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| "John Preaching" Mattia Preti (17th Cent.) |
This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah
spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the
way of the Lord, make his path straight.’” (Matthew
3:3)
It’s hard for me to believe, but I’m currently celebrating my twenty-fifth Advent season as pastor of Faith Lutheran of Philadelphia. (Where the heck does the time go?) One of the things I recall about those first Advents was the great Christmas-Versus-Advent-Hymn Debate. Liturgical wonk that I am, I maintain that it isn’t actually Christmas until it’s Christmas. Advent is a time of preparation, so let’s not jump the liturgical gun by singing Christmas songs when we’re not there yet. But, no! Some of the old-timers in the parish balked at the unfamiliar tunes to be appropriately crooned during the season of blue paraments, and insisted that God would not smite us with a bolt of lightning if we sang a chorus of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” or “The First Noel” before the evening of the 24th of December. An argument used in opposition to their pastor’s insistence on seasonal purity was, “Pastor, we always used to sing Christmas songs in Advent, and they always made us feel good.”
Ah. So that’s it. You want to feel good.
That’s not always easy this time of year, is it? You can turn on the radio and hear Burl Ives telling you to have a holly-jolly Christmas, but you may not feel like getting your jingle on. And you may also feel guilty about not “getting into the spirit of the season” like the culture says you’re supposed to. Everything is expensive this year and we’re still smarting from the effects of COVID. Maybe your kids are grown, or you’ve lost a loved one, or you’re dealing with an illness. Maybe stuff just isn’t like it used to be in the good ol’ days.
So you come to church, and the first two gospel lesson for this season turn out to be total bummers. On Advent 1 we’re told that we should keep alert because tribulation is unpredictable. Well, that’s cheery, isn’t it?[i] And on Advent 2 we have that whacky prophet, John the Baptist, telling us to repent, and talking about chaff being burned with unquenchable fire. This may not be the stuff you want to hear right now.
So who is John talking to in our gospel for Advent 2 (Matthew 3:1-12)? He’s got two distinct audiences. He’s ranting at Pharisees and Sadducees whom he likens to poisonous reptiles. These smug, holier-than-thou guys probably came out to the wilderness so they could look down their stuck-up noses at John and declare him to be an outlaw preacher with no credentials. John reams them out for their self-satisfied hypocrisy.
All these centuries later there are still plenty of reasons to call out the folks in power, and plenty of modern-day prophets willing to do it. Al Gore can warn about climate change. Bernie Sanders can declaim the dangers of income inequality. All the Black Lives Matter folks can instruct us on the sin of systemic racism. And the Christian Church as an institution has a responsibility to speak these truths to power.
But…
There’s a second group to whom John preached. They weren’t the rich and the powerful. Some were city folk, but some were just rural peasants. They were just the poor, work-a-day slobs who came out to the wilderness hungering for a word from God in this crazy and painful world. I don’t think John was calling them out.
He was calling them back.
John’s cry to repent was a cry to God’s people to get back to the promise God intended for them. John preached from the wilderness, the place where God’s people were formed after they’d been freed from bondage in Egypt. Matthew characterizes him as the one predicted by Isaiah who will cry, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight.” This is a reminder of God’s people returning to the Promised Land after 70 years of exile in Babylon. Even John’s whimsical apparel and diet harken back to the prophet Elijah, another pretty crazy dude who tried to keep the nation on the straight and narrow during a time of corruption and apostasy a few centuries earlier.
We’re told that people came to be baptized, confessing their sins. Yet the word the Bible uses for “sins” in the Greek isn’t anomia (anomia) which means “wickedness” or “lawlessness.” Matthew says the people were confessing their hamartias (‘amartias), which might be translated as “imperfection,” or just not feeling whole or right. I think John is trying to call these people back to a place of hope and a place where they recall the promise God made to Abraham to bless them so they might be a blessing to others. John awakens in them a longing to be the people they were meant to be, people who could receive and love and follow Jesus as their Messiah.
On this Second Sunday of Advent, let’s let John call us back to our purpose. When I first started seminary, I’d hoped to be a city pastor, one who ministered to an underserved community. Perhaps we are now that community, feeling forgotten or overlooked by the culture. If so, I have good news to tell you: God has not forgotten us. God is still ready to call us back to our purpose of regular prayer, regular worship, care for one another, and purposeful generosity to this neighborhood in which we find ourselves. We have done so much good in the past, but we still have more good to do, more possibilities, more ways to be God’s hands.
God is not finished with us. Knowing that should make us all feel pretty good.
[i]
You know I’m being sarcastic here, right?
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