The 2nd Sunday of Advent
Scripture Readings:
Hebrew Scriptures – Malachi 3: 1-41
1See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—indeed, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. 2But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?
For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; 3he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the LORD in righteousness. 4Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD as in the days of old and as in former years.
Gospel Lesson – Luke 3: 1-62
1In 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, 2during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. 3He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, 4as 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. 5Every 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; 6and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’"
“Become What You Wait for.”
Jewish tradition is full of wonderful stories, isn’t it? The one of the rabbi looking out his window that I used for the “Words of Meditation” in our bulletin this morning is just one of them.3 Another one is the story of a rabbi welcoming a Christian Confirmation class into his synagogue for a visit. Much to their pastor’s chagrin, however, one of his young flock asks the rabbi, “Is it true that you don’t believe Jesus was the Messiah?” Trying to smooth things over the pastor hastily adds, “The Jews are still waiting for the Messiah.” To which the rabbi responds, “Well, no.” The pastor is a bit surprised, but then the rabbi adds, “We’re not just waiting. We’re preparing.”
What is it that you and I are doing?
Punctuation can not only shift the emphasis of a sentence, it can change its entire meaning. Take, for example, the way that Luke has quoted the prophet Isaiah: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord….’” But if you were to look up that same text in the actual book of Isaiah, you would hear it this way: “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord….’”4 One seems to emphasize “what” to do; the original tells us “where” to do it. Isaiah’s text reminds us that it is precisely in the wildernesses of our lives that you and I are called to “prepare the way of the Lord.” We’re not called to do it from a place of perfection, or from the luxurious vantage point of a mountaintop experience – where everything seems clear, pristine, well-ordered. Instead, it’s in the wilderness, in the uncertain, confusing, and often ambiguous places, in the tensions and turmoils of our everyday lives, that’s where we are called to prepare a sacred way.
This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, one attributed to Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi, where he says: “We must be the change we want to see in the world.” In Luke’s story of the “Feeding of the Five Thousand,” when his disciples wanted to send the hungry mob somewhere else for food, Jesus’ first instruction to his followers was to say to them, “You give them something to eat.”5 Of course they think that’s impossible. There are simply too many people! How does he expect them to feed them all? But then Jesus shows them a way that it can be done.
Are we “making a way” for good to be done, or are we just waiting – standing around, shuffling our weight from one foot to another, and expecting somebody else to do what’s called for?
Where’s this wilderness for you? Could it be the wilderness where children, as well as women and men, are still dying of AIDS? Could it be the wilderness of a church where vigorous debate, parliamentary procedures, and majority votes still keep certain people barred from the sanctuary and church membership? Or might the wilderness be our own personal inner turmoil – a place where doubt, grief, fear, uncertainty or deep sadness keep us in a constant state of wandering? Discover your own wilderness. Define the wilderness of our church or community. It is exactly there that we are being called today.
So let’s go back to the question, “What is it that you and I are doing?” We’re Christians who believe that the Messiah has already come. We claim Advent as a time of preparation to celebrate the Incarnation – the uniqueness of God revealed in Jesus – even while we’re still getting ready for that event to happen at Christmas. But are we preparing or are we just waiting?
We’ve been discussing the nature of “salvation” in our Sunday School class lately, and someone asked “What are we saved from?” Well, from ourselves, the church would say. But I find that a much more helpful way of asking that question is to ask “What are we saved for?” In these weeks of waiting that are Advent, for what or for whom are we preparing? After all, we would prepare very differently for a dinner party than we would for reconciliation with our enemies.
You’ll forgive this former teacher of English when I suggest that something more than just shifting punctuation is going on here in our scripture lessons. The derivation of the word “prepare” is, well, illuminating. Not only does it point us to the expected Latin parare – to bring order, to get ready – but it also refers us to parere – to bear or bring about. Preparation doesn’t just have to do with getting ready for a birth; it has to do with the very act of giving birth itself, with bringing into the world something that’s never been there before: something new. But then yet another question comes to me: Does giving birth at Christmastime have anything to do with the elusive ways in which we experience the Holy?
If we’re not careful at this point we’ll simply revive those same nostalgic images of an infant Jesus in the manger, surrounded by animals, choirs of angels and even the parents whose heads are surrounded by haloes. We can cling to our commonly held assumption that this Advent season has to do only with preparation for the birth of Jesus. But as heartwarming as this event has proved to be over the centuries, it has already happened! It’s over! If we insist upon keeping Jesus in the manger, if we’re forever escaping into those pictures from our collective past, we will lose the power and the challenge of these words of John the Baptist made to us now. We’ll find ourselves walking right on by the fundamental nature of the work to which both he and Jesus call us.
There’s another key word in John’s proclamation; it’s “repent” – take another look, turn around, things aren’t what they were meant to be. That delightfully evil character, Fagin, in the musical Oliver has it right when he anxiously muses to himself, “I think I better think that through again!” Paths have to be made straight; whole mountain ranges have to be leveled; and the deep valleys nearby filled again. Whatever we find that we’re supposed to be doing or being in this process of giving birth, it involves a radical upheaval of “the way things have always been.” The world as we know it has been turned upside down by the coming of this Jesus.
So what?
Well, if we were to ponder, like Mary, how to put all of this together we might just come to the startling realization that the birth for which we’re called to prepare in this Advent season is our own. I invite you to consider that as God planted something of the divine in Mary, God has planted that same seed in each one of us. Our life’s work, then, is to carry that seed to its fruition, to help it grow, blossom and become fruitful – that we too become the human beings God intended us to be from the very beginning. We have got to become the very thing we’ve all been waiting for all these years.
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1 The book of Malachi was composed sometime during the early to middle part of the fifth century BCE, a time just after the rebuilding of the temple and a religious reformation led by Nehemiah and Ezra. Scholars don’t agree on whether “Malachi” is actually the name of the prophet or simply a reference to an anonymous mal’aki – which literally means “my messenger” (i.e., the messenger of the Lord). Either way, by Malachi’s time the fervor of spiritual renewal had gone out of the people, giving way to loose morality – especially among the temple priesthood who (according to this prophet) had profaned the sacrificial rites and perverted religious instruction. Sound familiar?
2 Luke quotes a passage from Isaiah, here, which describes the return of the exiles from Babylon, their God in the lead traveling over roads in the desert prepared for an “anointed one” (literally, the “messiah” or “Christ”). Their salvation (that all would see, oddly enough), would come, not from one of their own, but through rescue by the Persian king, Cyrus.
But first comes a dating of the appearance of the Baptist: Tiberius was the Caesar from the years 14 to 37 BCE, succeeding Augustus Octavian; Pilate’s dates as the prefect of Judea are 26 to 36; Herod Philip (half-brother of Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great and Cleopatra of Jerusalem) dates from the years 4 to 34 – he was tetrarch over a region north and east of the Jordan that included the two small territories that our gospel reading names; and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, a small region northwest of Damascus. This sequence – from the most powerful head of state to a petty officeholder – gives an eloquent context for what is to follow.
3 That story is of a rabbi who would look longingly and intently out of his window each morning, only to pull his head back in sadly and announce, “He hasn’t come yet.” Presumably he was talking about the long-awaited messiah. The next time that we bemoan the state of the world, though, let’s ask ourselves, “Are we doing our share of the preparing, or are we just waiting?”
4 Luke 3: 4b and Isaiah 40: 3, respectively.
5 Luke 9: 13a.