2. Sunday in Advent, 12/09/2012

Sermon on Luke 3:1-6, by Hubert Beck

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness. And 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 Isaiah the prophet,

"The voice of one crying 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 become straight,
and the rough places shall become level ways,
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God." (New English Bible)

PREPARING THE WAY OF THE LORD

Then

It is quite amazing that one who would appear to us as a "wild man of the wilderness" should attract as much attention as this man named John did. According to accounts by the other gospel writers his dress was scarcely attractive, his diet was not typical, and his insistence that he was only of secondary importance was absolute. His place of residence was at best reclusive, far from any centers of power or axis of wealth. He was abrupt, curt to the point of being offensive, and virtually fanatic in his message. As you will hear next week when the text for today is stretched out, his message was hardly designed to win friends and influence people, for it bore threats and warnings of a most dire sort. Be sure that he would not have been well accepted in pulpits of our day!

Yet, for all that, there was something undeniably compelling about him, for his reputation spread throughout the region and people flocked out to this unimpressive and almost inaccessible place to hear him, to question him, and even to submit to his exhortations by promising a turn-around in their lives that was symbolized and signified by being baptized by him in the river Jordan. Somehow he conveyed hope for a new future that all who came out to hear him longed for in spite of all his peculiarities and the surroundings that would otherwise have turned them away.

Those who came to him must have felt a "wilderness" in their lives not unlike the wilderness into which he had retired so long ago as Luke had informed his readers earlier, shortly after the account of his birth. "And the child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness until the day of his public appearance to Israel." There in the wilderness, away from all the distractions of human voices, stresses and pressures, in a place much like that to which Jesus would be led by the Spirit a short time after this in order to ascertain with certainty the end to which his own life was to be directed, John "grew and became strong in spirit." It surely was not a place where the ordinary voices and stresses of civilization could or would dictate his inner life. There, for as many as twenty or so years according to the context given in this account, he had remained in isolated communion with God. Then, apparently of a sudden, like the voice that propelled the prophets of old, "the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness."

John's "wilderness voice" struck a chord among those whose own "wilderness" was one of waiting and longing for a new day - both in their own personal lives and in the larger life of Israel. Many so-called "prophets" had risen in the midst of Israel from time to time in the four hundred years since the last of the Old Testament prophets had spoken, but they had all disappeared from the scene almost as fast as they appeared on it. Those to whom they spoke sensed that those "prophets" spoke their own thoughts and dreams, but not the things of God. The "wildernesses" of empty spots in their own personal lives and in the life of Israel had become acutely agonizing during those four hundred years of prophetic silence that had fallen over the nation. They fretted under the rule of an iron Roman thumb; as they became increasingly desperate for a word from the Lord.

John's message sounded forth with words that were different from all those other would-be prophets, though. It rang out with all the authority of the prophets of old to whom the word of God had come with such power and authenticity. It stirred up considerable enthusiasm - so much so that, as Mark put it so vividly, "All the country of Judea and all Jerusalem was going out to him." They found in him a "voice crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord,'" as that great prophet Isaiah had proclaimed centuries before this. Although Isaiah was speaking about the return of Israel from Babylon after Cyrus had swept down with a liberating hand into that great power of old, the people of John's time heard it as a new voice for their own time; a promising voice; a voice of hope that some great act of God was about to take place in their midst; an action for which they had to prepare themselves as people who believed and trusted in this projection that God was instituting a new day in their lives.

Luke used an interesting way of introducing this message of John by contrasting the contemporary powers holding authority in his day - the political dominance of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Philip, and Lysanius along with the religious governance of Annas and Caiphas - with the one whose coming John was announcing as imminent in the person of Jesus Christ to whom he would shortly point in an emphatic way - the one "whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire." Even apart from establishing the historical framework within which the rest of his gospel would be written - and Luke is very much interested in clarifying that historical framework as he had already done when recording the birth of Jesus in the days of Caesar Augustus and Quirinius - he also made it quite clear to readers who knew the history of the time in which the events recorded in his Gospel took place that all those great and illustrious powers and authorities were long gone while Jesus of Nazareth not only remained alive but had made it quite clear in his resurrection and ascension that he alone was the supreme authority over all the heaven and earth.

