Advent in 4-D!

Text: 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
Theme: “Advent in 4-D”
3rd Sunday of Advent
December 11, 2011
First Presbyterian Church
Denton, Texas
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

IN THE NAME OF JESUS

16 Rejoice always, 17 pray continually, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
19 Do not quench the Spirit. 20 Do not treat prophecies with contempt 21 but test them all; hold on to what is good, 22 reject every kind of evil.
23 May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.

At the end of A Christmas Carol, the famous story by Charles Dickens, Ebeneezer Scrooge was a changed man. No longer mean and miserly, he was the epitome of joy and laughter, kindliness and generosity. The ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future had done their work. Dickens wrote, at the very end, that old Scrooge knew how to “keep Christmas well.”

There’s something magnificent about this thought of keeping Christmas well. Luke says of Mary, the mother of Jesus, that she “kept all these things” (the announcement of the angel Gabriel, the holy birth, etc) and “pondered them in her heart.”

The temptation, old yet ever new, is not to keep Christmas. Actually doing that would require the engagement of our minds, hearts, souls, and a certain amount of time. What’s familiar to us about Christmas is really that it’s NOT kept. We may observe it; we may rush through it; we may count down the shopping days until it’s here. But do we really, truly keep it?

I have to confess that I’ve actually “kept” the Advent season this year. For reasons that I’m not entirely convinced of, this time of preparation we call Advent has been particularly meaningful to me in 2011. I’ve benefited greatly from the Advent devotions by O.P. Kretzmann that our Worship Committee has offered. I’ve found myself, for whatever reason, immersed more deeply in the Advent Scripture readings. My prayers have been less scripted and more personal. I didn’t see this coming; I didn’t expect this to happen. Like many of you, I’ve got a lot going on in my life, and I have entertained thoughts of Christmas kind of getting in the way. There were moments when I wanted Advent and Christmas to hurry up and be over with.

Then, a little over a week ago, while lifting a 65 lb dead weight over my head at LA Fitness, a thought occurred to me. It created what actually was a feeling of grief. Somewhere along the line, that sense of childhood wonder had died and I was mourning its loss. My intellect, my mind had glossed over that word of Jesus that we must become like children. And children – like my grandson Noah watching Yo Gabba Gabba on Nickolodeon – have a sense of playfulness and wonder about them. And that becomes amplified at Christmas.

I want that playfulness and wonder back, and I don’t want it to leave anymore. I don’t want to check Christmas off on my long list of things to do and then move on. Like Scrooge, like the mother Mary, like baby Noah, I want to keep Christmas well.
I’ve got a fighting chance for that to happen this year, and I can’t understand why. It’s certainly not due to any hard work – spiritual or otherwise – on my part. Part of the answer, I’m persuaded, lies in circumstance. I’m at a point in life when I’m making some serious decisions about my two oldest daughters who live in Indiana that are both disabled with autism. My father and stepmother, who reside in Nebraska, are now facing the unpleasant realities that their advancing age brings. The foundations of the global economy are nothing if not wobbly. Tens of thousands of dollars that some people are depending on for security in their retirement years can vanish in one day’s trading on Wall Street. Then I look to the Presbyterian Church (USA), the denomination that our congregation is part of, and I see strife and division that diverts it from its mission. Statistically, the membership of many of the old, mainline Protestant denominations is dropping drastically. I look at our congregation and what it has been through in the last ten to twelve years. I’m aware of what many of you, today, are going through as you face the limits of life. Ill health can come on slowly or suddenly. You wonder what the next day – or the next hour! – will bring.

Martin Luther, one of the great reformers, was a busy man. Like many of us, he had a lot going on – so much, in fact, that he once remarked that he needed to spend the first three hours of the day in prayer just to get through what lay ahead.

The best prayers are the ones that flow out from the Word of God. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once remarked, “The Word of God ought to determine our prayer – and not the poverty of our own hearts.” And during this season of Advent, as I’ve found myself once more immersed and bathed in the Scriptures of the season, there has been much to pray about because there have been so many words from God for us to consider.

The Word of God takes on all these circumstances we face, and Advent becomes more than just shopping days before December the Twenty-Fifth!
Advent becomes not one dimensional, not two dimensional, not three dimensional, but four dimensional. The four stands for four words that begin with the letter D: drama, doctrine, doxology, and discipleship.

Drama involves the facts, the story, the narrative: the Messiah was prophesied and prepared for. John the Baptist, as he declared in today’s Gospel, was the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Jesus was born at a certain place and a certain time. He began a public ministry of preaching and teaching and healing. He instituted a Supper, the meal of His new covenant. He was crucified. He rose from the grave bodily. He issued a commission to go into all the nations to baptize and teach. He ascended into heaven. His Spirit was poured out at Pentecost. These are not fractured fairy tales. These are the facts. All of this is the drama.
The second D word is doctrine, and the doctrine – or teaching – is this: You and I are part of the drama. We are part of Christ’s story. His narrative is our narrative. Christ was born for us, lived for us, died for us, rose for us, ascended for us, sent His Spirit for us. Why? Because only God in Christ could do for us what we could not do for ourselves. Why? Because God loved – and loves! – us even when we were God’s enemies.

This leads to the third D word: doxology. Doxology literally means “glory words” or “right praise.” In simple terms, it involves worship. Realizing that the drama is our drama and the teaching that flows from it enlivens shapes our lives, we respond with much, much praise and much, much thanksgiving. We are only too ready, in public worship, to hear the drama and to study the doctrine over and over again. Why? It is because the forces of evil, the world, and our own sinful selves are always trying to distract us – to pull us away from and out of the drama and the doctrine.

So the drama leads to the doctrine. The doctrine leads to the doxology. And the doxology leads to the fourth and final D word: discipleship.
A disciple, quite simply, is a follower and student of Jesus Christ. Discipleship is taking our following and learning right out into the world we live in, into our various callings at home, in our schools, in our places of employment.
This Sunday’s New Testament reading from First Thessalonians is particularly appropriate to this matter of discipleship. We are encouraged to “rejoice always, pray continually, and give thanks in all circumstances.” This encouragement has direct application to the four D words I’ve brought to mind. But especially, it treats discipleship.

Best of all, we are encouraged to rejoice, pray, and give thanks not because they are good ideas, or means to an end, or methods of self-improvement or fulfillment. We are not encouraged to do these things, as Christ’s disciples, so we can have “our best life now.” There’s only one reason for us to do these things –and it is right there in the text: it is God’s will for us in Christ Jesus.

You see, that’s the reference point; that’s the North Star. It’s not our own circumstances – good, bad, or ugly. It’s not our own dramas or stories. Jesus didn’t come to simply give us insights or principles for holy living, or to help us write a better script for the movie of our lives. Jesus came, as He Himself said, to “seek and to save the lost.”

If I focus only on myself, I’m lost. I can’t find my way. My heart is impoverished and filled with evil. I’m the black sheep gone astray. I’m dead in my trespasses and sins. Put a fork in me; I’m done. But when I look to Christ and what He has done for me in His advent, birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, I find that I’m part of the greatest story ever told. I’m strengthened in this when I hear the Gospel of God and I recall the baptism that sealed me into God’s story. And then I get to partake of the bread and the cup, the body and the blood of Christ, as a foretaste of that great banquet I’m going to enjoy with you when my life’s journey ends and I’m at home with God and with you.

Drama, doctrine, doxology, and discipleship! Don’t miss this for the world!

Amen.