Isaiah 38.1-6
December 1, 2014
In those days Hezekiah became sick and
was at the point of death. The prophet Isaiah son of Amoz came to him, and said
to him, ‘Thus says the Lord: Set your house in order, for you shall die; you
shall not recover.’ Then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall, and prayed to
the Lord: ‘Remember now, O Lord, I implore you, how I have walked before
you in faithfulness with a whole heart, and have done what is good in your
sight.’ And Hezekiah wept bitterly.
Then the word of the Lord came
to Isaiah: ‘Go and say to Hezekiah, Thus says the Lord, the God of your
ancestor David: I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears; I will add
fifteen years to your life. I will deliver you and this city out of the hand of
the king of Assyria, and defend this city.
As we begin the season of Advent, Rev. Frierson and I are
beginning a new sermon series for Advent. Normally creating sermon series
topics aren’t hard for us, but Advent always presents a challenge. The reason
is that over the years the Advent stories become very familiar, with the angels
appearing to Elizabeth, Joseph, and Mary, and the story of preparing for
Christ’s birth. How do you talk about these events in a fresh way year after year?
As we were trying to figure out what to do for this year, Rev. Frierson came up
with a brilliant idea, which is to focus on what we normally do to prepare for
Christmas as a metaphor for how Christians are called to prepare for Christ’s
coming. Advent is a season of preparation, so we decided to use the basics of
Christmas preparation, such as cleaning your house, putting up the tree, going
to parties, and giving gifts to look at how we can prepare for Christ. And this
morning I want to talk about the first of those ideas, which is cleaning our
houses.
So,… how many of you stuck around for Thanksgiving? And how
many of you who stuck around hosted Thanksgiving dinner? And how many of you
who hosted dinner cleaned your house first? If you are like our family, pretty
much all of you cleaned.
We didn’t host Thanksgiving dinner, but we did have our extended
family over to our house the evening after Thanksgiving, which meant that
Friday was a day of cleaning in preparation for Friday night. I helped a bit in
the morning and early afternoon, but I had tickets to the University of
Pittsburgh football game against Miami University, so I got out of some of the
heavy cleaning. Still, my wife, Diane, and my kids got to mop, vacuum,
straighten, arrange, and wash. Before we could celebrate, we had to prepare.
In a lot of ways this season of Advent is meant to be a
season of cleaning before a party. We don’t normally think of this season in
this way, but preparing for celebration is at the center of the season.
Christmas is meant to be a celebration, but not just a celebration of food,
trees, presents, and family. At its center it is meant to be a season of
celebrating Christ coming into our lives. But before we can celebrate that, we have
to prepare for it.
Advent is the season of preparation. It is meant to be a
time of prayer, reflection, and centering in preparation for Christmas, but we’ve
forgotten it in our rush to celebrate Christmas. Advent reminds us that we
cannot celebrate Christ’s coming without preparing, but that doesn’t mean we
listen. Let me explain.
Have you heard that there is a war on Christmas in our
culture? You can’t escape the warnings if you watch Fox News. It has become
something of a tradition for them to rail against the war on Christmas this
time of year. Watch Fox today. Someone will talk about the war on Christmas.
They self-righteously complain that nobody says “Merry Christmas” anymore in
stores, but substitute “Happy Holidays” instead. They then encourage people to
boycott stores that say “Happy Holidays” until they return to saying “Merry
Christmas.”
The irony of Fox’s obsession about the supposed war on
Christmas is that they completely miss the fact that in their railing they have
been part of the War on Advent. They ignore Advent by consistently proclaiming
that we are in the Christmas season. We’re not in the season of Christmas,
despite what the consumer culture might lead us to believe. Ironically, the
Christmas warriors ignore the season of preparing for Christ’s coming. They act
as though the Christmas season begins the day after Thanksgiving, or even
Halloween, when it doesn’t actually start until Christmas day and then goes on
for another eleven days afterwards. I don’t mean all of this as a particular
swipe against Fox News. I mean it to point out the fact that in our zeal for
Christmas we can forget a more ancient wisdom, which is that spiritually we can
only discover God’s presence when we prepare for it. And in our modern culture,
our zeal for Christmas celebration obscures our need for Advent preparation.
The fact is that while most of us like parties and
celebrations, we don’t necessarily like the cleaning and preparation we have to
do before them. Who wants to clean? Who wants to straighten? Who wants to prepare?
It’s much more fun just to show up.
In a lot of ways we’re like that spiritually, too. We
love spiritual good times. We love those times when we feel complete, joyful,
purposeful, and close to God. The problem is that we don’t always like to prepare
for them. We don’t like to do spiritual work. We want our spirituality to come
easily, and we ignore the fact that while people may be naturally spiritual,
spiritual growth and maturity requires work. It requires taking time in
self-examination to determine whether or not we are truly open to God. It
requires taking time to read the Bible, or religious/spiritual books, to
stretch our thinking and understanding. Spiritual growth is always about
learning. It requires time in prayer, especially during difficult times.
