Third Sunday of Advent
Texts: Philippians 4:4-7;
Luke 3:7-18; Zeph 3:14-20
YouTube: https://youtu.be/vjN7VFNH54Y
See also accompanying Sermon Notes
ESCAPING ENEMY MODE WITH JOY
THE GROCERY STORY WAS NEARLY EMPTY when Jim heard metal hit metal. He turned to see a woman in her seventies repeatedly smashing her grocery cart into the cart of a woman half her age. It was the early 2020s — a global pandemic was raging, and enemy mode was spreading more rapidly than COVID-19. The older woman’s shouting was muffled by the mask she wore. The younger woman wore no mask. The younger woman glared silently, but belligerently, at her assailant. A man in his twenties intervened almost instantly. “Get away from her,” he told the older woman. “She is going to get you sick. Stay away from her.”
All three brains were in enemy mode. Because of Jim’s background in neuropsychology, he suspected that a specific brain state was causing a rapid transmission of alienation from person to person. The human brain is a natural amplifier, easily detecting unfriendly signals and returning them with more intensity. Enemy mode feels as if “you are not on my side.” We don’t like people being against us. We don’t like the way enemy mode feels. Suspicion, wariness, and hostility toward others, even those trying to help, follows. Relational joy levels drop drastically.1
That’s the opening two paragraphs from the book Escaping Enemy Mode, by brain scientist Jim Wilder and retired army general Ray Woolridge. The subtitle is How Our Brains Unite or Divide Us. Written from the perspective of brain science one of its key findings is that our brains have evolved to be relational, to facilitate our relationships with fellow human beings. When God in Genesis 2 forms the first human being from the dust of the earth, the first thing God observes is that it is not good for this earth creature, this human being, to be alone. So God creates and equal partner, woman for man. The very story of our creation features this truth about us being made for relationship with each other. Modern brain science now confirms this truth. Our brains have evolved for relationship.
The other thing that catches my eye from the opening to Escaping Enemy Mode is that so-called Enemy is immediately paired with joy. When our brains move into enemy mode, “Relational joy levels drop drastically,” we are told. The Third Sunday in Advent is traditionally known as Jubilate Sunday. The theme is joy. We even mark it with a different color candle, pink. In this season featuring hope, on this thir Sunday we raise up joy.
Our First Reading from Zephaniah opens, “Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!” And our Second Reading from Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.” Later in Escaping Enemy Mode, Wilder and Woolridge simply say, “Joy is relational and built when people are happy to be with us.” We rejoice when we are happy to be together. In other words, one of the reasons we gather here on Sunday mornings — and do things like a Christmas lunch today after the worship — is that we are happy to be together. We are building joy when we do so.
The outlier among our readings from Scripture today is the Gospel Reading. You can’t say that it’s about joy. Not when John the Baptist begins, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” It’s not much to brag about to say that I’ve never begun a sermon, “You brood of vipers!” Why did John? I’ve never done so because I’m called to specific Christian communities who want me to lead them in being together around the positive sense of joy — as a group of friends in Christ who are happy to be together, called to serve in this time and place. John the Baptist, on the other hand, was called to speak to people of his time who are increasingly being drawn into what we might refer to as enemy mode. Their relationships with each other were being coalesced around their common hatred for the Roman Empire, a wrath that would bring them to fight a war with Rome within a generation.
Here’s the thing that I want us to consider this morning. We have evolved, our very brains have been created, such that we are made to be in relationship with one another as human beings. Tragically, the power of sin is the power of division. Sin divides us in our relationships with one another, whereas we are created for the joyful relationships of being happy to work and live together. Enemy mode or joy — that is our basic choice as human beings. United or divided.
Or to get closer to the truth, we might admit to ourselves that the effect of sin is that we unite on the basis of dividing. The Scapegoat Mechanism. To have a scapegoat is to rely on being united against a common enemy. We become united on the basis of who we are divided against. Enemy mode is the state of constantly dividing the world between friends and enemies. To have friends, in enemy mode, is to be against a common enemy.
