By Reverend Laurie DeMott

"Only OK?" I asked.

"Well, the service was nice enough," she explained, "and the music was good but the minister's sermon was all about poverty and injustice. You know, I just don't want to hear about all of that at Christmas."

Now, my mother was a life long worker for justice and poverty issues. She helped her church start a Boy's Club for inner city boys in jeopardy, frequently volunteered at their local soup kitchen, and throughout her life opened her own doors to people in difficult circumstances. In fact, her comment was not born out of a disregard for the plight of the unfortunate, but was prompted instead by her very immersion in such issues. My mother had not gone to church that Christmas Eve needing to learn more about what the world was like -- she knew all too well what the world is like -- what she wanted to hear at Christmas was how the world might be.

G.K. Chesterton, a Christian thinker who also wrote stories for children said, "[My stories] do not tell children dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. [My stories] tell children the dragons can be beaten."

We look to the proclamation of Christ's entry into our world to assure us that there is a power out there that can truly defeat the dragons of our world. We want to know -- we need to know -- that the forces we battle which feel so persistent and threatening -- poverty, hunger, oppression, war, injustice -- will have an end one day. We need to know that the world as it is right now is not all that there is to life, but that peace can be a reality, safety and security can be a reality, love and happiness and joy can and will be our reality.

So too, the people living during the time of the prophet Malachi felt that they were battling dragons and they needed a word of hope. They had returned from their exile in Babylon to find their homeland ruined by war: their cities were reduced to piles of rubble and the fields had been salted by their enemy and were unable to grow crops. As they struggled to restore their society, a great gap grew between the small number of wealthy elite who figured out how to exploit the circumstances, and the poor who became their victims. Sound familiar? The people cried out, "Where is the God of justice? If you are a God of justice and righteousness," they complained in their prayers, "then why does everything seem so unjust and so not right? Tell us these dragons can be defeated."

The prophet Malachi heard the people's groaning and he announced, "The Lord you seek is returning to the Temple," but before the people could get too excited about this good news, Malachi added, "and the day of the Lord's coming will be a day of fire and judgment. You complain about dragons out there -- look to yourselves," he warned, "because you are the dragons."

Many centuries later, John the Baptist would echo the prophets' words. "Prepare the way of the Lord," he declared, and when the people asked how they should prepare, he answered, "Bear fruits in keeping with repentence."

The people were hoping for the good news of God's intervention and what they received instead was a warning to repent, to look to their own culpability and responsibility. When we are struggling every day to battle forces that feel overwhelming, we don't like to be told that we might be contributing to the very problem that plagues us, but both Malachi and John the Baptist knew that self-reflection and repentence is a necessary first step in dragon fighting because without it, we could easily become self-righteous in our arrogance, or self-pitying in our sense of victimization. We are all too ready to blame our misery on other people or on the stars aligned against us, rather than take responsibility for the hand we have had in creating the very circumstances we rail against.

There is a website called "Stop the Hunger" which is dedicated to eliminating world hunger, and the website notes that it would take 22 million dollars to feed all of the hungry people in the world for just one day. That seems like a lot of money: 22 million dollars a day to cure the hunger of our world? In fact, it feels like a God sized amount of money, something that would require a miracle to find, but before we cry out, "Lord, come and save us from this dragon," we should let our eyes travel down that web page a little farther until we come to the statistic that tells us that in the United States alone we spend 65 million dollars a day on weight loss programs and products. While people around the world go hungry, we are spending our money on trying to eat less. In fact, 78% of all malnourished children live in countries who regularly experience food surpluses.

Carlyle Marney, a preaching professor and pastor said that during the civil rights era, he stopped praying that God integrate the southern churches because he realized that all it would take to integrate the churches was a majority vote in each congregation. "I could not pray for God to do something that we could do on our own if we were really committed to the gospel," he explained to his students.

Whether it be the global issues of hunger, poverty, or environmental decay, or personal issues of conflict with others or marital discord, the first step in battling dragons is to ask ourselves whether we are the dragons, and if the answer is "yes" -- even if the answer is a reluctant, "OK, maybe" -- we need to get down on our knees and repent. Pray for God to change us before we ride off determined to weild our blame against the rest of the world.

During Advent, John the Baptist challenges us to have the courage to inspect our own behavior and repent of our contribution to the world's misery or even our own unhappiness, but his proclamation of repentence was not intended to be the final word to us. After self-reflection, after repentence, we will rise from our knees knowing that there are still dragons out there which are not of our doing. Sometimes we are the undeserving recipients of other people's cruelty. Some injustices are so entrenched that one person may be powerless against them. Illness and economic downturns are indiscriminate in their choice of victims. Not every dragon we battle in society or in our own life is of our own making. We hear the promise that God is a God of justice and righteousness, yet even after we have repented for our own failings, we look around and know all too deeply that we are still in need of salvation from the powers that lie beyond our control. How then shall we be saved?

At Christmas, we pray for God to make the world anew into a place of peace and joy. We look for God to come and miraculously sweep away the evil from our world and make everything right but the stories of the Bible warn us that human sin is stubbornly persistent. God tried to wash away evil in a flood and sin came roaring back; God tried to burn it away in fire and sin refused to be quenched. No matter how many times God purified creation, human sin went and messed it all up again. And so in Christ, God did a new thing -- instead of wiping out the sin, God stepped into the breach between us and injustice, between us and evil, between us and cruelty and oppression and suffering. In Christ, God entered into our world of sin so that sin, though still out there, may no longer have the power to defeat us because we are enfolded within the embrace of Christ.

F. B. Meyer said, "Unbelief puts our circumstances between us and God. Faith puts God between us and our circumstances."

Or in the words of St. Patrick, "Christ to shield me today...
Christ with me, Christ before me,
Christ behind me, Christ within me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise."

"Prepare the way of the Lord," John the Baptist declared. "Kneel down in repentence, asking forgiveness for your sins, and then arise into the embrace of the one who will keep you in wholeness, even as the world does its worst, for in him you shall be saved."