Luke 3.1-6
+ Today is a special
day. December 6, I mean. It’s been a very important day in the history of the
church. For some reason, we, as Episcopalians, have somewhat lost the
importance of this day. But I think we can regain our respect of this day.
Today is the feast day of
St. Nicholas. Yes, that, St. Nicholas. I know exactly what images are going
through your head right now. Jolly St. Nick, all roly poly, decked out in his
red, fur-lined outfit. OK. I’ll give you that.
But that’s not what St.
Nicholas was at all. In fact, St. Nicholas was a very important saint in the
church, a very important person in the history of the church. And he is one of
the most appropriate saints to be commemorating during the Season of Advent. A
lot of people don’t know this, but he was a Bishop who, the story, once slapped
the heretical priest, Arius across the face at the Council of Nicaea because
Arius denied Jesus’ divinity.
I’m happy I’ve never had a
bishop slap me across the face.
But, despite that outburst,
he was also known for his almost radical kindness. He provided grain to starving
people in his diocese during a famine, he rescued women from slavery, he saved
sailors from storms at sea and he saved innocent people from being executed. He also tossed gold into poor people’s houses,
which sometimes landed in their shoes. And it’s from this we get the idea of
Santa Claus delivering presents to people who have been good.
But, St. Nicholas was a
rebel. He stood up for what he believed was right, even when it was unpopular. He
was a real example of radical Christianity. And he’s a good model for all of us, as a good
saint should be.
Today, in our Gospel
reading, we also encounter another person kind of like St. Nicholas. A
firebrand. Someone who said and did things that made him unpopular. A prophet. One of the great and one of the
last official prophets. In this morning’s Gospel, we are faced with the
formidable figure of John the Baptist.
I used to not like John the
Baptist. He always seemed kind of frightening to me. He was kind of crazy,
after all. But over the years I’ve really come to like John the Baptist. He is
actually an incredible saint. And someone very important to the story of Jesus.
Certainly it would be
difficult for any of us to take the words of a man like this seriously. Especially when he’s saying things like,
“prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” How could WE do any such thing? How do we make pathways straight? Somehow, in the way John the Baptist proclaims
it, this is not so much hopeful as frightening. It is a message that startles us and jolts us
at our very core.
But this—whether we like
it or not—is the true message of Advent. Like John the Baptist and those who eagerly
awaited the Messiah, this time of waiting was almost painful. When we look at it from that perspective, we
see that maybe John isn’t being quite as difficult and windy as we initially
thought. Rather his message is one of
almost excruciating expectation.
For us, as followers of
Jesus, we too are living with this excruciating expectation. But our expectation is not something we do
complacently. We don’t just sit here and
twiddle our thumbs in our patient waiting. Rather, in our expectation we do what John the
Baptist and other prophets did.
We prophesy. We proclaim. We assess the situation, and strengthened by
what we know is coming to us, we make a guess at how it will all turn out. And
we profess and proclaim that message. Our job as prophets is to echo the cry of
the Baptist:
“Prepare the way of the
Lord, make his paths straight.”
We should find ways to
prepare for the Incarnate God’s coming to us. We do it in many ways during
Advent. We light the candles of the Advent wreath. We listen to the message of
the prophets from the Hebrew Bible. We slow down and we ponder who it is we are
longing for. And we wait…
As prophets, as fellow
seers of the future, of that moment when the Messiah will come to us, the most
common prayer we seem to pray during this Advent season is:
Lord Jesus, come quickly.
But it is also the perfect
summation of this Advent season.
Lord Jesus, quickly come.
It is the prayer we should
all be praying as we prepare the way of the Lord. It should be the prayer that
is on our lips constantly in these days before Christmas. We know he is coming.
We know his coming is imminent. But sometimes he seems so agonizingly slow in his
coming to us. In our impatience and our expectation, we cry out:
“Lord Jesus, come
quickly.”
Sort of like those
Christmas stories we always see or hear or share every year—like Dickens or
“The Christmas Story” or the “Charlie Brown Christmas”—your weird priest often
shares another story around the feast of St. Nicholas. It was on this day—December 6—140 years ago, in
1875, that a German passenger steamer, The
Deutschland, on its way from Bremerhaven to New York, ran aground in a
blizzard on a sandy shoal in the Thames estuary near Harwich, England. After
several hours of being trapped there, early on the morning of December 7 the
ship began to take on water and the captain ordered the ship to be abandoned. The
passengers panicked and people began falling into the freezing water. Among the
several hundred who died were five Franciscan nuns who were fleeing the
anti-Catholic sentiments that were sweeping Germany at the time under Otto von
Bismarck. All five nuns died in those waters. That shipwreck, of course,
inspired one of the greatest poems written in the English language—“The Wreck
of The Deutschland” by the poet and Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
This is a poem I find
myself reading again and again in my life, especially at this time of the year.
And the lines from that poem that I find myself reciting around this time of
the year are these. On that day in 1875, as those nuns floundered in the water,
they were heard crying out one prayer. As Hopkins puts it in his poem:
“And they the prey of the
gales;
She the black-about air,
to the breaker, the thickly
Falling flakes, to the
throng that catches and quails
Was calling ‘O Christ,
Christ, come quickly’:
The cross to her she calls
Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best.”
Those lines haunt me. For me, personally, many times in my life, I
have quoted those lines. When the waters of my life have risen about me, I have
remembered those lines from Hopkins.
To some extent, our Advent
is much like the freezing waters that rise about this poor nun in Hopkin’s
poem. In this season, overwhelmed by all that is happening around us, we too
might find ourselves crying out as that sister did in those freezing waters. Both places are frightening. Those freezing waters are frightening. And our own lives can be frightening. And at times, these moments of expectation are
frightening.
But, still, even in these
frightening moments, we are prophets. We
can assess the situation—as ugly and bitter as it is—and see that there is a
positive outcome. Always.
Jesus is coming. Yes, not
at the speed we want him to come. But he
is coming. And in that moment, prophets
that we are, seeing into the dark of the future, we too can say,
“Even so, Lord, Jesus,
come quickly.”
Or in the words of the
drowning nun on The Deutschland,
“O Christ, Christ, come
quickly”
In it, we find our hope
and our longing articulated. We, the prophets, find that we can now see the
goal for which we are working. We can look into the gloom, into the frightening
future and see that all is not lost.
He is coming. He is coming
to us. He is coming to us in this place in which we seem sometimes to flounder.
He comes to us in these moments when we feel overwhelmed. He comes to us in
those moments when it seems we have lost. He comes to us in our defeat. And
when he does, even in those moments, we know.Truly the summation of our
prophecies is upon us. And that summation?
It is the fact that, in
his coming “all flesh shall see the salvation of God” in our midst. And with
that realization, with that actualization, we are listed from those waters and
from mire and muck of our lives, and we restored.
Even so, Lord Jesus, come
quickly!
Amen.
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