Isaiah 11:1-11; Matthew 3:1-12
In our household, it feels like we do home renovations, repairs and restoration projects almost by accident. At least, they do not happen with lots of advance notice or long term planning. That is mostly my fault. We have an older house, which means there is always a long list of potential projects that could be tackled. We talk in general terms about things that need to be done or we would want to do –mental wish lists, but usually without any specific timelines and maybe not even a vision of what could be. We can go for years with the background sense that this particular part of the house needs some work. Then all of a sudden one day, I get a sudden motivation, or a little window of unexpected time, and I simply launch into one of the projects. I usually think the project will be fairly easy and straightforward and won’t take long. I don’t really calculate how long the work will take or even what supplies and tools and advice I might need to make it all happen. I just start in. Inevitably, it takes much longer than I think, is more complex and the whole process is chaotic, messy and disruptive to our everyday life.
One May Long weekend I decided that our front wooden porch, with its old boards and peeling paint, needed refinishing. A half hour later, I had cleared it off and started sanding and scraping – a simple project. Do you know how hard it is to get rid of decades old paint? I have a little hand sander that worked on the easy parts, but I soon realized that was insufficient. I quickly Googled equipment rentals, drove to several places early Saturday morning, on a Long Weekend, for last minute possibilities before finally finding a full sized stand up power circular sander, and then spent hours and hours getting that porch back down to the original wood – which did look fantastic. Done! … but then realized it needed some sort of staining and finishing and protecting now to preserve the porch. More back and forth to paint stores. It all took much longer – days – and was way more work than I thought on that Friday afternoon. So much for that relaxing long weekend!
Our big restoration project was our kitchen and backroom in 2008, and this was more forced upon us than chosen. When we bought the house, there was a little un-insulated shack off the back of the kitchen that housed our freezer, and washer and dryer. Yup, not the best idea, especially in winter. Some makeshift piping wrap mostly prevented the water pipes from freezing. The dryer vented directly under the structure and the shack regularly leaked. One Saturday morning Rachel calls upstairs to wake me out of bed and tells me that the whole ceiling of this little shack had fallen down – mess everywhere. We had to do something. Do we just try to somehow nail the ceiling back up? A makeshift repair? It was just enough of a motivation to say we needed to do this right, and to re-imagine a whole new backroom addition 2 level computer room and laundry room, paired with a complete kitchen tear down and renovation – right down to the studs, opening up walls, re-wiring, and re-arranging the whole layout. These things always end up way bigger, and yes, more expensive, than what one first imagined. We were wise not to attempt this ourselves, and contracted Mark Bauman and Menno S. Martin, and some of you will remember a Saturday morning destroy-the-pastor’s kitchen event. That Saturday morning falling ceiling led to 4 months of chaos, mess, disruption, and eating out of our basement or outdoors with the BBQ.
Last winter, ‘inspiration’ hit again. It happens about once a year, but with no predictable time line. Rachel wishes I would be more intentional and planned. The whole time we have lived in our house, our master bedroom has been very dark, with a deep maroon paint and a dark flowery wallpaper border running around the top. It was fine, it worked, but was on the mental to do list, especially as more and more plaster cracks appeared and a big crumbling plaster ‘wound’ got bigger and bigger just above the head of the bed. It was one day in the doldrums of January that I figured – why not now. Again, I wanted to just jump in, but I am maybe slowing learning that there needs to be some preparation when you do a project. There’s a lot of furniture in a bedroom that needs to be moved or carefully covered up. You also realize that maybe you don’t need each piece of furniture, or random scattered things, and it is time to sort through and get rid of certain clothes or other items you have not used for years. You clean up. You purge. Where do we sleep for the next month? … our kid’s empty bedrooms. How do you actually repair plaster cracks and wounds and holes? Again, Mark Bauman’s advice was helpful. And then there is simply that hard and messy work of stripping very stubborn wall paper, patching holes, sanding down filler, filling nail holes, washing walls and so on, before you even get to the paint stage. How you prepare and clean makes all the difference. The preparation takes way longer than the actual painting. Then there were 2 and some places 3 coats of white primer over that deep burgundy, and then… well, we struggle mightily with picking paint colours. Those little paint patch strips all start looking the same. We finally had an on-line consultant over Zoom on our phones looking at our bedroom and making what turned out to be a helpful suggestion … which of course we ignored for the first coat of paint when we went one strip lighter than her suggestion and it looked like a baby nursery, and then had to paint all over again with her proper, fitting, colour. If anyone needs an almost full gallon of light baby blue paint, talk to me after church. We were out of the bedroom way longer than I expected, but it finally got done and looks great. It’s all about preparing and cleansing.
