In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius
Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee… 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.'"
Luke
3:1-6
In
June I moved back to my home state of Missouri from Phoenix, Arizona. There the summer temperatures force people to
stay inside like the winter temperatures do here in the Midwest. In the desert the swimming pool is a favorite
place to relax at the end of a summer day as the sun is fading. During my 16 years in Arizona I entered
ministry and helped start a new church. There
was a young family in the congregation who had just built and moved into a new
home where they hosted a gathering of people from the church. They were a family of six, the youngest of
whom were two energetic little brothers.
Earlier that week workers had come to dig their swimming pool. The boys’ eyes nearly popped out when they
looked out the window and saw an enormous pile of dirt in the back yard! Almost nothing excites a little boy more than
a big pile of dirt. Dad’s eyes got
nearly as big as theirs imagining the ways he could use that pile of dirt for
landscaping in the front yard. So dad
went out with shovel in hand and filled a couple of wheelbarrows full of that
dirt with his usual degree of resolve. The boys were out the door right behind
him, not wanting to miss one bit of the excitement. Before long he sent the
boys back into the house and took off for a while, returning with a rented
Bobcat. A job this size called for a
much bigger shovel. Almost nothing excites
a boy or his dad like a big pile of dirt begging to be moved, except perhaps
the sight of heavy equipment that can handle the job.
John
the eccentric Baptizer was excited by prospects for the landscape of his day,
too. He could see some changes that
needed to be made. He was specifically
talking about the social landscape in which some had all the power and others
had none, some prospered and others suffered.
In today’s lesson, John talks about moving dirt, leveling the ground, to
make a highway for the God of Israel to travel on. John is advocating for justice… God’s justice,
which is not retribution (getting even), not entirely restorative (putting
things back as they were before), but distributive (enough for everyone).
The
passage above refers to Isaiah 40:3-5 (A
voice cries out: “In the wilderness
prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”)
In those days every tribe of people had its own gods. There was an ancient Babylonian tradition of
building highways for festival parades celebrating the gods of Babylon. The Israelites would have witnessed this
highway construction while they were held captive in Babylon. Isaiah says that it is time to build a
highway for displaying Israel’s God, for all people everywhere to see. Luke is of course intending for us to
understand the road construction image metaphorically. Just how directly do
these ancient truths apply? Take a
minute to “look out your window” at our social landscape today. Where do we see excesses to shave off and
where are the valleys we need to fill up in order to make the rough places
smooth in our world… to build a road for God to travel on?
It
is fascinating that again in the second week of Advent we are learning that
there are things we must do to prepare for God to come. All this time we have operated on the
assumption that when things get bad enough God will intervene, and God will
make the way straight and level things out.
The prophets Isaiah and John are telling us that changing the landscape
is our job. We have to make an opening,
a way in the world for God to enter.
Luke
has an interesting way of describing John’s style of baptism, “a baptism of
repentence for forgiveness.” We could
easily get caught up in the question of which came first – repentance or
forgiveness. But I suspect that would
miss John’s point. What if they are two parts
of the same event? …Not a cause followed
by effect, just change that IS repair, restoration, and reconciliation (which
is what happens when there’s forgiveness).
When God forgives us, or we forgive each other, things are put back as
they should be, as God designed things.
That might just be the definition of true transformation. The Greek (Luke’s native language) word for
repentance was metanoia--to radically change one's mind, to think differently. John preached metanoia for the forgiveness of
sins, which is repair, restoration and reconciliation. The Jews believed that in the instant that they
repented they were forgiven by God. John
told the people to "bear fruits worthy of repentance." If you truly have changed your way of
thinking, your behavior will reflect it.
In
all honesty, I believe it’s not an either/or proposition. The prophets are
pointing us toward a partnership between
God and us. Their point is that we
cannot be passive recipients of this amazing grace God offers. We are required to DO SOMETHING. Today, what
landscape needs some work? Wait! What if
we are the landscape? What if your life and my life are the highways
upon which God is paraded? What if the
world will only be able to see the God we know by how we live? That, my friends, is precisely where the landscaping
needs to begin.
