Year C
Luke 3:1-6
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
The Gift of Advent
The Advent Season, a very few short weeks on the church calendar is a time of waiting, expecting, hoping, and preparing for Christ’s birth at Christmas and his return at the end of the age. Yet, for most of our culture, these weeks leading up to Christmas are called “the Christmas Season” which is getting longer and longer as the Christmas advertisements and displays in stores are appearing earlier and earlier. For the church, we know the Christmas season doesn’t start until Christmas Day and lasts for 12 days until the Epiphany on January 6. Advent may seem short compared to the secular season of Christmas, yet until Christ returns, we are actually in the longest Advent season.
For centuries, the people of God have been looking forward, waiting and preparing for Christ’s return and John is the one who points forward to that coming. For those who are preparing, he is the one who prepared the way and today, Luke introduces us to John the Baptist. I have to admit he has always been one of my favorite biblical characters of Advent because he definitely interrupts our busy holiday schedules and demands that preparations of a different kind be made.
John demands that we get ready for Jesus by forcing us to examine ourselves and our world before we can welcome the baby Jesus at Christmas and then again one day when this risen Christ returns. Like Jeremiah, Isaiah and Joel, in the style of these Old Testament prophets before him, John challenges us to prepare ourselves and our world with a sense of urgency. This preparation is not easy, but forgiveness will result. Author and theologian Will Willimon says John the Baptist gets introduced into the story of Christmas to keep it from becoming a Hallmark occasion.
He tells of how he tried for a number of years to introduce the figure of John the Baptist into the Christmas pageant. John, whose trail was traced by a spotlight, would bound into the church sanctuary yelling, “Repent, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand! Quite a contrast he says to serene, youthful Mary, quiet Joseph, cute shepherds and angels and every year it was greeted with some chagrin. They tried toning John down a bit until he was dropped altogether from the cast.
He comes to bring an urgency; a crisis at the coming near of God. The last of the Old Testament prophets he straddles the before Christ and the after Christ divide in history. In the days of emperors, rulers, and high priestly appointments, he signals upheaval just around the corner. Though Luke, the gospel writer is not Jewish, he uses a traditional Old Testament image in introducing John: “The Word of God came to John.” This was the hallmark of the OT prophets: that the Word of the Lord came to them. That the word of God came to John “in the wilderness” an unusual setting for his ministry is also significant. For Isaiah, who is quoted in the text today, “in the wilderness” was where the way of the Lord was to be prepared.
For the New Testament writers, “in the wilderness” was where the voice cried out. The voice who names what is crooked and rough, and so provokes crises. Mountains and hills will be made flat, crooked places made straight, rough ways smoothed out. He does not come to establish centers of power to deliver his word from the Lord. He delivers it in the wilderness and people came from all over to hear him preach the word of God. John proclaims that God is about to shake up the current arrangements. He announces salvation as leveling, upsetting and overturning.
Yet, this sense of crisis is not meant to leave us with a sense of catastrophe. Whenever a sense of crisis is spoken as though judgment and doom are the last and final words, the word is not from the Lord. Theologian Karl Barth says, “The “no” to crooked and rough ways is for the sake of making God’s “yes” heard. The coming of salvation exposes our need; our need for forgiveness. Repentance is always a response to the gospel, not a pre-condition of the gospel”. John’s cry of “repentance” points to the mercy of God that alone will guide our feet into the longed-for ways of forgiveness and peace. The scribe Baruch today has a slightly different way of expressing John’s message.
He begins with the command: “Take off the garment of your sorrow, and put on the beauty of the glory from God.” The text is all about the fresh start God gives us. Written by an anonymous author, and possibly dated around the fourth century before the coming of Christ, found in the Apocrypha; which is a collection of writings that are not part of the canon of scripture in the bible but are useful for teaching. He gets the people to admit that they are sinners and in need of God’s forgiveness. Those who are guided by the Lord’s mercy and righteousness he says shall be surrounded by God’s glorious presence and the coming of the Lord Jesus is a bridge to this new reality.
The apostle Paul calls it today from prison “the day of Jesus Christ. Paul looked for the faithful to share in “the day of Jesus Christ” and all its glory. He invoked the grace and peace that come from God as he prays that God will help the Philippian Christians. He prays that their love will overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to determine what is best, so that in the day of Jesus Christ they may be pure and blameless. This prayer of Paul’s for an increase in the community’s love sets the table for the rest of the letter. Agape’ love is the overarching theme and the example of Christ Jesus.
The love we await in Advent is such a love-a love that will overflow and leave us, if not fully blameless at least a bit closer. Advent puts our wait for the day of Christ into clearer perspective. We are reminded of the “nowness” of the day of Christ. Prayer, love, knowledge, and worship, help us prepare and John shows us how to be voices in our day who cry out in the wilderness….”Prepare the way of the Lord”! Turn to God and from sin, seek God’s forgiveness. Get ready for the Messiah. These are hope filled words: words that Paul used to encourage the Philippians and now us about God bringing to completion what God has begun because God is not through with us yet.
In Advent we are given a gift as Scott Gunn writes in Forward Today, “an invitation to return to the Lord, to prepare our hearts and our minds to greet Jesus wherever we meet him. It’s about opening ourselves to be ready to meet him in the sacraments; in the body of Christ, the church, in the scriptures, in those whom serve in his name”. In the baby at Christmas and in the risen Christ who will return one day, so may this be a time of making paths straight and seeking Jesus in hope, love, and peace.