Luke 3:1-6 The Proclamation of John the Baptist
In
the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was
governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler
of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during
the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of
Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan,
proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is
written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,
‘The voice of one
crying out in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths
straight.
Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall
be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made
smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” ’
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The Coming of Christ – Lessons from the Wilderness
By Rev. Connie Frierson
There’s
a story of a woman who was Christmas shopping with her two children. It was in
the midst of all the crowded stores, for hours she looked at row after row of
toys and heard both her children asking for everything they saw. They had their
coats on because it was cold outside. But in the mall they were too hot and
sweating. So the mom ended up wearing her coat and melting and carrying the kid’s
coats and the bags of presents. She
finally made it to the elevator with her two kids.
She was feeling what so
many of us feel during the holiday season time of the year: overwhelming
pressure to go to every party, every housewarming, taste all the holiday food
and treats, getting that perfect gift for every single person on our shopping
list even the curmudgeon uncle who never get the gift he really want. Finally
the elevator doors opened and there was already a crowd in the car. She pushed
her way into the car and dragged her two kids in with her and all her
purchases. When the doors closed, she couldn’t take it anymore and stated, “Whoever
started this whole Christmas thing should be shot.”
From the back of the car
everyone heard a quiet calm voice respond, “Don’t worry, we already crucified
him.” For the rest of the trip down the elevator it was so quiet you could have
heard a pin drop. I guess our
question is who feels like that woman in the elevator? But the bigger question
is how do we receive Christ instead of crucifying him?
I
always want to get really specific in my problem solving for this poor
overburdened mom. I want her to
“Just say No.” to lots of traditions that aren’t meaningful to her. I want to
suggest she pair down the buying and to shop on line for the things on that
more manageable list. I want her to not shop hungry and to get some protein
instead of five Christmas cookies for breakfast. But all that advice is a band-aid
on the bigger problem. How do we
receive Christ instead of crucify him? Our passage from the Gospel of Luke is
an antidote to that cramped sweaty confinement of too much, stuff, too many
tasks and too many thoughts racing. Here is the key. Go into the wilderness and
straighten out our road for God to come in. Make some room. “Oh gosh,” the woman in the
elevator wails, “I just don’t have time for that now.” Ah but you, who are worshiping, are here
now. So let’s look at what Luke is saying about how we prepare to receive God.
John,
the Baptist, is a wild man in the wilderness. I don’t want to sound like the Sierra Club but maybe we need
a little more wildernesses in our life. What is the wilderness? Is it undiscovered and unmapped
territory? Is it open spaces with
not much in it so we can see Christ coming from a long way off? Is it a time of
trial and hardship and suffering?
Is it a place to think? Or is it a place to feel? Or is it both? I think
the answer is yes, yes, yes and yes.
Whatever is happening in your life there is some wilderness space in
there with a voice crying out, Prepare A Way for Christ. In Advent we
prepare to receive Christ, so let’s start out being in the wilderness. In order to move forward you need
to know, acknowledge and honor where you are. So one of the steps of preparing
for Christ might be to name the wilderness. Name the place that feels like a
harsh and barren place. My wilderness could be called The Forest of Too Much Stuff.
My wilderness is The Desert of Grief and Loss. My wilderness is Illness, or Job
Loss. My wilderness is the Rocky Ground of Marital Problems or Troubled Kids. Put this place on the map and say,
Christ is coming here.
But
if you are in and naming your particular wilderness, go there with God’s
Promises echoing in your ear and heart. ‘I will not leave you nor forsake you.”(Hebrews
13:5) “Nothing can separate you from the love of God.” (Romans 8:38) Christ
says, “I will abide in you and you in me.” (John 15:4) The Psalmist writes, “If you arise up to
heaven, I am there, if you descend into Sheol, I am there.” (Psalm 139:8) So
can’t Christ come into that wilderness of yours, the Christ who went into the
wilderness himself and knows it so well?
John
the Baptist gives us another step in Christ coming. John fulfills the Isaiah
prophecy, a voice calling in the wilderness “Prepare the way of the
Lord, make his paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled, and every
mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” There is some road building
to do in order to receive Christ. And from the sound of things this isn’t a
little cow path, this road is a superhighway, with monumental earth moving. How
are we supposed to do that in our little cluttered, overburdened lives? Is this project just too much for us,
especially in the holidays? Well,
think of the cost of not building this road. Infrastructure is important. But no one wants to spend time
or money on it. Until the Romans
road building wasn’t always a high priority in subsistence societies. We
peasants can be pretty content to live in our isolated, insular hollers. But if
something really important is happening, like the coming of a King then get out
the wheelbarrows and start moving some rocks. We need to get a road built. Spiritually speaking what is
this road we are to prepare for God? John preached and baptized repentance. Repentance
builds a road to prepare for Christ’s coming.
