Sermon for December 4, 2022 – Second Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19, Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12

Last week’s gospel passage took us nearly to the end of the Gospel of Matthew. We began Advent with an apocalyptic vision, reminding us that we will not know when the Son of Man, the Messiah, will come. This week, we go almost all the way back to the beginning of his gospel. We are still not at the birth of Jesus, yet, but today we find ourselves out in the wilderness where we hear the familiar Advent call to prepare the way of the Lord; a call to repentance.

Every Advent when I hear about John in the wilderness, I think of the wilderness that used to surround the edges of the neighborhood where I grew up, before Phoenix, in Arizona, became the expansive valley that it is today. I think about the miles and miles of seemingly empty, dry desert that has since given way to miles and miles of planned neighborhoods and endless strip malls. I also think about my experience in the Judean wilderness; the very place where these words from John were uttered. The wilderness, as I have experienced it, is a place that is both dry and desolate, and also filled with life. Both of these places remind me that God often shows up where we least expect it. I’m sure you too can picture a specific place when you hear the term wilderness. Maybe it’s deep in the woods or high in the mountains or just a few kilometers past the Perimeter where farms and sky go as far as the eye can see. 

Whatever your mental picture is of the wilderness, keep it in your mind as we continue listening to words of John the Baptist. It doesn’t matter what the wilderness looks like, what matters is that John is not preaching where all the important people are. He is not in the markets or even at the Temple complex. He is out on the fringes. He knows through the long history of ancient Israel, God shows up in those fringe moments. God shows up in those desert moments of our lives when we perceive God to be absent.

Like Moses, like the prophetic voice in Isaiah 40 which he is quoting, John challenges God’s people to see the wilderness as a place not of desolation, but of hope. God is calling them, like the Babylonian exiles, to leave their captors behind and head home through the wilderness. God is calling them, like the people of Israel in Egypt, to join an exodus out of slavery into God’s promised freedom. John preaches that the first step on this journey toward freedom is a baptism of repentance. John’s hearers were probably already familiar with two kinds of baptism: the baptism by which Gentile converts became Jews and so embarked on a whole new way of life; and the ritual washings that the Qumran community understood as cleansing them, but only if they turned from their sins and obeyed God. Both types called for changed behavior. John’s baptism of repentance does too.

Repentance, or metanoia in Greek, is not mere regret for past misdeeds. It means far more than saying, “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.” Metanoia means a change of mind and heart, the kind of inner transformation that bears visible fruit. John proclaims a baptism of repentance that leads to release from sins. The release or forgiveness that follows repentance does not undo past sins, but it does unbind people from them. It opens the way for a life lived in the service of God.

This call to repentance is an essential part of all Christian living. Every day we make decisions in which our hearts, minds, souls, and flesh move closer to God or recede into the world of self. The battle is often lost, and so we repent again and again. In turning to God, we turn to our help and our salvation.

What have we done that we ought not to have done?

When did our words cause harm, or our silence make us complicit with evil?

When did we nurse grudges and plan revenge?

The call to confess our sins is one of the most liberating things we can hear if we believe in the loving kindness of God. Through confession we unburden our hearts, we unburden our souls because we know that no matter how far we stray from God, we have a way back. Confession is a course correction along the path of our spiritual lives.

Preparing the Lord’s path toward peace requires overturning the world as we know it. John quotes the prophet Isaiah to describe the earthshaking transformation that must take place.

Preparing for God’s arrival means rethinking systems and structures that we see as normal but that God condemns as oppressive and crooked. It means letting God humble everything that is proud and self-satisfied in us, and letting God heal and lift up that which is broken and beaten down. Paths that seem good to us are not good enough for God. John calls us to let God’s bulldozers reshape the world’s social systems and the landscape of our own minds and hearts.

God’s ways are not our ways. But God’s ways lead to salvation. God’s glory will be revealed in Jesus. And this is the good news that John proclaims, and it is good news not just for us, but for the whole world: all flesh will see God’s salvation. This is God’s promise, and our hope. So, bring on the bulldozers. Let’s prepare the way.