It
is easier to keep this discussion in the political arena where we can argue
about it and throw a little mud and dig in our heels, and find plenty of others
to blame and hold responsible for the problems that surround us. It is easier to find our scapegoats in the
worlds of commerce or law. It is easier
to look outside ourselves for blame-placing, isn’t it? Let’s get them to change. Or maybe we
could just talk about it with our like-minded friends, punctuating our sentences
with exclamation marks, spending a lot of energy pontificating, and walk away
from the conversation tired from all the talking, and convinced that we’ve settled
the matter once and for all.
The
landscaping has to start somewhere, and Isaiah and John say it starts with us.
You and I must be willing to tear down the high and mighty places in our lives
and level things enough for God to be seen in us. We can
become the highway for our God. And
then while we do our own personal roadwork, I truly do believe we must be
willing to step out in humble faith and make the rough places smooth in our
neighborhoods, our churches, our schools and our wider community. We are going to have to live differently if
we want to see a difference.
A
pile of dirt is one thing, but if you’re facing a mountain, a little shovel
won't do. Sometimes a Bobcat isn’t even
enough. Sometimes the unevenness in our living
is just too rough to level with a shovel and a wheelbarrow, and what we need is
a radically new way of thinking… John
the Baptist had a word for it… metanoia.
Change your mind – your way of thinking.
Repent. Turn another way, in a
new direction. For forgiveness. As soon as you change your ways, God forgives,
reconciliation begins.
Repent
from your urge to dominate the partner, friend or lover in your relationship
(i.e. needing to win every argument… even the impulse to argue.) Change your way of thinking. Families and friends, Repent! Repent from doing business in a way that
turns a profit or saves money at the expense of people, and at the expense of
your integrity. Businesses, Repent! Think in a whole new way about where God
would have you place the greater value.
Repent
from greed. Start thinking instead about
how much of anything you really need. A
favorite memory of my dear friend Ellen is the way she used to say (in a
southern accent) to her little boy, “Now Danny, you’ve got your “wanter” going
again!” Susceptible as we all are to the
advertising that grabs our attention constantly, especially in this season of
giving and receiving, our very own “wanters” tend to suffer from Danny’s
affliction. “Repent,” John says. Turn and go another way. I know… by now you think this preacher has
gone to meddlin’. But this is where John
seems to have been directing us. Still
today there are mountains of power and valleys of powerlessness, and some of us
inhabit pinnacles while others live in the depths. There’s got to be something we can do about
it.
Diggers
were the delight of my friends’ first-born child. Their home was the first to be built in a new
subdivision. This meant they had the
beauty of unspoiled open spaces… for a little while, until the heavy equipment
moved in and began to change the landscape. Every piece of earth-moving equipment Blake could see from the window inspired delight in this little boy and he pronounced each one a 'Digger.'
Development requires change you know, and the developer has to be able
to look at green rolling hills and envision the streets, electricity, water and
sewer systems that will transform them into a community. That is how God, according to the prophets,
imagines us. With the eye of a builder,
God looks at us in our raw form and sees the possibility of community. First the ground has to be prepared, a road
built. If we are to prepare the way for
God, we have to be diggers & graders in an uneven world. If we
are to become highways on which others can see the salvation of our God, we
must defer to the Builder’s blueprints. Lord,
God of hosts, be with us yet! Amen.
A
prayer for today: Humiliated, God… I was
embarrassed and humiliated beyond words when my friend arrived the day before I
was expecting her, and I hadn’t changed the sheets on the guest bed, and she
could hardly walk through my house for all the clutter left in the wake of
playtime. Sweet Holy Child, give me
wisdom and discipline to be prepared for your arrival. Not just so I can save face with you, but so
that I don’t run out of time to clear a path for you to walk through my life. I
want you walking through my life. I need discipline to stay on task with the work
of making ready for you… because ready or not, you are on your way like every
other baby who’s ever been born. Come
quickly, Little One, come. Amen.
© Rev. Linda Miller, December 15, 2012.
Feel free to borrow. Credit is appreciated.
Thanks to Blake for inspiring the sermon title, and to Danny & Ellen for inspiring me to check my "wanter."
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