Sermon for December 8, 2024 - The Second Sunday of Advent
Advent is a season of preparation. At home people are cleaning, getting out their Christmas decorations, purchasing a tree, baking, hosting, and attending parties, and simply getting ready for Christmas. But into our Advent “busy-ness” each year enters John the Baptist. He interrupts our schedules and demands that preparations of a different kind be made. John demands that we get ready for Jesus. Before we can bask in Christmas joy and the birth of a special baby, John forces us to examine ourselves and our world. In the style of the Old Testament prophets before him, John challenges Advent people with a message of personal and corporate self-examination. Advent, John reminds us, is a time to prepare to welcome Jesus and not simply for invited Christmas houseguests.
Now, the advent of guests prompts the host not only to straighten up but also fix things around the house - a broken doorknob, a loose towel rack, the burned-out light bulb, the leaky guest toilet. We know all too well those frantic and frenetic efforts to get our house “in order” before guests arrive. In my apartment, before anyone comes over, we race around cleaning and hiding our messes, to at least present a false facade that our apartment is always kept this clean and organized. But scratch a little below the surface and you will see truth hiding behind the facade. Preparing for company often causes the hosts to look at their home, to examine their surroundings with a whole new perspective. Suddenly the countertops are not clean enough, the broken chair inadequate, the silverware too tarnished. Preparing for guests demands self-examination as much as it involves a “to do” list.
John the Baptist does not seem like a character who would have likely understood all that is involved in welcoming company to our homes. He spent most of his time in the wilderness eating locusts and wild honey, after all, hardly the place for a bed and breakfast. But, if John wasn’t thoughtfully arranging pillows and forming perfect creases in the napkins, he did understand how a people ought to welcome their God. His bold preaching in the wilderness called people to preparation. His challenging words called people to self-examination, along with a “to do” list, if they were going to be ready to receive the one coming after him. John’s prophetic message called people to get ready to receive Jesus.
This season of Advent challenges us to a different kind of preparation, one that calls us to examine our lives, our values, and our priorities. If we are rightly to prepare to receive the Prince of Peace at Christmas, then we must also be willing to go through the detailed preparation process just as we do when planning for company in our homes.
Outside these walls, people are drinking eggnog with their neighbours, singing along with Bing Crosby in the car, and hanging the popcorn garland on their Christmas trees. But here, within these walls, we the people of God hear the challenging words of John the Baptist, calling for a different kind of preparation. John the Baptist and his message of repentance cannot be avoided. He appears in the Advent lectionary readings each year, causing us to listen and respond to his challenging words. John confronts us, commands our attention, and demands our responses.
John’s challenge is to repent and prepare. True repentance, metanoia in Greek, means literally, to change one’s mind, turn around, reorient oneself. John calls all people to turn to God and from sin, to seek God’s forgiveness, and to prepare the way of the Lord. Later he will give very specific and practical examples of what this rightly oriented life will entail, but this week we live in the poetic world of the prophet Isaiah, who called all people to prepare for the Lord by making crooked paths straight, lifting up valleys, and making rough places plain. The punch and promise of the poetry is saved for last: “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
Prepare the way of the Lord! If that is the central message of our passage, there is meaning in God’s choice of John, the wilderness-dweller, as messenger. In Luke, the word of God comes neither to the emperor nor to the governors, and not even to the high priests in the Temple. It comes to simple John, son of Zechariah, whom Luke introduces in the first chapter of his Good News. John the Baptist is to us a great prophet who prepared the way for Jesus but compared with the political and religious leaders of his day, he was just an ordinary guy, and yet, God chose John, and not the luminaries of his time to be the messenger. God sent the message to John, not in Rome, not in Jerusalem, but out in the wilderness. Not the seat of political or religious power, but the wilderness, the often scary and confusing place where God had spoken to God’s people in the past and through which God had led God’s people to a new and promised life. God’s choice of John and where God spoke to John are indications of what God expects from us. From the opening verses of our gospel Luke sets out a series of contrasts; the kingdoms of the day set against the coming Kingdom of God, the rulers of the day set against the coming of Christ. This contrast brings clarity to the disruption that will come as Jesus helps people to see and act in a different way. Our repentance, our turning around, will likely involve us looking at the structures and the systems and the people the world around us in new and different ways.
“Prepare the way” this Advent, the prophet John cries out. In the midst of this preparation, this time of hiding our messes, John makes us uncomfortable. John encourages, nay commands us to open up and let God into the mess. Not hiding who we are from God, but allowing the light to shine in the shadows of our hearts. Maybe…just maybe this is exactly where we need to be today, to make us uncomfortable enough to spend some time in self-reflection and prepare for the coming of Jesus to love, forgive, and heal us in the light of God.