These are the themes that run deep through our Advent Scriptures for today. Our overall theme for Advent is ‘Restoration is Near.’ That may be true that it is near, but it often takes so long to get there, it feels so far away. Near can feel far. Like so many of our home restoration projects, what seems like an easy jump to finish – it’s right there in front of you – takes much longer than you think, is more complicated, and inevitably involves more chaos, displacement, hard work and disruption than you ever imagined. The need for restoration comes on like a surprise, when you least expect it. Sometimes we need others to point it out and help us along. But the end result, the promise, the final vision, can be so beautiful and satisfying. As Janet said last week, there is the before and the after picture of restoration.
I have to wonder what the people thought when they first saw John the Baptist, stepping out of the wilderness like a wild man – clothing of camel’s hair, a leather belt holding it all together, eating locusts…grasshoppers and some sort of wild honey. Yum! Most people probably came to him first out of curiosity – for the novelty of it, the show, the intrigue; but they soon realized that this would be an interruption, a disruption to their lives, an unexpected call to a new way of living and being.
His message was not easy to hear. It had an edge! ‘Repent – literally, turn around and go the other way – for the kingdom of heaven has come near. Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’ It was even more pointed to the Pharisees and Sadducees, the religious leaders – who he called a brood of vipers and warned about wrath and fire. Repent and bear fruit worthy of repentance. John the Baptist, and later Jesus, kept talking about this Kingdom of God, this vision of how the world could be, and that it was near – you could reach out and touch it. Even that it was already hear, arrived, and yet not fulfilled, not yet complete. Restoration is near. It has to do with bearing good fruit, of living lives worthy of the calling of God. But how do you get there?
It seems to me that there are three key elements to this restoration from these passages. The first is about disruption. John the Baptist disrupted the so called normal lives of the people with his sudden appearance and radical message. He shakes things up. He makes people take notice that things are not right with the world and a change is needed. There is a waking up from complacency. Like a renovation project, there can be utter chaos. You can’t get to the other side, without going through this chaos, this disruption. There are times in our life that are like that. We are not living as we should. We are in transition from one place to another. Our relationships with others are broken or strained. Our spiritual lives are dry or shallow or self disruptive. We need to be shaken up, disturbed, renewed, totally transformed. Our lives will be in upheaval for a period of time. It will be chaotic. It won’t look pretty. It may come upon us as a complete surprise. But the path forward moves us to and through this disruption. This might happen in our personal lives, but also collectively. We have experienced this most recently through the pandemic. If you think back to March 2020, nothing had prepared us for the pandemic to come. It came as a complete surprise and shock to most of us. It quickly upended and disrupted all of our lives in so many ways. It was traumatic and life changing. We are still feeling its effects and its consequences will rattle around us for years. And yet, the pandemic has opened us up to change and the opportunity to structure our lives in new and transforming ways. What do we prioritize? Are there elements to the rat race of our lives that we needed to stop that we don’t want to take up again? What relationships are most important to us? Can we live more lightly on this earth? What do the structures and inequalities of our society look like and can we start anew? Disruption gives us the space for repentance, for turning around and going in a new direction.
