Year A: Advent 2 | Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
December 7, 2025
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman

To watch the full service, please visit this page (available for three weeks after the date of streaming).

“Prepare the way of the Lord;
make his paths straight.” – Matthew 3:3[1]

It’s easy for us to read passages in the Bible without putting a whole lot of thought toward their context. We read Isaiah’s description of an idyllic world and imagine him speaking during a historic utopia. We look at our Psalm and associate the mentioned king with one of our elected leaders with their term limits and restrictions on power. We see Paul mention the word “scripture” and assume he’s talking about the New Testament as well as the Hebrew Bible. We hear John (or Jesus) proclaim imminence of the Kingdom of Heaven and immediately reinterpret everything he says as applying to some sort of Afterlife. We understand what we see based on either our own experiences or what we’ve been taught.

It’s a natural behavior. However, once we do get a little background on the various situations and settings from which these text arose, it’s important that our perception adjusts accordingly.

Isaiah’s proclamation takes place under very different circumstances than what he presents. Throughout his role as court prophet, Judah was not at peace. The Assyrian Empire was sweeping through the region, devouring every nation in its path on its march to claim mastery over Egypt, the other great empire of the day. The people listening to Isaiah were living in deep fear, constantly hearing of “wars and rumors of wars.”[2] They watched as Assyria consumed the Northern Kingdom of Israel and deported their relatives living there to who knows where.

They experienced the strain and starvation as refugees hiding in Jerusalem throughout multiple sieges of their capital city. Throughout the period, their kings ranged from those the Bible describes as deeply devoted to God to some who were downright evil, including one who actively defiled Solomon’s Temple by introducing foreign deities to it and then, if the stories are true, had an elderly Isaiah sawn in half.

So, that’s the actual context of Isaiah’s vision. The just ruler may have been reflective of a current king, but the likelihood is just as high that he was as much of a dream as the spring revival of the dead stump and predators and prey (which are probably references to Assyria and Judah) living in harmony and peace.

We often miss the context of readings from Romans, as well. In fact, passages throughout the book have been so parsed and dissected and patched back together that the Church has often taken it to say the opposite of its plain message when read as a whole. The passage we read today is particularly telling.

We see “welcome” and assume that Paul is talking about visitors to the church. After all, in our culture, welcome and hospitality are generally reserved for guests. And they are indeed good things to practice. But that isn’t what Paul is talking about.

Paul wrote Romans, in part, to balance out his earlier letter to the Galatians. In that instance, a few Christians from Judea had come a young congregation living in what’s now central Turkey and tried to convince them that if they truly wanted to follow Jesus, they needed to abandon their culture and submit themselves to traditional Hebrew customs—even ones actively offensive to themselves and their neighbors. An openly frustrated Paul tells the Galatian Christians that these people are lying to them, that the Gospel of Jesus transcends languages and ethnicities. It’s okay for them to remain culturally Galatian—God isn’t concerned about morally-neutral external matters. The important thing is to honor God by behaving in love, kindness, and mercy toward their neighbors and one another.

Later, in Rome, we have the opposite situation occurring. In a predominantly non-Jewish community set in the capital of the Roman Empire, Christians there were pressuring people who had grown up under Judean traditions to abandon their past, adopting customs actively offensive to everything that they had ever known or understood. So Paul is essentially turning the tables, using a large portion of the book to tell the Roman Christians to step back for the very same reasons he had emphasized with the Galatian community: these morally-neutral external matters aren’t important. What is important is to treat one another with respect and kindness despite difference. To use modern terminology, forcing people into situations where they experience moral injury is wrong—an antichrist behavior, in fact. Demanding someone violate their conscience and abandon their home culture as proof of their loyalty to “our side” is the opposite of love.

Therefore, when Paul tells the Christian community in Rome to “Welcome one another…just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God,”[3] he’s talking about welcoming other Christians, ones they already knew—of acting with love and kindness not only to those outside the Church but to those inside the Church with whom you may hold significant difference.[4] We aren’t to cut one another off or divide ourselves from one another or isolate ourselves within cliques based on our own ideas of moral superiority. Those who follow Jesus are to “love [even those] neighbors as you love yourself”[5]—an injunction from the Hebrew Bible repeated seven times in the course of six books of the New Testament!

I bring this up occasionally, but this sort of reconciliation and promise to work together wherever possible is the point of the Peace we share during our services! Following its intention, we take that opportunity to find whomever it may be that we dislike or toward whom we hold a grudge to offer them a hand of fellowship—a promise to respect and love one another no matter our differences.

Moving on to our Gospel, what we see with the preaching of John the Baptist is a society obsessed with the End of the World who had recognized the return of one of their greatest legendary prophets. In days that echoed Elijah’s time, with people and rulers disrupting their own society by abandoning the Lord left and right for violent and vengeful deities more reflective of their own cravings, a wildman donning Elijah’s same fashion and roaming the same region emerges to call the people to turn, to come back and rebuild God’s pathways, to change not simply their ideas about how life should be but to renew their hearts and lives by change of both motive and behavior. It isn’t the Lord who’s coming to destroy the people, he tells them—they’re the ones doing that, a forest of trees already chopping themselves down and then burning their own remains to ash. John is calling them to stop, to change, and to find a better pathway, one directed toward God’s Kingdom—one that leads to life and exemplifies Resurrection.

So based on these passages, what can we say Resurrection Life looks like? How can we incorporate the timeless, underlying reality of God’s love, generosity, and mercy into our own lives? How does this power that makes the trials of our world drift toward irrelevance change not only the future but allow us to restructure our present?

First, even in a time of chaos, we adopt the spirit of the Lord—we inhale the healing air of God’s Reign and empower ourselves with the same breath as the noble ruler Isaiah and the Psalm talk about. Expelling the pollution that soils our lungs and clouds our minds, we set ourselves on pathways of wisdom and wonder and respect. We abandon our desire to seek power and curry favor. We bring justice to those whose humanity is being trampled and respond to the voice of the oppressed, embodying both righteousness and faithfulness in all we do.

Next, we do more than hope for an impossible peace. We chose to exemplify it, establishing God’s presence by rejecting harm and violence in any form, washing ourselves in Jesus’ example, and wrapping ourselves in his gift of living love. We praise God not simply with our voices but through our actions and behaviors, fearlessly walking beside one another, knowing that the Creator establishes our differences not to divide or destroy us but so their Gospel presence may spread throughout our community and world, allowing the Holy Spirit to infiltrate and redeem even those places we would never expect it to go.

Finally, we repent—we choose the course of change—turning again and again from pathways of selfishness, greed, and death to those that lead toward God. We cast aside the axe that threatens not only one another but our own selves. Rather than burning with selfish passions, we seek to be consumed within the Lord’s own purity, reforged in love that cleanses us from our individual and collective failings and reborn as true Children of Heaven who can’t help but spread God’s mercy and kindness throughout the world. We stand ourselves up and do more than simply raise a shout in the wild. We step forward—together—entrusting ourselves to one another and committing our own hands and labor as living prophets who

“Prepare the way of the Lord;
[who] make his paths straight.”

[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.

[2] Matthew 26:4 | Mark 13:7

[3] Romans 15:7

[4] It wouldn’t be incorrect to apply this to our national situation as Americans as well.

Sermons

Year A: December 7, 2025 | Advent 2