A boy wanted to be Joseph in the Sunday School pageant. He was cast as the Innkeeper and objected loudly, but to no avail. When the pageant was presented, Mary and Joseph knocked on the door and asked him if he had a room for them. The boy smiled and said, “Yes, sure. Lots of room. Come on in!”
I’m excited to be here with you this morning. We’re beginning a new year together, a bold year of bold faith! I love the logical progression of the seasons, the practice of preparing for a feast with a fast, the knowledge that what we’re doing has been done by Christians for countless generations.
I love Advent. There’s tension in Advent. It’s penitential, but the penitence is joyful. It’s full of expectation that we know will be fulfilled. And I really enjoy the counter-cultural nature of Advent. When the rest of society is celebrating Christmas throughout December, we Christians are not, at least in church. We’re waiting, preparing, savoring the moment.
You’ll be happy to know that market analysts tell us it’s going to be a good Christmas season. By Christmas they mean, of course, Advent; and by good they mean lots of sales. Total retail sales in the U.S will hit $1.002 trillion during the Christmas holiday period, marking the “strongest growth since 2011,” according to eMarketer.
Sales in items for children will be high on the list. Every year we read that sales of children’s items are driven at least somewhat by one thing—guilt! Parents whose marriages have ended, workaholic parents, parents whose quality time is minimal, parents who make mistakes (well, that covers the waterfront!), according to market analysts, are feeling guilty. Furthermore, advertising subtly plays on that guilt.
Dr. Amanda Gummer, a child psychologist who specializes in parenting and children’s play, wonders whether it’s the guilt factor: “Working parents may feel that buying lots of presents justifies the time spent working and away from their family, whereas stay at home parents meanwhile may feel the need to compete and not want their children to suffer in comparison to others.
“Both of these are poor reasons to overspend on presents. Parents should be confident in their own decisions and spend only what they want to and what they can afford at Christmas.” Good advice!
Life is full of irony, isn’t it? Just when psychologists, philosophers, and even theologians are trying to convince us that there’s no such thing as sin, and therefore nothing to feel guilty about, the marketplace capitalizes on it! In coming up with guilt as a motive for buying, the marketplace has hit the theological nail on the head in terms of stating the basic human problem: sin and guilt are indeed at their foundation relational. My sin affects not only my relationship with God, but also my relationship with my wife, my children, my friends, my coworkers. The lie in this bit of advertising strategy is that the problem can be solved by giving gifts—and the more expensive the gift, the better it will work in repairing the relationship. We all know that’s not so, but we’ve all been sucked into that lie in one way or another, at one time or another. All that being said, it’s sometimes essential that one send flowers to one’s wife!
Carl Meninger, in his book Whatever became of Sin?, first published in 1973, quotes from a sermon by a Presbyterian minister: “Our real problems are concealed from us by our current remarkable prosperity which results in part from our new way of getting rich, which is to buy things from one another that we do not want, at prices we cannot pay, on terms we cannot meet, because of advertising we do not believe.”
Try as we may, we can’t get rid of the reality of guilt, for guilt is the result of sin, and sin is ever with us. By sin I don’t mean just doing that which is obviously evil, but living life with ourselves at the center, rather than God. We can do all of the right things, but for the wrong reasons, and that’s sin, for sin is placing ourselves where God rightfully belongs. The most religious people in the days when Jesus walked the earth were the Pharisees; Jesus was the most critical of the Pharisees, because they did their good works “in order to be seen by men” and not to glorify God.
Try as we may, we can’t get rid of the reality of sin, and we certainly have tried! At a time when the family is disintegrating, racial tension is increasing, and we are in a perpetual state of war, to name just a few of our societal problems, the word sin has virtually disappeared from our vocabulary. Meninger traces that disappearance back to 1953. That year President Eisenhower, in proclaiming a National Day of Prayer, quoted Lincoln with the following words: “It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon.
Meninger goes on: None of Eisenhower’s subsequent calls to prayer mentioned sin again. The word was not compatible with the Commander-in-Chief’s vision of a proud and confident people… Since 1953, no President has mentioned sin as a national failing. I cannot imagine a modern President beating his breast on behalf of the nation and praying, ‘God be merciful to us sinners,’ though experts agree this is one of the best ways to begin.”
All of our efforts to make things right are in vain, and we certainly cannot make things right by doing what advertisers would have us to do. We need a Savior. We need the one God has chosen to redeem us, to free us from our sins and bring us back to a right relationship with him and with one another. He is the one for whose birthday we are preparing this Advent and who will come again to judge the living and the dead.
May this new year truly be a year of bold faith for each one of us, and a truly bold faith begins with a humble and contrite heart.
Sermon preached by the Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
1st Sunday of Advent
2 December 2018