The second element of restoration is about preparation. Prepare ye the way. Like when you paint, the process of preparing a room is far more involved, complicated, hard work and time consuming than the actual painting itself. While disruption catches us off guard, preparation can be intentional and purposeful. What are the specific elements of our lives that need work – that need sanding and cleansing? Is it our bad habits or addictions? Is it the words we speak to others? Is it how we relate to our family members? Is it how generous we are with our possessions and finances? Is it how much time and space we give to listening to and responding to God’s call on our lives? Is it our prayer life? What might we need to cleanse or let go of? We talked about the pandemic earlier and how many things we learned to let go of or hold more lightly. The Leader magazine speaks of restoration in a number of ways: as the ‘process of sorting – removing what no longer serves and reorganizing or refreshing what remains, and says it can be ‘a creative process – reimagining wholeness in a messy situation, creating something that was not there before.’ ‘It is a process of renewal – bringing back to newness what has been broken, damaged or worn, or the process of assembly – bringing different pieces together as they should be to create a beautiful whole. It can also be the process of transformation – sometimes the restored object needs to be overhauled or rebuilt to be fully restored.’ All of these are forms of preparation that open us up to restoration. The last definition provided by the Leader magazine, and probably the most important, is that ‘restoration often requires outside action – we participate in the process, but it is God who is our restorer, the one to whom Psalm 80 is addressed: Restore us, O God: let your face shine, that we might be saved.’ (Leader Magazine, Fall 2022, p. 36)
This brings us to the third element of restoration in our themes today – the larger vision of God. We can be disrupted in ways that open us to restoration, we can do all sorts of preparation, but it is God who is our restorer, and God who shows us the larger vision for how to live. John the Baptist calls people to repent, but in the very same breath adds – ‘for the kingdom of heaven has come near,’ and that we should ‘bear good fruit.’ There is something we are turning towards – there is a larger vision we are invited into. I am reminded of the vision we heard from Isaiah – a description of a new kind of kingdom. It has to do with righteousness for the poor and equity for the oppressed, and this upside-down nature where lambs and leopards, calves and lions, cows and bears, the have’s and have nots, live together in peace, justice and equity. It is this vision that makes all the preparation work worthwhile, that gives us a reason to prepare and turn in a new direction.
The other Saturday, about 30 MCEC pastors and leaders gathered at Conrad Grebel for a morning with retired church leader Robert or Jack Suderman. He was reflecting on his recent book ‘The Baby and the Bathwater’ (Mennonite Church Canada, 2021) His book boils down to 2 Biblical claims, themes that permeate the entire Biblical narrative. The first is that God is all about restoring creation, the world and its people, about bringing in the Kingdom of God. The second is that God has chosen to do this healing and restoration of the world through peoplehood, through the calling of God’s people, through Ekklesia – the church, the assembly of people, through the historical process of human beings in this world moving towards God’s vision – in the language of today, of humans repenting and turning in a new direction towards the kingdom of heaven. John’s message is not just about individual repentance and preparation, but about doing this on a collective level – as a whole people. Jack names that most often in church history, these two have been separated, detached, been cut off from each other. He urges us to reclaim this connection of peoplehood to the vision of God for the restoration of all creation. This does not deny that the church and God’s people have so often been in the wrong and failed as an institution. But God’s intention is for a peoplehood to be a part of restoring our world. What does this look like? He writes that we see the signs when ‘Generosity is evident, both spontaneous and structured. Hospitality is offered even at significant personal risk. There are efforts to implement justice, to structure equality, and to ensure compassion. Love is offered and received. Forgiveness is sought and granted. Lives are voluntarily sacrifices for the sake of others. Prejudice is confronted, racism is addressed, power is shared. Relationships are reconciled, acts of kindness are offered, lives are transformed. In other words, there is significant evidence of life sought at fountains that nurture life.’ (Ibid, p.14) There is an amazing vision here of what the kingdom of God looks like, and an invitation for the people of God to grab hold of that vision – repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.
I love that moment when a renovation-restoration house project is finally done, complete – and it looks wonderful. I know it only got there through disruption, preparation, hard work, a vision for what could be, and much chaos. I’m usually exhausted, but also satisfied, knowing that at least this part of the house will serve us well. We’re not done yet. There is a whole mental list of projects, both big and small, still waiting for tomorrow, or the next day, month or years. But restoration has happened. May we also find restoration, as individuals, but also as a people of God. May we have the courage to enter whatever disruption and chaos, repentance and renewal, God’s vision is calling us to as we seek to live as people seeking the Kingdom of God. Amen.