put it, ‘those that profess and promise repentance must show it by improvement and improvement in your particular place and condition’. Here John began to instruct them. And out of that moment, a great question arose, and I hope that it will rise up in here today, where when they were listening to him talking about Jesus, thinking about Jesus, thinking about the world we are in, they asked this question, ‘What should we do?’  I’m hoping that many of us will ask that question in this Advent season that it’s not just about the lights and the glimmer, but what should we do?

And I want to challenge us all this morning that the season of Advent and Christmas is filled with the good news of Christ, but it is a season, and perhaps even this moment, is an opportunity, to make a course correction. To check our instruments to see if we’re on course.  Before the run picks up, before the next services, before the singing, before the lights, before the candles, before everything here grabs us and holds us, that we are checking: are we really on course by what we are doing, not by what we’re saying?  That it’s not just a symbolic representation. It’s not just going through the motions. It is not simply just saying, ‘I’ve been part of the ceremony’, but ‘what should we do?’ It is in this season that we’re invited to embrace a bold vision, a bold faith that gives us the ability to run ahead of our circumstances, to run ahead of the moment, to get ahead of our fear, to get ahead of what looks dark, to be light along the path and the road for others. It is the time right now to check and see how far we may be drifting, to look, to listen, and most of all to do.

Dr. Ron Hobson will talk later after service about something ‘radical’ and I pray that we might do something ‘radical’, recognizing that the root of that word comes and shares something with ‘radius’ that we might check the distance we are from the center.  Where are we along this path? Because even as we think about this particular passage, the instructions of what we need to do, it began one way but it finished another way. The good news is with Jesus Christ, we can start one way, but we can finish another way.  With the gospel story we can begin one way, but we can all finish another way. So if there’s anything that I want you to remember in this moment, that we as part of the brood of vipers might remember out of this story, there is something that we should never forget and someone that we should always remember. Jesus. Jesus, Jesus.