Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

I was about 7 or 8 months pregnant with our first child when I realized why nearly every mother I knew was at least partially neurotic. I had spent 7 months worrying about all of the pregnancy risks: What if I miscarried? What if I fell and hurt the fetus somehow? What if I ate something dangerous? Maybe I’m being exposed to something toxic in the environment!

For those first seven months I had been looking forward to the day the baby was born, because (I figured) then I wouldn’t have to worry anymore. And then it dawned on me: once the baby was born, the worrying would really begin. Goodnesss! What if I drop the infant? What if we have the wrong car-seat? What if the kid eats something they find on the ground? Will I worry the rest of my life? (Yes. I probably would.)

I remember in one panicked moment asking John, “But what if the baby is born with a disability or special needs?  “What would we do then?”

And like the non-panicking type he is, John just pulled me closer and calmly reassured me, “Then we’ll love a baby with a disability, or do the best we can to care for a child with special needs. We’ll do everything we would do for any baby, just love with whatever resource we can, and care for them no matter what they need.”

Today we meet another non-anxious John in the wilderness[i]. “What then should we do?” he’s asked, repeatedly, by those coming to be baptized. John puts aside his viper-identifying warnings of wrath-to-come, and instead repeatedly answers, “Do what you’ve always been instructed to do; bear fruits worthy of this new life you’re seeking. Do you have more than you need? Share with those who have less. Are you responsible for collecting taxes? Take what is owed you. Are you serving for the occupying forces? Do what you’ve been hired to do, and don’t extort more than you’re due. Live honestly, in upright, gracious ways.

It’s not unlike the instructions we give to those bringing their children to be baptized today: practice your faith so that your children may “learn to trust God, proclaim Christ…, care for others and the world God made, and work for justice and peace[ii]”.

John’s response is very consistent: Practice generosity, justice, and contentment[iii]. Live the way you’ve been called to live since the beginning. How remarkably simple and commonplace.

And we? What should we do? It’s a familiar question, isn’t it? I’ve been hearing it a lot; I’ve been asking it a lot: What should we be doing now? What should we do now about immigrants, about trans-kids? about the environment, and people with preexisting health care needs, and people without adequate housing or food?

This unsettled feeling we’ve all been carrying since the election, or maybe we felt this way before then? This unsettled feeling we’ve been carrying since the diagnosis, since the employment termination, since the infidelity and the relationship struggles, since the grades came back, since we realized how deep the depression was, since the move, or was it since the pandemic?

We’ve been carrying around this sense of foreboding for so long, we’re not really sure when it started. Were things less fragile when I was 50? when I was 30? when I was 10? Or have the lives of God’s people been one long Advent of unsettled hopes and fears in a changing world? What if the shaky feeling underneath our feet is not a sign of disaster, but simply a description of a world always changing, always putting the most vulnerable at risk, always calling the faithful to lives of generosity and care?

So we join the crowds to once again ask John, What should we do? “See these stones on this unstable ground?” John responds. God is able to raise up faithful disciples from each one of them. And their task would be no different from yours. Love your neighbor as yourself. Work for justice. Free people who feel locked up in shame or fear.

Yes, things may fall apart. That doesn’t change a thing about the life into which we’re being led. Bear fruit of this new life. Live like children of God.

The instructions sound so —  obvious. But they didn’t come across that way. John’s audience found his message so revolutionary, they began to hope that he was the one for whom they were waiting, that he would inaugurate the coming reign of God. They received his exhortations to live as God expected as good news, and flocked to hear more. Of course, others were less pleased. Calling people to live according to God’s ways    ended up costing John his life.

“The Holy Spirit moves at ground level[iv].” This is how the Episcopal bishop of New York encourages his congregations. In everyday, unglamorous ways, the Spirit empowers churches to serve their neighbors, care for the elderly, visit the lonely, watch out for children, feed the hungry. These grassroots, ordinary ministries are nothing less than holy, the ancient and ongoing work of God. And though we who are called to it are not the messiah, this work does bear the mark of God’s incoming reign.

Pastor Heidi Neumark compares the description to acts of the resistance movement in the 1930s. A tiny congregation in a remote French farming village began encouraging its members to provide shelter and food for Jewish refugees arriving from Eastern Europe. Here, grassroots acts of kindness and justice became acts of courage and defiance. Congregants took in orphans or children whose parents had sent them alone in search of a safe harbor. “Others forged ID and ration cards. Still others helped Jews escape over the Swiss border. The Holy Spirit was moving at ground level,” Neumark writes, “weaving a wide conspiracy of goodness[v].”

Perhaps the ground feels unsettled under our feet because the Spirit is stirring us up from the ground level, spurring us to acts of kindness and generosity, encouraging us to live in faithful response to the good news that will be proclaimed to all the people.

What then should we do? This isn’t just about how to live today, before the Christ is born. This is about how to live the rest of our lives, and the message is the same. Love, regardless of the circumstance. Care as deeply as you can, regardless of the need or merit. Sometimes that love will lead you to heroic acts of resistance. Sometimes it will lead to ordinary gestures of generosity. Regardless. Love.

A few months after that frightened conversation when I was great with child, our baby came, right on time, healthy, strong and ready to change the world. And yes, I have continued to worry ever since. But we’ve loved her as best we could, and have made mistakes along the way, and God worked with us, and she’s making it.

How should we live? By responding to whatever is born into our lives, whatever comes our way, whatever circumstance we face, whatever administration or season or epidemic or outcome, and keep on loving the world in which we live, bearing the fruits of love in all we do, “weaving a wide conspiracy of goodness.”

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

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There is no video recording of today’s sermon.

[i] Luke 3:7-18.

[ii] Evangelical Lutheran Worship, service for Holy Baptism.

[iii] Troftgruben, Troy, “Commentary on Luke 3:7-18,” Working Preacher, December 15, 2024.

Commentary on Luke 3:7-18

[iv] Neumark, Heidi, “Conspiracies of Goodness: What I fear a dystopian future, I hold to stories of everyday resistance,” The Christian Century, November, 2024, pp. 32-33.

[v] Neumark, p. 33.