Advent is a call to undo oppression—and not simply oppression but everything the Bible would call “sin,” all the trials and struggles life imposes on people. For those society has beaten down, Advent is an opportunity to reclaim the dignity inherent to them as true children of God. For those of us who may have forcibly imposed our will on others or inherited certain advantages from generations past, Advent is a time to recognize the mountains and hills on which we stand.

…people in the Bible wouldn’t necessarily think of sin as something someone does. It’s far broader than that. Nor is it as all-encompassing as being something a person inherently is—it’s far less static. In a more collective culture, sin isn’t something evidenced only through the action or inaction of an individual. Sin is more systemic, something that can happen to you, with or without any other person involved.

As Christians, we claim that God already has come. And we all know how that last time went. We were thrilled to finally have God walk among us, until we realized that God wasn’t who we thought he would be. Instead of settling nicely into our expectations, God challenged us to embrace his.

Thanksgiving has been my favorite holiday for pretty much as long as I can remember. I mean, Christmas was great as a kid, what with all the lights and toys and vast overload of stuff. And the Fourth of July was always exciting with the bands and parades and explosions and barbeques. But Thanksgiving has always just been better.

The Apostle Andrew, the saint for whom our church is named, tends to run somewhat under the radar, both in the Bible and the Liturgical Calendar. The formal date for his feast, November 30, always falls within the range of the final Sunday of the Church Year and the first two Sundays of Advent. With those three celebrations formally taking precedent over his festival, we in the United States don’t often recognize an opportunity to enjoy his feast.

Biblical weddings—whether parables or not—are just plain confusing. With our dependance on electricity and reserving venues and RSVPs and strict scheduling, most of us end up searching for clues to understand the what’s and the why’s of weddings in the ancient world. Things that apparently held deep significance for New Testament authors make no sense to us, leaving us lost in regard to what exactly the point is.

The Book of Revelation doesn’t exist to give us secret knowledge or to alert us to signs of “the End;” it isn’t a warning to eventually straighten ourselves out or start getting our lives in order once we notice certain troubling coincidences happening around us. Revelation is a vision of renewal and re-creation, of returning our worship to the one who truly deserves it: “to our God…and to the Lamb.”

Truly loving ourselves has little to do with pampering and coddling or chasing whatever I want to the exclusion of others’ needs. It involves the exact same thing we take for granted in the idea of loving God or loving our neighbors: respect combined with genuine, gentle care for or even a stance of mercy and kindness toward ourselves. And that, more than anything else, may be how we can finally unlock this enigma of the Great Commandment.

This week’s Gospel looks like a pretty straightforward application of the modern concept of the separation of Church and State, the idea that religion needs to settle down in one corner of our lives while politics isolates itself in a different space. It’s a genuinely noble ideal on a governmental level. Unfortunately, on a human level it’s incredibly difficult to keep the distinction between faithfulness to God and moral responsibility toward our neighbor, on the one hand, clear from laws and public expectations on the other.

Jesus’ primary statement about war simply tells us we need not walk in fear: “you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet.” It isn’t a sin to be afraid; fear is one of the gifts God gave humans to help us survive. Fearful as we may be, however, Jesus reminds us that we don’t have to remain helpless in the face of its power. We are people called to turn love into action, and “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”

Even if you might not know each one by heart, chances are you’re at least familiar with the Ten Commandments. First appearing in Exodus as God proclaims them from a fiery blaze atop Mount Sinai and later restated as part of Moses’ final address to Israel before his death, the Ten Commandments have long been a cornerstone of Jewish and Christian tradition.

Jumping to our own day, even though we might know in our heads that the cross was initially a bad thing, it’s hard to associate it with much beyond just being a symbol for Church or Christianity anymore. People wear it almost like a sort of talisman. It hangs not only at the front of congregations like ours but probably from half of the rearview mirrors in the state.

Driving past the University the other night with Shannon, we started talking about whether or not we as Christians are trying to sell something no one really cares about. You’ll hear a lot of pastors and theologians blaming society around us for the change or the rise in religious “Nones,” but I don’t think that’s fair. People are going to be concerned about what they’re concerned about. The real problem seems to be that we as the Church are determined to keep asking and answering questions most of us stopped caring about decades ago.

…most Modern American Christians would summarize [the Gospel] as something like we read this morning, “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved”….But that’s only a minor portion of the overall concept. The Gospel isn’t really about providing relief for guilt or offering a way to go to Heaven when you die. It’s a revolution—a cry of overthrow and victory and liberation.

…we read our cultural ideals onto him, making Jesus the Rugged Individual of American lore—someone confident, knowledgeable, thoroughly capable, completely self-reliant, and utterly focused on accomplishing the task at hand. He’s come to save humanity, and gosh darn it, he’s going to do it—even if Death tries to stand in his way! We use the Transfiguration to prop up our image of an all-knowing, all-powerful God just bubbling beneath the surface of human flesh…

Over the last few weeks our Gospel readings have taken us through the many parables Jesus offers in Matthew 13. We started with the parable of the sower and jumped to Jesus telling the disciples what it meant. Last week we heard the parable of the wheat and the weeds and then, similarly to that first week, skipped a bunch of verses to get to the explanation. This week we’ve popped back to fill in a couple of the stories…

But even after all the reasoning and arguing, in the end there’s simply no way to solve the problem [the Binding of Isaac] presents—no way to explain away the tragedy, because no matter how we try to understand the story or justify motives, there’s no way to erase the trauma inherent to this tale.

Our Gospel passage this week is a challenging one, full of warnings and fear and swords and division. Technically a continuation of last week’s Missionary Discourse—the teachings Matthew records Jesus giving the twelve Apostles before sending them out on their own missions—it feels more like a collection of disconnected sayings than a cohesive set of instructions.

It can be a little tricky knowing where to start when addressing a text written by the Apostle Paul. People have used portions of his letters to defend a variety of positions that most of modern American society finds to be problematic, if not outright offensive. Today it’s his apparent glorification of suffering for suffering’s sake, but that’s probably one of his least controversial ideas.

But what if we could step back for a moment? What if we could turn our ego and pride their heads? What if, instead of approaching the Bible from an aspect of dominance or intellectualism—as a way to paste divine authority onto what we already want to think—we could take a look at it through a more playful lens?