Among those named, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Philip, Annas and Caiphas would play major or minor roles in the events now to be unfolded in the life of Jesus. The disparity between Jesus who appeared to be a pawn in their hands and his ultimate glorification in spite of - and even through - them was to become a major motif of the Gospel. This seemingly simple account of the time in which all this took place is, therefore, in all likelihood, a way by which Luke was establishing from the beginning of his narrative the irony of humans trying to control the ways of God; attempting to erect a barrier to his paths; a derisive anticipation of the struggle between the ways of this world and the ways of the kingdom of God.

John used Isaiah's words announcing that the Babylonians, apparently in control of Israel's future, found that God had no difficulty in getting his own way in the face of those earthly powers seeking control over God's way in order to make a new announcement: Once again God was cutting a new pathway - this time a pathway for the world to escape quite another kind of enslavement. The earthly conquerors of the past and present, were and always will be the conquered. The people of God left Babylonia for Israel as though going back on the King's Highway which was, much like our superhighways of today, created by a leveling out of the deep valleys and a reducing of mountains to passable roadways - a straightened out corridor over which the captives would return to their homeland as those freed from enslavement. As Isaiah had spoken it, John proclaimed, so it would be again! A way was even then being prepared by John for a royal homecoming of quite another sort!

The roadmarker for this new way was to be a "baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins." Ritual washings of water were not uncommon in other Jewish rites - and, for that matter, even in some pagan ceremonial washings - but John was using the Jordan as his baptismal font in an emphatically new way - a way of signifying the resolve of those coming to him that they were willing to use their own lives as pathways for this coming of the king John was leading them to expect. It was not the baptism with which we are acquainted and which we use, as is noted several times over in the book of Acts (1:5; 11:16; 18:25; 19:3-5), but it was the promise of the people to turn their lives in the direction of the Coming One of whom John spoke - "repentant lives," to use the word in our text - the one through whom the definitive act of God's clemency would be poured out in an ultimate fashion and be made finally evident in the suffering and death of this Promised One of God. John even spoke of him as "the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29)

In the time of John, as throughout all the prior history of Israel, it was and had always been very clear that lives needed to be constantly renewed through forgiveness; release from the clutches of the dangerous demonic powers was necessary; people bound by their own failures demonstrating enmity with God needed to be healed from the fatal illness of their sin by means of a cure that only God could administer. As we shall see next week, John made it clear that their turning away from any hope of earthly cure must be sincere, must be like a washing away of their former sinful intentions and a turning toward a future that would be anchored only by God.

His message was so intense, so passionate - indeed, even so severely demanding - that many thought of him as the very one who would do that of which he spoke, but, almost as though in horror, he turned their eyes away from himself in the moment his message took root in their lives, pointing to another. It is the "another" to whom we look today, of course, the one in whom and through whom everything to which John pointed became evident. Although he, himself, was not the one of whom he spoke, he insisted that the long wait of Israel for a redeeming savior was immediately at hand. It had been hard to maintain a sense of urgency in their waiting after the four hundred years of silence, so John roused it up again to a fever pitch: "Prepare the way of the Lord" in whose coming and through whose coming "all flesh shall see the salvation of God."

Now

How do these words of St. Luke address us in our day? In two very significant ways:

First of all, our day - not unlike many days in the history of our nation and of the world - is filled with fears and trepidations of all sorts. A huge number of uncertainties surround us in our own nation on a wide assortment of levels: economically, environmentally, socially, morally, politically, religiously and who knows how many other ways?

Beyond our own nation many of these and still other uncertainties plague the nations of the world on an international level: nuclear threats, international economies, the question of how much the world is being affected by human contaminants with resultant devastations of weather, wars and rumors of wars, terrorist aggressiveness on a number of levels, social upheavals in many parts of the world - on and on it goes. The "worldly powers," both in our country and around the world are keeping tensions high in almost every way imaginable. The Tiberius Caesars, Pontius Pilates, Herods and Philips of the world along with the Annaniases and Caiphases - the powerbrokers of the world - all speak loudly under other names in our day - but in equally powerful and threatening ways. It is enough to make anyone tremble and wonder how it will all turn out, how to cope, what to do.

