December 8, 2024
Luke 3.1-6
+ We are now well into this strange and beautiful season of
Advent.
As I’ve said before—and will no doubt say again—I love this
season.
You all know:
(This is a terrible thing for your priest-poet to say, but…)
I’m not a big Christmas fan.
I never have been.
But Advent. . . that is right up my alley.
Prophets and prophecies fulfilled.
God coming to us.
Talk about the end of things.
It’s all so fantastic and yet so compelling.
And just when we think we have it all kind of figured out, who do
we encounter?
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.
Which we talked about last week in my sermon.
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.
And what is that?
We prophesy.
We proclaim.
We assess the situation, and strengthened by what we know is
coming to us, we make a kind of educated guess—inspired by God’s Spirit—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 the paths of God straight.”
We should find ways to prepare for 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 Scriptures.
We slow down and we ponder who it is we are longing for.
And we wait…
As prophets, as fellow seers of the future, we are proclaiming that
moment when the Messiah will come to us.
We know he is coming.
We know his coming is imminent.
But sometimes he seems so agonizingly slow in his coming to us.
One of my favorite
books is called The Forgotten Desert
Mothers.
It is a book about early
Christians who took the words we heard this morning from the Baptist as
literally as they could.
These desert mothers
and fathers have a lot to teach us.
Like, us, they lived
in an age of uncertainty.
Many had suffered
dearly during the persecutions against Christians in the early years of the
Church.
Others had previously
been pagans who lived lives of excess.
It was a time when
nothing in the world seemed stable.
Governments gave way
to stronger governments.
Differing religions
battled each other for what each perceived to be “the truth.”
And so too did many
Christians.
It sounds familiar
doesn’t it?
In the face of all of
this uncertainty, these men and women heard the call of the Baptist. “Prepare
the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
In response they did
something we might find unusual.
We, as modern
Christians, are taught that we must not only live out our faith, but also, in
some way, must proclaim our faith to those around us.
We take seriously the
command to go out into the world and proclaim what we believe.
It is what we do when
we go out to feed the hungry or to tend the sick.
We do it when we
reach out to others in the name of God.
These early
Christians, however, did the exact opposite.
They retreated from
society and went off to the desert, in this case usually the deserts of Egypt
and Palestine.
Oftentimes, coming
from wealthy homes and positions of authority, they sold it all, gave the money
to the poor and went off to live alone.
And we’re not talking
about a few individuals here.
We’re talking about
people leaving in droves.
The deserts were
literally populated with men and women who tried to leave it all behind.
More often than not,
they formed loosely-organized communities, usually around a church, in which
they lived and prayed alone for most of the time, only coming together to pray
the Psalms or celebrate Eucharist.
Their lives in the
desert weren’t, as you can imagine, comfortable lives by any means.
Some walled
themselves up in abandoned tombs.
Others lived in
caves.
One went so far as to
crawl stop a tall pillar and live there for years on end, exposed to the
elements.
Even then they
couldn’t completely escape what they left behind.
Many of the stories
tell of these poor souls being tormented by demons and temptations.
It’s not hard to
imagine that, yes, alone in a dark tomb or cave, one would be forced to face
all the darkest recesses of one’s soul.
Part of the process
of separating one’s self from the world involved finally wrestling with all
those issues one carries into the desert.
Few of us in this day
and age would view this kind of existence as the ideal Christian life.
In fact, most of
would probably look on it as a sort of insanity.
But at the time, in
that place, people began to see this as the ideal.
People, I imagine,
were tired of the day-to-day grind of working, slaving, fending for themselves
in a sometimes unfriendly society.
They felt distant
from God and they were not able to find God in the society in which they lived.
The idea of going off
and being alone with God was very appealing.
Of course, even this
seemingly simple and pure way of living was soon tarnished by another form
excess.
Some of the people
who went off to live in the desert were simply mentally unsound to begin with.
Others went insane
after years of living alone in a tomb or a cave.
They abused their
bodies, sometimes to the point of death, by whipping themselves, by chaining
themselves to walls, by not taking care of themselves physically, or simply
starving themselves to a point close to death.
But despite these
abuses, the message of the desert mothers and fathers to us is still a valid
one.
The whole reason they
went off like they did was to shed everything that separated them from their
waiting for God.
They sought to make
their very lives a living Advent.
They were waiting
expectantly and anxiously for God’s Messiah.
And by mortifying
themselves, by chastising their bodies and fasting, they would be prepared for
his coming again.
Although I hope no
one here is called to a life quite that extreme, I think their message speaks
to us clearly in these days before Christmas.
We should find ways
to prepare for God’s coming to us.
In this season, overwhelmed by all that is happening around us, we
find ourselves reacting in our own ways.
Our own lives can be frightening.
And at times, these moments of expectation are frightening.
But, still, even in these frightening moments, we should remember:
we are prophets.
We can assess the situation—as ugly and bitter as it is—and,
inspired by God’s Spirit, see that there is a positive outcome.
Always.
God’s Messiah is coming.
Yes, not at the speed we want him to come.
But he is coming.
And in that moment, prophets that we are, enlightened by God’s
Spirit as we are, seeing into the dark of the future, we can look forward in hope.
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.
God’s Messiah, the Chosen One, 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 what is that summation?
It is the fact that, in the coming of God’s Messiah “all flesh
shall see the salvation of God” in our midst.
And with that realization, with that actualization, we are lifted
from those waters and from the dark mire and muck of our lives.
And we are restored.
Once and for all time.
S0, do what prophets do.
Rejoice!
Proclaim the way of the Lord!
The Messiah is coming!
God is close at hand!
Rejoice!
Amen.