C.S. Lewis describes the
unrepentant condition as being in a "hole" where we need the help of
a friend (i.e., a savior) to get us out. And what sort of pothole is it we've
gotten ourselves into? It's behaving as if we belonged to ourselves. We are not
simply imperfect creatures who need improvement; we are rebels who must lay
down our arms. "Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry,
realizing that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life
over again from the ground floor -- that is the only way out of a 'hole,'"
says Lewis.[i]
And this process of surrender is what we call repentance (the underlying Greek
word means "changing the mind" or "turning around"), and
it's what John was calling for in his prophetic preaching. But too often we
don’t want a boost and a hand out of our hole. What we want is someone to come down into whatever hole we
have made of our lives and help us move the furniture around so that the hole
is more comfortable. A throw pillow here and there and a few sticks of
furniture and we are cozy. But God
wants us to have a life and a view that is flooded with light. God wants us to have a room with a
view, a window that looks with a long and wise perspective. So Jesus came to give
us that leg out of the hole; not to redecorate our cave.
Lewis
adds this important note: "... this repentance ... is not something God
demands of you before he will take you back and which he could let you off if
he chose: it is simply a description of what going back to him is like." We
get all mixed up. We think we need
to engage in some humiliating debasement and then God will love us. But nothing could be farther from the
truth. God’s love precedes that
lift out of our holes. God’s love
is the thing that first gets us looking and wondering if God doesn’t have a
better way to live.
The
writer Kathleen Norris gives us another way to understand repentance. [ii] She
tells of working as an artist-in-residence at a parochial school and telling
children something about the psalms. The kids are often astonished to discover
that the psalmists expressed the more unacceptable emotions like sadness and
anger, even anger at God. She says that because the children know what it's
like to be small in a world designed for big people. They identify quite
readily with the psalmists, and often do quite well when she invites them to
write their own psalms. She tells of one boy who wrote a poem/psalm called "The
Monster Who Was Sorry." He began by admitting that he hated it when his
father yelled at him, and in the poem, he pictures himself responding by
throwing his sister down the stairs, wrecking his room and then wrecking the
whole town. The poem ends with, "Then I sit in my messy house and say to
myself, 'I shouldn't have done that.'" Norris concludes her account of
this boy's poem by referring to the fourth-century monks who guided beginners
in the faith and suggesting that those monks would have told this boy
"that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after
all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean
it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?"
This
reminds me so much of when my children were little and we needed to clean up
the living room strewn with toys, Lego’s and cars and trucks everywhere. The job was too big for little ones. But we would get a basket. And I would
get down on the floor with the boys and show how you scoop up the toys and
start the clean up.
Then
they would start to clear a small part and together we would clean up the mess.
Repentance is like that. God comes beside us and small piece by small piece
helps us clean up.
Perhaps
there is one last help in our scripture today. Our passage starts off with some
really specific names that give us specific dates, rulers and powers both
political and religious. When we hear, “In the 15th year of the
Emperor Tiberius Augustus, when Pontius Pilate was governor, Annas and Caiaphas
were high priests.” We hear a deep sonorous voice, slightly boring and from a
time far, far away. But to the first readers of the gospel it was a time they
knew and names they heard of. The start of Jesus ministry was in a really
specific time and place. What if
Jesus wants to break into your calendar time? What if we got as specific in our
reception of the Christ as our passage from Luke? What if we said Jesus is here
in 2012, Dec. 9th, Zelienople, PA, third pew from the front, 3
½ hours before the Steeler's game. Jesus comes now into my particular life, with
my particular problems, my particular gifts, my particular joys and sorrows, my
particular family. Christ is following my wilderness map. Christ coming
now. Wahoo! Here! Does this
immediacy and particularity matter?
Does it make a difference?
It does to me. This is the
coming of Christ that we celebrate on Christmas, but it has the transcendence
of the now. Now everything I do
changes. And I can look at the
everything and everybody else and see how that changes too. Christ comes now for me and for the
person beside me and for the church down the block and for people in the mall
and across neighborhoods and countries and boundaries. Now Christ is in the
now. Christ came, Christ comes
now, Christ will come ever more and more.
In
your pews there are little cards that mimic our passage here today. This is
your homework like the children who wrote their own Psalms. The key to letting
Christ come now is to be intentional and specific. So write your own Gospel of Jesus coming to you. Christ
came, Christ comes now, Christ will come ever more and more.
Amen.
In
the fourth year of the administration of Barack Obama, when Tom Corbett was
governor of Pennsylvania and Luke Ravenstahl was mayor of Pittsburgh, Ben Roethlisberger
was quarterback for the Steelers but Charlie Batch had played a good game.
The
WORD OF GOD came to __________________________in the wilderness of Butler
County.
Prepare
the way. Make the roads straight and smooth.
Meet
Christ.
Name
your wilderness ___________________
How
will you build a road for Christ._______________
