Advent 2 C - Sunday, December 9, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. John Forbis, OHC
Advent 2 C - Sunday, December 9, 2018

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

Luke more than the other Gospel writers seems to place curious emphasis on who the political and religious leaders are during certain events that take place in his Gospel.  You will hear him do this again not too far from now on Christmas Eve when he also names who the rulers are at the time of Jesus’ birth.  One possible reason for this is Luke’s desire to make sure that what he deems important is placed in a concrete historical time and place, as if you could place a point on the timeline when the good news takes place as if to say that this is real folks, it has really happened!  

But Luke also lists no less than seven names and their positions.  These are people who perhaps warranted the attention, who were feared even and many followed their every word.  And in history, what we also know about them from other passages in the Gospel and from other histories is that they were authoritarian, corrupt and oppressive.  They had the privilege and therefore, they called the shots.  They were the closest thing to being a god or even to being God himself.  Especially, in the case of the religious leaders, Annas and Caiaphas, (for let’s name them as Luke does), in their own minds, they were at least the voice of God.  

However, God seems to have passed them all by and came to the wilderness.  The Word did not come to those we all would have expected.  They were mentioned only to provide a glaring contrast to the true recipient of the Word, a very strange man baptizing and making ominous proclamations in the barren land of the River Jordan.  One rather visceral description of John the Baptist from the New Hampshire, Congregational Church minister, Nancy Rockwell, may help us get a picture for our imagination of who he might be:  

“Wildman John leaps into Advent’s second Sunday, taking my breath away with his matted black dreadlocks, that camel skin he wraps around his bony body, gnarled bare feet sticking out below.  His eyes seize me the way his rough hands seize the locusts he eats, the honey he snatches from wild bees.  He roars warnings: dire times, dereliction of duty, the brink of doom.  Advent seems too small a stage to hold him.”

God chooses to place his Word firmly in the hands of this fanatic.  And thousands flocked to him.  The people have not heard anything like this before as he preached his message of baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  If we were to read on in the Gospel, we would hear how John is calling the crowds who come out to him a brood of vipers who have nowhere to run with the wrath that is to come.  Not even their descent from Abraham can save them.

As the quoted passage from Isaiah tells us, mountains will be leveled, valleys will be filled in, rough places made smooth like a plain and paths will be straightened.  Dramatic even violent shifts are going to take place, and all of this seems to be equated with John and his message.   

We could certainly look at John as a figure of doom or we could see John as a prophet of hope for us.  The passage from Baruch has a very similar image to Isaiah’s only it is not God’s coming to us but God’s leading us to himself.  Yes, the high mountains and hills will be made low, the valleys will be filled up and there will be level ground but it is so that the children of Israel in exile can come safely home, so that the community can be whole and be at home in God.  Nothing will get in the way of God’s calling his children home and he will enable this journey to take place easily and joyfully.  

The language of Advent is seen as a language of doom and gloom only when we try to see ourselves as gods or even God, consumed by trying to control the world around us, by privilege, by power and even more by entitlement.  God does not stand for this.  God does not tolerate the oppression, the constant debt that we supposedly owe each other and even ourselves.  Whether it is external or internal it is still oppression.  

What God offers is the gift of forgiveness.  No debts are to be paid.  It is only the freedom of repentance and forgiveness, to turn to God and receive unconditionally.  God wants to offer this so much, he will level mountains and hills, fill in valleys, make rough places smooth and straighten paths to ensure this happens.  And to prove it even further, he will shove kings, princes and even high priests aside to bring the message to a wild man out in the wilderness so that there is no mistake of the meaning.  Only a wild man, an outlander, can speak it in truth.    

What is coming is unheard of, perhaps to many even unlikely.  And to a certain extent it is terrifying because nothing or no one can stop it.  This is one thing we cannot control.

Even death is not enough to stop it.  Death has no power against the love of Christ, the Messiah who will transform the world, who will give his life away to show us exactly just how potent love really is.  Yes, we have much to celebrate this Advent season.  We have a good reason to repent, to turn to God, to anticipate with eagerness the gift that is to come and to come home.  What is approaching is inevitable, universal and freely offered.  

What the Philippians are learning from Paul only reaffirms the celebration of losing this control.  We have an opportunity to live and I do mean “live” a life that expresses the abundance and generosity of this gift.  We can be partakers of grace in Christ.  We can love with all the fullness and wisdom of Christ, bringing each other home to the “beauty of the glory of God”.  We can be prophets for each other proclaiming this good news.  This message is given to us as much as it is given to John.  We may feel like we are nothing more than voices crying out in the wilderness, but it is here where the Word of God comes and the preparation begins.  Not to the great political and religious structures and ideologies of the world.  It comes to us when we are at our most vulnerable, when many might deem us crazy and outsiders, a powerful force that could seem quite threatening to some, a parade towards salvation as Eugene Peterson would put it.  

We can make our way living in the grace of God’s love and God levels the landscape to come to us.  At the meeting point is the coming of the Christ child into the world, and we can never go back.  Amen.