John the Baptist, and then our Lord Jesus, found themselves at a time and place when enemy mode was increasingly capturing their people, taking over the way they lived their lives. Their common enemy? The Romans and their Jewish collaborators, people like the Jewish tax collectors. Many Jews were also coming to hate their own leaders in Jerusalem, who were forced by Rome to be collaborators or else lose their positions of power. This is who John is speaking to when he opens his sermon, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee the wrath to come?” Amazingly, many in the crowd responded to his words and wanted to know what they could do. John responds by giving them positive ways to build relationships. He counsels everyone to share their clothing and food with those in need. To tax collectors, he tells them, ‘Quit ripping people off.’ To soldiers, ‘Don’t use the threat of violence as a soldier to milk money from people in order to pad your wages.’ These were simple ways to begin escaping enemy mode and to move toward more positive, joyful relationships with fellow human beings.
John the Baptist clearly holds a special place in Christian history since all four Gospels begin with him. Luke tells us that John was Jesus’ cousin. It seems likely that John began as a mentor to Jesus. But the Gospels are also quite clear that, early on, Jesus moved on from John’s mentorship and forged his own way. His ultimate answer as to escaping enemy mode was more drastic than John’s. Yes, like John, Jesus modeled how to make joyful, positive relationships with others around things like sharing clothing and food. He miraculously fed hungry crowds and cured those who were sick, including the most marginalized like lepers. He had a ministry specifically with those who lived on the margins of a culture built on scapegoating. But his ultimate answer for breaking the hold of enemy mode on us was to himself risk being made the Scapegoat. He became the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Who took away the powers of division that keep us locked into enemy mode. How? By not only teaching us to love even our enemies but then living it spectacularly on the cross, trusting in God’s power of love as the power of resurrection, the power of life itself.
As we’ve been saying the past couple weeks, this reveals to us who God truly is. God is not a god of wrath. Wrath names the enemy mode that we human beings get locked into. And then we create our own gods of wrath to justify the wrath we unleash against each other. No, in the cross and resurrection, it is finally revealed to us that God is a God of love, never wrath. In fact, it is God’s love for us, while we in sin were his enemies, that begins to saves us from the wrath we inflict on each other. As St. Paul says in Roman 5,
But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath.2 For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. (Romans 5:8-10)
Brothers and sisters in Christ, we, too, have been born into a time of increasing enemy mode. Our fellow citizens are increasingly locked into clear lines of division against one another. We began with that too familiar scene of who, during COVID, wore masks or didn’t. You could almost predict on that basis who one would vote for in elections. It’s gotten no less divided since then. We could predict pretty well, for example, who you vote for based on which news stations you watch or which social media sites you are drawn to. (By the way, I find myself trying to escape enemy mode by simply watching less news and visiting less social media sites.)
But you and I are called to something different. We come here each week to experience the joy of being happy to work together and serve together — around things like sharing clothing and food with those in need in our community. But it goes further than that, too. It means being specifically welcoming to those who are being made scapegoats with the cultures of division, reaching out to LGBTQ peoples. In the weeks ahead it may mean things like providing sanctuary for immigrants who face the threat of unjust deportation. It means, in short, that we might share in Jesus’ risk of being made the scapegoat ourselves. But we do so in faith and love. We do so with the joy of gathering together as God’s children called to help us all escape enemy mode for the profound joy of serving one another in love. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, December 15, 2024
YouTube: https://youtu.be/vjN7VFNH54Y
Notes
1. Jim Wilder and Ray Woolridge, Escaping Enemy Mode: How Our Brains Unite or Divide Us (Northfield Publishing, 2022), pages 19-20.
2. For more on the word “wrath” in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, see my Webpage “Nuechterlein on the ‘Wrath of God’ in Romans.”