But Luke and John saw those earthly powers - and urges us to see them also - through the eyes of heaven and urges us to fear not. They urge us to see another one, a small one as the world sees hugeness and smallness; a weak one as the world sees strength and weakness; a seemingly minor person on the world scene as the world sees major and minor players; a child in a manger rather than a king in a palace; an almost invisible presence to a world that seeks signs and symbols of a highly visible sort such as armies and wealth and moguls of industrial complexes and people in executive suites. John sees through all that pomp and circumstance and points us, instead, to a hope and an anticipation that, at the moment - both his moment and our moment - was and is hardly recognizable as one in whom and through whom God was - and is - already at work, quietly depositing into the strongly built and carefully cared for highways of this world designed for carrying the worldly cargoes of all the worldly powers a seemingly insignificant, inconsequential, trivial seed in a small crack in the material of this world that, when come into its own, will break apart the hard shell of this world's road system, blossoming into a tree of life in which all people everywhere can find shelter. We need not fear, for the seed of the Lord is growing in the pathways of this world - and it shall prevail long after the powers of this world have gone the way of all previous powers that have stood as a threat in the past.

The second way in which these words touch deeply into our lives is this: The wilderness in which John made his home is, as was noted earlier, a representation of the personal wilderness in which we all find ourselves - wildernesses of every kind, in fact, - wildernesses of worries, griefs, doubts and despair; deserts of pride and prejudice and fear and selfishnesses that both show themselves in others and then, suddenly, are discovered within our own hearts; wastelands of temptations, of trivial pursuits at the expense of things that really and truly are the ultimate things of life; hatreds and struggles to gain control over the lives of those around us while fighting off the efforts of others to gain control of our lives. Ah, yes, these are the desolate tracts of life among which we live, in which we live, and which, themselves, in turn, live within us. They are enough to destroy us, to bring us to our knees in despair, for we find them absolutely uncontrollable. Oh, maybe for a while in some small way we seem to get a handle on these things, but once we gain control in one arena another one of equal or greater magnitude pops up elsewhere. It is a horribly fearful thing to wander about aimlessly in this wilderness of our inner and outer lives.

Into such a wilderness as this "The word of God came to John the son of Zechariah." It was a word for his time - but it was, as it has been through the ages, a word for our time also. One was coming - in fact, was already approaching him as he spoke and is even now among us today - who makes the paths of our lives straight, fills out the valleys of our lives, makes low the mountains and hills through which we must travel, straightens out the crooked ways that seem so tortuous as we journey through them and levels out the rough places of our existence. He has been present among us this morning. We have remembered the covenant he sealed with us long ago in our baptism when, as we gathered today, we invoked the holy name of Father, + Son and Holy Spirit, making the sign of the cross over our hearts as it was made on the day when we were washed in those blessed waters. Now we prepare to be fed in a short time on his body and blood, where we will be nourished for that which still lies ahead of us. We have heard the word of promise and hope in the lessons read to us earlier. He makes himself known through his body, the church - not merely a building such as this one in which we are seated, but through the saints of old and the saints sitting together with us now and scattered throughout the world, for "all flesh shall see the salvation of our God."

It is here, then, in this communion of saints, among these people of God, where we take heart from the one whose way for whom John was "preparing the way." John's mantle, however, is passed on to us, for we, in the way we live, the words we speak, the shape and form of the lives that all those around us see as we go out from this place, continue to "prepare the way of the Lord." We are hardly as "ungainly" as that John was and the place from which these words are spoken is far more "civilized" than that wilderness in which John proclaimed "Prepare the way of the Lord." Nevertheless we stand in his place today.

In us and through us God is drawing those among whom we walk into the circle of his loving care, using our hands and our voices and our lives to do his work. We are given a word of hope in the face of what seems on the earthly level to be insurmountable powers and menaces threatening us on every side, for we know that the weak one who died is the strong one who rose and ascended into heaven and rules all these frightful powers; we know that the child whose birth we shall celebrate in only a couple weeks, the child who had to be protected from Herod's jealous rage by a pair of poor peasant parents, is the Lord of Lords and King of Kings who, himself, will judge all the Herods and Caesars and Pilates of this world, tossing them aside so that his people can live in peace and joy. For he who was coming, as John put it; who has come, as we know in the aftermath of John's proclamation; and who will come again in glory and great splendor will have - no, has even now, the last and final word over all the fears and tribulations and trepidations that cause our hearts to tremble in our present moment. He who was coming, has come, and will come is here even now to calm our hearts and strengthen us for tomorrow.

It is in him and to him and through him, then, that we dare to go forth from here into a world that purportedly is ruled by fearsome scarecrows of various sorts and names, knowing that they shall pass away while the Child of Bethlehem who grew to be the Crucified and Risen One shall stand forever - and we, who trust in him, stand with him also - both now and forever! Amen

Retired Lutheran Pastor Hubert Beck
Austin, TX
E-Mail: hbeck@austin.rr.com

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