Luke 3.1-6 | Advent 2

Advent 2 2021 | Luke 3.1-6 | by Richard O. Johnson |

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, 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 NRSV]

Once again, on this second Sunday of Advent, we turn to John the Baptist. He is, Luke tells us, “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.” The 8^th century bishop and theologian Rabanus reads this passage and wonders why it is necessary to “cry out.” The word literally means “shout.” Rabanus suggests there are three reasons that people shout: one is if the person they want to reach is at a distance; another is if that person is deaf; a third is if the one shouting is angry. And all three of these, Rabanus says, are characteristic of the human race.

Far away from God

First, we are far away from God. That’s an image that the Bible uses time and again. We human beings have wandered far from God. Jesus used the image in the beloved parable of the prodigal son, the boy who goes away into a far country. And it often appears in our hymns: Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love. It appears sometimes in our prayers; I remember one of the standard prayers of confession when I was growing up had us pray that “we have erred and strayed from thy paths like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.”

And that’s the nub of it, isn’t it? We follow our own hearts, and our own hearts often lead us astray until one day we wake up and realize we just don’t know where we are anymore, but wherever it is, we are far from God.

And that, of course, is just what this season is about. “His name shall be called ‘Emmanuel,’ God with us.” When we hear the voice of John the Baptist shouting out in the wilderness, the message is, “Get ready! You’ve gotten yourself hopelessly lost, but help is on the way! God is coming! He will be with you, to guide you and bring you home.”

Deaf to the Word of God

We also shout, Rabanus says, when someone is deaf—and we human beings are often so very deaf to the word of God. Of course our deafness is often by our own choice; it is more a refusal to listen. But the effect is the same: we do not hear.

I did a Biblical word search once on the phrase “not listen.” It appears some hundred times in the Bible, and almost every instance refers to human beings “not listening” to God. Is it any wonder that God might need to shout at us?

And yet the wonderful thing, the amazing thing about God is that he can shout with great tenderness! Several years ago, then Pope Benedict wrote a book on the birth of Jesus. As they so often are prone to do, the press totally screwed things up. CNN’s headline was “Pope’s book on Jesus challenges Christmas traditions.” Benedict, the story said, “debunks the claim that angels sang at the birth” of Jesus. Most of the news accounts made Benedict to be like the Grinch who stole Christmas. The Pope had noted that Luke’s gospel says that the angels said, “Glory to God in the highest,” not that they sang it—and for the press, that meant Benedict was “debunking the claim that angels sang.” In fact, Benedict went on to say, in the very next sentence, that “Christianity has always understood that the speech of angels is actually song”—quite the opposite from what the press claimed he said!

When God speaks to humankind—whether through angels or more directly—it is like music! It is joyful, beautiful, tender. St. John puts it this way: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth!” So John the Baptist shouts out in the wilderness—but that cry, for all its superficial harshness, is in the end a tender word, a beautiful song. One of the loveliest of Lutheran Christmas hymns puts it this way:

Hark! A voice from yonder manger

Soft and sweet, doth entreat,

Flee from woe and danger.

Come and see; from all that grieves you

You are freed; all you need I will surely give you.

Angry at God

And then, Rabanus tells us, people shout when they are angry. Anger, of course, is one of the seven deadly sins. It has been with us since Cain and Abel, when Cain was angry that God accepted Abel’s sacrifice but not his own. And just as God warned Cain that in his anger, sin was crouching at his door, so it is with us. Anger will lead us away from God faster than almost anything else.

Indeed, our anger is often directed at God. “Why did God let this happen?” “Why doesn’t God change this?” Who among us has not entertained those questions, nursed those questions?

William Willimon tells about the year his congregation was asked to set up a “holiday display” at a shopping mall. A committee went to work and developed a display that focused on a line from “Good Christian Friends, Rejoice”: Christ was born for this, Christ was born for this. In this display, the hymn was played over and over, while a movie screen showed scenes of contemporary life—some of them traditional holiday scenes, with a family decorating a Christmas tree or building a snowman; others more sober, scenes of hungry children, of riots and violence. But all of it under the rubric, “Christ was born for this.”

After two days, the mall management asked them to take it down. It was, they said, too depressing and bad for business, because people don’t want to think about things like that at Christmas. [Pulpit Resource, 21:4 (1993), 52-53].

But it is because of “things like that” that Christ came! The anger, the violence, the despair that is so much a part of this world—that’s why Christ came.

Did you pick up the fact that Paul’s letter to the Philippians was written from prison? If ever there was someone who might have been angry at God, it was Paul. God had turned his life around, set him on this great missionary endeavor, and now here he is in prison, no doubt sensing that this is not going to end well for him.

But what does he say? “I thank my God . . . I am confident . . . This is my prayer, that your love may overflow.” Where there might well be anger, there is calm. Where there might well be tumult, there is peace. What has happened in Paul’s life, you see, is just what John the Baptist has promised: the crooked made straight, the rough places plain. It is just what Malachi, the messenger of God, has promised: to “refine them like gold and silver.” In Paul, the anger and all that goes with it has been purged away, and he is at peace.

The promise of Christ

And that’s how it is with us, as we prepare the way of the Lord. Don’t you hear the promise in John’s cry in the wilderness? No more let sin and sorrow grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make his blessings flow, far as the curse is found . . .

That is the promise: Christ comes to us, in the midst of all our faults and failings, our anger, our despair, our selfishness. He comes to you and me—and he is the light that the darkness cannot overcome.

—

Pastor Richard O. Johnson

Webster, NY

roj@nccn.net