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

Here the prophet of Israel's return from exile sings a full-throated ode to joy: "I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God" (v. 10a). Apocalyptic gloom and doom and cataclysms of nature give way first to wedding imagery and then to a picture of Edenic life in a garden (remembering last week's reading from 2 Peter, "where righteousness is at home"): "For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations" (v. 11). The old and much-loved Swedish Advent hymn, "Rejoice, Rejoice, Believers" (LBW #25) weds text to music to create an unusually upbeat hymn of praise appropriate to today's texts. Unusually upbeat for traditional Lutherans, at any rate!

Pastoral Reflections

"Gaudete," the Latin imperative for "rejoice," this Third Sunday in Advent used to be called, supposedly because the Introit for the day began with a word of encouragement to joy breaking into the theretofore penitential spirit for which Advent used to be known. Hence the lone pink candle that has hung on in some Advent wreaths. (I've always been suspicious that the change from purple to blue as Advent's color and the retention of one pink candle had more to do with church publishing house marketing than liturgical scholarship, but who's to judge?) Anyway, both first and second readings do give strong encouragement to make this a day of rejoicing, and the readings generally represent a turn from the apocalyptic mood of the late November and early Advent readings to a more positive and confident attitude toward what Paul in 1 Thessalonians calls "the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (v. 23b). (For a provocative essay that argues for a "relaxed" Christian ethical attitude toward end-time matters because of the biblical basis for what Scripture calls "hope," see Hans Weder's "Hope and Creation," in The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology, ed. John Polking-horne and Michael Welker [Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2000], 184-202. On joy see also in the same volume Patrick Miller's "Judgment and Joy" and Miroslav Volf' s "Enter into Joy!")

The Gospel reading begins with a snippet from the Prologue of John's Gospel referring to John the Baptizer as "a man sent from God" who came "as a witness [Greek, 'martyr'] to the light" with the clear negation, also found in last week's Gospel reading from Mark 1, that "he himself was not the light." Then, jumping ten verses, we are given the Baptizer's own "testimony" that he is "neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet," but, invoking last week's text from Isaiah 40, "I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, 'Make straight the way of the Lord"' (v. 23). This matter of what scholars call the "intertextuality of Scripture," both the explicit citation and implicit resonances, echoes, and allusions of the older testament, are especially evident throughout our Advent texts and, as with the various Gospel passion accounts, are notably reliant on the Book of Isaiah. Advent would be an appropriate time to begin an in-depth adult Bible study of this most influential and many-layered writing that could carry through at least the season of Lent. (Brevard Childs' recent commentary on Isaiah, with his sensitivity to Isaiah's relationship to the whole canon of Scripture, would be an excellent resource--Isaiah: The Old Testament Library [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001]. For another perspective, see Walter Brueggemann's two-volume Westminster Bible Companion commentary [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998].)