“Prepare the way of the Lord, make his
paths straight.” (Luke 3:4b)
When I was a grad student at the
University of Wisconsin back in the early ‘80’s I used to see this wild dude
preaching at the Free Speech platform on campus. He was an elderly African
American gentleman with a long white beard like Santa Claus. I have to say, he
was a pretty scary old cat. He dressed in a worn blue choir robe, held an
enormous Bible in his hands, and shouted to the students like a crazed King
Lear. He had this sonorous voice and his eyes would bug out has he preached
Hell and damnation and called on us all to repent.
We all gave him a pretty wide berth.
The preacher we meet on the Second Sunday
of Advent in the Revised Common Lectionary (Luke 3:1-6) seems every bit as
weird and off-putting as the old gent I described above. We know from the
descriptions of John the Baptist in the gospels of Matthew and Mark that he was
not a little bit “out there.” I mean, here’s a guy living in the desert,
dressed in skins, eating bugs, and “crying in the wilderness.” This isn’t your
sophisticated three-point Sunday preacher. He’s a guy proclaiming destruction,
calling people out for their transgressions, and announcing radical change—valleys
filled in and mountains made low.
And crowds don’t avoid him, but, rather,
they come out from their towns and
settlements to hear him preach! What was with this guy? Why listen to John? Why
would the crowds leave their work and come out to listen to this guy and get
dunked in the muddy waters of the Jordan? Would you? If you encountered John,
wouldn’t you cross to the other side of the street and try not to make eye
contact?
Here’s what I think: I think the people
who encountered John were deeply in touch with their own need and their own
pain. They didn’t want to pretend nothing was wrong. They knew life sucked. They were thirsty for a word of hope. Aren’t you?
Or are you still pretending, after the dire warnings of Advent One, that
everything is peachy? Who are you trying to kid?
Every once in a while (and especially
during the holidays when festiveness and gaiety mask our insecurity, our sad
nostalgia, and our mourning) we need John’s tough love. We need to heed the
call to repent. This is a word (metanoia - metanoia in Greek)
which literally means to change the mind. John isn’t asking us to say “I’m bad,
and now I’ll be good (although, if the shoe fits..!). Rather, he’s asking us to
look at ourselves, be honest, and try to see things in a new way. He’s not
promising that the Savior will come and do all the work himself. Granted, God’s
salvation is free as the wind, but if we want to live an authentic life in the
face of everything we have to shovel through on this planet, we’d better start
by looking at ourselves.
Luke places the entrance of John at the
end of a list of potentates and rulers because he wants us to know that God
works through ordinary people like us. It’s not the emperor, the king, the
governor, or the high priest who prepares the way for the Savior. It’s us. The
evangelist Jim Wallis put it like this (I paraphrase): We don’t need a bunch of
elected representatives sticking their wet fingers in the air to see which way
the wind is blowing. We need to change the direction of the wind.[i]
The RCL pairs the story of John with a
reading from the post-exilic prophet Malachi (Malachi 3:1-4). This prophet is calling
for a messenger who will come and get people to worship in purity and
righteousness. He wants the people of God to be refined. This doesn’t mean that we lift our pinky fingers when we
drink form the communion chalice. It means that we approach God’s house and
make an offering of our worship in the right frame of mind. We don’t come out
of obligation or fear or in the hope of being entertained. We come hungry for
God’s word, believing that we are being challenged, and trusting that our
presence as the people of God’s promise has a purpose in the wider world. We
come with a sense of mission. We come for one another. And we come being ready
to change.
So what does this change look like? John
the Baptist has some suggestions, but we’ll get to them next week.
May this Advent season be a blessing in
your heart and inn your home. Thank you or reading!
[i] See
Wallis’ God’s Politics: A New Vision for Faith and Politics in America (San
Francisco: Harper Collins, 2005)
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