Preaching Helps: First Sunday of Advent-Transfiguration of Our Lord, series B

Currents in Theology and Mission, Oct, 2002 by Robert H. Smith, John Rollefson, Richard Rollefson

Pastoral Reflections

Many who hear today's first reading from Isaiah 40 can't help but do so to the strains of the opening tenor recitative, aria, and chorus from Handel's Messiah sounding in their mind's ear. (See Roger Bullard's Messiah: The Gospel According to Handel's Oratorio [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993] as well as the excellent adult study resource by Carol Bechtel Reynolds, Hallelujah: The Bible and Handel's Messiah (Pittsburgh: The Kerygma Program, 1995.) But late Baroque is not Advent's only musical idiom. The fusion of text and melody, of music's ability to sing the gospel in the language of the heart, is particularly evident in the rich variety of Advent hymnody available to the church in our day. Ours, like a growing number of congregations, annually hosts an Advent Service of Lessons and Carols that intersperses a number of Hebrew Scripture and New Testament Advent texts with Advent hymns and choral arrangements from a wide array of ethnic backgrounds and musical styles. None has been sung with greater vigor in recent years than Andrae Crouch's composed spiritual "Soon and Very Soon" (With One Voice #744). Isaiah's paean of return here sings of the earlier apocalyptic cataclysms of nature transfigured into a vision of the wilderness tamed, of valleys lifted up and mountains and hills made low, as a "highway for our God" transforms the desert into the way home.

The Gospel text from the opening verses of St. Mark connect this prophecy with "the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God" (v. 1) inaugurated with John the Baptizer's appearance in the wilderness, "proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins" (v. 4). Yet John, whose exotic garb and diet easily identify him with the widespread expectation of the prophet Elijah's return as a sign of the end time, is intent on underlining his own status as precursor rather than main event: "After me one who is more powerful than I is coming, the thong of whose sandals Jam not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water; but the one who is coming will baptize you with the Holy Spirit" (vv. 7-8).

A recent publishing phenomenon has been the popularity of the series of books on the rapture by conservative evangelical Tim LaHaye. While a recent film based on this fictionalized theology was not well received, the film Rapture of several years ago told a chilling story of emotionally needy people caught up in dangerous forms of adventism. (For an amusing story-sermon on this theme, see my Ann Arbor neighbor Michael Lindvall's "Rapture" in The Good News From North Haven [New York: Pocket Books, 1991].)

John Rollefson

Third Sunday in Advent December 15, 2002

Psalm 126 or Luke 1:47-55

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11

1 Thessalonians 5:16-24

John 1:6-8, 19-28

The Lord has done great things for us,
and we rejoiced. (Ps 126:3)

... the Mighty One has done great things for
me, and holy is his name. (Lk 1:49)

First Reading

The prophet Isaiah's swords, whose resonances are heard in Mary's song, begin with the text that is familiar from Jesus' reading of it during his visit to his hometown synagogue in Nazareth at the outset of his ministry as narrated in the fourth chapter of Luke's Gospel: "The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me ... to bring good news ... to bind up ... to proclaim liberty ... and release ... to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor ... to comfort all who mourn ... (vv. 1-2)