Spiritual growth requires preparation and work, just like anything else in
life. And when we take time to prepare, it also allows us to eventually
celebrate what we become ready for. The problem is that not everyone wants to
do this prep work.
Over the course of the past six months I’ve been having
conversations with younger people in their 20s and 30s about the growing
tendency of many their age calling themselves spiritual but not religious. I’ve
asked them what their impression is of their friends, and why they walk away
from church. I’ve been surprised by many of their answers, which often boils
down to “they’re lazy spiritually.” I asked, expecting to hear them say that
they find church boring, that they don’t resonate with our music or ideas, or
that they find Christian beliefs hard to grasp and accept. All of those might
be true, but the ones I’ve been talking with have been telling me that they
think their friends are just lazy spiritually. They say that their friends like
to talk about being spiritual, but then don’t want to do anything to build on
that spirituality because it might interfere with their leisure time.
I have no idea if what they are saying is true. And I
tend not to be critical of people and to call them lazy. But what they are
saying does fit with our struggle with Advent:
people don’t like to prepare. This points out that in this day and age a
significant part of the population, including the Christian population, doesn’t
see spiritual work as essential. This is different from Christians of ages past.
50, 100, 200, 500 years ago, people were much more willing to work on their
spiritual and religious lives, and to work hard. People read and knew the
Bible. They made prayer an essential part of their lives, and not just prayer begging
God to do their will. Much of their prayers were for God to help them to do
God’s will. These people made church and worship essential to their prep work
for God.
If we want to experience God in our lives, we need to be
responsible for putting our personal spiritual houses in order, and doing so
allows us to actually be blessed by God. That’s what happened in our passage
for this morning. Hezekiah was king of the southern Jewish kingdom of Judah as the
Assyrians were threatening it with destruction. Hezekiah had been a so-so king
up to this point. He had done much to pull the Jewish people back to a
centering in God, but he also had done some things that were a bit more
self-focused. Then the prophet Isaiah comes to him and says, “Thus says the Lord: Set your house in order,
for you shall die; you shall not recover.” Hezekiah is distraught and pleas
with God, reminding God of all the good Hezekiah has done. And he prepares to
put his house, his spiritual life, back in order. God responds by giving Hezekiah
15 more years, and Hezekiah puts the kingdom back in order.
In the same way, the angels visits Elizabeth, Joseph, and
Mary as preparation for Christ’s birth. And the angels do this because these
folks had already put their houses in order. In fact, each had always kept their
spiritual houses in order. They were constantly prepared spiritually for God’s
coming, and it made them part of Christ’s coming.
Advent is a season of preparation, and we are called to
spend time in it preparing for Christmas by cleaning our own houses. I’d like
to close by giving you a final thought. A number of years ago I became a fan of
a British television series on BBC America. The show was called “How Clean Is
Your House?” It was a fascinating show in which two women travel around Britain
looking for the filthiest houses. They then come in and clean the houses, all
the while teaching these people how to keep their houses clean. The houses they
work on are amazingly disgusting. Often what caused these people’s houses to
become so filthy and cluttered was the snowball effect. Something caused them
to stop cleaning, and over time the accumulation of filth and mess became
overwhelming. They didn’t know where to start, so they just stopped.
The one episode I remember most was the house of a
lifelong bachelor whose house was awful, especially the kitchen and bathroom.
He hadn’t cleaned his bathroom in 28 years. It was the must DISGUSTING thing I’d
ever seen. Nor had he cleaned his kitchen. They did culture swabs of his
kitchen counter and alarmingly found it covered with salmonella, wisteria, e
coli, and all sorts of other creepy, harmful bacteria. They told him that his
house was actually dangerous to visitors. He smiled and responded that it
wasn’t a problem because he hadn’t been sick in over 15 years, so it couldn’t
be that bad. They told him that it was only because his immune system was in
such constant high alert that he couldn’t get sick, but if he prepared food in
his own kitchen to take to friends’ houses, that he could actually kill them.
Typically, the women made a plan to clean and de-clutter
the houses, and then made the owners help them clean. In the process they
taught them how to clean. They always started with the bathroom because it was
typically the smallest space, as well as the one with the most potential
bacteria. Then they moved onto the kitchen, because it was the next smallest,
yet dangerous space. They cleaned counters, stoves, refrigerators and tables.
Then they moved to the rest of the house moving onto the bedrooms, dining room,
and living room. The amount of trash they would pull out was astounding. And
when they steam-cleaned the carpets, often they would collect up to 30 gallons
of filthy water of dirt just from the carpets.
I learned lessons from this show about how to put our
spiritual houses in order. First, start small. Do the simplest things to
connect with God. It might mean reading an inspirational quote once a day from
an Advent calendar, or taking three minutes to pray for someone else. Then
build on that to add in bigger spiritual acts. The point is to take care of
part of our lives, and the move onto others.
Don’t just make this a season of being pulled out of
order in the zeal for Christmas, but make it one where you put God at the
center, and put your house a little bit more into order.
Amen.
